The Middle English Prose Complaint of Our Lady and Gospel of Nicodemus ed. by C. William Marx, Jeanne F. Drennan (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER seems to have been widely perceived as an imperative to convey the gist of each saint's legend in as few words as possible-and the compilers and scribes responded. . .with considerable independence and ingenuity." In general, the scribes tended to displace allegorical readings with literal ones and to bring the content of each saint's exemplary life into closer accord with the reviser's own cultural values. Ordinatio in late-medieval vernacular manuscripts is George Keiser's concern in "Ordinatio in theManuscripts ofJohn Lydgate'sLy/ofOurLady: Its Value for the Reader, Its Challenge for the Modern Editor," but in passing he has sensible things to say about the works of Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love, and Malory. Until recently, modern editors of Lydgate (and most other English medieval works) have tended to ignore the layoutof the manuscript page, attributing such physical features to scribes rather than authors and thus throwing away valuable evidence about authorial mean­ ings. Keiser points to critical misconceptions that have resulted from such editorial fecklessness. Tim Machan's "Late Middle English Texts and the Higher and Lower Criticism" is in many ways at odds with the achievement of the volume it introduces. Under the dual influences ofJeromeJ. McGann's critique of the Bowers-Tanselle school of textual scholarship and of recentcritical theories that prompt his observation that "valorization" of the authorial text is "necessarily an interpretive imposition on the manuscript evidence," Ma­ chan argues that critical editing "is only one of the things, and perhaps the most historically problematic, which one can do with a medieval work." Postmodernist critics will find much to admire in Machan's essay, but textual scholars of a more traditional stripe will be glad that the other contributors work from more empirically based epistemologies. HOYT N. DUGGAN University of Virginia C. WILLIAM MARX and JEANNE F. DRENNAN, eds. The Middle English Prose Complaint of Our Lady and Gospel of Nicodemus. Middle English Texts, vol. 19. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987. Pp. 232. DM 112 paper. The Complaint of Our Lady (Planctus Mariae) and The Gospel ofNic­ odemus in their various forms were common, if not popular in the modern 236 REVIEWS sense, in the late Middle Ages and are well known to medieval scholars, who, if they differ on some of the specific lines of influence, agree that such influence was very great indeed. There is virtually no medieval literary genre that is not profoundly affected by these "eyewitness" accounts of Christ's trial, passion, death, descent into Hell, and resurrection. It is only natural that two such works would fall together and even be combined in medieval collections of religious and devotional works. The form repre­ sented in the volume here reviewed is an extended planctus, or "com­ plaint," of the Virgin, to which is attached a greatly abbreviated Gospelof Nicodemus. Editors C. William Marx andJeanne F. Drennan present in this volume the two texts that often appeared together in both French and English versions, the French being the original of the one which was translated into Middle English, instead of the Latin versions, especially of The Gospel of Nicodemus, which were current all over Europe in the late Middle Ages. The principal text reproduced and edited here is Cambridge, Magdalene College, manuscript Pepys 2498 (hereafter P). This version is frequently emended from two other English texts, and beneath the English one is supplied a parallel Anglo-Norman text of the same material, which, although not the actual source of the Middle English versions, is the closest known to survive, according to the editors. As well, there is appended a complete edition of another fairly close Middle English version, edited from Henry Huntington Library manuscript HM 144 (hereafter called Hh). To these is added a complete critical apparatus-an extensive critical and editorial introduction, commentary on the English texts, a brief glossary, and a bibliography-which together accounts for nearly two-thirds of the volume. Indeed, the featured text takes up only 63 pages. The editors emend their text of P freely, especially from Leeds University Library manuscript Brotherton 501 (hereafter Br), and provide a full array of variants both beneath the texts and in...