Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (review)

Editors of themed essay collections must routinely have difficulty devising appropriate collective titles as volumes on the same theme multiply. Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England will do well enough for this one, partly because the quality of the contributions is mostly very high: it would be unreasonable to complain seriously. But a reviewer has the responsibility of making clear the actual content of a collection. In the present case, the bias is predominantly Middle English and textual, most of the essays deriving from the 2005 York Manuscripts Conference. Only two of the thirteen are centrally concerned with the physical design of manuscripts in the sense of layout, decoration, and illustration. Design is elsewhere interpreted as relating to the choices a scribe makes when deciding how to transmit text in writing. As for distribution, the introduction asserts that late medieval producers of manuscript books were as concerned with marketing, audiences, intended use, and the like as those involved, shortly afterward, with the printed book trade. This claim is not really substantiated by the essays here, and a better word than "distribution" might have been "circulation," or simply "copying."

The book is usefully organized into three sections, by subtheme. We start with "Designing the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Early Copyists": three fairly heavyweight essays for those who wish to keep up with the latest thinking on the early textual transmission of the Tales, especially following the identification of the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, who must be Chaucer's own scribe Adam. Dan Mosser, "'Chaucer's Scribe': Adam and the Hengwrt Project," examines physical and textual evidence in the Hengwrt manuscript to see what we can deduce about authorial presence or absence in its direction. His tentative conclusion is that Chaucer is quite likely to have been involved at some stage of Hengwrt's production—perhaps at a distance—"but certainly not to the extent of 'finishing' it" (38). Jacob Thaisen writes about "The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited." This is a close examination of the orthography (and, in support, codicology) of these manuscripts (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, and London, British Library, MS Harley 7334) in relation to the nature of the exemplars the scribe employed. Thaisen presents evidence for, among other things, the very early integration of the noncanonical Tale of Gamelyn into the Canterbury Tales tradition—perhaps even before Chaucer's death—and stresses generally that "other manuscripts than Pinkhurst's contain authoritative material unrecorded in his" (60). Takako Kato's "Corrected Mistakes in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27" is rather different in being wholly textual. Its concentration on types of scribal error occurring as part of the copying process (which she categorizes in detail) is scholarship of a kind practiced before manuscript studies came into vogue. MS Gg.4.27 is a textually important Chaucer manuscript, and so Kato's conclusions about the scribe's performance—that the majority of his errors are the result of carelessness rather than insufficient understanding of his exemplar—are valuable for understanding its place in the textual tradition.

In the second grouping, "Designing Devotion: Individual and Institutional," no more than one of the four essays has to do with Middle English. This is Alexandra Barratt's "Singing from the Same Hymn-Sheet: Two Bridgettine Manuscripts," which expertly characterizes the physically contrasting London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 3600, and BL, MS Harley 494 (which belonged to Anne Bulkeley), and analyses their complicated textual overlap, testifying to common source materials. The former was undoubtedly made at Syon Abbey, and Barratt, who traces the court and abbey connections of Anne Bulkeley's family, shows that the latter manuscript was very likely compiled there also, in the 1530s. The other three essays in this section are Sherry L. Reames, "Late Medieval Efforts at Standardization and Reform in the Sarum Lessons for Saints' Days"; Amelia Grounds, "Evolution of a Manuscript...