Recent Books
- Recent Books
Ralph Hanna's exemplary edition appears at a time when an appreciation is forming of the effects on vernacular devotional literature of the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel of 1409 (which asserted orthodoxy against Lollard writings). Rather than venture new composition, writers turned to retrospective compilations of approved texts earlier in date than Wyclif's. Richard Rolle, the fourteenth-century Yorkshire hermit and mystical writer, was a beneficiary of this conservatism: his writings were much copied, his style imitated, and some works may travel incognito under his name. From this tangle Hanna has gathered up an armful of texts that have been overlooked by modern scholarship, and in particular by Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson for her collection Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, published for the same society in 1988, and based on what she regarded as the 'canonical' collection in Longleat House MS 29. Hanna argues that such an approach has risked unjustly consigning to the margins authentic works that happen to be transmitted by other manuscripts, and sets out here to supply the lack. His edition divides into four parts. In the first section, a block of short tracts is printed from Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, a miscellany compiled by the Yorkshire gentleman Robert Thornton (died c. 1465). Only one of these, 'Desire and Delight', was printed by Ogilvie-Thomson, although the others here have equal claims on authenticity. The second section consists of an edition of Rolle's lyrics, giving the sequence usually considered genuine plus two other lyrics possibly by Rolle; it is based on Cambridge University Library MS Dd. 5. 64, but informed by a critical examination of all known manuscript witnesses. In the third part of the book Hanna presents three didactic texts of which the first and longest piece, 'The Lessouns of Dirige', is very likely authentic. Two shorter pieces have clear Rolle affiliations, and Hanna argues for the authenticity of one of them, 'Of the wyrkyngs in mans saule'. The fourth section prints three Northern translations of excerpts from the much-read Vitas patrum and Verba seniorum, which communicate the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers. (Professor Hanna's Latinate ear shrinks from the construction 'Vitas patrum' as a title, preferring 'Vitae'; but the former was the normal title in the Middle Ages, deriving from the first words of the incipit.) These anonymous pieces are not by Rolle, but their tenor and style place them firmly in the realm of eremitic spirituality associated with Rolle and his imitators. In all, Hanna calls upon twenty manuscripts, of which the great majority belong to the fifteenth century. Each is carefully described and its contents identified. This edition is an offshoot of Hanna's research for his forthcoming handlist of Rolle's works, which will replace Emily Hope-Allen's catalogue of 1927 and should be warmly welcomed.
James Willoughby
Oxford
In this short study Anthony Payne presents a revised and expanded version of his essay '"Strange, Remote and Farre Distant Countreys": The Travel Books of Richard Hakluyt', first published in Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the [End Page 82] Book Trade, ed. by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (1999). The original essay has been adjusted for a different audience (a little less book history, a bit more about maps) and takes note of new material, such as David Armitage's recent edition of the single, scribal manuscript of Hakluyt's translation of Hugo Grotius's Mare liberum. Nevertheless the book historian will still want to consult Payne's Hakluyt Society lecture of 1996, 'Richard Hakluyt and his Books'. Appended to the main text of this new book is a list of twenty-nine...
