In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives ed. by Susanna Fein
  • Laura Ashe
susanna fein, ed., The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 253. isbn: 978-1-903153-65-9. £60.

This collection of essays provides an impressively comprehensive ‘state of the field’ view of scholarship on the Auchinleck Manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS MS Advocates 19.2.1). It gathers together some of the foremost authorities on the manuscript, and [End Page 105] combines their contributions with those of younger and emerging scholars, covering a large variety of approaches to the manuscript and its textual and visual contents. The volume’s approach is admirably set out by Susanna Fein’s introduction: appropriately to the study of such a vast and collaborative undertaking as the Auchinleck MS, Fein documents the many scholars whose past and current work has illuminated our understanding of the manuscript over the forty or so years since the publication of the invaluable facsimile edition in 1977. The effect is to present an inspiring showcase of the fruits of scholarly conversation and collaboration. As Fein notes, her senior contributors refine and expand upon their earlier expressed views in this volume, drawing on all the interim developments, while those who have come new to the field all display a sense of contributing to a vibrant, open and generous critical landscape. This in itself makes the volume a wonderful flagship for medieval studies as a whole.

The importance of the Auchinleck MS is undoubted; Fein quotes her contributors on its ‘crucial significance’ and ‘deserved cultural centrality’ (p. 1). It is striking then that there remains so much uncertainty about the circumstances of its commissioning and production, not to mention its audience and reception. The essays in this volume offer many, entirely plausible, theories in response to these questions, and the contributors are not all in agreement with one another, which is absolutely as it should be. Because of the lost gatherings and smaller textual lacunae in the manuscript, the fourteenth-century book is itself an object of speculative reconstruction, and one whose material existence can be imaginatively traced as it changed through time—both the lengthy (and uncertainly ordered) process of producing the book, and the piecemeal, ongoing correction, alteration, damage, and loss. A prime example of this is Ralph Hanna’s contribution, in which he argues that Scribe 6 is identical with Scribe 1, working on the manuscript at different times and under different conditions of composition; this leads him to a fascinating discussion of the manuscript’s inconsistency overall. Derek Pearsall’s essay offers an overview and updating of the early ‘bookshop’ theory of the Auchinleck’s production, but he is more optimistic than Hanna about the overall organization of the manuscript’s numerous contributors, describing a plausible scenario of a ‘network of contacts’ (p. 24) through whom Scribe 1 could source and commission the required materials and labor. This picture is augmented by Timothy A. Schonk’s study of the paraphs in the manuscript; his analysis of the four separate identifiable paraph-markers provides evidence both of a single individual’s organization of the work, and of the sometimes rather ‘loose’ associations which bound the various scribes and illuminators to the project and to one another (pp. 177–8). Meanwhile, Míceál F. Vaughan’s detailed analysis of scribal corrections to the Auchinleck leads him to question the status of Scribe 1 as the undisputed arbiter of the project. He suggests that the pattern of corrections throughout—including corrections to the work of Scribe 1—may imply a final production stage overseen by another, or several others. In combination, these fascinating essays on the production of the manuscript provide nuanced and carefully-thought out arguments which interact most fruitfully.

Several essays which attend to textual matters as well as to the book itself persuasively draw the Auchinleck away from its long-assumed ‘monolingualism’ or [End Page 106] a possibly ‘unlearned’ audience, notwithstanding its unprecedentedly comprehensive presentation of texts newly or very recently translated into English. Translation is of course an inherently multilingual and scholarly activity, and it is very pleasing to see this pursued in imaginative ways. A.S.G. Edwards draws...

pdf

Share