English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990–circa 1035 by Peter A. Stokes (review)

In the late tenth century, some Anglo-Saxon scribes adopted a thinner, more elongated style of script specifically for texts in Old English, while others pursued a heavier manner that preserved stronger echoes of Square minuscule; by the mid-eleventh century, rounder forms were more widespread for the vernacular, reflecting the Late Standard Anglo-Caroline minuscule that was then current for Latin texts. These were protean styles, embracing numerous variations, and beyond each of them was an extensive penumbra of more or less divergent hands. This much will be clear to anyone who has worked extensively with the material: progressing any further is very challenging owing, on the one hand, to the quantity and diversity of the material and, on the other, to the paucity of specimens that can be dated and localized.

Peter Stokes has plainly labored long and hard, examining this corpus of scribal work, hand by individual hand, trying to make sense of it. He has refined and given depth to the basic outline presented above: he has considered the origins of the elongated script (probably from forms used in glossing); he has tried to plot the diffusion of all three principal forms, along with their relationships—in terms both of form and of hierarchy—to Latin writing; and he has sketched the progeny of the rounded type. There is a formidable amount of information, knowledge, and reflection here, even embracing an interesting analysis of scribbles and pen-trials. Sadly, however, it cannot be said that the presentation of the material as a whole is very successful or the “results” particularly significant.

The first problem is the intractability of the material itself. Attempts to identify “house styles” of script are compromised by the paucity of localizable specimens and the lack of standardization in the hands. Christ Church, Canterbury, is the center represented most strongly in the sample, and even here, “the evidence is minimal at best and is often controversial even then” (p. 121), and “despite these hints of a house-style, however, there are other examples which do not fit this pattern” (p. 126). Yet not only is its “house style” defined at some length (pp. 120–34), but so too are those of other centers for which evidence is exiguous in the extreme: thus although “almost no scribal hands can be attributed to London or Westminster” (p. 145), a page of semihypothetical discussion of them is offered nevertheless. In such circumstances, attributions of origin based on aspect alone have little value, yet groupings are still attempted—inevitably with so many conditionals and uncertainties (hand x shares certain features with some manuscripts from center y) that it is impossible to judge the significance of the putative connection. Long discussions of individual hands and their “milieux” invariably end inconclusively: “several of these common features are also found in Vitellius A.xv (fols. 94–209) [H1], found in [sic] another manuscript for which London has been suggested as the place of origin, but such connections are too weak to be argued with confidence” (p. 97); “none of these hands [in Junius 11] fits at all easily into the development of script at Christ Church which was outlined above, and perhaps Malmesbury may deserve more attention than it has thus far received, although the arguments for this are tenuous, and the little Vernacular Minuscule which survives from there is different again” (p. 128). When no solid attributions of origin (as opposed to suggestions of possible “milieux”) result, one must ask whether the game was worth the candle.

The second problem is the rebarbative nature of much of the prose. The text is littered with full shelfmarks (common names or short forms being eschewed as a point of principle [pp. 6–7]), and there are countless passages describing script, as the author acknowledges: “almost five hundred scribal hands which I have dated approximately 990x1035 have been surveyed, analysed and compared...