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  • Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition
  • Tim William Machan
Ralph Hanna, ed. Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition. EETS o.s. 331, 332. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xcvi, 674. £74.00; $150.00.

The landscape of Middle English literature has changed. For many years, literary histories treated medieval England as a locally undifferentiated place that produced, simply, English literature. Or they treated it as a place synonymous with London and its court poetry, from which poets in literally marginal places might take their models and inspiration. No more, however. Scholars of Chester, Norfolk, Scotland, and the Welsh border area (to name just four examples) have all recently shown the late medieval literary landscape to be both less coherent and less focused on London than once imagined. With his work on Yorkshire as well as London, Ralph Hanna has been among the boldest of these new geographers, and his edition of the Speculum Vitae will take its place as a crucial contribution to this emergent mapping of the literary landscape.

Previously unedited, the anonymous Speculum is a late fourteenth-century northern verse translation of the Somme le roi by Lorens of Orléans. It is a translation, however, in the way that many late medieval works are translations—a work indebted to a source for its ideas, structure, and much of its language but also to an array of ancillary works that can be incorporated to amplify what the translator understood to be the source's essential meaning. In this case, these ancillary works are distinctively northern, including anonymous lyrics, Rolle's “Form of Living,” and the Cursor Mundi. Extant in forty-five manuscripts that vary from fragments to documents containing more than sixteen thousand lines of text, the Speculum offers a fairly complete catechism by way of meditations on topics like the Pater Noster, the seven virtues, and the seven vices. Structurally, it is at once rigid in its reliance on listing and subdividing and also casual in its expansiveness. While no one would [End Page 344] ever consider it a must read—Hanna well describes one of the translator's rearrangements as “awkward, but . . . at least clever” (lxxii)—it is not without its occasional charms, as in a comparison between the allure of false speech for sinners and honey for bears:

Þai enoynt with swete hony Þe way to helle for þam namely, Forþi þat þai suld hardylyer ga By þat way þat enoynte es swa, Als men does þat þa beere taas.

(13763–67)

Ultimately, though, the greatest contribution of the Speculum to the literary landscape is conceptual. In its length, methods, and number of extant manuscripts, the poem attests to a thriving Yorkshire literary culture that looked inward for its texts and methods rather than outward to the court and society of London. Like Cursor Mundi, the Speculum opens with warnings to readers to avoid minstrelsy and romances like Ysumbras, and, like Rolle's “Form of Living,” it stipulates that sins of thought, word, and deed are joined by those of omission: “Þe synnes of leuynge of gode vndone” (5592).

Hanna subtitles his text a “reading edition” because it is understandably based on collation of only a selection of manuscripts—the five best ones, as he sees them, along with two copies from another of the poem's textual traditions and sporadic collation from other manuscripts. He describes editorial capitalization and punctuation as “heavier than customary, since I have tried to disambiguate complex grammatical sequences and to mark the poet's abiding interest in Vices and Virtues” (lxxxvii). Variants are located at the bottom of the page, and the second volume concludes with notes and a glossary. In the introduction, Hanna provides characteristically thorough descriptions of the manuscripts along with discussions of authorship, date, dialect, sources, and meter. While thoroughly informed and informative, this material sometimes seems to reflect the enthusiasm that long work on an obscure text can produce. Hanna grants, for instance, that deducing phonology from the Speculum and then reading it against LALME is problematic (lxvi), but then does this very thing. And the discussion of metrics in particular raises concerns, maintaining as it does that the poem is written not...

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