The Middle English Text of The Art of Hunting (review)

This work (AH) is a critical edition of a fifteenth-century 130-lines-long Middle English translation of “the earliest manual on the sport to be composed in England” (back cover), the Anglo-Norman hunting treatise L’Art de Venerie, by William Twiti, written probably about 1327.

Scott-Macnab’s text is based on a manuscript (MS A) once located in Ashtonunder-Lyne (Lancs). It was not known to earlier editors of Twiti’s work such as Gunnar Tilander, who used London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian B. XII (MS C) as his base text, and accordingly MS C is the manuscript that most readers of Twiti use. MS A, however, offers a far more coherent and accurate translation of Twiti’s work than does MS C.

AH then, provides a modern edition and a thorough study of the Middle English version of L’Art de Venerie, with a facing text of the Anglo-Norman original, now Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 424/448 (MS G), which is similar to, but not “the direct ancestor” of the other Middle English versions. Perhaps to help justify a book-length monograph, a fresh edition of MS C and of The Craft of Venery, now at Yale (MS Y), as well as material on hare hunting from The Boke of St. Albans are added. There are extensive notes in the form of a commentary on each text and an excellent glossary of key hunting terms, as well as a bibliography to 2007, and four plates showing pages from the manuscripts studied.

As some general users of AH may not be completely familiar with the tradition of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Middle English hunting treatises, a brief synopsis may be in order. Three of the earliest examples are based on Twiti’s work. Edward of Norwich, Duke of York’s Master of Game (1406–1413) translates into English prose the French Livre de Chasse of Gaston Phébus. Slightly later than The Master of Game is the anonymous verse Boke of Huntyng, which eventually became The Book of St. Albans associated with the name Juliana Berners (1486). Independent of these is the group comprised of the prose Treatyse off Huntyng and its contemporary The Craft of Venery, a version of one of the translations of Twiti already noted. Except for The Master of Game, which translates a French original, all the works just mentioned are native to England.

Scott-Macnab clearly outlines the textual tradition of The Art of Hunting (the oldest copy of which is British Library Additional 46919: MS B) and states his purpose “to make available a scholarly edition of Twiti’s treatise . . . using as a base text a translation that was unknown to all previous editors of Twiti’s work” [MS A] and which is “more faithful to the . . . original treatise than The Craft of Venery (MS Y)” (p. ix). A secondary purpose (perhaps responsible for the unusual scope of the preface and introduction given the modest literary and historical importance of Twiti’s text itself) “is to redeem . . . [Twiti’s] work from some of the criticism [of incoherence] that has been leveled against it” (p. ix). To this end, the publication of AH “provides students of the medieval English hunt . . . with a reliable and comprehensive” text of Twiti’s treatise, important “to linguists, lexicographers and students of the hunt” for its large number of “technical loanwords” (p. x).

The introduction states of William Twiti’s brief manual that it is “the first hunting treatise in England” (p. xvii) and claims that “there is every reason to believe” the putative author (whose name was spelled in several ways and may come from a Norman place name Thuit) was a huntsman of King Edward II (p. lxxi). But beyond this, little is known of the author or of his purpose in composing the work.

Clear and detailed, the description of the various MSS...