Patient Reading/Reading Patience: Oxford Essays on Medieval English Literature by Ralph Hanna (review)

With Patient Reading/Reading Patience, Ralph Hanna joins the ranks of established scholars who have reprinted earlier essays in the form of an edited collection (see, e.g., M. B. Parkes's Pages from the Past [2012] and Vincent Gillespie's Looking in Holy Books [2012])—with a twist. Hanna's volume includes thirteen essays—ten reprinted and three new ones—divided by subject into three sections, and a final section of new material described as "the book I thought I never wanted to write" (p. 271). This ending minimonograph is topically and methodologically distinct from the prior essays, as the first three sections offer keen examples of Hanna's skills as a close reader of codicological and paratextual form, while the final section focuses exclusively on Piers Plowman and provides a close textual reading of that work that, in general, does not engage with specific manuscript witnesses of its A, B, and C versions.

The reprinted essays of the first three sections ("Language Barriers," "Nasty Books: Collection Procedures," and "Historicising the Archive") are not pulled from Hanna's entire career but instead comprise more recent work, published in 2000 or later. The Introduction to these essays offers a compelling discussion of Hanna's methodology as a book historian, one defined by a patient examination of archival material, an attentiveness to the specific example, and a resistance to an overreliance on generalized observations. Hanna is at his most persuasive when he encourages his readers to "see, notice, [and] be bewildered" each time they pick up a book (p. 2). And every essay is figured as a case study that offers an "exemplification" of how book historians should approach their objects of study, with the methods of analysis employed being almost as valuable to the reader as the argumentative conclusions advanced in each piece (p. 2).

These essays demonstrate the importance of carefully attending to the codicological features of medieval codices and to the contexts (linguistic, formal, and textual) in which works occur, as seen particularly vividly in "Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260, and the Problem of English Vernacularity," in which Hanna explores the widely ignored Latinate contexts in which snippets of Middle English verse can be found. In "Editing 'Middle English Lyrics,'" Hanna similarly explores how the multilingual contexts in which Candet nudatum pectus circulates challenge assumptions that undergird discussions of that work, and he argues that to disregard the trilingual environment surrounding this poem is "an act of severe selectivity" that untenably privileges works in Middle English over those in Anglo-Norman and Latin.

In "Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487," Hanna empathizes with the scribe whose process of copying could extend across months or years and be limited by the availability of exemplars. In Hanna's hands, codicological and paleographic evidence becomes a window into the scribe's struggles to create a coherent form for his book while also accommodating "additional interesting exemplars [as they] became available," an indication of the relative scarcity of the works to which scribes and readers had consistent access in provincial locations during the thirteenth century (p. 103). Elsewhere Hanna's abiding fascination with the organizational logic of the contents of medieval codices can be seen in his exploration of Magdalen College MS lat. 93, the scribe of which, he suggests, "may have conceived arranging his books in various orders and groupings, and the surviving MS lat. 93 reflects only a 'last' (perhaps an interrupted in-transit, not 'final') version of a book" (pp. 119–20). The malleability of a book's organization over time repeatedly evokes Hanna's interest. In "A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited," Hanna persuasively works to "disaggregate the medieval evidence" of binding arrangements from "later accretions" to reconstruct the contributions of a cohort of late fifteenth-century scribes to fifteen booklets that are now divided among ten separate codices (p. 132).

The three...