"Yee? Baw for Bokes": Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan ed. by Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (review)

It is a real accomplishment for a festschrift to achieve an impressive methodological range while retaining an equally impressive thematic unity. Hoyt Duggan's friends, colleagues, and students speak to the full range of this scholar's influence on Langland studies, the digital humanities, metrical analysis, manuscript studies, and medieval literary scholarship more generally. The contributors' exemplary essays simultaneously express the interrelationships among these subjects as they examine, for example, the value of digital editions for understanding the history of meter, or the importance of codicological study for reconstructing Langland's early reception—questions of immediate relevance to twenty-first-century scholarship. The volume itself is divided into two sections: one with six essays on "Composition and Authorship," and another with seven essays on "Reception and Use." Together, these two halves on textual production and postproduction create an illuminating collection of essays that offer new perspectives on some of the most vexing, long-standing questions in the study of Langland and the work of his contemporaries.

Of the first six essays on "Composition and Authorship," the first four deal with questions of meter. Thorlac Turville-Petre's opening piece promotes the Piers Plowman Electronic Archives' edition of a Bx archetype for its ability to improve future attempts at metrical analysis. Ralph Hanna identifies Richard Formande's The Bridges of Abingdon, a publicly displayed poem surviving on a single vellum broadsheet, as an example of "alliterative chronicle poetry" that documents and celebrates the building of bridges to make Abingdon commercially accessible. Written in an alliterative style that may have been influenced by interregional literary exchange, this fifteenth-century poem's local "liberation narrative" records how this community project frees the town from the abbot of Abingdon's oppression (35). The next two essays reexamine the linguistic status of final -e in fifteenth-century Middle English metrical practices. Problematizing the accepted history of final -e, John Burrow studies Hoccleve's holograph manuscripts in order to reveal how the poet's consistent use of final -e as an unstressed syllable most likely aligns with his own spoken pronunciation and with an audience able to understand the role this -e plays in his meter. Judith Jefferson's study of the final -e in On Husbondrie, a Middle English translation of Palladius's Opus agricultura, reveals a "more restricted" use of final -e for syllable count than Hoccleve used a few decades earlier.

The last two essays in this section address problems associated with non-Langlandian composition in Piers's manuscript tradition. Because these pieces deal with the work of Langland's scribe-redactors, who also act as interpreters and readers, these two could easily fit into either section of the book, justifying their somewhat liminal position between the sections. Thomas A. Pendergast's excellent contribution argues that the famous John But ending merges the author-figure and reader-figure in a way that reflects the redactor's understanding of Piers's "inherently complex authorial quality" and of "Langland's invitation to blur the distinctions between the reception and the making of the poem" (68). This author-continuator's "poetics of reception" voices the audience's presence while also setting up Will's writing of the B- and C-versions. Turning to the substantial gaps in an A-text manuscript, Míċeál Vaughan suggests that, despite its missing quire at the end, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 213 (sigil E) might be a fourth witness to A manuscripts containing Passus XII. He bases his argument on the average line count in the extant folios as well as on E's genetic relationship with other copies of the A-text that share a displacement of lines from Passus VII into Passus I, which may have larger implications for editing the A-text...