Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts ed. by Emily Steiner and Lynn Ransom (review)

In 2011, the late Lawrence J. Schoenberg donated his important library, dedicated to the history of European science, to the University of Pennsylvania Library. The benefaction is noteworthy for a variety of reasons: the tailored, subject-specific nature of the collection, testimony to a collector's concentrated interest and vision; its preservation en bloc, rather than dispersal at auction; and its presence in a major public collection, where it is available for protracted scholarly consultation.

This slender volume presents six papers gleaned from a 2012 conference designed to publicize and highlight the collection. Unfortunately, in their aggregate, these essays suggest that it may be some time before Schoenberg's riches achieve any public impact. Indeed, only two or three of the essays might be described as offering contributions specifically manuscript based—and none of them focusses upon materials included in the Schoenberg bequest to Penn.

The volume's most impressive manuscript studies appear in the first two essays. Elizaveta Strakhov at least takes up a manuscript at Penn, MS Codex 902/French 15, made famous by James I. Wimsatt's ascription of fifteen French lyrics, all marked "Ch," to Geoffrey Chaucer. Strakhov's careful investigation of the book's compilational procedures makes it clear that this is not, as Wimsatt implicitly argued, a collection predicated on authorship, but rather on poetic form. (However, the author might be aware that the term "ordinatio," as developed by Malcolm Parkes, does not refer to text order, but to aspects of a book's mise-en-page.) In a similarly stimulating account, Alfred Hiatt investigates how readers might process medieval geographical descriptions. With a keen eye to nuance, he demonstrates the overlap between different modes of presentation, and the difficulties inherent in each, as well in their conjunction. In a much too brief introduction to Latin scientific translation from Arabic, Charles Burnett draws attention to the manuscript presentation of "arabic" numerals, which customarily retain their Semitic right-to-left orientation, even in a Latin surround.

Regrettably, the volume's weakest essay is the longest, absorbing a full quarter of the book. Here Katharine Breen attempts, against any serious reading of the text, to routinize interpretation of the baffling Piers Plowman as commonplace medieval homiletic diagram. (Uncited here are the seminal, yet considerably more nuanced, essays that initially developed Breen's metaphors: Elizabeth Zeeman (Salter), "Piers Plowman and Pilgrimage to Truth" [1958]; and Penn's own Siegfried Wenzel, "The Pilgrimage of Life as a Late Medieval Genre" [1973].) Breen's (in)explanatory exhibits are well known to manuscript scholars—Lucy Sandler's "Turris sapientiae" diagrams and ubiquitous medieval septenary materials exhaustively discussed by another uncited Penn scholar, Rosemond Tuve (Allegorical Imagery [1966]). Breen manages to argue for the relevance of instructional diagrams only by misreading the passage central to her entire argument, "Piers the Plowman's pilgrimage to Truth." Her truncated account excises altogether from the analysis the passage's climax (B 5.605-8; cf. C 7.254-58), customarily read as vertiginously inverting the entire pilgrimage metaphor. Moreover, the responses such imagery stimulates in the poem, at B 5.630-42, would imply that even the most conventional visual metaphor ("the holy house") is in Piers Plowman a problem, not a solution to anything.

In the remaining, largely text-driven essays, Mary Franklin Brown takes up the place of poetry in medieval schemes of the sciences, and Sara S. Poor investigates the well-recognized wavery boundary between hagiographic writing and other generic forms. Given the treasures Schoenberg has given Penn, one must hope for better in the future.