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  • Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London by Arthur Bahr
  • Joseph A. Dane
Arthur Bahr. Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x, 285. $45.00 cloth.

The book consists of an introduction followed by four chapters that discuss: manuscripts produced by (or “supervised by”) a fourteenth-century Londoner, Andrew Horn; the Auchinleck MS; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and the Trentham MS of Gower. These seem reasonably well researched, although research is not really the goal here; rather, each defined corpus (a group of manuscripts, a single manuscript, a literary text) is subjected to a critical reading—what I suppose could be styled the codicological version of the very New Critical readings of a distant and undefined scholarly past from which Bahr struggles at several points to distinguish himself. What links these four disparate subjects is stated in the keywords of the title: “Fragments,” “Assemblages,” “Compilations,” “London.”

I will state from the outset that I am very skeptical of this kind of study and the assumptions that underlie it, whether the subject is manuscript collections (I claim no particular expertise here) or those compilations of printed books known as “tract volumes,” or Sammelbände, with which I am more familiar. Bahr’s interest and the intellectual task from which he claims to derive “delight” (256–57) lie in the readings themselves, and the value of the book depends on them; I am more interested in the method and assumptions (admittedly a secondary concern for Bahr), and that is what I will focus on here.

The reasons texts were put together in single manuscripts or bound volumes of printed books vary. These reasons are sometimes irrecoverable (why anyone did anything in history is rarely clear), and when they are recoverable, they are often not always that interesting or illuminating. One way to approach this problem is simply to look at other compilations: when you survey a number of them (whether manuscripts or printed Sammelbände) you can begin to see distinctions and differences; you can see (or imagine) types of composite volumes, perhaps a scale on which these might form a continuum. Volume X is intentional, Volume Y, by contrast, accidental. Volume Z is authorial. Another one is scribal. [End Page 279] Thus Bahr’s apparent method—to bring various types of compilations together—has potential. You might be able to say something about the nature of one compilation by contrasting it with another. What Bahr does here is different: each of his four different compilations is given what appears to be an independent close reading. The relations are not really dealt with, even when they are obvious (Chaucer/Gower), nor when they are apparently remote (how is Horn’s corpus of manuscripts in any way comparable to the Canterbury Tales as represented in modern editions?).

The following theses and assumptions are stated repeatedly in the introduction: “This book … contends that we can productively bring comparable interpretive strategies to bear on the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works” (1) (i.e., manuscript compilations are “texts”); “I define compilation, not as an objective quality … but rather as a mode of perceiving such forms so as to disclose an interpretably meaningful arrangement” (3) (i.e., historical objects are critical objects); “a compilation relies on the perspective of its readers” (11). (I believe this is also the implication of the syntax of the subtitle, where a close reading reveals that the implied agent of “forming” is the modern scholar.) Onto these main assumptions is grafted what I’ll call a thematic assertion: all these compilations have to do in some way with civic matters, whether the city of London, or the royal succession. “They are thus four compilations from medieval London, that, when assembled and apprehended together, become a compilation of medieval London” (4). This is not much of a thesis—it is rather a recent popular topic (David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]; Ralph Hanna’s London Literature, 1300–1380 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]). And to assert that the Canterbury Tales is about the city of London in some way, as is...

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