The Middle English Ywain and Gawain: a bibliography, 1777-1995

The Middle English Ywain and Gawain: a bibliography, 1777-1995 Ywain and Gawain is a Middle English redaction of the late-twelfthcentury French romance Yvain ou Le Chevalier au Lion, by Chretien de Troyes. Written by an anonymous author, probably in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the Middle English poem survives in only one manuscript, British Library M S Cotton Galba E. ix, ff. 4-25. A transcription of the poem from this manuscript, made by J. W . Reed in 1777, is now M S Douce 65 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Another, undated transcript of the poem from this manuscript, by Samuel Ayscough (1745-1804), is in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (not seen). Research on Ywain and Gawain is considerably less in volume than that on the parent French text, and a substantial part of the criticism of the English poem focusses on comparing it with its famous source. More recently, however, interest has been shown in this poem for its own sake, particularly as insular romance. M o d e m interest in Ywain and Gawain was kindled in the 1770s when HThomas Tyrwhitt directed Thomas Warton to the Cotton Galba manuscript. Warton is credited with carrying out the first scholarly work on the poem, publishing excerpts of it in his History of English Poetry: From the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century in 1781. His study of the English romance provoked caustic criticism from Joseph Ritson, who was to be thefirsteditor of the complete text, expressed in his Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry in a Familiar Letter to the Author. There have been five published editions of Ywain and Gawain and two editions in doctoral theses. Thefirstedition was that of Ritson in 1802, in his collection Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees. The next was that of Gustav Schleich in 1887, which spawned considerable scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially amongst German researchers interested in textual and language studies. Schleich's edition was aheady rare by the 1930s, but that of Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington for the Early English Text Society in 1964 (for 1963), presumably based on Harrington's 1960 thesis and generally recognized as the standard critical edition, has given scholars greater access to the poem: P A R E R G O N ns 13.1 (July 1995) 2 B.-E. S. Calf well over half of the entries in this bibliography have been published si that date. The 1963-64 thesis of J. Taglicht was never published (but is highly regarded by Tony Hunt, one of the major recent critics). The 1992 page-annotated edition by Maldwyn Mills in his Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arther has brought the romance out of exclusively scholarly circles and into the public domain. The fifth published edition is the 1995 page-annotated one by Stephen Shepherd in his Middle English Romances, prepared specifically as a student text. W h e n I began work for m y thesis on Ywain and Gawain, it was clear at once that no current, comprehensive, and reliable bibliography existed. Some published bibliographies attempt to cover only limited periods of scholarship; a number are concerned with many different romances, which means further searching for relevant items amongst shared references; and several even include misleading citations which do not refer specifically to the English romance. There is an observable tendency in some to omit scholarly work in a foreign language. In addition, typographical and reference errors in previous works have on a number of occasions been transferred to new bibliographies, apparently without a checking of the original publications. The bibliography offered here includes new items not previously referenced as well as items listed in previous bibliographies and catalogues. With the exception of the theses and other items described as 'not seen', I have checked the details for each entry against the actual work (in the latest edition or reprint unless indicated otherwise) through the use of many libraries in Australia and overseas. I have made every effort to eliminate previous mistakes and have signalled in the...