Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers by Ralph Hanna (review)
- Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers by Ralph Hanna
This volume examines ‘common topics or situations that typically engage the interests of medieval book historians’ (p. 1), using a set of texts and manuscripts ranging from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales to more obscure, individual manuscripts from medieval England, particularly fourteenth-century Yorkshire. Although Hanna makes it clear that this is neither a guide to codicology nor a handbook for book history, the volume is explicitly aimed at students; indeed, its individual chapters are based on Hanna’s postgraduate teaching at Oxford.
Unlike a handbook or guide which synthesizes approaches to medieval book history, the chapters of this volume each deal with specific problems or questions relating to individual manuscripts or sets thereof. Thus Chapter 1 essentially presents an overview of recent debates on Beowulf, with an emphasis on contextualizing the text thoroughly within its manuscript (BL, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv), which is a miscellany produced by two scribes and presented as a Liber monstrorum. Chapter 2 examines a set of manuscript witnesses to the Middle English ‘Benjamin’, focusing particularly on producers’ uses of booklets and how the text was transmitted. Chapters 3, 4, and 6 all focus on different manuscripts from late medieval Yorkshire in order to examine issues of authorship, production, and textual transmission. Chapter 5 looks in detail at two different manuscript witnesses to The Canterbury Tales (the ‘Ellesmere Manuscript’ and the ‘Hengwrt Manuscript’, respectively San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9, and Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D) in order to think about the activities of Chaucer’s ‘Scribe B’, whose hand appears in several other manuscripts, and the exemplars available to him in copying the version of The Canterbury Tales in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 2. Finally, Chapter 7 addresses the question of libraries and book collections, ranging from the humble to the grand.
Together, these chapters engage with medieval book history in its broadest, most important manifestation: the cultural relations between texts, objects, and society, foregrounding both producers and readers. Hanna offers up valuable and complex insights into matters such as reading habits, local networks of production and how scribes shaped the texts they produced, as well as the impact of nineteenth- and twentieth-century editorial practices on our own understanding of medieval books. A good illustration of the volume’s contribution is Chapter 6, which engages not with a codex itself, but with a contract for one to be produced. Hanna considers an entry from a register of the dean and chapter register of York Minster, which indicates that on 26 August 1346 a priest, John Forbor, commissioned the scribe Robert Berkeling to produce a psalter. Hanna gathers the evidence together and presents a mini-biography of the patron and considers what kind of book he wished to possess. Here, Hanna’s knowledge of codicology and illumination are used to shed light on [End Page 447] how Forbor would have used his bespoke book, as well as its relative level of expense. Such a discussion has clear applications beyond both Forbor’s psalter and its contract.
From a teaching and learning perspective, however, this book is awkward. The main problem is that each chapter engages with its manuscripts and texts in highly specific and involved ways, making it difficult at times to follow Hanna’s treatment without having knowledge of specific manuscripts themselves. Discussion is necessarily intricate, but one of the book’s strengths and key aims—to explore an overlapping set of book-historical problems—results in a highly discursive treatment which can be difficult to follow. These are serious issues for an introductory text aimed at graduate students; while no academic would wish for Hanna’s insights to be ‘dumbed down’, they could be presented in a more accessible manner, and one which enables students to apply them more readily to manuscripts they themselves will be studying. As it...
