Nourishing the alchemical child: metaphors of family life as textual cohesion in the fifteenth-century The Gracious Work

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

John Shirley compiled and wrote at least three miscellanies, probably more, in the first half of the fifteenth century; and Shirley's books appear to have remained accessible to a number of scribes in the decades following his death, to be used as exemplars for further miscellanies produced mainly in London for a century after his death. This article is an attempt to bring together what evidence we have for the network of scribes who inherited Shirley's books: what they copied from Shirley, what were their interests, how they may have had access to his books. John Shirley compiled and wrote at least three miscellanies, probably more, in the first half of the fifteenth century up to his death in 1456; and Shirley's books appear to have remained accessible to a number of scribes in the decades following his death, by what means we do not know, to be used as exemplars for further miscellanies produced mainly in London for a century after his death. (1) This article is an attempt to bring together what evidence we have for the network of scribes who inherited Shirley's books: what they copied from Shirley, what were their interests, and how they may have had access to his books. In a collection of essays on miscellanies, it will first be necessary to establish that Shirley's books and the books of later scribes who copied some of Shirley's texts can be considered as miscellanies, as understood elsewhere in this volume. Although most scholarly studies of Shirley's books have focused on their literary contents and Shirley's introductions, a closer look at their contents, as laid out so clearly in Tables 1 to 3 of Margaret Connolly's recent book on Shirley (pp. 30-31, 70-74, 146-49), reveals compilations more miscellaneous than these studies suggest. His earliest volume, London, British Library MS Additional 16165, includes besides literary works texts such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Master of Game, and a Latin Regula sacerdotalis. His second, as reconstructed from its parts in Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.44, BL MS Harley 78 (fols [80.sup.r]-[83.sup.v]), and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, includes besides literary works the translation of Deguileville's Pelerinage de la vie humaine, prognostications, prayers, and proverbs. His third, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59, while the most exclusively literary of his compilations, nevertheless includes a list of the Knights of the Garter in 1416, the Middle English translation of Augustinus de contemptu mundi, medical recipes, and an account of lucky and unlucky days. Those who copied his texts in succeeding decades also compiled miscellanies of literary, didactic, historical, and practical texts. For instance, BL MS Harley 7333 brings together the prose Brut, Middle English versions of Cato, proverbs, and Lydgate's verses on the kings of England with what we would more clearly define as literary texts. In John Shirley, Chapter 8, Margaret Connolly discusses the manuscripts of Shirley's 'successors', as she calls them. Manuscripts in which are copied one or more texts apparently derived from Shirley's manuscripts are BL MS Additional 34360; BL MS Harley 2251; Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Eng. 530; BL MS Harley 7333; BL MS Cotton Titus A.xxvi (fols 61-207); John Stow's manuscripts, BL MSS Harley 367 and Additional 29729; and possibly BL MS Additional 5467 (Connolly, pp. 172-85). Other manuscripts discussed by Connolly as sharing a number of texts in common with Shirley manuscripts, though showing no signs of direct derivation, are BL MS Harley 7578 and Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.86 (pp. 177-78, 181-82). Others sharing some contents with this group of manuscripts are Leiden, University Library MS Vossius Germ. Gal. Q.9; Cambridge, Jesus College MS 56; Bodleian MS Fairfax 16; Cambridge, Trinity College MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21; BL MSS Harley 2255, Harley 372, Egerton 1995, and Lansdowne 699; and Lambeth Palace Library MS 306. …

THE choice of the Middle English translation of William of Saliceto’s Anatomia, together with its Latin source, is excellent for inclusion in the well-established series ‘Middle English Texts’. It is perhaps not very astonishing that the Middle English version has never been published before. The Trinity College MS is the only complete copy, and there are two not very incomplete copies in the British Library and in the Wellcome Library. It forms part of this author’s Chirurgia. It is amazing, however, that (p. xxvii) ‘[t]here is no modern edition’ of the Latin, which survives in ‘at least 46 Latin manuscripts’ plus eight incunabula and early prints. There appears to be no reason, other than convenience, why the Leipzig copy of the Latin should have been used in parallel with this edition of the Middle English. The printing of the texts in parallel merits high praise; first, of the...

Notwithstanding the exhaustive work of Conrad Lindberg,1 the most complete edition of the Wycliffite Bible gospel manuscripts remains that published in 1850 in four quarto volumes and edited by Jos...

