Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (review)

Because of electronic databases, no one needs the kind of review a volume of disconnected essays such as this once received in mainstream journals—a listing of contents with an uncritical summary of their various arguments. If you are interested, say, in MS Bodley 647, or an article on similar manuscripts by Ralph Hanna, you fire up the MLA Bibliography or simply Google these terms; eventually you will find a reference to the article here, which you can then read without considering others in the collection.

Most of the venues for scholarly publishing in the humanities were once of this nature. Articles collected in physical units of a journal issue were related only enough to make it possible for the journal board to seek individual subscribers (specialists in the eighteenth-century, Chaucerians, literary theorists). The virtue of such journals lay not in the coherence of individual issues but in the editorial process itself: the more disconnected the essays, the more likely each had been subjected to serious peer review. The system of peer review provided by editorial boards of journals spared universities the expense of developing their own, or more precisely transferred that expense to the acquisitions departments of their libraries.

All that has of course changed. Thematically based collections, such as the one under review here, have become more and more the norm in humanities publishing. Mainstream journals are relying increasingly on special issues, often produced without systematic peer review, once the very raison d’être of scholarly journals. In theory, we trust the judgment of the commissioning editors; but we trust them for vetting not the quality of the essays, but that of the essayists themselves.

The opening statement of the perfunctory two-page introduction refers without irony to the “recent 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK.” The pronouncements of this odious (and now re-named) institution apparently prove the “buoyancy” (p. 1) of the history of the book, which is now an officially sanctioned area of research. If book history is good enough for the RAE, the editors imply, then it should be good enough for us, and the RAE-approved essays here are connected only through the virtues of their creators: “The aim of this volume was . . . to publish the work of scholars whose approaches to books, words and texts are engaging, innovative and always rigorous” (p. 1); “All the writers here demonstrate convincingly the importance of scholarship on the material text in its context” (p. 2). Note how in these brief and utterly banal sentences, quality is associated not with works but with authors—persons of quality all, who, for these essays at any rate, were happily spared the indignity of submitting them over the transom. As I read these essays, skipping from one topic to another as if I were browsing the shelves of a journal reading room, I could not help but think of this volume as another nail in the coffin of serious peer review (which means more than simply having an outside reader for the press), as just another distressing signal to junior faculty that scholarly credentials are the consequence of, rather than the basis of, political connections.

There is no way to assess the volume completely, written as it is by scholars of such diverse interests. Several of the essays deal with particulars: Erika Corradini on the eleventh-century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421 and Ralph Hanna on Oxford, Bodley 647 provide what anyone with a special interest in these particular manuscripts might want. There are also what seem to me competent but obvious notes on the York Register by Liberty Stavanage. Stavanage’s study is interesting, but cannot be generalized, given the peculiar nature of the Register, unless one is advancing the argument that individual manuscripts are both singular and, say, written by hand. Elsewhere, there are summary articles, and the quality is uneven: I am very interested in David Gants’s cogent discussion “Descriptive Bibliography and Electronic...