A Festschrift for John Scattergood

Abstract

THE editors, Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, have added to the title of this volume the apt quotation from Edward Duke of York's, The Master of Game, ‘The key of all good remembrance’, for all who think of John Scattergood, or meet him in Ireland or England or further afield, the few (of whom I am one) who some years ago taught him as an undergraduate, or the many, whom he taught, or who know him as a colleague, all hold him dear, or those who now read and value him as an editor or writer of learned articles, or as a poet. This excellent and well-edited festschrift is a key to that good remembrance: Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (eds), Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 416. €75 (£50). ISBN 1–85182–929–6. The contributions are arranged in alphabetical order of the contributors, a distinguished group, and at the end there is an index of manuscripts followed by a very useful general index. Richard Firth Green gives a splendid fully annotated edition of The Hunting of the Hare, a mock-heroic poem comparable with The Tournament of Tottenham, Bannatyne's Colkelbie Sow, and the Rokebys’ Felon Sew. Julia Boffey writes on Chaucer's Fortune, and relating it to William Calverley's Dyalogue of the 1530s, successfully rebuts any division between late medieval and early Renaissance literature, the unity of which is the theme of this festschrift and lies at the heart of its dedicatee. A different sense of limitlessness is promoted in Alan J. Fletcher's ‘Pearl and the Limits of History’. Problems and the effects of post-Reformation readings of Chaucer, such as are in evidence in or to be inferred from the editions of John Stow and Thomas Speght, and the books associated with the former, appear in John J. Thompson's ‘Patch and Repair and Making Do in Manuscripts and Texts Associated with John Stow’. Ralph Hanna, while disavowing any festschrift-like intention in his ‘Notes on Some Trinity College Dublin Manuscripts’, in fact amplifies Marvin L. Colker's Descriptive Catalogue on TCD MSS 69, 75, 271, 423, and 432; he is sure to have whetted the interest of the dedicatee, and that was Hanna's intention after all. Helen Cooper uses an interpolation found only in the Auchinleck Manuscript version of The Short English Metrical Chronicle to date that manuscript.