The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER to modern eyes they are mobile and intriguing, floating free of the restricting frame and the rigid ranks of the liberal arts above them. Rosalind Field Royal Holloway, University of London Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, eds. The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland , Kempe, and Gower. English Literary Studies 85. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 2001. Pp. 239. $26.00. This collection of essays is in some ways a companion volume to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s earlier study co-authored with Denise Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce ‘‘Piers Plowman’’ (Minnesota, 1999). The ‘‘professional reader’’ in question is not the monk or nun, for whom lectio was part of the day’s work, but the scribe, rubricator, corrector, annotator, or illustrator, who read through a manuscript and then helped prepare it for a general reader. Kelly Parsons offers the most fully developed picture of such a reader in her treatment of the so-called Red Ink Annotator, a Carthusian monk, possibly even the prior, at Mount Grace in the early sixteenth century, who annotated British Library MS Additional 61823, the only surviving manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. As has long been recognized, the monks of Mount Grace had a powerful tradition of emotionally charged meditation, and the Red Ink Annotator encouraged this practice, adding small pictures of hearts, hands, Christ’s bleeding wounds, and even the flames of divine love. But Parsons takes us a step further, arguing that the red ink annotations were intended specifically to meet the needs of a lay audience. When Margery says that God’s love has so moved her that she would forgive her fellow Christians even if they had prepared for her the most shameful death that any man might suffer, the annotator inserts ‘‘or woman.’’ Elsewhere, the same hand notes passages that might console married women and draws attention to the presence of Margery’s husband or children and to her secular status. The Red Ink Annotator also adds a small sketch of the Virgin’s smock, a high-necked and conservative dress of the kind a pious layPAGE 400 400 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:41 PS REVIEWS woman might have favored. Not surprisingly, the annotator also tones down some of Margery’s more intense passages, as when in her meditations she imagines herself assisting Mary to take care of Christ in his childhood. As Nicholas Watson notes in his preview of the chapter, all this suggests that the monks of Mount Grace understood The Book of Margery Kempe as a pastoral treatise, just as Margery’s priest-scribe did (p. 11). Those who wish to pursue the implications of this insight will be well served by Parsons’s careful retranscription of the annotations. One might wonder if there is much left to be said about the Ellesmere manuscript, especially after the publication in 1995 of the new facsimile and the accompanying volume of essays edited by Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, but Maidie Hilmo, in her provocative account of the illustrations, has a great deal to add. She sees the Ellesmere illustrator as a social conservative, anxious to promote the dignity of the seigneurial class and snib mercantile and peasant pretentions. Drawing both on direct consultation of the manuscript and on computer enlargements, Hilmo discovers that the figure of the Knight is wearing not gloves but fingerless mittens! But is this figure, placed at the top of folio 10r where the Knight’s Tale begins, really Chaucer’s Knight? Others, in particular Richard Emmerson, have noted that the figure diverges sharply from the description in the General Prologue of the plainly dressed pilgrim in his rust-stained ‘‘gypon.’’ Not so much a soldier or a crusader as a lord, the figure might also be taken to represent Theseus, Haimo argues, or even, in some ways, Chaucer himself. In her enthusiasm to uncover a subtle visual commentary, Haimo often pushes too far her argument that the illustrator had a consistent agenda that is reflected in small details. If the Prioress ‘‘shrinks back disapprovingly’’ from the...