Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx by Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (review)

For nearly twenty years, William Marx has been a general editor of ‘Middle English Texts’ (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University), a series for which several of the contributors to this Festschrift, whose title is self-explanatory, have edited volumes. The first section appropriately concentrates on the minutiae of editing. A. S. G. Edwards queries the treatment of manuscript capitalization and text division in the Athlone Piers Plowman editions; Ronald Waldron examines the extent of scribal attention to punctuation in English and Latin copies of the Polychronicon; Janet Cowen scrutinizes the function, if any, of virgules in an English verse translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris; and Hans Sauer taxonomizes ‘binomials’ (i.e. doublets and similar phrases) in the same Boccaccio text.

Section 2 focuses on chronicles. Erik Kooper exhaustively analyses the work of a copyist and/or adaptor who drastically abridged one version of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle; Andrew Prescott and Raluca Radulescu both write on the Middle English Prose Brut, the former on its influential treatment of the Peasants’ Revolt and the latter on the manuscript tradition; Julia Boffey speculates on the possible different audiences for Robert Fabian’s two chronicles.

Section 3 contains seven contributions on religious texts. Oliver Pickering claims one of the many hybrid versions of Nine Points Best Pleasing to God as prose heightened with rhyme and assonance; Susan Powell supplements her edition of Mirk’s Festial with additional historical and textual notes and Margaret Connolly, too, revisits earlier work, discussing Chapter AB from Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, which circulated independently of and possibly existed before the main text. Veronica O’Mara studies the problems of defining the term ‘prayer’ in relation to those found in the Chester Processional; Mayumi Taguchi examines the use of multiple biblical and extra-biblical sources in The Patriarks and Caxton’s Golden Legend; Martha Driver revisits the Gospel of Nicodemus to discuss the recycling of French woodcuts in Julian Notary’s and de Worde’s editions. John J. Thompson traces the fortunes among lay readers of Nicholas Love’s Mirror in manuscript and print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The volume concludes with a list of the honorand’s publications.