Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers (review)

Reviews 221 Parergon 21.1 (2004) While the thematic chapters on the penitentials are concerned with attempts to regulate the day-to-day practices of laypeople, and engaging directly with pre-Christian practices and norms, those on the nunnery rules are concerned with a world (the cloister) that is already circumscribed by Christian values and expectations, and explore the ways in which the rules tried to organise and regulate that world. The discussion of their attempts to define the physical environment of women’s monastic life through prescriptions about enclosure, and to maintain harmony within the community located in that environment, covers ground that has recently become familiar through a number of seminal works on women’s monasticism. Smith provides a synthesis of this work that is useful in its focus on the content of the rules. This book is likely to function as an introduction to readers who are new to the period, or to one or other of the groups of texts it analyses. For such readers, it would have been useful to have at some point a list of the penitentials used, with bibliographical references, rather than having these scattered through the text, particularly since there are references in the chapters on the content of the penitentials to at least two texts (the St Hubert Penitential and the Penitential of Silos) that are not mentioned in the introductory chapter, with no indication of how they fit into the development outlined there. This caveat aside, the study provides a useful analysis of a group of sources of information about women’s experience in the early Middle Ages. Janice M. Pinder School of Historical Studies Monash University Taylor, Andrew, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; cloth; pp. 300; 31 b/w illustrations; RRP US$55; ISBN 0812236424. In Textual Situations Andrew Taylor throws out a challenge to all medievalists, regardless of discipline, to work collaboratively in developing understanding of manuscripts, their scribes, owners, social status and the tradition of commentary in which they were read. He examines three manuscripts, Bodley MS Digby 23, BL MS Harley 978 and BL MS Royal 10.E.4, each chosen because the manuscript itself has been largely ignored by scholarship, although different parts of the manuscript have 222 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) been used by medievalists of varying disciplines. Digby 23, for example, is best known for its text of the Song of Roland, Harley 978 for Sumer is Icumen in, the Lais of Marie de France, and the Song of Lewes, and Royal 10.E.4 for its marginal illustrations of life in Smithfield. Taylor provides a detailed examination of each of these manuscripts considering their historical, cultural, religious and political contexts, and exploring the possible interests and roles of scriveners, owners, patrons, booksellers, libraries, universities and readers in constructing, using and preserving them. He develops a complex understanding and appreciation of the manuscript as a product of, and also a key into, the world in which it was created. Taylor’s discussion of MS Digby 23 questions our 21st century concepts of medieval readership, drawing connections between the two texts in the manuscript, the Chanson de Roland and a glossed copy of Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus. He uses a blend of literary and historical critique to establish a strong argument against the Chanson de Roland as minstrel text, and indeed against the Roland as a song at all. Instead, he suggests that this text of the Roland was a scholar’s book: ‘a vision of what a song might be’ (p. 70). The Timaeus, bound into the same volume, was also clearly a scholar’s book. Taylor’s exploration of the glossing is particularly rich in opening up ideas about the reader’s interests, perspectives and philosophical context. Clear comparisons can be made between these texts. Taylor observes that neither text is highly adorned, both were affordable to scholars, and both emerged from the same cultural milieu: ‘The Timaeus and the Roland might seem to belong to different worlds, but the Norman and Anglo-Norman scribes who copied them lived in the same one’ (p. 58). BL MS Harley 978...