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

Anyone who enjoyed Joseph A. Dane's The Myth of Print Culture (reviewed in Textual Cultures 1 [2006], 93-96) or his Who is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? will turn eagerly to Abstractions of Evidence. Readers will look forward to the same mixture of acerbic scepticism and witty playfulness as in the two earlier volumes. Dane's arguments about materiality and what pass for facts in relation to authors, books, and literary works move from an exposition of and absorption in detail to a larger engagement with what can be known about the past and how that knowledge is shaped and determined by often unrecognized and unacknowledged forces. Dane is an entertaining and often bracing writer who is at home in a wide range of medieval literature; he also has a highly developed sense of books as material objects and of their histories.

Abstractions of Evidence consists of two parts. The book's essential subject matter is outlined in the introduction: how does what is actually in front of the reader relate to what is or might be expected to be there? In the first part, called "Inference and Evidence in Medieval Books", Dane looks at "cases where the ordinary logic of literary history produces the foundational bibliographical evidence for that history", while in the second, "What is a Book?", he "focuses more closely on printed books and the way in which description of these books changes their real or imagined material nature" (10). The opening piece looks at the mathematical underpinning for W. W. Greg's conclusions about the popularity of the play Everyman as witnessed in its surviving early editions. By examining Cambridge MS Gg.4.27's version of the prologue to Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women, Dane engages with and modifies significantly George Kane's arguments (1989, 162-77) about the origins of its variant passages. "Two Studies in Early Dramatic Texts and Performances" looks sceptically at E. K. Chambers's account (1903) of the staging plan for La Seinte Resureccion and the relationship between Adam de la Halle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion and Le Jeu du Pelèrin. A further essay, "Myths of the Wakefield Master" presents "a more extreme example of authorial fiction" (57) than those already offered, by casting a fresh eye at the Towneley Plays, especially at their verse forms.

Other sorts of idealizing fictions come into play in the volume's second part, beginning with a strong account of what facsimile reproductions of books represent. All the following pieces return to similar themes touching on the relationships between books as they currently exist (or have existed) and the forms they are supposed to have in catalogues of various kinds. "Two Studies in Bibliographical Identification and Identity" looks at Prosper Aquitanus's De Vita Contemplativa (Speier: Peter Drach, 1486 and 1487) and at two Huntington copies of the 1542 Reynes/Bonham edition of Chaucer. This is followed by an account of Colard Mansion's 1476 Boccaccio, a more discursive piece on "What is [a] Caxton", and then by a consideration of the effects of various catalogues on the incunabula collected by Leander van Ess (1771-1847) and now in the Huntington. The volume concludes with a brief and rather engaging account of how the author's own uncertainties about the nature, even the existence, of parody and irony — about which he has written important critical accounts — have spread to his work on books as material objects.

There is much to be enjoyed in and learned from Abstractions of Evidence. Dane is particularly good at drawing attention to the competing forces that determine what a book is, from what the author created, to "the object foreseen by the printer, or what the printer intended or imagined to be sold" (123), to what collectors and dealers value, to what cataloguers and bibliographers describe, and to what scholars examine...