Reviewed by:
  • Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production: A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group by Alpo Honkapohja
KEY WORDS

Manuscript studies, England, Alchemy, Medicine, Codicology, Linguistics, astrology, book production, book trade, Medieval Latin, Middle English, London, code-switching, multilingualism, scriptoria

Alpo Honkapohja. Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production: A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Xv + 250 pp., 57 black and white illustrations + 3 color illustrations, 20 black and white tables. €80. ISBN: 978-2-503-56647-4

In a series of articles from 1989 to 2003, Linda Ehrsam Voigts identified a group of eleven manuscripts produced in England during the later fifteenth century that are relatively uniform in layout, contents, or both. These professionally made, but utilitarian, paper manuscripts contain similar medical, alchemical, astrological, and magical texts written mostly in self-contained booklets. Because six of the eleven manuscripts are found in the Sloane manuscript collection of the British Library (the other five are in different libraries), Voigts called them the "Sloane Group." She tentatively argued that the Sloane Group was an example of speculative publishing, aimed at a growing market for technical literature, before the advent of printing in England. Her theories about the Sloane Group have had a great influence on the study of book production at the dawn of print, but they have also been accepted uncritically at times.

Alpo Honkapohja's Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production is the first book-length study of the Sloane Group, in which he modifies or challenges the ideas of Voigts and other scholars about the production of [End Page 176] these manuscripts and their supposedly sophisticated multilingualism. This is an important book and should provoke historians and linguists to rethink some received ideas about later medieval book production, especially in technical fields like alchemy and medicine. Honkapohja rechristens the Sloane Group as the "Voigts-Sloane Group" (hereafter VSG) both in recognition of Voigts's scholarly contributions and to avoid confusion with the entire Sloane collection of the British Library. He remains respectful of Voigts and her work while frequently calling into question details of her arguments about the VSG.

Honkapohja's approach to the study of the VSG is framed as a response to a call made by Claire Jones in a 2004 essay for more detailed analyses of the codicology and languages of this and similar manuscript groups to test Jones's arguments about the "discourse communities" reflected in medical manuscripts. Honkapohja carefully applies both types of analysis (codico-logical and linguistic) to the VSG "to see whether they contain signs of a publisher, co-ordination, speculative sale, or even 'veritable mass production'" (21) and to determine whether some or all of the texts were written in London or Westminster, as Voigts originally proposed. This is a highly technical study, intended for scholars already versed in codicology and Middle English linguistics. After a detailed introduction on the definition and historiography of the VSG and a disconcertingly short Chapter 1 on "The Book Trade in London Before Printing," Honkapohja dedicates three chapters to the codicology of the VSG and two to a linguistic analysis of the Middle English texts. The arguments in both sections of the book (that is, Chapters 2–4 and 5–6) are supported by a profuse number of collation diagrams, tables, dialect maps, and grayscale and color images of the manuscript texts. An appendix is dedicated to the full collation of British Library, MS Sloane 1118, which Honkapohja uses as representative of the entire VSG.

Voigts divided the VSG into a Core Group of manuscripts sharing a typical mise-en-page of compressed Secretary script and dramatically large margins, and a Sibling Group unified not by appearance but by a common anthology of twelve short medical and astrological treatises, which Honkapohja calls the Sibling Set Texts. Each group contains six manuscripts, with [End Page 177] Sloane 2320 shared between the two subgroups, for a total of eleven. Honkapohja further divides the Sibling Group into three subgroups: Sloane 2320, a group of three "half-sisters, or at least cousins," and two manuscripts of the Second Generation, dating from the 1480s or 1490s. In various essays, Voigts has also named five other fragmentary manuscripts that share features with the Core or Sibling groups, which Honkapohja groups under the rubric of Family Resemblance.

Chapters 2–4 are dedicated, respectively, to the Sibling Group, Core Group, and Family Resemblance fragments. In each chapter Honkapohja provides detailed descriptions of each manuscript or fragment for the purpose of identifying codicological evidence of the rapid, commercial manuscript book production outlined in Chapter 1: multiple scribes working simultaneously, texts copied speculatively and without a commission, and signs of booklets being kept in stock for the creation of client-designed codices. Honkapohja acknowledges the difficulty of this endeavor, given that no manuscript of the VSG is in its original binding and because the individual texts may have been organized differently or not even bound at all in the fifteenth century.

Honkapohja's conclusions challenge some of the proposals made by Voigts and the assumptions of other scholars who have used her work on the VSG. In the first place, he concludes in Chapter 2 that the Sibling Group, although featuring a standardized set of twelve texts, does not otherwise provide convincing codicological evidence of "assembly-line" production in a single scriptorium or of compilation for speculative sale. Particularly troubling for the integrity of the VSG is Honkapohja's analysis of Sloane 2320, which Voigts identified as the link between the Core and Sibling groups. He demonstrates that Booklet A of Sloane 2320, containing the complete Sibling Set Texts, was produced separately from the other six booklets of the manuscript, which make up a collection of texts on aging, secrets, and alchemy. The whole of Sloane 2320, therefore, cannot be used to prove related production schemes between the Core and Sibling Groups.

