Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (review)

Over the past two decades or so, the study of Middle English literature has been enriched by a return on the part of many scholars to manuscript sources. Once regarded as erudite, exotic chores, palaeography (the study of handwriting) and codicology (the analysis of the physical composition of books) became either required or highly desirable fields of training for medievalists and an expected dimension of publication on poems such as Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, to name only two of the literary monuments. It is impossible now to imagine a retreat to some kind of “pure” New Critical explication of a Middle English poem, of the sort in vogue during the 1970s, a reading that draws on dictionary evidence and the critic’s subjective habits of appreciation in isolation from the raw physical history of a text’s origins and circulation.

The epicenter for much of this exciting primary research (although by no means the only locus) has been the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York and its Manuscripts Conference, which brings together regularly a wide range of experts in the field. The latest proceedings volume to be published by the Centre, Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, demonstrates how York continues as a strong venue for the intersection of careful analyses of manuscripts with compelling interpretations of both major and minor Middle English writings. Taste alone will enable a reader to distinguish between the thirteen contributions assembled here and edited superbly by Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney. The essays are all impressive.

As its title hints, Design and Distribution has a diptych-like structure. The first seven contributors discuss various aspects of the mise en page of manuscripts, how the layout of an opening and details of script function together in conveying a medieval book’s sense. The second six writers (this diptych is slightly lopsided) take up issues of textual migration, the circumstances within and beyond which Middle English writings, some of them unfairly neglected by critics, lived, moved, and had their being.

The biblical loftiness of my last phrase is deliberate. Not too long ago, many of the issues explored by the contributors to Design and Distribution might have seemed humdrum to scholars, footnotes to more profound critical questions. This book demonstrates the reverse: that it is idle to theorize concerning Middle English works without knowing something about and respecting their manuscript details. Dan Mosser’s essay, for example, “‘Chaucer’s Scribe,’ Adam and the Hengwrt Project,” revisits deftly the debate over the poet’s direct involvement with one of the best surviving witnesses to The Canterbury Tales, in light of Linne Mooney’s 2006 identification of Chaucer’s copyist, Adam Pinkhurst. Mosser admits finally that “[w]e are left . . . with conflicting evidence as to authorial presence and absence in the Hengwrt project” (p. 38). The conflict itself, however, he shows to be well worth exploring, especially since it underscores the provisional nature of a canonical literary text, a theme that recurs in connection with other major Middle English texts throughout this collection. Whether a medieval book was written in London, Westminster, or beyond, by a scribe gone rogue or one who belonged to the Gild of Textwriters—one of Mooney’s chief concerns in her fine essay, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London”—tells us much about the cultural vitality of a great urban center in the Middle Ages, the economics of late-medieval book production, and most important, which scribes may have been copying what kinds of texts in and outside the metropolis. This kind of data, once recovered and reflected on, becomes indispensable to our conception of authorship and the literary marketplace during the Middle English period.

The range of evidence deployed across the first half of this book is noteworthy: orthography (Jacob Thaisen on the Trinity Gower D scribe), erasures and corrections (Takako Kato on an important Chaucer manuscript, Cambridge...