New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle (review)

This volume of twenty-four essays is the latest and also grandest example of commemorative essay collections, deservedly dedicated to Derek Pearsall. The collection builds upon Pearsall's own work establishing the York Manuscripts Conference in the early 1980s. This conference and its successor at Harvard gave birth to some of the most acclaimed contemporary scholarship on medieval manuscripts and literature: including volumes such as Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature (D. S. Brewer, 1987) and New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies (York Medieval Press, 2000)—both edited by Pearsall—and several collections of essays dedicated to Pearsall, such as Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry (D. S. Brewer, 2000) and Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions (York Medieval Press, 2001).

The way this book of New Directions is different from the earlier festschrifts and collections, however, is how deeply the feted honoree's presence is felt throughout the volume. Rather than just offering an appreciative and celebratory introduction and a dignified photo facing the title page, the volume's editors help to map out its contents for readers with prefaces to thematic section groupings that all illustrate Pearsall's legacy helping to link medieval literary studies and book history.

As a tip-of-the-hat to Pearsall's role in establishing this standard of textuality-awareness, Part 1 of the book is titled "Celebrating Pearsallian Reading Practices," in which Tony Spearing leads off with an article that builds upon Pearsall's work on Troilus and Criseyde. Spearing does so by examining Chaucer's major contribution to Middle English narrative verse, i.e., overt narrative markers of the author's participation in a tale's retelling, through the lens of narrative theorists such as Gérard Genette and Gary Saul Morson. In this, Spearing further fleshes out his concept of "autography," illustrating how it can be understood as a reaction against earlier forms of retelling existing stories. In her "Derek Pearsall, Secret Shakespearean" Martha Driver offers a metacritical piece that combs back through Pearsall's curriculum vitae.

Drawing on metacritism in another vein, Part 2 of the volume is as much a memorial to Pearsall's esteemed colleague at York, Elizabeth Salter, as it is a celebration of Pearsall himself. Essays from Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on affective reading in two meditations on Christ's Passion, Susan Powell on Wynnere and Wastoure's connection to the Wing-field family of mid-fourteenth-century Suffolk, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis on strategies used by the Red-Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe, and Sarah McNamer on the place of origin and Franciscan affiliation of the author of the Italian Meditations on the Life of Christ all pay homage to the enduring work Salter produced to ground Middle English literature in its international, textual, and historical contexts.

To demonstrate further the influence of Pearsall's effort to invigorate the field of literary studies with manuscript studies, Part 3 of the collection is positioned as a celebration of the thirty-year anniversary of the 1981 York Manuscripts conference. Carol Meale, for example, shows how her career-spanning interest in the book trade in London is built on the work she developed for that conference on early sixteenth-century bookseller and collector John Colyns. In her new essay, she reads Colyns's network of influence on cultural history even more deeply in an exploration of an important group of printers and book-dealers with whom Colyns gathered at Norwich in 1526. Other contributions in this section include A. S. G. Edwards's study on the cost and trade in Lydgate manuscripts in the twentieth century, A. I. Doyle's study on what can be learned about readers from marginalia in a single...