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  • Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna ed. by Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde
  • Stephen H. A. Shepherd
Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde, eds. Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 262. $98.00.

Born Californian, but raised Texan (attested by the accent and turns of phrase he has never relinquished), Ralph Hanna is probably best known as Professor of Palaeography at Oxford, his retirement from which post is the occasion of the volume under review. A worthy and entertaining tribute to Hanna's extraordinary and extraordinarily influential career is made by Vincent Gillespie as the volume opens; this is complemented by a list of Hanna's publications at the end of the volume (but, as Gillespie notes, Hanna is "probably the fastest critical gun in the west" [xii], so the list is already well out of date). Given the ubiquity and influence in Middle English studies of honoree and honorands alike, a review of each essay in this festschrift should, I think, entertain one main question, concerning the utility of the material. In Texas the question might [End Page 377] be framed as, "Will these dogs hunt?" Without exception, the answer is affirmative, though perhaps on some occasions the prey was able to get away.

The first of twelve essays, Derek Pearsall's "The Tribulations of Scribes," holds a candle to Titivillus by offering a defense of the fallible scribe. Through Pearsall's relativizing approach, much maligned scribal "improvers" and reorganizers of defective or unfinished exemplars such as the Canterbury Tales become avatars of coherence for grateful readers and patrons. Cobblers, patchers, dramatizers, and simplifiers, such as those frequently adduced in the textual tradition of Piers Plowman, need also to be recognized as curators of collatable texts in nearly every case, while scribes belabored by supervisory (or authorial) micromanaging, such as some of those working on the Confessio Amantis, are redeemed as dedicated negotiators simultaneously of text space, decorative space, and that space conditioned by the presence of Latin.

Continuing with the theme of scribal practice, Linne Mooney's "A Scribe of Lydgate's Troy Book and London Book Production in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century" attempts to consolidate and amplify evidence for the output of the individual she calls (following the late A. I. Doyle) the "Selden scribe." Like Pinkhurst, he was one of a cadre of metropolitan copyists who appear to have specialized in certain authors. As yet identified only in highly illuminated manuscripts, he "seems … to have been considered the scribe to commission to prepare high-quality copies of the Troy Book in London in the first decades after Lydgate wrote it, and by patrons who could afford manuscripts of the highest quality" (20). As written, the essay makes it a little difficult to sort through what is actually new information, what is certain, and what is speculative; the nonidentification of the illustrative photographs with the sigils used in the discussion also slows things down, as does a lack of scale for each picture.

It may now be verboten to speak of value, of "great" or "classic" texts, and yet the usual suspects often reassert themselves through the sheer force of new insights they can yield. Thorlac Turville-Petre's "The Vocabulary of the Alliterative Morte Arthure" presents strong evidence that "the poem … reached a wider readership than any alliterative poem apart from Piers Plowman and possibly Siege of Jerusalem" (44). Well documented already, as Turville-Petre reports, is the wide regional (and temporal) range the poem had traversed as a source for other Middle English texts or as a copy to be owned—from Malory's Warwickshire– [End Page 378] London axis, through East Anglia and Lincolnshire, to Robert Thorn-ton's Yorkshire, to the border country of the Awntyrs off Arthure, and into the Scotland of Wyntoun and Hary. The unique elements of the poem's vocabulary presented in the essay add to this sense of range, not just geographically, but in the recondite demands it appears to make on its readership (including in matters of law). The poem...

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