Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (review)

Joseph Dane's investigation of evidence in medieval manuscripts and early printed books from a bibliographical and theoretical perspective is very much a sequel to his The Myth of Print Culture (2003) and a contribution to recent discussions in bibliography and history of the book. The book is structured in two parts: "Inference and Evidence in Medieval Books" and "What Is a book?" Both are prefaced by an introduction on the difficulties of using electronic resources and catalogues to identify books as well as researching specific bibliographical evidence regarding these books. "What is that thing before us? How does it relate to what we think and speak about? How does one appeal to it? or address it?" (20), Dane asks, and how can a researcher defeat the standardization of books, which is imposed by catalogues and databases? Dane argues that such tools do not regard the book as a unique entity but rather a book as many others. These are important questions that shift from the location and identification of the object into a larger theoretical framework on materiality and textuality, thus leading Dane to explore the "abstractions" of evidence. The term, by the author's own admission, is "deliberately equivocal" and relates to evidence "removed or taken away" (9) from the materiality of the book and from, so it seems, its context.

In the following chapters, Dane presents self-contained case studies that introduce readers to a wide range of texts and issues. Chapter 1 reconsiders Littlewood and Greg's formula in calculating print runs of sixteenth-century copies of Everyman, arguing that the calculus was very much influenced by assumptions that ultimately cannot be proved. Chapter 2 is a cogent and lucid appraisal of Kane's editorial approach to the "Prologue" of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women with specific reference to the treatment of the text in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg 4.27. Chapters 3 and 4 conclude the first section of the book by focusing on medieval vernacular drama, reconsidering its editorial history in constructing textual and authorial identity. In Chapter 4, for instance, Dane reviews the creation of the abstract notion of the "Wake-field Master" in an interesting excursus through the critical editions of the Towneley plays and related scholarly publications from the nineteenth century to the present day.

The second part of the monograph starts with a discussion of the production of erroneous facsimiles of printed books and examines the lasting impact of such errors in the critical and scholarly use of the text reproduced. Dane here reconsiders the dangerous authority that a facsimile can exert. He fears that facsimiles are becoming "the primary substitute for the literary 'thing itself ' " (93), especially given the wide use of Early English Books Online. The succeeding chapters focus on detective work and detailed bibliographical examination of books with mistaken identity. Dane chases two misbound title pages of Thynne's 1542 edition of Chaucer's Works and reattributes them to the correct book. He reconsiders De Ricci's bibliographical note on the 1476 edition of Boccaccio's De Casibus virorum illustrium by Colard Mansion. In Chapter 8, he evaluates the duality of the use of Caxton in scholarly discourse, on the one hand as a synonym for the printed book itself and on the other biographically, as an individual. He concludes that our understanding and rating of the man and the object can at times be diametrically opposed, with the object being more highly regarded than the man. The final two chapters reconsider how books are subject to manipulation to "conform to abstract and evolving notions of what they should or ought to be" (139): a bibliographical case in point is the Huntington Library's 1484 printed edition of Bonaventura's Opuscula. This is a book that is difficult to describe because the print-run of this edition had a table of contents that varied in its content...