Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Vol. 2: Literature and Philology (review)

140 Reviews Muzio. Apparently instigated by Love herself to write this preface, Muzio declares: 'I have only ever belonged, and still belong, to Signora Tullia'. Rinaldina Russell's declared purpose in presenting this translation of Tullia d'Aragona's work is that: 'Its significance . . . and the complex motivations for writing it, have largely been misunderstood or ignored.' By providing the first publication of this work in English and adding a succinct yet dense introduction, Russell has certainly achieved her objective and presents Aragona as a w o m a n worthy of further study. It is this emphasis on accessibility to an English audience which is the hallmark of King and Rabil's previous work and is laudably true of this series. As undergraduate texts they are excellent (although there is an occasional typographical error). They do, however, suffer from constraint of space, and it is hoped that both these volumes will inspire further work on the women who are their subjects. Catherine Kovesi-Killerby Department of Humanities University of Notre D a m e Australia Damico, Helen, ed., with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz, Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Vol. Literature and Philology (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2071) N e w York and London, Garland, 1998; board; pp. xxx, 465; 24 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$95.00. 'Error', suggests Hans Aarsleff, 'may be as influential as truth. It is on retrospect that the difference stands out clearly. W e see the line of truth as a record of progress, but forget that the record of progress is not the same as history. To the historical understanding, the pseudo-science of an age may be as important as its science' (The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860, Princeton, 1967, p. 3). The biographical Medieval Scholarship series, which will conclude with a third volume on philosophy and the arts, has never claimed to be other than a record of progress. Yet it suffers, I think, from its lack of attention to error, to 'wrong' history. What it offers is a curiously old-style grand narrative, in which our biographers lead us from one peak of achievement to the next as scholarship relentlessly improves itself. Errors do occur along the way of course, but w e are assured that the subjects remain important despite them. Many times in this volume w e see one or another form of a saving 'although' clause: 'Though their research has largely been superseded', Elizabeth Scala writes of Manly and Rickert, their work 'continue[s] to form the base of Chaucer research' (p. 297). Before I amplify this point, it should be emphatically stated that like the first volume in the series the second is an outstandingly useful work that Reviews 141 should remain current for years to come. In addition, no one will read the book as a reviewer does, from page 1 to page 465; dipping into it in a more piecemeal way will mitigate its continuist narrative of scholarship. The volume contains 32 biographical essays covering 34 medievalists— not 35, as the back cover blurb claims—including the brothers Grimm, and Manly and Rickert. It opens with an account of the sixteenth-century scholar Laurence Nowell and then moves to the scholarly efflorescence of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the work of George Hickes, Ami Magniisson, Humfrey Wanley, and Elizabeth Elstob. The bulk of the book then covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and scholars involved in comparative philology (Benjamin Thorpe, the Grimms, Rasmus Rask); the great editing and publishing projects of Victorian Britain (Frederick Furnivall, Walter Skeat, Henry Sweet), and the editing debates in France and Germany (Gaston Paris, Alfred Jeanroy, Joseph Bedier, Andreas Heusler). As in the previous volume each biography opens with a standard formula, rapidly locating the scholar in relation to his or her discipline and mapping the scholarly career before an assessment of the work follows and then a select bibliography. The result is an extremely useful digest of information, mostly in wellwritten form. M y main concern with it is that w e ought to be sceptical of the official narrative of medieval studies...