The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative edited by Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (review)

The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 is an important collection of essays that should be warmly welcomed by scholars working on medieval manuscripts. This is a book that has much to offer to its readers and fits in well with a genre of publications that over the years have appeared to study manuscripts in their own right. The Studies on the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts, edited by Pearsall (1990); The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, edited by Stevens and Woodward (1995); and, more recently, Studies in the Harley Manuscript, edited by Fein (2000), for instance, are collections tightly designed to read a particular manuscript within its social, historical, cultural, and literary contexts. Following this approach, Couch and Bell put together a stimulating publication that will encourage further work on Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. This is a key witness of thirteenth-century book production. It contains hagiographical material, debate literature, romances, medieval lyrics, and moral precepts that were put together during the medieval period.

The essays are organized around a major editorial assumption. In the Introduction, Couch and Bell make a firm stand against the seemingly unhelpful label “miscellany.” They note: “The notion of the manuscript as a ‘whole book’ argues against the assumption of miscellaneity in a codex that contains diverse texts, assuming instead that an ‘organising principle’ informs the order and context of the book and points to a writerly or readerly agenda” (p. 7). One can easily agree with the rationale that the editors have adopted here, but codicologists may wonder about the need to assert unity as a main principle to further study a manuscript. The debate, perhaps, should be about how scholars use labels but celebrate diversity in manuscript production. The study of every manuscript is an opportunity to discuss the unique nature of the witnesses to a culture that still eludes us. As the editors acknowledge, the misuse of “miscellany” is something that needs addressing, but the truth is that the majority of medieval manuscripts can be miscellaneous in nature because they can contain more than one text, in the flyleaves or elsewhere, and they can be put together over time. Many of the essays in the book, for instance Edwards’s, Evans’s, and Fein’s, explain how unity in MS Laud Misc. 108 is the end point, rather than the beginning, of a process that develops layer upon layer. Conceptually, intentionality is important, and pushing this agenda is reasonable, but perhaps in this case can cause contradictory responses. This is, however, an example of the type of stimulating issues and questions that this book promotes.

The contributions are organized into two main parts: the first part focuses on the codicological study of MS Laud Misc. 108, and the second looks more closely to the content of the manuscript, its textual transmission and interpretation. Both parts offer an array of equally important studies that celebrate the importance of this manuscript. Edwards’s meticulous and judicious codicological account of MS Laud Misc. 108 is thought provoking, leaving the reader with a number of questions worth following up in future research. For example, he asks, “Where did L [Laud 108] come from? Whence did it derive its contents? How did its SEL materials come to be conjoined with the romances the manuscript also contains?” (p. 26). Liszka helpfully summarizes the question of the dating of the South English Legendary and of the two romances, and urges scholars not to compartmentalize the study of one genre or the other. Evans describes the layout and the decoration patterns of the manuscript, and Taylor revisits earlier discussions on the provenance of the manuscript within the Oxford book market. Fitzgerald recovers the lost steps of the manuscript’s...