The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen ed. by Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, Marjorie Curry Woods (review)

REVIEWS duction, which are utterly unmodern, and also to be conscious of the utter modernity of the editorial act. He encourages experimentation with the goals and formats of editions so as to provide the user with a fuller picture ofthe medieval evidence that cannot be provided by any one edition alone. And while he encourages the new, he genuinely appreciates the accom­ plishments of past editors that are treated rather dismissively elsewhere in the volume. His counsel is directed to those who would edit, but it ought to be heeded as well by those who "consume" the products ofthe editorial process. DoUGLAS MOFFAT Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor, Michigan CHARLOTTE CooK MORSE, PENELOPE REED DooB, and MARJORIE CURRY Wooos, eds. The Uses ofManuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory ofJudson Boyce Allen. Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 31. Kala­ mazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Pub­ lications, 1992. Pp. xvii, 338. $35.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Judson Boyce Allen (1932-1985) is remembered by many medievalists for his enthusiasm about working with manuscripts, as well as for his collegi­ ality and his encouragement of younger scholars. This volume contains a dozen chapters by those who knew him or his work: "Dante's Comedy, the Codex, and the Margin of Error," by R. Allen Shoaf; "In a Nutshell: Verba and Sententia and Matter and Form in Medieval Composition Theory," by Marjorie Curry Woods; "How Was the arspraedicandi Taught in England?" by Marianne G. Briscoe; "Contradictory Paradigms: The Labyrinth in Art and Literature," by Penelope Reed Doob; "'Bothe text and gloss': Manu­ script Form, the Textuality ofCommentary, and Chaucer's Dream Poems," by Martin Irvine; "Talking Back to the Text: Marginal Voices in Medieval Secular Literature," by Christopher Baswell; "Authors in Love: The Exe­ gesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets," by Alastair J. Minnis; "Nimrod, the Commentaries on Genesis, and Chaucer," byJohn M. Fyler; "John ofCorn­ wall's Innovations and Their Possible Effects on Chaucer," by Cynthia Re­ nee Bland; "Langland's Reading: Some Evidence from MSS. Containing Religious Prophecy," by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton; "What to Call Petrarch's 229 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Griselda," by Charlotte Cook Morse; and "'Thys ys my mystrys boke': English Women as Readers and Writers in Late Medieval England," by Josephine Koster Tarvers. Penelope Doob's chapter is adapted from her book, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1990), and the bibliography of Judson Allen's publications that concludes the book is reproduced from The Chaucer Review 21.2 (1986): 90-92 (that issue was also a commemorative collection). The other materials here are new. Unfortunately, no overall index is provided. Five of the chapters are especially pertinent to Chaucer studies, though many of the others will also be of interest. Marjorie Woods's essay discusses a medieval commentary that describes two organizing principles within Geoffrey ofVinsauf's Poetria nova. Woods then proposes that the two orga­ nizing principles of the Canterbury Tales (the Host's plan for journey-and­ return as announced in The General Prologue, and the linear structure that ends with the Retraction) may reflect a particular medieval "delight in dual organizing structures" and a preference for artificial order, in this case an artificial order "enhanced, rather than destroyed, by the alterations or con­ fusions of the scribes" (p. 33). Irvine, emphasizing the importance of the layout of manuscript pages that combine text and gloss, argues that com­ mentary or gloss should be regarded as "a macrogenre-a transtextual and transgeneric form-which was inscribed within other literary genres" (p. 109), and that Chaucer's dream poems "are, in an important sense, extended glosses on other texts" (p. 109). Baswell, also working with glosses, concentrates on instances in which they challenge or undermine the main text and on the "centripetal tendency of commentaries, their tendency to move from the margins back toward the center of the manu­ script" (p. 134), which permits a "slippage and fusion between authorial and marginal voice" (p. 141). In The Wife ofBath's Prologue, Baswell argues, the Wife "talks back to Jankyn's book" (p. 144); "the process of marginal challenge" then continues, as the...