Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards ed. by Carol M. Meale and Derek Pearsall (review)

As anyone who has read much of Anthony Edwards’s published work will recognize, whatever the argument or theme, the text will be full of information about English manuscript and printed book history, particularizing authors (especially Lydgate), makers, printers, owners, later users, and sellers (and even destroyers such as Otto Ege). As well, Edwards has focused on the late fifteenth-century transition from script to print with a microscopic intensity not easily found elsewhere. These fifteen essays continue such detailed scholarship and wide-ranging provision of information. And unlike many Festschriften honoring a scholar with broad interests and a long publishing history, where the essays can be so diverse in topic and approach that the book lacks focus, this collection has a natural unity.

The work concludes with a Bibliography of Edwards’s publications totaling 290 items. There is an Index of manuscripts and early printed books cited as well as a General Index. Black-and-white illustrations clarify points in many of the essays.

The book’s first group of essays concerns “Composition” broadly understood. In the first of three essays, J. A. Burrow treats Langland’s debt to Wynnere and Wastoure. Langland favored good winners and bad wasters, whereas the earlier alliterative poem treated the pair more even-handedly, illustrating these qualities by distinct social types (such as landed gentry, concerned with estate management and household matters). From this poem Langland borrowed “its masterly way with personification[s]” (p. 11) that use everyday language and themes.

Alfred Hiatt’s study of the Granarium, by John Whethamstede (an abbot of St. Albans), illuminates a little-known work (indeed unprinted and unedited) of great importance for students of florilegia and encyclopedic collections. The metaphor of grains or seeds organizes this protohumanist work, which interestingly reveals an early use of an alphabetized structure with an elaborate system of cross-referencing topics. A colophon to British Library, MS Arundel 391 develops the idea of the Granarium as a sort of “farm” of ideas whose “soil” will nourish scholars as well as rulers. Hiatt aims “to provide an account of the contents of the Granarium, with some commentary on its source material, and to offer some suggestions about how to locate the work within the contexts of late medieval encyclopedism and fifteenth-century humanism” (p. 15). Among the subjects it brings together are British ecclesiastical history, authors both ancient and medieval from Orpheus onward to Dante and Boccaccio, and moral topics such as abstinence and luxuria. Whethamstede uses antique sources such as Valerius Maximus as well as humanist sources such as John of Salisbury, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. An extremely detailed and helpful topic appendix helps the potential reader get around in the work.

The last study in this group, Martha Driver’s wonderfully rich treatment of the complex term pageant, shows that by the early modern period, this multivalent word can “refer to a manuscript illustration … wall hangings, allegorical or symbolic, imagery in a royal entry or street festival, a play in a mystery cycle or the vehicle it was staged upon, or even to a scene from a life” (p. 47). Driver notes that the “conception of a pageant as an allegorical image … also appears … in the cycle plays [and] … also in royal entries” (p. 37). In such entries and related dramatic presentations, pageants also emphasized a ruler’s positive attributes or the trade insigniae of guilds.

The book’s second group of essays, on “Compilation,” treats how books are physically and textually put together. Here, Orietta Da Rold’s essay on codicology and localization looks for “the cultural and social DNA of the book itself” (p. 49) and the “structural fingerprint of a manuscript,” particularly the use of quires of twelve, examining Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108...