The Prose ‘Brut’ and Other Late Medieval Chronicles. Books Have Their Histories: Essays in Honour of Lister M. Matheson ed. by Jaclyn Rajsic, Erik Kooper and Dominique Hoche (review)

The Prose ‘Brut’ and Other Late Medieval Chronicles is a lovely book. It quietly argues, through its collection of high-quality essays, for the importance of chronicle traditions to the understanding of medieval literary history and the development of Medieval Studies as a discipline, from Early Modern antiquarian interests to the present day. The volume honors the great scholar of, among much else, English Brut chronicles, Lister M. Matheson (1948–2012), and its contents evolve from papers delivered in his memory in 2013, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo and the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. As its editors underscore in their introduction, ‘exploration of … Matheson’s influence as a scholar and a teacher lies at the heart of this collection’ (p. 1), and, far from just a subtitle or nominal gesture, this is true from start to finish. Julia Marvin’s opening ‘memoir’ paints a lively and vivid portrait of Matheson as a scholar and colleague who approached everything from Middle English Dictionary entries to high-school outreach with generosity; Edward Donald Kennedy’s essay on the early eighteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Hearne’s uses of English chronicles includes an afterward that affectionately compares Hearne, who never completed an announced edition of the Brut, to Matheson: ‘Whether speaking of a “remarkable fragment of an old English chronicle” or a newly found “curious version” of the English Prose Brut, both displayed similar delight in and enthusiasm for discovery, delight and enthusiasm evident too in the plans for projects that both left incomplete at their deaths’ (p. 198); A.S.G. Edwards’s useful essay at the end of the volume—on twentieth-century sales and acquisitions of Brut manuscripts, including an appendix of all such sold or donated and their current locations—is indebted to Matheson’s ‘detailed record of surviving copies … supplemented in a posthumously published article’ (p. 219). Beyond this, so much of the volume explicitly responds to (in footnotes) or otherwise depends on Matheson’s scholarship, that it is hardly hyperbole to say that his heart beats through it. It is, frankly, quite moving to read the book in this spirit.

The memorial aspect, however, is far from the only reason to read this volume. Divided into three sections—‘The Uses of History,’ ‘The Prose Brut,’ and ‘Receptions and Afterlives of Late Medieval Chronicles’—the collection is comprised of very readable selections by important voices in the field of English chronicle and manuscript studies. In addition to those already mentioned, essays appear by Krista A. Murchison, Christine M. Rose, Alexander L. Kaufman, Dan Embree, Erik Kooper, William Marx, Jaclyn Rajsic, Neil Weijer, Heather Pagan, Elizabeth J. Bryan, and Caroline D. Eckhardt. Several announce significant new research or detail key data related to the provenance or origins of individual chronicles, such that the book should become an important reference volume for anyone who works on English (particularly vernacular) historiography. A notable example is Embree’s ‘The Lawyer and the Herald’ (pp. 64–71), which argues succinctly and persuasively that two fifteenth-century English chronicles—The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire (London, College of Arms, MS Vincent 435) and The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England (London, British Library, MS Harley 543)—are by distinct authors, though their contemporary appearance and overlapping content has hitherto suggested shared authorship. Elizabeth J. Bryan provides new information on Matthew Parker and his circle’s attention to English Prose Brut manuscripts (pp. 165–180): her essay shows how a seemingly minor appearance of Parker’s characteristic ‘red crayon’ in London, British Library, MS Harley 24 can be collated with two other Parker-annotated Brut manuscripts to show that his circle...