The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (review)

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea ofthe Vernacular:An Anthology ofMiddle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 506p. Elizabeth Holtze Metropolitan State College of Denver "What could be more natural for an English writer than to write in English?" What, indeed?Thiswonderful anthologybyWogan-Browne, Watson, Taylor, and Evans begins with this very question (3), and its answer becomes a part not only ofthe answer to the seemingly simple question (that Latin, French, and AngloNormanwere real alternatives) but also the reason for the volume itself. The simple answer, too, becomes more interesting as examples and discussion proceed. The editors have compiled selections from fifty-seven prologues and extracts illustrating the position ofmedieval texts that speak to three connected issues: the idea ofauthor, the idea ofreader or audience, and, lastly, the idea ofreading itself. The dates named in the title, 1280 to 1520, cover the period in English history from the early Plantagenets to the earlyTudors, although the vast majority ofthe selections were written in the 1300s and 1400s. In each of the three sections the editors, sometimes in collaboration with other scholars, reproduce individual texts in the original Middle English from a single surviving source, supplying marginal notes on the Middle English and endnotes that explicate references. Precedingeach text is a careful description that includes in separate paragraphs the date and location of its composition; the author, his or her sources, and comment about the content; the likely original audience for the text; a briefbibliography ofmodern editions ofthe text itselfand related sources and/or criticism; and, finally, the single manuscript or early book source, including its location and description, from which the quoted text is taken. The editors' decision to reproduce the readings of only a single manuscript has the advantage ofallowing very specific description and provenance, which are often quirkily interesting: "A careful (if irregularly written) early-seventeenth-centurycopyofa fifteenth-century manuscript" (234). This choice, however, circumvents the necessity of establishing a definitive text from all surviving manuscripts, including a critical apparatus for each, an effort probably beyond the scope ofthis volume since most selections are already available in critical editions. The editors chose particular manuscripts to be reprinted in The Idea ofthe Vernacular based upon interesting individual features, age, or, sometimes, availability (xvii). Introductions to each individual prologue contain much valuable ancillary information beyond locating the individual selection in time and place. For exSPRlNG 2000 # ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 107 ample, rhe comment on the text from the prologue of Lydgate's Troy Book goes beyond mere summary ofthe longer complete prologue to call Lydgate's subject, "Europe's most important foundation narrative," and the section on bibliography lists both editions ofLydgate's source, Guido délie Colonne, and important studies ofLydgate's work, life, and the larger tradition of the Troy story in Britain. The selections themselves are a mixed bagoffamiliar authors and familiar texts, less familiar authors and less familiar texts, and familiar authors with less familiar texts. So, William Caxton is represented by his prefaces to Christine de Pizan's Book ofFayttes ofArmesandofChyvalryeand Geoffroy de laTour-Landry's Book of theKnightofthe Tower(both in the section on readers and audience), and a Dutch version ofReynard the Fox (in the section on images ofreading itself), while his more famous comment on editorial choices oflexicon, egges or eyren ("Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte?"), from his Preface to the Eneydos is absent , although parts ofit are discussed in one ofrhe introductory essays (12). Each ofthe three sections ofprimary source material opens with a discussion oftheir order and content: why each text is located as it is, and what generalizations may be drawn from the group oftexts as awhole.These introductoryessays to the three sections contain manyinterestinggeneralizations andgive helpful (although sometimes provocative) direction to the twenty-first-century reader about to read about medieval writers and readers. The idea ofcollecting prologues in itselfis not new (see, for example, Prefaces andPrologues to Famous Books, Harvard Classics, Vol. 39. NY: Collier, 1910 — which begins with Caxton). However, this book is the first to bring together in one place so many medieval English prefaces written in...