London Literature, 1300-1380 (review)

Ralph Hanna's London Literature is essentially a work of literary history — very deliberately, of local literary history — but its exploration of the pre-Chaucerian vernacular literary tradition in the capital is based upon illuminating new arguments about London book-making and reading. It is a pioneering piece of work, by a scholar passionately concerned with the history of manuscript production, the process of literature, and (as he stresses in his very personal preface) the importance of locality.

But it is not an easy read, and book (and text) historians will feel that Hanna's wordy and convoluted academic style would have benefited from the attentions of an editor. They might also have preferred a shorter, tauter account of book production in fourteenth-century London, concentrating more on the physical artefacts on which the study is based and less wrapped round with literary analysis. Indeed Hanna's discussions of the English texts he surveys (romances, sermons, Piers Plowman) are so detailed as to deter anyone but the specialist, and there is a sense at times — when London disappears from sight for long stretches — that he is indulging himself; that an analysis of a text is being included because he has done the work. However, the intention of the present review is to concentrate on the new landscape of London book production and patronage that the author sketches out for us.

His procedure is, in a way, simple, to the extent that it becomes surprising that the work has not been done before: identify London books of the period (irrespective of language), compare their texts, scripts, and physical make-up, and draw conclusions. But Middle English is Hanna's main interest, and his starting point is ten manuscripts (spread across the fourteenth century) exhibiting what is known as Type II London English. Hanna notices that groups of texts recur in these manuscripts, notably romances (as in the well-known Auchinleck manuscript of the 1330s) and translated religious prose. Through the addition of other evidence (for example, from wills) he establishes these clusters of texts as staples of the London book trade and London reading in the period up to the 1380s, bringing out in particular the importance of the little-studied English prose texts (the sermon cycle known as the Mirror, a glossed Psalter, an Apocalypse). One result is that the manuscript anthology Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys 2498 comes into prominence, characterized as 'the most extensive project of English vernacular book-production undertaken [in London] before the close of the fourteenth century' (p. 153). Pepys 2498 also contains an altered copy of the much earlier prose Ancrene Riwle ('The Recluse'), and Hanna shows how the various texts in the manuscript borrow from each other — demonstrating compositional as well as scribal activity — rather as the Auchinleck romances do. London's importance as an import-export centre for texts is also explored, and so the originally West Midland Piers Plowman enters the equation. Hanna convincingly associates the B version of Langland's poem (undoubtedly a London text) with the 'Edwardian' era that ended in 1376–77, and these years are shown to be transitional also in respect of script, as Anglicana (shown to be a unifying feature of pre-Chaucerian London book production) gives way to the new age's Secretary.

The central book-production themes are laid out in the potentially forbidding Chapter 2, devoted to the production of legal works. Hanna persuasively argues that the evidently huge number of copies of the Latin Statuta Anglie in circulation in the earlier fourteenth century would have familiarized Londoners with the procedures involved in making and consulting books, while helping to establish Anglicana as an appropriate script for formal book-making purposes. There is particular focus on the book-production activity of Andrew Horn, Chamberlain of London, in the period 1310–25, an enterprise that clearly required cooperative work by a group of book artisans, who thus gained experience (Hanna suggests) likely to have been put to subsequent use in...