Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (review)

This impressive volume is a recent publication in the valuable series of Middle English texts sponsored by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages associated with the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. For twenty years, this series has performed a great service to the study of the Middle Ages by providing for classroom use scholarly editions of important literary texts not usually available at reasonable prices. Anyone who has sought to contextualize Malory by teaching Le Morte D'Arthur in conjunction with other romances or to situate Piers Plowman among other protest literature of the period will attest to the usefulness of the series. On a purely practical level, one can only admire that, in this age of inflated costs and prices, most volumes in the series cost less than $20, and this one, considerably longer than average at 655 pages, is still a modest $30.

This edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 is something of a departure for the series. Instead of an edition of an individual text such as Hoccleve's The Regiment of Princes or a selection of representative texts from a genre such as romance, lyric, or saint's life, this volume offers an edition of an anthology of verse compiled at the end of the fifteenth century in the northeast Midlands. As such it provides, as its editor notes, "a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England" (p. 1). In other words, it allows us to contextualize (or, perhaps, historicize) these texts, especially their social milieu. In this connection, it is interesting to note how the scholarly pendulum has swung back. I well remember, in graduate seminars many years ago, being instructed (by R. H. Robbins) never to ignore the manuscript context in which a text appeared—what other texts surrounded it; what, if any, significance that might have, for instance what might it tell us about audience or use. It is precisely those types of questions that an edition of an anthology such as this can address and begin to answer.

The edition consists of a general introduction in which the editor discusses, first, the codicology, date, provenance, and, in particular, the scribe of the manuscript (who identifies himself throughout as "Rate"). The editor concludes that the scribe is an amateur copying texts for his own use as they may have come to him and also making use of what the editor calls "regional networks of circulation" (p. 7). Here the editor makes the important observation that "amateur productions like Rate's are by no means uncommon in this period [late fifteenth century]" (p. 6), and he points to anthologies such as the Thornton, Findern, and Heege manuscripts as well as others, many of which share common texts with Ashmole. From these manuscript "networks," scholars may begin to understand the development of popular literary taste.

Next, the introduction discusses the texts themselves, describing the prominent genres to which they belong (romance—6, saints' lives—2, exempla—6, didactic—8, prayers—4, and lyrics—9) and the themes that appear common to many of them (family life, proper social behavior, religious belief, and devotion). The editor also notes what the anthology does not contain: no history, no humanist texts, no utilitarian material (recipes, prognostics, etc.), no prose at all. The editor aptly summarizes this analysis by suggesting that the overall purpose of the anthology was "sentence and solas" (p. 15), that is, instruction and entertainment, probably for a well-to-do provincial family of merchants or gentry.

Following this introduction, each text is presented in manuscript order, preserving the readings from Ashmole, except where the sense requires conservative emendation from closely related manuscripts. The texts range from the well-known romance Sir Orfeo to the much less familiar Sir Cleges, from devotional bestsellers such as The Northern Passion and Maidstone's Seven Penitential Psalms to...