The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (review)

Weighing in at one and a half kilograms, this substantial volume is not a handbook in the literal sense, but it fulfils many of the other requirements of the manual for guidance in a particular area. Besides Elaine Treharne's useful prologue, 'Speaking of the Medieval', which opens to scrutiny the continuities and changes of the long period from Old to Early Modern English, and Greg Walker's epilogue on the large question of when the medieval period ended, there are thirty-five scholarly essays, not all of which can be examined here. Aiming to cover 'key themes' (p. v), they are grouped in fives under the capacious and permeable headings, 'Literary Production', 'Literary Consumption', 'Literature, Clerical and Lay', 'Literary Realities', 'Complex Identities', 'Literary Place, Space, and Time', 'Literary Journeys'. An Index of Manuscripts, and a substantial general Index follow. The last has two entries, not cross-referenced, to Brunetto Latini (first and surname), both including Latini's Trésor, but giving different page numbers.

Most of the essays are authoritative, yet also fresh and thought provoking. Some, such as Nicholas Perkins's 'Writing, Authority and Bureaucracy', Ralph Hanna's 'Literature and the Cultural Elites', and Thomas Bredehoft's 'The Gothic Turn and Twelfth-Century Chronicles', are innovative, in interpretation, material, and approach. A few, such as Nicola McDonald's on the primer, and Bella Millet's on the English sermon before 1250, draw helpful attention to understudied yet essential topics. Others, among them Gillian Rudd's 'Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse' and Alcuin Blamires's 'Individuality', offer alternative and recuperative readings.

A. S. G. Edwards's 'Books and Manuscripts' is a highly competent opening to Part I. The chapter introduces core information on the coexistence of print, manuscript, and oral transmission; surveys the functions (administrative, literary, devotional) and locations of these activities (with reference to the most important productions), and examines the patterns of commercialization. There are brief footnotes in this essay (as in others) and a useful self-contained bibliography appended. (Not here, but in essays of others, there are a few footnotes without a corresponding bibliography entry, such as 'Treharne 2003', p. 5 and 'Pettit 1984', p. 380.) In 'Textual Copying and Transmission', Orietta da Rold takes an unusually direct look at manuscript-making processes and the agencies involved, which is extended in Simon Horobin's lucid 'The Professionalization of Writing' and Elizabeth Evenden's informative 'The Impact of Print ... 1476-1575'.

Within Part II, Siân Echard's 'Insular Romance' addresses the central matter of the non-English origins for works 'en romanz', and the generic difficulties of the term. John McGavin's 'Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama' looks at both medieval performers and, especially, medieval spectators, pointing out most perceptively (via town records and the play texts themselves) the interdependencies in public community contexts over time. This is matched by Elisabeth Dutton's 'Secular Medieval Drama' (Part IV), which discusses carefully the lack of sharply defined boundaries between the dominating religious drama and the secular productions that began in the 1490s, then developed into the household dramas of the Tudor period.

In Part III, Andrew Galloway's 'Visions and Visionaries', benefits from the Handbook's removal of the tight time-limits often given to the term 'Medieval', considering with illuminating amplitude the possibilities of the long and varying tradition of dream works, literary and non-literary.

The topics of medieval individuality, autobiography, representation of identity (in terms of authority, race, religion, politics reputation, common or singular good, social status, nationality), occupy the authors of Part V, beginning with the wide and informed sweep of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's 'Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self'. Two essays, Kathy Lavezzo's and Samantha Zacher's, are concerned with the ambivalent presentation of Saracens and Jews in medieval literary texts; Jacqueline Stodnick's...