The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557 ed. by Lotte Hellinga, J. B. Trapp (review)

REVIEWS on the language of Harley Scribe B and his exemplars which is a model of modern linguistic and dialectal analysis; and Marilyn Corrie discusses Harley beside MS Digby 86 and the evidence offered by both manuscripts of the vigorous circulation of French/Anglo-Norman literature of all kinds. She emphasizes the need to study English and French/AngloNorman texts in conjunction—something that the study of Harley 2253 must be bound to encourage. Corrie’s essay is an attempt to write the cultural history for the manuscript that is needed if all the work that has been done is to be brought together and made sense of. She has made a beginning. The volume ends with an appropriate collection of apparatus, and is fully illustrated with plates throughout, including photographs of all 41 of Revard’s charters. It is a splendid achievement, and very handsomely produced by the Medieval Institute Press. Derek Pearsall Harvard University Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 743. $135.00 Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp have launched the Cambridge seven-part series on the history of the book with an impressively weighty volume. Containing two introductory pieces and twenty-eight separate essays, the volume suggests a definitive review of the period from Chaucer’s death to the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company and the publication of Sir Thomas More’s English Works. Fitting both the loose disciplinary rubric of the history of the book and the variety of material forms of this period, the volume’s essays range in topic from workaday textbooks to erudite humanist scholarship, from the London book trade to monastic libraries, from canon law to courtly literature. These studies are complemented by a substantial bibliography; indices for general information , manuscripts, and printed books; an appendix presenting the 1484 and 1534 Acts concerning the book trade, and a selection of black-and-white plates. The volume is thus a collection of interlocked and at times overlapping but nevertheless discrete essays; against this, 405 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:15 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER it also possesses the greater unity of a reference work and as such suggests a coming to terms with the period as a whole. Literally, then, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 3 explores the material and intellectual production and use of books from 1400 through to 1557; more broadly, it challenges our ability to read this period, one conventionally defined as a lacuna between the medieval and the early modern, on its own terms. The volume is at its best when it takes up this challenge directly. For example, in his essay on the customs rolls, Paul Needham revises N. J. M. Kerling’s well-known 1955 essay, ‘‘Caxton and the Trade in Printed Books,’’ to argue that book importation in the late 1400s ‘‘was not an interesting sideline, but a primary factor in the history of the English book-trade’’ (148). This is not the essay’s single point; Needham uses the occasion to suggest that we cannot take archival documents at face value, that we must instead proceed with ‘‘a lively cautionary awareness of [their] complications, limitations, and ambiguities ’’ (149) and read the assumptions and distinctions behind—indeed, even the gaps within—what they present. The result is an object lesson in archival research, one that not only revises the existing history, but also suggests the critical imagination necessary for such a revision. Mary C. Erler’s analysis of devotional literature demonstrates a similarly innovative approach. Instead of surveying the range of contrasting discourses running throughout the period—vernacular and Latinate theology, limited literacy and bookishness, manuscript and print production—Erler explains the continued centrality of devotional literature by reading its variety—books of hours, primers, prayer books, religious verse, even devotional cards and pasted-in printed images—as offering its readers and owners a range of cultural uses, alternatively orthodox and heterodox . In essays such as these, the volume moves toward a greater understanding of the ways in which books belong to the cultural context of...