Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Lazamon by Elizabeth J. Bryan

Abstract

422 Reviews narrator. It also explores questions of authority,truth,and interpretation, and implicitlyalso of instabilities of patriarchal power, signalled in Henry son's famous question used in Pearsall's title. Intriguingly, this wide-ranging paper sometimes ventures into neo-New Critical methodology, and the critical values of 'intensity', unity in the form of 'connectivity' (meaning a 'composition full of echoes and anticipations' (p. 172)), and the primacy of 'the poem' and 'poetic representation', as objects of study separable from cultural discourses (pp. 179-82). Janet Cowan shows how the Middle English version of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus responds with some complexity to the original'smisogynist ambiguities. Performance is central to Ralph Hanna's explo? ration of the themes of feasting and minstrelsy, mutability, and absence and presence in written and spoken texts in alliterative poetry, concluding with a demonstration of how the distinctly 'writerly' Destruction of Troy also 'parades its orality'. Characteristically proceeding by taking nothing for granted, and carefully negotiating his way through complex textual and codicological territory,getting beyond existing impasses, and finallyadvancing forward to what look like firmnew positions, Norman Blake's 'The Links in the Canterbury Tales' argues convincingly that extant links include authorial revisions. Similarly Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards's * Middle English Verse in Chronicles' draws from a mass ofvaried data interesting and sound conclusions, including the frequency with which verse inserts are used for elegy and eulogy in later chronicles, the nationalistic tensions and xenophobia often ex? pressed through vernacular rhymes, and the possibility that transitions into different metres, or between verse and prose, for inserted songs may indicate modal shifts, including exemplary, summarizing functions, celebration, and reflection, and should not automatically be assumed simply to indicate prior popular existence forthe songs. This is a commendable collection, worthy of its dedicatee in its fund of good schol? arship, serious intellectual festiveness, and demonstration of the potential for fruitful interconnectedness in the analysis of aspects of texts, linguistic, literary,editorial, and codicological, that, as Waldron's work has always shown, yield most benefit to the subject when not pursued in isolation from each other. University of Liverpool Helen Phillips Collaborative Meaning inMedieval Scribal Culture: The Otho La^amon. By Elizabeth J. Bryan. (Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2000. xx + 238pp. $49.50; ?31. ISBN 0-472-10949-9. La3amon's Brut is the earliest substantial surviving Middle English poem. Fate decreed that both surviving manuscripts, which date from the second half of the thir? teenth century, should enter the Cotton Library and sufferdamage in the Cotton fire of 1731. One of these, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ix, has generally been afforded a considerably greater degree of scholarly attention than the other, British Library MS Cotton Otho C. xiii, since it has been left substantially more complete. Elizabeth Bryan, however, feels that Otho has been unduly neglected and that it reveals 'a wealth of meaning in the cultural accretions that make up this manuscript text' (p. 59), that has not hithertobeen appreciated. The articulation of this 'meaning' forms the main subject of her book. The physical state of the Otho manuscript has considerable bearing on Bryan's study. Otho now comprises 146 vellum leaves, all to a greater or lesser degree damaged by fire,some of them very greatly. Bryan does not explain what led her to seek as an object of study a manuscript in which the evidential potentialities have been so crucially obscured, but perhaps the most striking point to make about her evidence is its paucity. The forms of 'cultural accretion' she finds significant are decorated initials MLR, 98.2, 2003 423 (78 instances), notae (11), rubricated words (6, together with a slightly larger number of letters touched in red). In quantitative terms these data do not seem a sufficient basis for useful conclusions at all, let alone to possess the 'wealth of meaning' Bryan asserts they contain. Indeed, apart from an evident interest in the history of King Arthur, the forms of decoration do not seem to offermuch clear insight into anything. The design of her book seems tacitly to acknowledge this evidential shortfall. For, in spite of the...