Regionalism in Late Mediaeval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ed. by Felicity Riddy (review)

REVIEWS Throughout the study one would like to see more detailed documenta­ tion of historical precedents, more subtle analysis of the dynamics of audience response, and less attention to old arguments like the case against Jean Bodel's Matieres or the usefulness of evaluating fourteenth-century English narrative by the standards of twelfth-century France. The writing occasionally lacks lucidity, and, while it is a publishing matter, the book's format requires some comment, for the double-spaced typeface and lack of paragraph indentations are distracting. Despite these drawbacks, Reuters's study gives new insight into the forms of love and friendship depicted in the romances; it also contributes to the larger scholarly task of elucidating the dynamics and contexts of literary forms. HARRIET E. HUDSON IndianaState University FELICITY RIDDY, ed.Regionalism inLate MediaevalManuscripts andTexts: Essays Celebrating the Publication ofALinguistic Atlas ofLate Medi­ aeval English. York Manuscripts Conferences, proceedings, ser. 2. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. Pp. xiii, 214. $70.00. The papers collected here are the fourth volume of proceedings from the biennial University of York manuscripts conference. The first of these conferences, in 1981, organized by Derek Pearsall, effectively charted the course of Middle English manuscript study for the rest of the decade and had implications that are still being felt.Subsequent conferences and the volumes that have followed them have been of no less importance in their examinations of particular aspects of manuscript study. That is equally true of this volume, edited by Felicity Riddy. It takes as its occasion the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME), by Angus McIntosh, MichaelSamuels, and Michael Benskin, an occasion that provides the opportunity for papers on aspects of regionalism as it is reflected in various manuscripts and texts. The rela­ tionship of the individual papers to this occasion varies. Most distant from it is Colin Richmond's paper on John Wyndham, of Felbrigg, Norfolk, which sits oddly in the context of the volume as a whole since it is not concerned directly with either manuscript or dialect analysis but is an 271 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER excellent examination of the social and political contexts of fifteenth­ century local history. Some ofthe earlier papers also tend rather to eschew the opportunity to demonstrate the potentialities of LALME in favor of more general meth­ odological reflections. The most provocative of these is a brief paper by Samuels, who suggests some of the areas in which LALME might be of assistance to scholars. He reiterates some earlier observations that seem unlikely to gain universal approval; for example, he suggests that "an editor's best evidence for the B-text [of Piers Plowman] would be the Laud and Rawlinson manuscripts plus a reconstruction of final -e" (p. 6). Equally controversial is the view that The Equatorie ofthe Planets is in Chaucer's ownspelling, a view that has recently been challenged in articles by Larry D. Benson and Stephen Partridge in English Manuscript Studies III (1992). Others of these early articles are broadly methodological. Michael Benskin explains the "fit" technique for localizing texts, while both Mar­ garetLaing andJeremy Smithdiscussthe plans to extendLALME backward to cover the early Middle English period and some of the problems and procedures that this project will entail. Ronald Waldron offers the only detailed application ofthe resources ofLALME in the entire volume in his study ofdialect aspects ofthe manuscripts ofTrevisa's Polychronicon. The most absorbing of these early essays is Richard Beadle's "Pro­ legomena to a Literary Geography ofLater Medieval Norfolk." It is a wide­ ranging examination of the dialect evidence for literary activity in this region. Itsmethodologicalcore is an appendix "A Handlist ofLater Middle English Manuscripts Copied by Norfolk Scribes" (pp. 102-108) listing nearly 150 manuscripts of various kinds. Anyone concerned with under­ standing English vernacular culture during this period will want to study this appendix very carefully. It provides a model that could be profitably replicated for other counties and regions and provides the most compelling employment of the potentialities ofLALME contained in this volume. It is something of a paradox that, while the subsequent essays are not­ able demonstrations of various techniques of manuscript analysis, these demonstrations have little to...