Þe Lyfe of Soule ed. by Helen M. Moon (review)

REVIEWS HELEN M. MOON, ed., Pe Lyfe of Soule. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 75. Institut fiir Englische Sprache und Literatur, Salzburg, 1978. Pp. xci, 122. $22.75. This prose treatise has never before appeared in print and in the nature of things this edition will stand for a long time. In this it is like many editions now being published and provides an occasion for reflec­ tion on desiderata in those editions, reflections which I will postpone to the end of this review. The transcription from the base text in Bodley MS. Laud Misc. 210 is, except for some inexplicable omissions near the end, impressively accurate, and for her careful work Moon is to be praised. The few slips are mostly minor. On page 2, line 15: read noJt not the editor's nouJt; on 5/19: pei axen Jow not pei Jaw; 6/2: him not henn (e is expunctuated and a hairstroke added to the first minim); 9/2: aftir not after; 19/5: probably owene nouJt (as ms) not owe ne nouJt; 9/ll: j,at axep not f,at seip axep (seiJ, expunctuated); 19/17: whan not when; 22/4: iseie not seie; 23/3: com not comen (-en expunctuated); 29/3: no not ne; 30/11: alle not all; 32/6: wole not the typo wde; 33/l7: princypal notprincypally; 34/11: J,enotto; 37/12: expand mstofirstis notfirsts and in 40/11: to lustis not lusts; 40/14: read peynenotpayne; 47/5: Go not com (more easily confused in the ms than it might appear); 49/5: loue. Also Crist seiJ, J,at not loue also. Crist seib (following ms punctuation); 53/3: mown not mowen; 58/22: nedeb, ne fayleth no man in J,ing pat him nedit, a not nedet,, a; 59/10: hath not hap; 59/13: word not wed; 60/2: haue we not haue; 61/6: lesing not pe ping; 63/2: Criste seythe it was seyde not Crist seyde. Other errors in the text proper are such small deer as failure to italicize a small minority of the expanded abbreviations and failure to note all the scribal corrections. The manuscript has a number ofmarginal additions in a hand different from but roughly contemporary with the scribe's. Moon regularly, and rightly I'm sure, includes these as part of the base text, but her notice of these passages as marginalia is sporadic. (And theomissionsnoted above for pages 58 and 63 are such marginalia.) Thedescriptionsofthemanuscripts (Laud plus Huntington MS. HM 502 and British Library MS. Arundel 286 are taken, in the main, from the published catalogues and necessarily repeat some errors. Laud Misc. 210, for example, is not made up of "186 folios" but iii + 187 191 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER numbered leaves, "really 188 leaves as 19 is doubled" (note on f. 187v). Other errors are apparently original. Arundel is written in two hands, which Moon doesn't note, and it is not true that "final 's' and 'y' have hairstroke descenders" as a rule. Moon also doesn't notice that the item beginning on f. 160v of that manuscript is verse, not prose, though it is set as prose on tht> leaf. There is no frontispiece facsimile of the base manuscript. There is no glossary, hard words being glossed in the notes, and inevitably there are words one would like glossed which aren't. The simplefro (from) is glossed, but not querne (mill stone), but the users of this edition are most likely going to be able to draw on sufficient resources to read the text. Otherwise the notes contain little in the way of commentary and annotation, being mostly given over to citations of chapter and verse for the biblical quotations and paraphrases in the text. Since the text is, as Moon points out, nearly two-thirds made up of such biblical material, the citations are extensive. This is all to the good. Such full references should be standard in editions of theological materials with an eye to one day increasing our understanding of the uses made of the bible and of particular passages. The lack of annotation is compensated...