Domesday Now: New Approaches to the Inquest and the Book ed. by David Roffe etal. (review)

Despite the unabated interest in, and studies of, the Domesday inquest and the documents that resulted from it, there remains a lack of scholarly agreement on the purpose for either the inquest or the texts. The contributors to Domesday Now have come to the consensus that the way forward is through a new critical edition of Domesday. Their essays in this volume present new categories of evidence that lay the scholarly foundation for that new edition.

In Chapter 1, "Domesday Now: a View from the Stage," the first of his three chapters, editor David Roffe observes that the study of the Domesday inquest, texts, and processes are "not for the faint-hearted" (23). One might make the same claim for Domesday Now: New Approaches to the Inquest and the Book. In the opening chapter, Roffe plunges readers into a detailed review of the lengthy and complex historiography of Domesday studies. The "now" in the book's title points back to the "then" of a conference held in 2000, "Domesday Book: New Perspectives." That conference was highlighted by the work of Frank and Caroline Thorn: a new assessment of scribal methods used during the Domesday inquest. The Thorns' analysis marked a turning point in Domesday scholarship, and subsequent work led to another conference in 2011, which provided the basis for the essays in the present volume. Domesday Now also serves as a memorial to Caroline Thorn who died a few months before the conference in 2011; Chapter 13 provides a remembrance of her life and scholarship.

In Chapter 1, Roffe also outlines the main themes of Domesday scholarship since 2011: texts and databases; codicology and scribal history of Domesday Book; other Domesday texts; the context, procedure, and purpose of the inquest; the boroughs; lords and land; settlements, land, and taxation; economy and society; and communities, estates, and landscapes of lordship. Roffe points out major areas of both agreement and contention within each theme, and traces the pertinent historiography. Helpfully, he also points to chapters of Domesday Now, and even specific pages within chapters, that address each theme. It bears mentioning that this level of precision and detail extends to the index, which includes names of people and places in Domesday texts, names of Domesday scholars, and terms in English, Latin and Old English.

In Chapter 2, "A Digital Latin Domesday," J. J. N. Palmer begins by describing the first project to digitize a Latin text of a Domesday manuscript, including problems encountered and progress thus far. In addition, Palmer reports on the first test use of data from that digitization: his analysis of diacritical marks within the text. The results from even that limited test on an older digitization suggest the benefits that would come from a new edition.

Chapters 3–5 primarily address the theme of codicology and scribal history. In Chapter 3, "McLuhan Meets the Master: Scribal Devices in Great Domesday Book," David Roffe presents his examination of letter forms that were used throughout the first compilations of the Domesday inquest. Roffe determined that the letter structures were copied from scribal sources, and a new electronic edition would enable further analysis of the important pieces of minutia in Domesday. Frank Thorn continues the theme of codicology and scribal history in Chapter 4, "Non Pascua sed Pastura: the Changing Choice of Terms in Domesday." Thorn argues that scribal choice of vocabulary changed as the inquest proceeded and encountered new and different people and resources. In Chapter 5, "Domesday Books? Little Domesday Reconsidered," Ian Taylor also addresses the theme of "other Domesday texts," and contends that Little Domesday came out of the situation in East Anglia in 1085 where a Danish invasion threatened and which actually prompted the Domesday inquest when William realized that he lacked sufficient information about the economic resources he could draw upon to address the crisis. Little Domesday, then, was not merely a...