Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein Daron Burrows susanna fein, ed., Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles Vol. 9. York: York Medieval Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 310. isbn: 9781903153901. £60. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is a commonplace book generally thought, on the basis of manuscript-internal evidence, to have been copied by Richard de Grimhill II in Worcestershire in the years 1281–83. As a voluminous trilingual anthology preserving a heterogeneous mix of prose and verse texts, its importance to our understanding of the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin literary culture of medieval Britain has long been recognized, and the impetus provided by the EETS printing of a black-and-white facsimile of the manuscript (ed. Tschann and Parkes, 1996) and, more recently, by the full-color publication on Digital Bodleian has inspired this worthy collection of essays seeking to build upon the earlier work on the manuscript by Stengel, Miller, Meier-Ewert, Corrie, and others. [End Page 124] Delbert Russell argues that the copy of Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, with its combination of the terrestrial and the celestial, forms a bridge between the unequivocally pious and the sometimes shockingly secular material transmitted in the manuscript; he also offers a stimulating orthographical analysis which contributes significantly to the study of the copyist's scripta. Maureen Boulton relates the opening six items of the manuscript, a variety of pastoralia, to the enthusiastic promotion by English bishops, such as Cantilupe of Worcester, of the canons of Lateran IV, convincingly identifying minor modifications which ensure that the doctrinal material is entirely consonant with the cura animarum in the late thirteenth century, and demonstrating that these concerns are reflected in various of the explicitly religious Anglo-Norman texts which appear later in the manuscript. Sheri Smith discusses the organization and significance of the thirty-one prayers in the manuscript, appearing in six clusters organized in various ways by language and theme; an important conclusion drawn is that Anglo-Norman features as the principal language of prayer, with English a later addition. Marjorie Harrington explains the practical emphasis of the first section of the manuscript, as it moves from pastoralia for the soul to medical recipes for the body, and thence to texts including charms, experimenta, and prognosticatory material. Jennifer Jahner concentrates specifically on the experimenta—a combination of practical tips, chemical experiments, and party tricks—as a possible metaphor for the project of the manuscript itself, an exercise of trial and error as the scribe attempts to craft a new form of book. David Raybin argues that the French version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, as the longest text in the manuscript, occupies a pivotal position in introducing a series of literary texts; separate appendices provide a concordance of the French and Latin narratives, and editions with translations of the tales seen as analogues to The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Marilyn Corrie exposes the wealth of misogynistic material present in the manuscript, hypothesizing that the Digby compiler's choices in this regard may have reflected his own predilections. Neil Cartlidge focuses on the numerous texts across the manuscript featuring an antagonistic relationship between men and women, concluding that 'the shared insistence on the inevitability of gendered antagonism is in the service of a determined playfulness, with gendered experiences and gendered perspectives being mined, in effect, as a source of sociability' (p. 161). Susanna Fein summarizes the Middle English content of the manuscript, drawing attention to the patterns of organization and providing an inventory of texts cross-referenced with other manuscript copies, as well as editions with translations of The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Jenni Nuttall considers the use of paratextual features to highlight verse structures, with particular attention to the scribe's distinctive use of tie-lines. J.D. Sargan offers a detailed analysis of the numerous forms of colored initial 'A' found in the manuscript, comparing the scribe's experimentation with attested types to a jazz musician improvizing on the basis of learned structures. John Hines and Melissa Julian-Jones...