The Wollaton Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers (review)

The focus of this handsome, sumptuously illustrated quarto-sized volume is ten medieval manuscripts acquired by the University of Nottingham in 2007 with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund. Formerly part of the Middleton Collection that was on deposit in Nottingham University Library, on acquisition by the university they were newly designated the Wollaton Library Collection along with forty-three early printed books also from the Middleton Collection. The Wollaton Manu scripts is the outcome of research associated with the acquisition and exhibition of the new collection.

The Middleton Collection, the archive of the Willoughby family of Wollaton and Middleton, is important as 'the largest surviving assembly gathered by a medieval gentry family' (p. 3). This extensive collection of books and documents was first described in 1911 by W. H. Stevenson for the Historical Manuscripts Commission (p. xi). Divided into three parts, 'Studies', 'The Catalogue', and 'Illustrations', The Wollaton Manuscripts brings various disciplinary perspectives and methodologies to bear on the medieval literary material. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre co-author the opening essay on the history of the family's books. Richard Willoughby (d. 1471) was friend and executor of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Chaworth, and the opening essay is followed by a study of Chaworth's books based on his will and three known survivals from his collection, co-authored by Gavin Cole and Thorlac Turville-Petre. They infer that it was through the relationship between Willoughby and Chaworth that the magnificent Wollaton Antiphonal (oddly not specifically men tioned in the will) was acquired for less than market price by the executors of a Wollaton rector and donated to St Leonard's Church, Wollaton, the Willoughby family church. Alixe Bovey's essay describes the style of the antiphonal and reflects on its significance and use in the Chaworth chapel and later in the parish church. Alison Stones's chapter discusses the artistic affiliations of two French literary items in the collection, a miscellany and a romance manuscript, both of the thirteenth cen tury, and Derek Pearsall considers a copy of the Confessio Amantis in relation to other Gower manuscripts. Rob Lutton considers three manuscripts of pastoralia. The final essay, by Nottingham curator Dorothy Johnston, describes the conserva tion challenges posed by the manuscripts and recounts the strategies employed to address them.

There is regular recourse in the essays to their history as part of the collection but the evidence for how the manuscripts found their way into Willoughby hands and what they meant to the family is disappointingly elusive. Part of their importance, it is claimed, is that the collection is 'the product of a single acquisitive burst' that ran from c. 1460 to c. 1540 (p. 3). However the evidence of the detailed catalogue entries does not seem to bear this out. A late fifteenth-century roll listing the kings of England does not seem to have entered the Willoughby family's collection until the mid- or late-sixteenth century (p. 113). The date and means by which the family acquired a thirteenth-century grammar book are unknown (p. 108). Notably, Hanna and Turville-Petre acknowledge that the early printed books in the collection 'frequently give the flavour of something acquired at a much later date' (p. 19). Even volumes bearing heraldic decoration sometimes resist attempts to discover their proven ance, for example a fifteenth-century prayer-book that bears three shields (p. 14). As for the significance of the books to the Willoughby family, Derek Pearsall finds the Gower manuscript 'almost completely silent on the matters we might have been interested in' (p. 58). Rob Lutton points out that certain exempla in one of the religious manuscripts 'would have been relevant' but he is forced to acknowledge that a 'relative scarcity of evidence' frustrates attempts to link the religious volumes with family piety (p. 75). Later Willoughbys took a keen interest in the family...