A Sporting Lexicon of the Fifteenth Century: The J.B. Treatise (review)

Reviews 237 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Arasaratnam’s Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast or works published in the USA such as H. Furber’s Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient are not referred to. It is surprising to find discussion of Bristol without reference to the work of David Harris Sacks, discussion of Scottish piracy without reference to David Ditchburn. The footnotes therefore provide an interesting insight into the sources upon which Scammell principally relies in these mostly descriptive essays.The records of the High Court ofAdmiralty are a major source and they are undoubtedly invaluable if tricky to interpret. A little more discussion of their reliability, particularly when they appear to be the source for claims about customs and perquisites or earnings, might be helpful. Then there are the Hakluyt Society volumes, and other printed accounts of sea voyages. He cites with some frequency works such as Francesco Carletti’s My Voyage around the World. This is a delightful and entertaining account but belongs to a genre of adventure stories whose audience liked their accounts well spiced. The tale Scammell uses of the confrontation on a ship from Japan to Macao has an element of ben trovato for example. His use of the enigmatic Pedro Nùnez in a section on spying serves his purpose, but passes over the ink spilt (let alone the fictional reworking) of his career. Teachers at various levels will find the individual essays useful as a short introduction to the subjects, particularly where longer reading lists may be counter-indicated but they may need to balance them against work that takes a different approach. Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Scott-Macnab, David, A Sporting Lexicon of the Fifteenth Century: The J.B. Treatise, (Medium Evum Monographs, New Series, XXIII), Oxford, The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2003; paperback, pp. xvi, 350; RRP £16; ISBN 090757016X. The popularity of the medieval miscellany The Book of St Albans (StA), both at the time of its first printing in 1486 and subsequently, has afforded the work and its putative originator, Dame Juliana Berners (the ‘J.B’ of the title) a somewhat unfair domination of both scholarly and general considerations of the range of hunting and hawking treatises of the late Middle Ages. In fact, Dame Juliana can only be securely associated with StA’s hunting treatise which carries the 238 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) colophon ‘Explicit Dam Iulyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng’. Similarly, despite the imperfections of the StA text, it has been often used as the primary reference for the J.B. material and yet, as David Scott-Macnab points out in his Introduction, there is no ‘single, authoritative test that can be pointed to as [the J.B. Treatise’s] pre-eminent representative; nor can such a text be constructed from the surviving sources’(p. vii). Scott-Macnab redresses the imbalance in this absorbing and beautifully organised work and more than fulfils his stated aims of ‘ … examin[ing] the range of material associated with “Juliana Berners” in sources other than StA’ (p. 4) and of ‘collat[ing] [and] compar[ing] the J.B. texts in a systematic way for their own sake’ (p .6). The author uses all 25 known sources of the J.B. material. Of this number, 21 are fifteenth-century manuscripts, three are fifteenth-century incunables and one is a sixteenth-century incunable. In Parts I, II and III of the book, three manuscripts, MS Brogyntyn II.I (Prk), MS Harley 2340 (H) and MS Hale 148 (Ha), are presented in their entirety both because of their reliable foundation on base manuscripts and because their arrangement is typical of all the major J.B. material. Part IV features a variety of J.B. material that is either unique or notably different from that presented in the preceding three parts.Altogether the manuscript material occupies only 40 pages of the book but it is the centre of the work, physically and thematically, and offers some of the most interesting and quirky reading in the medieval English corpus. The Prk collation (Part I), for example, contains such diverse information as the...