English manuscript studies 1100-1700: Vol. 4 (review)

134 Reviews with the complementary Old Testament text, the Book of Job. This assimilation would also be made by both Saint Gregory the Great (ca A.D. 540-604) in his Moralia in Job, and by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his thirteenth-century commentary on Job. Gregory had also used an extended allegory of martial combat to interpret the straggle between Job and Satan. Saint Jerome, also, saw Job as a kind of heroic poem, combining the didactic and the dramatic, a complex view with which Bede would concur. Astell also contends that in chivalric romance Job presents the various forms of medieval knighthood: spiritual warrior, patron of wayfarers and seekers, the penitent knight returning to lost virtue, and, finally, a despairing sinner such as Spenser's Redcrosse Knight. Her concluding section illustrates how Milton's great works may be seen 'as an exegetical trilogy inspired by Protestant theology' affording the reader self-knowledge. The core of this book is in Chapter 2, 'Boethius and epic truth', and Chapter 3, 'Job and heroic virtue'. Thefirstconcludes that 'true perception depends on recall of forgotten memories' and the joining of 'external images with internal forms'. The latter sees the Christian hero as 'an authentic human being and a saint' (p. 96). Thus the true hero and saint may be found to be a sufferer who, Job-like, transfers finally to 'true certainty', as Job did. While the thesis may seem to be somewhat simplistic and to over-ride more medieval genres, the ideas behind it are powerful and they illustrate well the heroism behind almost all medieval romance. This is a book to shelve alongside C. M . Bowra's influential study of Renaissance secondary epic, From Virgil to Milton (1946). John S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Beal, Peter, and Jeremy Griffiths, eds, English manuscript studies 11001700 : Vol. 4, London and Toronto, The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 1993; cloth; pp. vi, 310; 57 monochrome illustrations; R.R.P. £40.00. The fourth volume of this handsome, generously illustrated series, contains seven main articles, three shorter articles, and the regular report of H. R. Woudhuysen, 'Manuscripts at auction: January 1991 to December 1991'. Reviews 135 In ' "As fre as thowt"?: some medieval copies and translations of Old English wills', Kathryn L o w e finds evidence in three cartularies copied in Winchester and Canterbury from the twelfth to the fourteenth century that the later such copies of legal documents are, the less the scribal interference with the Old English linguistic forms. This phenomenon is a telling gauge of the increasing inability of medieval scribes to understand their Old English exemplars properly. L o w e warns that such conservative habits will pose problems for current research towards the Linguistic atlas of early Middle English. Three articles are concerned with medieval manuscript illumination. Richard Gameson's 'The Romanesque artist of the Harley 603 psalter' shows how the last illustrator of this Canterbury psalter, produced in stages from the early eleventh century to the second quarter of the twelfth, was challenged by the conflicting demands of the Caroline Utrecht psalter, which was its model, the late Anglo-Saxon interpretations of this model already present in the book, and contemporary influences of Romanesque art and life. Again, medieval copying is seen to involve more than straightforward modernizing of older materials. M . A. Michael's 'English illuminators c. 1190-1450: a survey from documentary sources' follows a discussion of the documentary evidence with a full listing of the known illuminators by date of document. Interest in the fine manuscripts of medieval England has intensified in the last twenty-odd years, as their role in the emergence of a distinctly English consciousness in the thirteenth and fourteenth century becomes more evident. Michael brings existing scholarship together with his own investigations to create what will become a standard work of reference. A. S. G. Edwards' short article, 'The Chaucer portraits in the Harley and Rosenbach manuscripts' suggests that if the latter portrait is indeed a post-medieval insertion into the Rosenbach manuscript of Hoccleve's Regiment, it is probably a direct copy of the medieval portrait in the Harley Hoccleve, effected...