<i>The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume II, 1100–1400</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume II, 1100–1400 Ralph Hanna The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume II, 1100–1400. Edited by Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxiv + 616; 82 plates. $190. This is a volume anyone interested in book history should be extremely grateful to have. It has been orchestrated by the doyens of the field (“middle medieval English book production”?), among the most respected of its scholars. Thomson is without peer in his knowledge of monastic production of the twelfth century (and provides another iteration on the subject here, pp. 136–67), and Morgan is a preeminent commentator on illustrated books of the thirteenth and early fourteenth. As one would have expected from such expert hands, the editors have assembled a cadre of generally distinguished contributors to produce this volume, the third in a series of seven projected. The ensemble is comprised of twenty-eight essays, covering 485 text pages, on an extremely wide, yet carefully [End Page 389] chosen, range of topics. We will remain in Morgan and Thomson’s debt for their capable solution of monumental logistics problems and their persistence in bringing so diverse and generally useful a volume to conclusion, after more than a decade since its inception. That being said, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume II (hereinafter cited as CHB II) labors under certain immediate limitations. The most pressing of these is external, the unfortunate editorial decisions made in the previously published, yet successor volume III of the series, covering 1400–1557. Among a good many other shortsighted policies on view there, that history was devoted solely to the new medium of print (in spite of abundant evidence that preparation and circulation of works in manuscript, and a rather constant oscillation between script and print, typified English book culture well into the eighteenth century). Thus, Morgan and Thomson’s contribution, in spite of the series’ preimposed chronological limits, must stand as The Cambridge History’s bow to post-Conquest medieval manuscript production. The editors attempt to obviate this difficulty in the first sentence of their preface (p. xvii) by extending their remit to cover the period ca. 1066 to ca. 1425, but this does not fully address a problem not of their making. Moreover, such a scholarly endeavor is a distinctly new one (paralleled by a Cambridge History of the English Library), and one that has its unique challenges. On the whole, the editors have guided their contributors between what might be construed as the Scylla and Charybdis that could beset volumes like this. On the one hand, the study can become absorbed into something else, a broader study than “the book.” On the other, it might easily fall into an indigestible rash of particulars. At one extreme, because books are always engaged with texts, one could choose to write simply a literary history, a listlike run-through of some sequence of canonical texts. But a “book history” ought to engage itself otherwise: it should be a study of those mechanisms by which the textual becomes visible, instantiated in books, and ones of various specifiable sorts. At the other extreme, the history of book production has customarily been pursued through the extended article or monograph, relatively limited in its scope yet rich in codicological detail. Such studies build toward tentative generalizations only at their conclusion. A volume like this, while remaining aware of the imbrication of a discipline in such necessarily minuscule attentiveness (and one in which “all situations are unique”), nonetheless needs to arrive at larger, yet still nuanced, generalizations. All the contributors here are well aware of and contribute aptly to what might be identified as the book’s general thesis, the arc of the longue durée between the Conquest and the Lancastrians. The twelfth century was the great age of the English monastic book. For much of this century, book production was limited to a relatively narrow range of enclosed centers, and in the main catered to the needs of holy men and women. The most typical products of such production certainly focused on the great staples of monastic...