Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

Abstract

A new study of the most notable Middle English miscellany to survive from pre-plague England—that is, the Harley Manuscript (London, British Library MS 2253, ca. 1340–47)—is an event to welcome and celebrate. Daniel Birkholz's book appears in timely fashion five years after the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series’ publication of The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript in three volumes (2014–2015), which I edited, with translations of non-English texts prepared in collaboration with David Raybin (Anglo-Norman) and Jan Ziolkowski (Latin). Birkholz's volume contributes handsomely to the present-day impetus to comprehend very important yet doggedly miscellaneous medieval books in holistic ways. To fill out the history of early Middle English, we need to better understand a crucial set of trilingual miscellanies that hail, by and large, from the same West Midland milieu that conjured Ancrene Wisse a generation or so earlier. Specifically, we need to glean the conditions by which these rare books came into existence. By what scribes, in what places, and for what audiences were they created? Who were the authors who opted to compose in English? And what was the canon of Anglo-French and Anglo-Latin that circulated ancillary to this emergent Middle English literary corpus?Birkholz opens his book on “Harley manuscript geographies” with a long introduction that scrutinizes the curious, one-off nature of miscellaneous manuscripts. This discussion participates in a burgeoning subfield of Manuscript Studies, and it deserves consideration in any future taxonomies of the “miscellany” as a classification for vernacular manuscripts. The topics of the four succeeding chapters can be briefly summarized as follows: (1) Harley love lyrics by Hereford clerks; (2) Harley texts that reveal Hereford attitudes towards Jews; (3) one specific Harley text, Gilote et Johane, that promotes the “counterfactual” fantasy of sexually liberated women; and (4) Harley texts on death and dying. Chapters one and three are reprints of articles that Birkholz published earlier, here augmented with transitional beginnings and ends. Some internal tensions surface as a result, as when, in chapter three, a 1973 translation of Gilote is utilized even though the rest of the book employs the new edition. The volume concludes with a long epilogue on Harley saints’ lives and a search for the saint said to be “present but absent” from Harley: the recently canonized Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford.Birkholz's study centers on Harley contents while simultaneously veering into many other topics with varying degrees of relevance and coherence. The titular literary-geographical conjunction is key to the approach. Birkholz insists on the Diocese of Hereford, and specifically its episcopal center, as the locus of study, despite the scribe's documented parochial career in Ludlow, a smaller city to the north. Evidence for the scribe's Hereford connections are real, though sparse. Knowing this, Birkholz uses the data mainly to bypass the scribe in favor of an imagined coterie (or familia) of episcopal clerks who wrote lyrics of secular love and religious piety of a generally unified nature. In this manner, he can recreate a world of authors and dissect a kind of conglomerate author as the “voice” of many lyrics mainly in English. Here and there, characterizations of the scribe emerge (e.g., pp. 135, 182–83), and there is even a moment where Birkholz states his own belief regarding who was the scribe's patron (Joan Mortimer Talbot of Richard's Castle; p. 263). But these revealing bits of an underlying thesis about the compiler are mainly buried and out of sight.Birkholz's prose presents a reader with a strange brew of one-part straightforward seriousness (both philologically and historically) mixed with one-part whimsy and word-drunkenness. The writing is in want of balance and self-restraint. Throughout, deep learning and earnest commitment are impressively at show, but also on full display is a need to rein in unnecessary digressions and quibbles. Lengthy paragraphs typically open on one subject, then combine many fertile yet unrelated ideas by loose association, and finally end on quite another subject. On page 254, Birkholz summarizes the argument of each chapter in words as succinct as can be found anywhere else. To illustrate the quirky style and no-holds-barred originality of this book, I open each of the following chapter-by-chapter paragraphs with Birkholz's own summaries.Chapter one, Birkholz writes, works at “reconstructing the mobile life experience of Hereford Diocese clerks, and tracing this phenomenon's displacement on to Harley love-lyrics, which reconcile the contradictions of cosmopolitanism and regionalism in the fetishized body of an embowered western beloved.” The chapter boasts vigorous new readings of some individual lyrics, for example, The Poet's Repentance, Song of the Husbandman, Satire on the Consistory Courts, Advice to Women, and Alysoun. Birkholz eloquently locates in Hereford “an ambitious, distinctive, and unusually mobile interpretive community: one whose underpinnings are ecclesiastical, whose contours are familial, and whose poetics are cosmopolitan, yet that finds its umbilicus in the radiant figure of the embowered regional beloved” (p. 81). This arresting conceptualization provocatively breaths into life a coterie of male clerical authors, familiar to each other and responsible for the bulk of the English love lyrics. But Birkholz goes too far when he extends this coterie to a masculine “interpretive community” and “male-bonded cohort that includes most modern critics” (pp. 62, 69). By these offhand comments, he seems to erase the cohort of female scholars who have also defined modern Middle English (and Harley) lyric studies—doing so, I dare say, without enacting any homosocial male bonding—namely, R. Woolf, J. Boffey, A. Butterfield, G. Margherita, I. Nelson, and C. Harris, not to mention myself. Modern study of the Harley lyrics is not a mono-gendered endeavor.Birkholz's summation of chapter two, titled “Captives among us: Harley 2253 and the Jews of medieval Hereford,” observes that “royalist territorial and Christian-devotional imperatives led to the expulsion of Hereford's Jewish population, from a frontier community whose textual remembrance of their departed neighbours—in pilgrimage itineraries and biblical paraphrases near the centre of Harley 2253—vacillates between contempt and empathy, rapproachement and erasure.” This complex chapter is admirably original and ethically relevant, as it situates Harley contents in remembrance of official antisemitic decrees and expulsions (by bishop, by king), and unofficial acts of neighborly intercourse and tolerance, in a region far from the central metropolis. Birkholz's analysis of the Harley scribe's attitudinal interpolations in his Bible Stories (naming Jews “captives among us”) is especially incisive. Pilgrimage travelogues and Passion texts are aptly examined as well. Good commentary is given to the rare Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo, but Birkholz's wording again goes too far when he writes of “gore issuing from Oviedo's ark” (p. 120). The text states that the relic housed in the ark is a crystal ampule holding blood that poured from the Lord (“cristillinam ampullam cum cruore Domini fuso”)(“Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo,” in Fein, ed. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 3:258): however vivid Birkholz's image, no blood gushes from the ark itself. While a Jewish wedding held in thirteenth-century Hereford becomes the chapter's leitmotif, Birkholz saves till the end a perhaps more relevent detail, especially as regards the scribe's milieu: the respect for Jews evinced by Andrew of Saint-Victor, who spent much of his career at Wigmore abbey, just eight miles from Ludlow (pp. 99, 141–42).Birkholz's précis of chapter three reflects the book's accruing intricacy of argument. He explains that it traces the “counterfactual” trajectories of women who refuse to submit to medieval patriarchal realities. Social spaces and generic structures, alike, are constructed so as to contain medieval women and regulate their expression. But taking seriously the narratives of self-determination asserted by two Harley femmes, who rewrite the pastourelle in which they find themselves, offered textual-geographical means by which to challenge the regimes of gendered enclosure, literary-history's not least.Given the book's all-Harley scope, this reprinted chapter is the least successful because what the topic demands next is an examination of Harley attitudes on women, not simply a look at the singular Gilote et Johane according to the “what if?” methodology of counterfactualism. Much in this chapter tries a reader's patience. First, because it neglects other Harley texts taking bold stands on being a woman, such as The ABC of Women, The Life of Saint Marina, and The Follies of Fashion, it draws attention to Birkholz's evasion of the topic in full. Second, an irrelevant digression on Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes should have been excised. Third, a merciless quibble with Carter Revard's work on Gilote, on the grounds that it is outlandish, is drawn to great length and then suddenly withdrawn, as Birkholz admits that his own methodology is also outlandish. Fourth, the premise of the Gilote analysis grants radical autonomy to the “two Harley femmes” to such a degree that they “find themselves” in a pastourelle that they can “rewrite”—and, thus, do they break free from even their author? Birkholz ought to acknowledge that Gilote is a text undoubtedly written by a man, meant to regale other men (even if women sat in its audience), just as was the Wife of Bath's Prologue, a text granted a good deal of comparative discussion here. From a feminist perspective, how subjectively realistic are these two fictional women and their fantasy-inducing brand of sexual freedom?Chapter four, titled “Dying with Harley 2253: last lyric things,” claims to imagine another order of future-tense geographical removal, by featuring lyric eschatologies and the Harley miscellany's late-added quire of Ars moriendi [craft of dying] texts. The afterlife spatiality envisioned in the manuscript's “last lyric things”—texts offering literary salve against the trauma of coming expiry—proved enduring, worming its way into contemporary poems, even as desires for this-worldly emplacement give way to fixation upon the next, as embodied in medieval devotional substitutions of Oure Levedy (or Suete Jesu) for secular lyric's beloved lady.Birkholz's fourth summary grows wordier than ever, obscuring what is in fact a rather neat chapter that sensibly emphasizes how themes of death in Harley texts represent pre-plague attitudes and therefore ought to be read in ways distinct from post-1350 medieval English literature. This is an important and valuable point. He also distinguishes, crucially, the theme as it is ritualized in the manuscript's last quire of practiced religion—prayers, indulgences, rites, with Saint Anselm's Questions to the Dying being a featured text—versus how it is poeticized in many evocative Harley lyrics, both religious and secular. Because the endpoint—the act of coming “home”—superimposes temporal male sexual comfort and eschatological finality, one must again ask: what kind of comfort or “eschatopoetics” (p. 230) does the collection provide for women, if any?The strangely sympathetic ABC for Women might begin to give an answer here, as well as the handful of lyrics that give voice to women. Moreover, it is odd, overall, that Birkholz virtually ignores the fabliaux, even the “embowered” wife of The Knight and the Basket. He admits that, in structure, Harley Manuscript Geographies is itself somewhat of a miscellany (pp. 252–53). One must ask why. A more straightforward prose style, one less prone to metaphor, wordplay, and ruminative digression, along with a solid chapter on attitudes toward (and for) women—to balance the one on antisemitism—might have alleviated the book's burden of miscellaneity. Still, what Birkholz brings to the table of Harley Studies is a generous feast of provocative fruit and delectable treats.