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  • The Manere of Good Lyvyng: A Middle English Translation of Pseudo-Bernard’s Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem ed. by Anne E. Mouron
  • Bella Millett
The Manere of Good Lyvyng: A Middle English Translation of Pseudo-Bernard’s Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem. Edited by Anne E. Mouron. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 30. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Pp. x + 584; 1 illustration. $167.

The Manere of Good Lyvyng survives in a single manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 517, copied by a Carthusian of Sheen, William Darker (d. 1513), at some point after 1471, probably for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon Abbey. Its anonymous author describes it as “a devoute tretes of holy Saynt Bernard, drawne out of Latyn into English … which he [i.e. Bernard] sent unto his own suster, wherin is conteyned the summe of every virtue necessary unto Cristis religion and holy conversacion” (f. 1r); its seventy-three short chapters contain moral advice on a wide range of topics, addressed particularly to nuns. The Latin source is no longer attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), but it was probably composed within a century of his death (the earliest surviving manuscript is dated 1267), and was circulated under Bernard’s name well into the sixteenth century. The Middle English version is a professional and readable piece of work, showing a good understanding of the original Latin and steering an assured course between the opposing vices of late medieval English translators, overliteralism and overelaboration; while it makes no major alterations to its source, it often adapts it in minor ways to suit the needs of its new audience, expanding the Latin text (by doublets or other means) for greater clarity, abridging repeated material, adding additional words or phrases for emphasis, replacing figurative by more concrete expressions, and simplifying the language.

In spite of its merits as a translation, and its interest as evidence for the nature of late-medieval English spirituality, The Manere of Good Lyving has not previously been edited, so this new and attractively produced scholarly edition is particularly welcome. It includes, in addition to the edited text, a substantial introduction; an extended textual commentary; four appendices, the first providing more lightly edited versions of the three other (very short) devotional texts in the manuscript, the others brief extracts from the three later English translations of the Liber de modo bene vivendi (by Thomas Paynell [1545?], Antony Batt [1633], and Cecil Robert Tyrwhitt [1886]); an index of Biblical quotations; a select glossary, accompanied by a biographical “Glossary of Proper Names”; and a full and well-laid-out bibliography.

The edited text is described as a “transcription” in the table of contents, but is in fact more user-friendly than this term suggests: abbreviations are expanded; scribal corrections silently incorporated; Latin spellings standardized; word-division, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing modernized; “stage-like directions” added where the reader is imagined as engaged in dialogue with the writer; and emendations, although “kept to a minimum” (40), occasionally provided. Since the text is carefully copied in a clear “fere-textura” hand, and its language and content offer relatively few problems to the editor, the policy of minimal emendation is defensible; in a few cases, however, more decisive intervention might have been desirable (e.g., if MS indefynentli [f. 34v] is, as the editor plausibly suggests [p. 228], an error for indesynentli [the Latin has indesinenter], why allow it to stand?).

The supporting scholarly apparatus is generally both thorough and helpful, but in some cases would have benefited from firmer editorial discipline, and from greater attention to the practical requirements of those using the edition.

In the first place, although the forty-page Introduction makes effective use of its space, the nearly three hundred pages of textual commentary could have been [End Page 126] much shorter and more sharply focused, and are not always easy to use. Some of the problems are caused by layout. Each textual note is followed by an unnecessary line-space, and the lemmata are not only unabridged (taking up to five lines in some cases) but often repeated as...

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