Harumi Tanabe and John Scahill with Shoko Ono, Keiko Ikegami, Satoko Shimazaki, and Koichi Kano, eds., Sawles Warde and the Wooing Group: Parallel Texts with Notes and Wordlists. (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 48.) Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. xii, 170. $52.95. ISBN: 978-3-631-66305-9.

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Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsHarumi Tanabe and John Scahill with Shoko Ono, Keiko Ikegami, Satoko Shimazaki, and Koichi Kano, eds., Sawles Warde and the Wooing Group: Parallel Texts with Notes and Wordlists. (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 48.) Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. xii, 170. $52.95. ISBN: 978-3-631-66305-9.Robert HasenfratzRobert HasenfratzUniversity of Connecticut Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis edition brings to completion a long-standing project of the Tokyo Medieval Manuscript Reading Group to provide parallel manuscript versions of Ancrene Wisse and the texts in its orbit: the Katherine and Wooing groups. The parallel edition of Ancrene Wisse, allowing readers to compare four versions (Corpus, Cleopatra, Nero, and Vernon) of the text line by line, appeared in two volumes published in 2003 and 2005, while the three-text parallel edition of the Katherine group (excluding Sawles Warde) was published in 2011. These volumes were to have formed the basis for a database, the Electronic Corpus of Diplomatic Parallel Manuscript Texts as a Tool for Historical Studies of English, though the status of this larger project is difficult to determine.This last installment and its predecessors are first and foremost technical editions that allow readers to compare different surviving versions of anchoritic texts line by line. Though their format is not easy on the eye or conducive to discursive reading, it does allow users to compare the versions of the texts closely, conveniently, and intuitively. In addition, this volume introduces a number of symbols and conventions that represent a wide variety of manuscript features including line breaks, folio breaks, insertions, cancellations, capitals, word division, and so forth. To give a sense of its textual presentation, I have chosen a line more or less at random from Sawles Warde. The edition starts by giving the folio and line references of each of the three manuscript versions (Bodley 34, Royal 17 A.xxvii, and Titus D.xviii, abbreviated as B, R, and T, respectively) on one line, followed by a diplomatic version of the corresponding line of text from each of the three versions, lineated according to the “control text,” in this case Bodley.B 72v25, R 2r04, T 106ra19B Wit þe husbonde godes cunestable cleo{p}eð war|schipeR Wit te husebonde . godes cunnestable cleopeð war/schipeT ¶ Wit þe husebon-/de Godes cunestable clepeð war/schipe (p. 8)This pattern repeats, lining up each of the versions according to the original lineation of the Bodley manuscript but indicating line breaks in R and T with virgules and folio breaks in all with a vertical line (|). Expanded abbreviations are italicized, while insertions by the original scribe are indicated by curly brackets. According to the brief introduction, the parallel texts were derived from published editions, which were then checked carefully against the manuscripts themselves.The great advantage of this unique method of presenting the text is that it allows readers to see and compare the manuscript versions of the text quickly and in great detail. Its possible disadvantage for some readers is that the text itself is rather forbidding and difficult to decipher without the long list of symbols and conventions (xi–xii) at one’s side. In my opinion, however, the wealth of information that the edition encodes more than makes up for its ungainly form.The data offered in the series in some ways duplicates what a reader could draw from the published editions of the Katherine and Wooing groups. D’Ardenne and Dobson’s edition of Seinte Katerine, for example, presents Bodley 34 (the base text) along with the Royal and Titus versions running in parallel. Similarly, Thompson’s edition of the Wooing group texts offers separate editions of those texts that exist in multiple versions. However, not all these editions signal original manuscript punctuation or represent the word division and layout of the manuscripts. Further, neither Millett’s editions of Hali Meiðhad or Wilson’s Sawles Warde present parallel texts of the surviving versions but instead produce a critical text. A reader interested in tracking the different versions of these two texts would be forced, in lieu of consulting the manuscripts themselves, to use the critical apparatus in each edition to reconstruct the variant texts. The problem is that both editions present only substantive lexical variation in the apparatus, not every single difference in spelling and in fact very little punctuation. For these two texts in particular, then, the Tanabe-Scahill edition is very useful indeed, providing access to a wealth of manuscript detail that is otherwise unavailable from any other source except the manuscripts themselves.I have been referring to this presentation of the text as an edition, though the editors themselves are careful to subtitle the volume Parallel Texts with Notes and Wordlists. In fact, Sawles Warde and the Wooing Group is a special kind of diplomatic edition, one without a historical or linguistic introduction, explanatory notes, or a glossary. Instead it provides notes on the text and word lists. The notes generally describe the state of the manuscript text that cannot be represented easily by symbols and conventions (the shape of the capitals, unusual spacing, the appearance of erasures and stains, etc.) as well as notes on how the editors Morris, Wilson, and Thompson have rendered the text and sometimes misrepresented it. An appendix contains unpublished notes by E. J. Dobson, discovered in a signed secondhand copy of Wilson’s Sawles Warde. Only a third of Dobson’s notes, those that concern the text specifically, are reproduced here. They analyze the phonology and etymology of various words, give their form in the AB dialect, note errors in Wilson’s edition, and suggest possible emendations. The editors of the current volume believe that these notes suggest that Dobson was preparing an edition of Sawles Warde or had plans to do so.The volume also features two word lists, cataloging the vocabulary of Sawles Warde and the combined Wooing group texts separately. These unlemmatized lists, which exclude Latin forms, are arranged alphabetically and include the number of occurrences of each word. Scholars who want to refer to word lists derived from these texts will probably prefer to consult Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., Concordances to the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), instead of the current volume, since Stevenson and Wogan-Browne provide complete lists of vernacular and Latin forms as well as proper names, in alphabetical order, reverse alphabetical order, and order of descending frequency.Who will benefit most from this and its companion volumes? Surely not the casual reader or beginning students, though scholars of anchoritic literature, manuscript culture, dialectology, philology, history of the English language, lexicography, or textual/editorial theory will find much of interest. While this volume as well as the series as a whole duplicates some work found in published editions and concordances, its unique layout will attract serious students of anchoritic literature, who with it will be able to compare different manuscript treatments of the same text quickly, easily, and in detail. Even if all the manuscripts transcribed by the Tokyo Medieval Manuscript Reading Group were to be made suddenly available in full online facsimile, the series would continue as a valuable resource for scholars and students. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 1January 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689876 Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.