Rethinking the “South English Legendaries.” ed. by Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (review)

In ways that the editors of this volume survey in their introduction, recent trends in thinking about literature and culture have been favorable to the South English Legendary (hereafter SEL). Blurton and Wogan-Browne cite a concern with “a text’s reproduction rather than its production, together with the abandonment of authorial intention, an attentiveness to the local, to fragmentation, contingency, hybridity, . . . and the disruption of high art by popular culture” (11), all of which the SEL shows in abundance. This has led to a change of direction in research after Manfred Görlach’s work on the SEL’s textual history, justly described by Sherry Reames as “heroic” (84): the tendency has been “to relinquish the quest for the origins of the SEL, at least for the moment” (14). Taken together, the essays in this volume consolidate this turn and explore some of its implications: but they also return attention to its audience and sources with a fresh eye.

Thomas Liszka’s 2001 paper “The South English Legendaries,” reprinted here, not only illustrates the variety in content and arrangement of the SEL manuscripts, but suggests that it is not just the nature of the manuscript record but also that of the literary activity that makes the quest for the original text pointless: in the descent of this work, “greater geniuses reside further down on the stemma than at the top” (41). Liszka instances “the SEL text intended by whoever wrote the Banna Sanctorum,” and the work of the reviser whom O. S. Pickering has called the “Outspoken Poet.” This volume contains a useful amalgamation of two papers by Pickering on that poet, first identifying his hand more widely in the SEL, then equating him with Robert of Gloucester, as author of both the Chronicle to 1135 and the longer continuation. A reprinted paper by Thomas Heffernan, “Dangerous Sympathies: Political Commentary in the South English Legendary,” finds implicit pro-baronial sentiment in the SEL’s Dominic that is shared by the Robert of Gloucester Chronicle. In this context it would have been helpful to specify that the relevant lines are from the longer continuation. (The line numbers, given on page 312 as “II, 714–8,” should be “11,714–18.”)

Once the quest for origins is left aside, later developments come more clearly into view. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out that “just over half of the extant SEL manuscripts are c. 1400 or later” (403). She shows how Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 779, the largest of all with many unique texts, displays characteristic early fifteenth-century concerns with papal activity and Eucharistic controversies. By c. 1400, when Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 17 was made, the SEL could be recast as “a devotional manuscript—more like a book of hours than a legendary” (376), as Karen Winstead argues on the basis of its illustrations.

The collection inaugurates consideration of the audience of the SEL by reprinting John Frankis’s 1986 paper “The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth-Century England,” which found that the manuscript evidence pointed to a range of contexts in which clergy mediated texts to other clergy and the laity. This is suggestive for the early history of the SEL, and compatible with the more specific conclusions of Annie Samson’s influential paper in the same 1986 collection, that it was written initially for regional gentry, and private rather than public reading or instruction. Frankis’s paper is usefully updated with a discussion of the context of the earliest and most puzzling of SEL manuscripts, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, concluding that both parts of this manuscript “circulated, and were probably produced, in a secular environment, possibly among layfolk, more probably among secular clergy” (78). A more detailed history is proposed in a second contribution by Pickering, “Black Humour in the South English Legendary.” While it is his view that “the South English Legendary, in its first developed...