Gospel Books and Early Latin Manuscripts (review)

Reviews 247 McGurk, Patrick, Gospel Books and Early Latin Manuscripts (Variorum - Collected Studies Series CS606), Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998; cloth; pp. xii, 344; 39 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £57.50. Single-volume manuscripts of the entire Latin Bible were rare in the earlier Middle Ages, mainly because of the sheer size and length of the Biblical text. Volumes containing individual books or groups of related books were far more common. Of these, the most frequent survivor is the Gospel Book, which usually contained the text of the Four Gospels together with some supplementary material. More than 4 0 % of the surviving Latin Biblical texts from the period up to 800 A D consist of Gospel Books—about 160 volumes in all. They range from the 'pocket Gospels' designed for individual use by travelling m o n k s to sumptuously decorated large-format volumes like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Patrick McGurk has spent more than forty years studying these Gospel Books and is undoubtedly our leading authority on them. This collection, in the usual format of the Variorum series, brings together fifteen of his papers originally published between 1955 and 1996. They include the introduction to his definitive catalogue of early Latin Gospel Books, first issued in 1961 and reprinted with a new, brief postscript. Six of the other papers have been given short supplementary bibliographies. There is also a general index to the whole collection, as well as an index of manuscripts. Though most of the papers deal with the period between 400 and 800, three of them extend the coverage into Anglo-Saxon England in the century before the Norman Conquest. McGurk's focus is very much on the palaeographical characteristics of these books: their format, arrangement, and appearance. H e is particularly interested in the ancillary materials accompanying the Gospel text. In several of the papers he looks at the Canon Tables—the tabular concordance for the four Gospels devised by Eusebius of Caesarea—and considers the significance of variations in presentation and text. The etymological lists of Hebrew names, compiled by Jerome and often found in Gospel Books, are also studied in two papers. In several cases, McGurk undertakes a detailed examination of individual manuscripts: the Book of Kells, the Ghent Livinus Gospels, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Codex Fuldensis. Elsewhere his emphasis is on a minute palaeographical detail: the use of citation marks in early 248 Reviews Latin manuscripts. But these specific investigations are balanced by several magisterial and wide-ranging surveys: 'the oldest manuscripts of the Latin Bible', 'the Gospel Book in Celtic lands before A.D. 850', and 'Latin Gospel Books from A.D. 400 to A.D. 800.' Most of these papers were originally published in specialist journals or books of essays, and their re-publication in a single, easily accessible volume is to be welcomed. It is a fitting recognition of McGurk's seminal contribution to the study of these early manuscripts of the Latin Bible and will be a definitive starting-point for researchers in the future. But the coherence of the collection is unfortunately undermined by the lack of any obvious order in the arrangement of the papers within the volume. The specific and the more general are jumbled up together, and papers on the same theme—such as canon tables—are not grouped together. Nor is there a clear chronological or geographical order. This gives a misleading impression of incoherence to what is in fact a coherent and very valuable body of research in this field. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre University of Western Australia Masschaele, James, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150-1350, N e w York, St Martin's Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xii, 275; 13 maps and diagrams; R.R.P.£35.00, US$45.00. Recent studies on regional, rather than local or national, communit have transformed our understanding of social and economic relationships in medieval Europe. James Masschaele continues this trend as he traces the development of commercialisation within England before 1350, and in particular demonstrates that peasants immersed themselves in deliberate production for the market m u c h earlier than has often been...