Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, Linda Olson (review)

Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts seeks to provide an introduction to manuscript studies for students and scholars who are interested in the study of Middle English literature but who are not yet equipped to consult manuscripts directly. The volume contains contributions from three authors who collectively offer a number of avenues for approaching literary study through attention to manuscript books. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton contributes a brief preliminary section entitled ‘How to Transcribe Middle English,’ the Introduction, and chapters one (‘Major Middle English Poets and Manuscript Studies, 1300–1450’) and four (‘Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts’). Linda Olson contributes chapters two (‘Romancing the Book: Manuscripts for “Euerich Inglische”’) and six (‘“Swete Cordyall” of “Lytterature”: Some Middle English Manuscripts from the Cloister’), while Maidie Hilmo rounds out the collection with chapters three (‘The Power of Images in the Auchinleck, Vernon, Pearl, and Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts’) and five (‘Illuminating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Portraits of the Author and Selected Pilgrim Authors’).

The volume is beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, with 205 images that document numerous manuscripts and features of book production, from well-known illustrations such as the pilgrim portraits found in the Ellesmere copy of The Canterbury Tales to details from more obscure texts and manuscripts that focus on the activities of a broad range of producers and consumers of literary texts, including scribes, correctors, illustrators, and readers. Many of the plates cover full pages and, given the 9x12 inch format of the volume, offer a generous amount of detail and visual information.

In the Preface, the authors note that they envisioned a variety of readers when assembling this volume: ‘[T]he book is written for tiers of readers. The glossary, the front plates, and the “Bare Essentials” entries throughout “How to Transcribe Middle English” and chapter 1 are meant to introduce readers who are new to concepts and terminology in manuscript studies (e.g., chapter 3 teaches how to approach illustrations in literary texts). Some of the chapters and sections, meanwhile, model detailed analysis of a single codex, such as Linda Olson’s in-depth studies of key monastic manuscripts (chapter 6)…The range in the volume is quite deliberate and meant to accommodate the spectrum of readers now interested in Middle English manuscript studies, both new and advanced’ (xv).

While the authors are quite clear regarding their goal of creating a book that would be of benefit to a wide variety of users, the results of this attempt are mixed. The book does indeed have a lot to offer beginners coming to manuscript studies for the first time. Teachers who are not familiar with manuscript studies but would like to incorporate a focus on manuscripts into their curricula might especially find the book helpful. Although not designed as a pedagogical resource per se, the volume contains numerous foci throughout that might be easily adapted for use in the classroom. The many pilgrim portraits reproduced in chapter five, for example, could foster productive discussion on how manuscript illuminations bear witness to the ways in which medieval readers understood texts and/or how they were encouraged to interpret those texts. While this work offers much less in the way of basic instruction than Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham’s Introduction to Manuscript Studies, which was also published by Cornell University Press and seems to have served as a model for the volume reviewed here, the exclusive focus on Middle English makes this a welcome addition to the landscape.

The book is weakest when it seeks to address the more advanced readers on the spectrum identified in the Preface. Too often arguments are advanced that demand much more evidence than their authors are able to adduce in the space allotted. Kerby-Fulton, for example, attempts in the span of a few pages to participate in...