The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff (review)

Dick Pfaff, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina, is the honorand of this very readable collection of sixteen essays. Their thematic unity emerges from what is common to each, which is a close reading of the sources of evidence and all that that can open up for the student of manuscripts. Pfaff is best known for a distinguished record of publication on medieval liturgies, recently crowned by his one-volume survey, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History; but his scholarship has embraced medieval books more generally as well as the history of manuscript scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which informed his biography of M. R. James. Accordingly, the essays here are grouped into ‘Liturgical studies’ and ‘Historical studies’.

Most contributions in the first category in fact cross the border into the second, as does the first of them, Janet Sorrentino’s, whose essay finds the points of contact between the rebellion of the Gilbertine lay brothers in the 1160s and the liturgy that was subsequently finessed to affirm their status and encourage their conformity. Christopher Jones contributes a notice and transcription of a new witness to a redaction of the Liber officialis by Amalarius, now at Lambeth Palace, detached from a twelfth-century manuscript from the Augustinian priory of Lanthony Secunda. Elizabeth Teviotdale addresses the question of how to characterize Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 302, a handsome English manuscript of the mid-eleventh century that might be considered as either an abbreviated gospel book or a gospel lectionary, concluding that it was probably created as a devotional book for a high-ranking Benedictine. In a closely argued essay Andrew Hughes explores the manuscript setting for the office of the Vigil of the Feast of St Thomas the Martyr, focusing chiefly on the prosa and its rubric. An entertaining walk around Salisbury Cathedral is led by William Mahrt, in search of the evidence for liturgical processions in the early Sarum ritual. The manner in which these processions hugged the building probably belongs to traditions established in the tighter space of Old Sarum. Nigel Morgan’s article is of great value, offering a list of missals and breviaries grouped by date from the century after c. 1250, tracking the complex routes by which the Sarum sanctorale gradually replaced local texts in the province of Canterbury. The same question is approached from the other end by Sherry Reames, who notes some unexpected saints (listed in a helpful appendix) in a survey of some ninety Sarum breviaries, reminding us that there was no one normative Sarum ‘use’.

The ‘Historical’ section contains three studies on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and six on books from the later Middle Ages. Alan Thacker contributes a valuable new survey on priests and pastoral care in Anglo-Saxon England derived from a scrutiny of the sources, to conclude that priests then were perhaps as thin on the ground and scarcely less grand than the bishops. Joshua Westgard examines the textual transmission of annals about St Wilfrid added to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, finding a Mercian origin more plausible than Plummer’s suggestion of a northern one. Joseph Wittig also invokes Bede, as a source for certain glosses on Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae; and he sets out to test whether the glosses as a whole were taken over into the Alfredian Old English translation of Boethius. He concludes that, in spite of some striking points of contact, it is safer to see the glosses as reflections of current interpretations. The great manuscript of William of Tyre’s History of Outremer that is British Library, MS Yates Thompson 12 is discussed by Jaroslav Folda, the only art-historical essay in the volume. He suggests that the...