In a similar fashion, Honkapohja closes his discussion of the Core Group manuscripts in Chapter 3 by expressing doubts about their supposed similarities. Voigts's original interpretation of this group was that they were compiled or commissioned by someone collecting medical and alchemical booklets in a [End Page 178] standard format. This theory is supported by the fact that all Core Group manuscripts contain some booklets in the distinctive "core" mise-en-page, and all but one are "fascicular" (composed of discrete booklets) in composition. But the differences among the Core Group manuscripts (quire length, collation, additional texts, etc.) are as important, Honkapohoja argues, as their similarities. A more serious challenge to the theory that the Core Group manuscripts were mass produced for speculative sale is the predominance of alchemical content in Sloane 1118, Sloane 2320, and Sloane 2567. Alchemy was illegal in fifteenth-century England, and the production and public sale of numerous alchemical booklets, Honkapohja argues, is highly unlikely. This observation prompts an excursus on the reputation of alchemy in later medieval England, the circulation of alchemical texts, and the possible identity of the commissioner(s) or owner(s) of the Core Group. All that Honkapohja will venture on the question of identity is that someone involved in the production of the Core Group manuscripts knew or admired the alchemist John Kirkby, who was granted a special royal license in 1456 to practice alchemy and whose name appears in the margin of two Core Group manuscripts. But this description could apply to any number of suspects.

Honkapohja uses his analysis of the Family Resemblance fragments in Chapter 4 to question even further the integrity of the Core Group. He grants that "Voigts is definitely onto something in recognizing these codices go together" (101), but notes that there are no clear rules or measurements by which a Core Group or Family Resemblance manuscript can be identified. Honkapohja provides a list of twelve codicological features typically shared by Core Group manuscripts, including recurring watermarks, standard quire length, compressed Secretary hand, multilingualism, and other features. He questions whether some of these features should remain relevant in determining how similar the Family Resemblance fragments actually are to the Core Group. In the end, he rejects the presence of Bastard Secretary titles, the use of certain watermarked papers, and the proportions of writing frames all as too common in the fifteenth century to be offered as evidence of a close relation between manuscripts. While each of the five Family Resemblance manuscripts shares some texts or codicological features with the Core Group, four of them do not share what Honkapohja considers [End Page 179] a sufficient number of features to constitute genuine "family resemblance." He determines that only a single, two-leaf fragment (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.815) retains a plausible connection to the Core Group.

Honkapohja approaches his study of the languages in the VSG in much the same way as his codicological analysis—that is, with an eye to challenging assumptions about the Core Group. Voigts argued that Latin and English are used with "equal sophistication" (121), and later scholars (including Honkapohja in an earlier publication) have used her ideas to argue for comfortable "code-switching" between Middle English and Latin among later medieval English scholars. In his new work, Honkapohja instead argues in Chapter 5, using quantitative evidence and close analyses of numerous VSG passages, that actual intertextuality and code-switching are quite rare in the VSG and that Latin and English are not used with "equal sophistication." Some of his other conclusions are that only 20 percent of the Sibling Set Texts are in English, the rest being in Latin; technical or theoretical treatises in the Core Group are typically in Latin with introductory and practical manuals in Middle English; and multilingualism is quite rare, as Latin and English mix consistently and comfortably only in alchemical recipes and only in two of the VSG manuscripts.

In his final and longest chapter, Honkapohja applies the so-called fit technique to the Middle English texts in the VSG to determine whether they can be localized or if they display the standardization of English under way by the later fifteenth century. He does this by comparing the spelling and orthography of several dozen common words in VSG texts to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME and its digital updates at eLALME). He acknowledges this is not a perfect technique in this case, since the VSG manuscripts post-date LALME's coverage of ca.1350–ca.1450. Nonetheless, he presents his data and conclusions in great detail with a series of tables and maps. Honkapohja poses two main questions about both the Sibling and Core Groups of texts: First, to what extent do the VSG texts align with any of the four types of standard Middle English written in and around London, as distinguished by Michael Samuels? He does this using twenty-two words designated by Samuels as the standard forms most indicative of type. And second, to what extent do the VSG texts display [End Page 180] significant dialectical variations pointing to scribal activity outside of London? For this analysis, he identifies thirty-seven forms in the Sibling Group and twenty in the Core Group that display considerable variation between manuscripts.

Honkapohja provides many conclusions specific to individual manuscripts or texts, but his general conclusion is that both the Sibling and Core Group manuscripts contain enough Type III and Type IV English forms to suggest either that they were copied in London or that they reflect a standardized and "colourless usage typical of the latter half of the fifteenth century" (199). This confirms quantitatively what Voigts, Lister Matheson, and others have proposed tentatively about the composition of the VSG Middle English texts. One significant new conclusion made by Honkapohja is that the Core Group manuscripts display a significant "Central Midlands colouring" (209) that nonetheless differs from the Type I Central Midland Standard. Honkapohja suggests that this dialectal variation might actually be due not to the scribes' locality but to genre variation within medical texts. Further research, building on Irma Taavitsainen's studies of Middle English medical dialects, is needed. Yet this consistency of dialect among the Core Group manuscripts confirms Voigts's original proposition that they belong together.

Alpo Honkapohja has, through his joint codicological and linguistic analyses of the VSG, dismantled the unity of this famous collection of medical and alchemical manuscripts, and challenged the widely held beliefs that they provide evidence of speculative production and of Latin-English code-switching. These conclusions will no doubt sadden scholars of English manuscripts, alchemy, or medicine (like this reviewer), who could hold the VSG up as an example of the sophistication of later medieval manuscript production at the dawn of print and of the popularity of alchemy, medicine, and astrology among an increasingly educated English populace. Any arguments made on the basis of the supposed unity of the VSG must now be set aside or at least reexamined in light of Honkapohja's detailed analysis of these eleven important manuscripts. [End Page 181]

Winston Black
Clark University

Share