The Historye of the Patriarks: Edited from Cambridge, St John’s College MS G.31, with Parallel Texts of the Historia Scholastica and the Bible Historiale ed. by Mayumi Taguchi (review)

Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica (Paris, late twelfth-century) pervaded the medieval university lecture hall, and it became one of the most widely known digests of Old Testament material in the Middle Ages. It was widely translated into many medieval vernaculars, notably Old French and Middle English. The importance of the Historia is likely to be well known to anyone consulting the volume under review, which appears in the valuable series of Middle English Texts published by Winter.

Whereas the Historia Scholastica appears in numerous Middle English verse adaptations, only one version exists in Middle English prose, and it covers only the Genesis portion. Mayumi Taguchi has edited the unique manuscript that contains that translation (fifteenth-century), and she provides parallel texts of Comestor’s Latin (from the Patrologia Latina) and Guyart Desmoulin’s Bible Historiale (late thirteenth-century; Taguchi transcribes British Library MS Royal 19.D.iii). Both versions were clearly known to the Middle English adapter, and it is most instructive and interesting to browse all three versions of the biblical stories. Because Genesis was one of the most extensively adapted and commented books, having these three sets of texts readily available is the single greatest contribution of Taguchi’s edition. Taguchi has edited conservatively, and thus it is easy to reconstruct exactly what appears in the manuscript. Taguchi has, however, sometimes emended needlessly, when for example she supplies verbs when the sense does not require them. It is not that heaven, earth, fire, water, wind and so on “[obeyith]” God, but that those secular elements have been ordained as God’s “auditory and concistory” (p. 4, ll. 10–13). Both the Latin and French—to say nothing of the quoted Biblical verse from Jeremiah 23.24—make clear that God is the agent. Taguchi also claims that the “careless” scribe omitted two verbs in one sentence on folio 3r (p. xiv), but I see only two sentences with verbs that are either suspended or clearly inferable from context.

The annotations are most welcome, as any scholar of this complex tradition needs as many signposts and elucidations as possible. The annotations concern mostly textual matters, with notes on marginalia, comparisons to the Bible, Comestor, and Desmoulins, and discussions of unusual vocabulary. The glossary is well done, and the bibliography is up to date. The introduction to the edition is less satisfactory because it is pitched at too elementary a level. Anyone consulting an edition such as this will be familiar with the general background of the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages and of medieval book production and ownership. Likewise, that story has been told far more effectively elsewhere (e.g. by Mary and Richard Rouse, Malcolm Parkes, Nicholas Watson, et al.). A cursory outline of what might have been possible takes us almost no distance toward what is distinctive about this text. The claim that the Bible was “utterly inaccessible” (p. xxiii) to English speakers until the fifteenth century perpetuates a long-standing misconception about the history of Biblical transmission in England. When Taguchi addresses the authorship and audience of this manuscript, she has little to offer. The manuscript may (or may not) have been one of many such prose digests produced in fifteenth-century England; it could have been written by any number of learned clerics; the scribe (or intermediary scribes) may have been from Norfolk; and the various owners (one of whom was Richard Crashaw’s father) may or may not have agreed with its contents. Taguchi argues from a negative to conclude, because William Crashaw made no corrections or comments in the manuscript, that he found it consonant with post-Reformation ideas (p. xxxvii). One could propose other explanations. In...