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  • Three Alliterative Saints’ Hymns: Late Middle English Stanzaic Poems
  • Lawrence Warner
Kennedy, Ruth , ed., Three Alliterative Saints’ Hymns: Late Middle English Stanzaic Poems ( Early English Text Society, Original Series 321), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003; cloth; pp. cix, 120; 4 b/w plates; RRP AU$240, US$74, £40; ISBN 0197223249.

Readers of Parergon are already in Ruth Kennedy's debt for editing the special issue on 'Medieval English Measures' (vol. 18.1), which included her fine essay 'Strong-Stress Metre in Fourteen-line Stanza Forms'. This edition provides 239 pages of information about and analysis of the mere 686 lines of poetry that constitute this narrow sub-genre of Middle English poetry. This edition not only comprehensively analyses these three 14-line-stanza, alliterative and rhyming poems addressed to saints Katherine, John the Evangelist, and John the Baptist. It also contributes importantly to our understanding of the Middle English alliterative [End Page 248] tradition, which extends well beyond the 'classical corpus' of Piers Plowman and all that.

The texts themselves occupy fewer than ten percent of the volume. The long introduction includes ample information about the manuscripts and textual histories; construction, metre and alliteration; language; provenance and dates; sources and affiliations; and treatment of the texts. With an important exception to be discussed below, all this is well analysed and presented. Following the texts are 70 pages of notes, primarily lexical, followed by a complete glossary and index to proper names.

Kennedy points to lexical, syntactical, and metrical affiliations between these saints' hymns and the guild cycle and non-cycle drama, thus developing a discussion only hinted at in her Parergon essay. She proposes the 'tentative hypothesis that there was some flowering of the Revival in the early fifteenth century in the East Midlands…, largely witnessed by the alliterative lines in the plays, but perhaps influenced by a surge of stanzaic alliterative verse of which our hymns are a small surviving example' (p. xciii). In short, it is no longer feasible to identify a self-contained 'alliterative tradition' which had nothing to do with other cultural developments. As Kennedy acknowledges, it is still too early to be very confident in such matters, but future work in this area will find her edition indispensable.

The least satisfactory aspect of Three Alliterative Saints' Hymns is its lack of a clear policy on its treatment of the texts, particularly with regard to emendation. Often Kennedy emends on good grounds and explains her rationale, as in the note to B30 ('B30'=line 30 of 'Baptist'). But sometimes she retains readings whose sense is bad, even when she suggest simple emendations, as at K36, B19, and B40. She neither emends nor offers a textual note for B32 even though she had earlier proposed a simple original reading for that line's b-verse that 'would restore both alliteration and metre' (pp. xxxvii-xxxviii, n. 75). Finally, the notes on retained readings which might well be erroneous are dotted with references to the 'grounds for emendation', grounds that seem to exist only where the manuscript reading is not 'satisfactory': if so, then even if better readings seem possible, Kennedy refuses to emend.

I have two complaints about all this. First, in the introduction Kennedy should have been explicit and positive about her grounds for emendation, rather than forcing users of her edition to infer them, and she should have applied them consistently. And second, she should have explained her belief that the existence of 'satisfactory sense' compels endorsement of the manuscript reading. To justify [End Page 249] that approach, she would need to show that a large majority, or even only a fair portion, of scribal errors render texts unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, that is palpably not the case, as works extant in multiple manuscripts make clear. Her wise remark at K87 that '[s]ome judicious emendation makes so much good sense that it would appear perverse to twist the MS readings into some kind of sense' shows that she is aware of this problem.

Those complaints aside, Kennedy's scholarship and presentation of it are on the whole rigorous and careful. A few errors and confusing situations, however, would be worth fixing. The erratum...

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