Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton ed. by Robert Boenig, Kathleen Davis (review)

REVIEWS Langlandian scholarship is not famous for consensus. Far from being an exact science, paleography itself remains the domain of a small number of well-informed but opinionated experts. Benson and Blanchfield can expect much stern correction—which their Preface is generous enough to invite. Highly complicated and detailed assemblages of data are also prone to human error. Blanchfield conducted work on Sion College manuscript (now privately owned by Toshiyuki Takamiya) and the three Huntington Library manuscripts through the use of microfilms, which do not always yield the most reliable results. Marginal annotations are usually cramped scribbles, with an infuriating amount of abbreviation , and so their transcriptions will be open to numerous challenges. Even specialists do not agree, have second thoughts, change their minds. The scribe of the C-text manuscript Huntington HM 137 from the late fourteenth century signed his name in the explicit, for example, but even the long-persevering editor George Russell cannot finally decide whether to read the name as Thomas Lancaster or Thomas Dancaster. While Chaucer scholars have long profited from the information assembled by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in the first volume of their monumental Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) supplemented in recent years by M. C. Seymour’s two-volume Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts (1995–97), this first-ever volume of The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman serves as a landmark undertaking that will encourage wider initial access to these historical materials and better understanding of their uses for literary studies. John M. Bowers University of Nevada, Las Vegas Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, eds. Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000. 261 pp. $44.50 This collection of eleven essays by colleagues and former students of Whitney F. Bolton provides a kind of road map to that scholar’s diverse interests over the course of a venerable career of teaching and research. 371 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:36:51 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER A quick look at the list of Bolton’s publications in the Appendix is helpful before reading the contents proper, because it is apparently the categories of Bolton’s own writings which lent the editors direction in choosing work to fill these pages. Bolton’s publications are grouped as follows: ‘‘Old English and Old Norse Literature’’; ‘‘Chaucer and Middle English’’; ‘‘Medieval Latin’’; ‘‘Later English Literature’’; ‘‘English Language ’’; and ‘‘Computer Applications.’’ These are the concerns which stand behind the four divisions of the table of contents, and the scholarship assembled within each. Of particular interest to Chaucerians are essays in Part 1, and one essay in Part 3. In ‘‘Part 1: Transmissions between Manuscripts and across Genres’’ are five essays, one each by Susan Crane, Malcolm Andrew, Andrew Welsh, Robert Boenig, and Lord Morris of Castlemorris (Brian Robert Morris). Crane, Welsh, and Boenig all write about Chaucer, in one capacity or another; Andrew’s focus is the poem Patience; and Lord Morris examines Wagner’s use (or perhaps abuse) of Measure for Measure. Of the first three, Crane’s study (‘‘Duxworth Redux: The Paris Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales’’) is the least about Chaucer per se, but obviously, in its attention to detail and its carefully supported iconoclasm, it has a place alongside Bolton’s own work. Crane returns for a fresh look at the question of editorial responsibility in the Paris manuscript. After a thoughtful reconsideration of published scholarly opinion on the matter, she rejects predominant opinion to conclude that the idiosyncratic emendations made to Chaucer’s text in the Paris manuscript present the decisions not of its owner, Jean d’Orleans, Comte d’Angoulême, but rather of John Duxworth, copyist of the Paris Canterbury Tales and of a Dialogue of St. Anselm also belonging to Jean d’Angoulême. Both manuscripts bear Duxworth’s signature. Crane’s treatment of preceding scholarship and the evidence of the manuscript are even-handed and convincing. Readers will be particularly interested in her two primary conclusions (and ought perhaps to heed the careful note of admonition on which she ends): ‘‘John Duxworth is . . . typical of the early Canterbury Tales scribes in...