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  • Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval England by Rory G. Critten
  • Sarah Baechle
Rory G. Critten. Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval England. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xii, 226. $99 cloth; $24.99 e-book.

Scholarship on the history of authorship and literary criticism in the Middle Ages has long focused—understandably, given the wealth of source material—on scholastic theories of exegesis emerging from the medieval universities. Such scholarship recruits the rhetoric of accessus to Latin auctores, and extensive commentaries on both classical and scriptural texts as the foundation of the medieval understanding of authorship and the literary; this foundation has assumed primacy as the locus for studying the authorial self-styling of late medieval vernacular poets. Rory G. Critten’s Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval England represents a welcome addition to this critical scene, approaching the subject of vernacular authors’ self-fashioning, not via the lens of commentary tradition, but rather through the material production of the manuscript codex.

Critten charges himself with the task of demonstrating that Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay, and Charles d’Orléans deserve consideration alongside their more famous peers for “their demonstration of the local, socially instrumental uses both of authorship and of the Middle English book” (190), and Author, Scribe, and Book accomplishes that task with panache, comprising four chapters, each focusing on a single author as a case study of what Critten terms the “self-publishing pose.” Following an introduction that lays out Critten’s concept of this “self-publishing pose” and its English localization to the fifteenth century, each chapter surveys the material presentation of its focal author’s work alongside their instantiation of themselves as self-publishing, with careful attention to the pose as a construct, a deliberate form of self-presentation of varying potential degrees of artifice rather than a straightforward history of textual production. The treatment of each author then considers how the diegetic self of that author operates within the text; the historical, [End Page 298] political, and cultural circumstances that self-presentation engages in order to reshape authors’ negative reputations; and the reception of those efforts.

Author, Scribe, and Book begins with Hoccleve, whom Critten sees deliberately engaging the literal reality of his scribal work in symbolic registers for the specific audience of his Chancery peers. Critten teases out a reading of Hoccleve’s Series that models for this audience precisely how he wishes to effect a return to his social circle following the bout of madness described in the text, with his scribal productivity witnessing his return to previous form. Chapter 2 addresses Margery Kempe’s claims to a kind of corporate production of the physical copy of her Book. Critten carefully explores the significance of the exigencies of Kempe’s gender, both as they condition her iteration of the self-publishing pose and as they are keyed to her desire to recuperate her reputation from sexualized slander. Chapters 3 and 4, on Audelay’s Poems and Carols and Charles d’Orléans’s English Book of Love in London, British Library, MS Harley 682, complicate the expression of the self-publishing pose. They incorporate claims not only to some form of material production (almost certainly a construct in Audelay’s case, given his blindness, but plausible in the case of Charles, whom Critten theorizes may have first composed and circulated work on loose paper leaves), but also to compilatio as a facet of self-publishing. In these chapters, I found myself wishing for an appendix with tables of contents for these manuscript anthologies, to inform better my understanding of how this compilatory direction plays out over the codices; nevertheless, Critten persuasively links the production of Audelay’s Poems and Carols to his implication in a scandalous attempted murder and the copying of Harley 682 to Charles’s deft manipulation of English perceptions that he was too politically sly to release from captivity during the Hundred Years War. In a brief afterword, Critten is careful to specify that none of these four authors appears influenced by any of the others; rather, they all spontaneously and independently embark upon similar paths of self...

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