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REVIEWS very well. Their unity comes only from their common concern about events before, during, and after the passion. The Gospel of Nicodemus is es­ pecially likely to be drawn into collections of passion materials and outright romance cycles as well. The editors' point would be greatly strengthened if Mary were made the narrator of the Gospelas well, and medieval adaptors were certainly not above such modifications, but that is not what has hap­ pened here. As well, the attempt to pull in the Revelaciones ofSt. Bridget ofSweden as asourcefor the Complaintis rather forced.Also, after pages of argument held together with words like "if," "might," "could," and "prob­ lematic" (a favorite of the editors), one finds it difficult to accept absolute statements like "there is no possibility that Hh is derived independently from the AN text" (p. 23). I could quibble on about such matters, but I do not wish to detract too much from the genuine service Marx and Drennan have rendered medieval scholarship. This certainly is a good buy-three full texts in two lan­ guages-and either a serviceable or excellent edition, depending on how closely one agrees with the editors' editorial philosophy. Actually, my main problem with this book is one of aesthetics, and one that I share with many others, especially now, when books like this are so expensive and camera-ready copy can look very professional indeed. In a paperback priced at DM 112, one has a right to expect something that looks like a real book-not just like a reduced typescript, which in fact this actually is. The overstamped p and b for ft is especially hard on the eye. This, however, should more properly be laid at the feet of the publishers and printers than at those of the editors, who have made available to us manuscript texts that most ofus up to now have known only through scant references in books often difficult to find. JERRY 1. BALL ArkansasState University MALDWYN MILLS, JENNIFER FELLOWS, and CAROL M. MEALE, eds. Ro­ mance in MedievalEngland. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. Pp. viii, 228. $70.00. This collection of essays grew out of a conference on "Medieval Romance in England," held at theUniversity of WalesConferenceCentre,in Gregynog, 239 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Newtown, on August23-26, 1988, which also served as the initial meeting of the Society for the Study of Medieval Romance. The society and its conference, like the collection itself, exclude Arthurian romances and the Arthurian sections of chronicles as well as all vernacular romances of Continental origin. Like many of the romance collections it studies, Medieval Romance in Englandis a fine miscellany that makes little effort toward unity. The book aims "to exemplify some of the most significant recent trends in literary studies in general. Notable among these are an interest in women's history and female points of view; in the application of Marxist theory to literary texts; and in the reception of texts." Yet the volume remains firmly rooted in codicological and literary-historical approaches, and it is these far from recent methodologies that make for the more important contributions here to romance studies. In the opening essay, "Editing Middle English Romances," Jennifer Fellows offers a sensible overview of editorial methodologies: recension, "an editorial method devised by classical scholars for the treatments of classical texts"; the single-text edition; the "eclectic," or "direct-method," edition; and the parallel-text edition. Using SirBevis a/Hampton as her focus for an analysis of the effectiveness of these four, she shows the illogic of recension: "The editor must go some way towards editing the text in order to identify what may be termed 'error' and to formulate the stemma which will be used to justify editorialchoices. So the recensional method is also a circular one." The eclectic and the single-text methodologies are also found want­ ing, for one text is "implicitly exalted to a position of authority." Fellows favors, therefore, the parallel-text method, despite its expense, concluding that the ideal editor has the duty "to edit and, as far as possible, to present his/her readers with a readable text or texts. The ideal to be...

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