John Lydgate's "Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund" and the "Extra Miracles of St Edmund": Edited from British Library MS Harley 2278 and Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46 (review)

Lydgate's "Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund" has been receiving some overdue attention in the last few years, not least in the publication by the British Library of a color facsimile of the earliest (and most deluxe) manuscript of the work, Harley 2278, and a Folio Society version of the same facsimile with a companion transcription (and with introduction and notes), both prepared by A. S. G. Edwards. The present edition of "The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund" (edited by Edwards and Anthony Bale) is the first published scholarly edition of this important text since Carl Horstmann's edition of 1881 (though it has with some frequency been edited in graduate theses), and is the first edition, published or unpublished, that takes into account the Arundel Castle manuscript which was first brought to public attention by Kathleen Scott in 1982. In conjunction with the color facsimile, this new edition will provide a starting point for future research, and is a very welcome addition to Lydgate scholarship.

Lydgate's life of St. Edmund was produced in the 1430s as a gift for King Henry VI, in commemoration of his stay at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds from Christmas to St. George's Day in 1433-1434. To the life of Edmund (Books 1 and 2 of the three books of the poem), Lydgate attached (as Book 3) a life of St. Fremund, identifying him as a nephew of Edmund, and also attached an account of miracles attributed to Edmund. In the next decade, a supplementary text, the "Extra Miracles," was produced, probably (though not certainly) by Lydgate, giving an account of three additional, and quite recent, miracles that were attributed to Edmund, and that occurred after the composition of the original "Lives." The "Extra Miracles" is written in the same ballade stanza as is the Prologue to the "Lives," and the text clearly, as the present editors argue, is intended as a supplement to (though not as an insertion into) the "Lives."

The Bale and Edwards edition presents both of these texts in a fairly basic and student-oriented form, with introduction, notes, and glossary. The editors claim, justifiably, that this is the first published critical edition of these two texts; while they adhere closely to their chosen base texts (Harley 2278 for the "Lives" and Ashmole 46 for the "Extra Miracles"), the base texts are conservatively emended based on a comparison of their readings with those of all of the other manuscripts. Appropriately for a student edition, the textual apparatus is limited: full collations of the manuscripts of the "Extra Miracles" are presented, but the apparatus for the "Lives" is limited to the resolution of difficult readings (and the reader is referred to an unpublished dissertation by James Miller for a fuller apparatus).

The text is presented without notes or glosses on the page, but only with folio and line numbers; the commentary and glossary are at the back of the volume. Asterisks appear at points at which there are illustrations in the Harley manuscript, and for each asterisk there is a note in the commentary identifying the subject of the illustration, but there are no other indications of the existence of notes to particular lines: the reader is simply expected to flip to the back of the book on a fairly regular basis to check for commentary. The lack of glosses and notes (and even note numbers) on the pages of the text makes for a "clean," uncluttered appearance, but is not very helpful to the reader, especially a student reader, since the back of the book is a place where students, unfortunately, seem rarely to look. With respect to...