The first systematic attempt to construct a textual history of the Hebrew Bible, that of J. G. Eichhorn, states the nature of the task succinctly: A complete history of the Hebrew text would enumerate, with reference to causes and consequences, all the essential and accidental changes, whether for good or evil, which it has undergone in the process of thousands of years and in its passage through men’s hands, from the time of its first composition down to the latest periods. (1888: 114 = German 3d ed., 1803) If a textual history maps “all the essential and accidental changes” through time, then what we require first is a collection and analysis of the secondary readings. In this formulation, textual history is (to oversimplify only slightly) a history of error. Modern methods for constructing textual histories have refined this view but generally affirm the significance of textual error in historical inquiry. In this area, “error” is used as a shorthand for “readings of secondary origin,” including intentional changes as well as accidental (West 1973: 32). One difference between the procedures of textual history (historia textus) and textual criticism per se (critica textus) is that in the former errors are of primary importance and in the latter they are to be removed (see Chiesa 1992a: 264-67).

This study is the first comprehensive overview of the Middle and Early-Modern English alchemical texts previously attributed to the thirteenth-century English Franciscan scholar Roger Bacon. The genuine Bacon wrote some alchemical texts, but his posthumous reputation as an alchemist became legendary, and his actual alchemical material is overwhelmed by the writings falsely attributed to him. This survey of these Pseudo-Baconian alchemical writings covers both manuscript and print, collected using bibliographical resources and archival research. The texts give an overview of English alchemical topics and genres from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. Corroborating previous work on alchemical texts, it is shown that detailed bibliographical research into the under-studied domain of English-language alchemy can enrich knowledge of the texts attributed to a certain author.

Author's Introduction The article provides an overview of the annals known collectively as The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle , an extensive project of historical writing in English initiated in the late ninth century and continued for some two centuries and in eight manuscript versions. Because of the great complexity of its textual history, and the relative obscurity of its origins, much scholarship on the Chronicle has concentrated on its language – vocabulary and spelling – in an attempt to reconstruct both the relationships of the manuscripts to each other, as well as their putative originals and possible source materials. At the same time, the Chronicle has always been used as a source, in a raw sense, of historical data. This article considers the merits and limitations of both approaches, as well as advocating the value of more recent work that considers the Chronicle itself as a cultural product, which mediates and thereby shapes the perception of events by means of a deliberately restrictive and highly specific idiom. Summarizing the trends of past scholarship and attempting to predict the shape of future work, the article aims both to introduce students to the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle and to establish the centrality of this text to broader questions about the nature of historical writing. Author Recommends Michael Swanton's The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicles (London: Phoenix, 2000) is the best translation available for those who want to access the texts in Modern English. Following the practice of earlier Chronicle editors and translators such as Plummer and Garmonsway, Swanton provides concurrent annals from different manuscript versions, with A and E providing his main texts. He also includes black and white plates of various Anglo‐Saxon antiquities, as well as maps and genealogical tables. For those who can read Old English, the volumes of the magisterial series The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition are essential, since they provide the texts of all the major Chronicle versions in a modern, scholarly format with full annotations and lengthy discussion of the manuscript background, textual relationships, and language: MS A , vol. 3, ed. Janet Bately (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986); MS B , vol. 4, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983); MS C , vol. 5, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); MS D , vol. 6, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996); MS E , vol. 7, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004); MS F , vol. 8, ed. Peter S. Baker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000). Thomas Bredehoft's Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) was the first book‐length study devoted to this text, and is a thought‐provoking, well‐researched and enjoyable read for students and scholars alike, paying admirable attention to manuscript details such as pointing and layout. Alice Sheppard's Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), another book‐length study, considers the Chronicle not just as a repository of historical detail, but as a nationalizing text containing shaped narratives of kin and lordship. No scholar has done more to advance our understanding of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle , and particularly the relationships among the manuscript versions and the use of source material, than Janet Bately. Essential reading in order to understand the complex textual history of the Chronicle includes: Janet Bately, ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, 60 BC to AD 890: Vocabulary as Evidence’, Proceedings of the British Academy 64 (1978): 93–129; ‘World History in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Its Sources and its Separateness from the Old English Orosius’, Anglo‐Saxon England 8 (1979): 177–94; ‘Bede and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle ’, in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1979), 233–54; ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle Once More’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985): 7–26; ‘Manuscript Layout and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle’, John Rylands University Library Bulletin 70 (1988): 21–43; The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Texts and Textual Relationships (Reading: Reading Medieval Studies Monograph, 1991). Online Materials A manuscript image of annals 824–33 from the C‐text of the Chronicle may be viewed at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/histtexts/angsaxchron.html . You can hear R. D. Fulk reading the poetic entry for annal 937 of the Chronicle at http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/audio.htm . This poem, known as The Battle of Brunanburh , which employs heroic diction and a traditional verse form, commemorates Æþelstan of Wessex's victory against a combined force of Picts, Irish, and Norsemen. The Chronicle is not the only formulaic historical text in Anglo‐Saxon England, although it is arguably the most wide‐ranging in its focus, as well being the most self‐aware of its identity as a historical and national text. Charters are a related form, sharing with the Chronicle a highly formulaic diction (albeit generally in Latin), a focus on territorial tenure and exchange, and the function of recording details of persons and events. Translations of the charters are available at: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/kemble/pelteret/2%20Index.htm . Sample Syllabus The Textuality of Medieval Culture Course Description This course will explore, in a broad and interdisciplinary manner, the various influences and aspects of textuality in medieval English culture both early and late. We will investigate the question of what constitutes a ‘text’ in a manuscript culture in which scribes customarily and substantively altered the texts they copied; in which the beginnings and ends of individual works were not graphically marked;

If Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Morgan M.126 grants us spectral visions of an author attempting to inhabit his book, it is the mostly anonymous scribes who copied texts into books during the Middle Ages who might most properly lay claim to inhabiting the virtual dimensions books potentially enclose. Among the many individuals who labored to copy the numerous manuscripts I have touched upon in this exploration of the medieval manuscript matrix, several have made their identities known in that territory: we know that John Grimestone wrote Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 18.7.21, that someone in the Frowyk household wrote the booklet in London, British Library Harley 541 in which the “ABC of Aristotle” appears, that John Shirley penned Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59 and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, that Humphrey Newton compiled Bodleian Library MS Lat. misc. c.66, that John Lacy wrote and illuminated Oxford, St. John’s College MS 94, that Ricardus Franciscus inscribed Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.126, and that one “Lyty” copied Bodleian Library Bodley 638.1

The first systematic attempt to construct a textual history of the Hebrew Bible, that of J. G. Eichhorn, states the nature of the task succinctly: A complete history of the Hebrew text would enumerate, with reference to causes and consequences, all the essential and accidental changes, whether for good or evil, which it has undergone in the process of thousands of years and in its passage through men’s hands, from the time of its first composition down to the latest periods. (1888: 114 = German 3d ed., 1803) If a textual history maps “all the essential and accidental changes” through time, then what we require first is a collection and analysis of the secondary readings. In this formulation, textual history is (to oversimplify only slightly) a history of error. Modern methods for constructing textual histories have refined this view but generally affirm the significance of textual error in historical inquiry. In this area, “error” is used as a shorthand for “readings of secondary origin,” including intentional changes as well as accidental (West 1973: 32). One difference between the procedures of textual history (historia textus) and textual criticism per se (critica textus) is that in the former errors are of primary importance and in the latter they are to be removed (see Chiesa 1992a: 264-67).

The Textual Criticism of Visual and Aural Works G. Thomas Tanselle (bio) Textual criticism—the study of the relationships among variant texts of works—has primarily been associated, throughout its long history extending back to antiquity, with verbal works as transmitted on tangible objects such as parchment and paper. But all works, whether constructed of words or not, have had histories that—if fully told—would reveal stages of growth and change, reflecting not only their creators’ intentions but also the effects of their passage to the public and through time. All works, in other words, have textual histories. Whether or not one chooses in every case to use the word “text” to refer to the arrangement of elements that make up a work is irrelevant; the point is that the issues and problems dealt with in the textual criticism of verbal works have their counterparts in the study of all other works. One reason that this point has not been as widely acknowledged as it ought to have been is perhaps the fact that the varying media used in different arts affect the nature of the accompanying scholarship. The textual criticism of verbal works, for example, often leads to the production of scholarly editions, which embody insights derived from the study of textual history. Because the medium of verbal works—language—is fundamentally intangible, a work can be represented by a text in a newly produced physical object (the one conveying the scholarly edition) without making any alterations to the historic artifacts that had transmitted earlier texts of the work to the present. But a work in a tangible medium, like a painting or a sculpture, cannot as freely be accorded scholarly editions, since any alteration deemed appropriate by the editor would permanently alter the artifact that uniquely is the site of the intended work and thus would deprive the future of some of the evidence that had been available to the editor. Regardless of whether textual scholarship leads to editions or to essays, the medium employed in each art determines the nature of the evidence available for reconstructing textual history. (I am not speaking of the quantity of evidence, which can vary irrespective of the medium.) [End Page 1] The evolution of the text of a painting, for example, may be attested to by sketches, which are analogous in some respects to the drafts of a verbal work. But, being made of a physical material that is applied to a physical surface, a painting may preserve earlier stages of its text that exist on the same surface beneath the layer of paint that is now on top, and these stages can be revealed, in varying degrees, by modern technology. Some works in intangible media, such as literature and music, can be transmitted either by direct imitation or by tangible aides-memoirs. When a textual tradition is entirely of the intangible kind, knowledge of a work’s history is dependent on memory; when texts are passed along in physical objects, there is direct access to certain moments of the past (the moments when the documents were prepared), but the texts thus reported are not necessarily more trustworthy than those carried forward in human memory. The objects, however, inevitably carry traces of their own manufacture; and when those clues are uncovered through analysis, they can help explain how the text came to be constituted as it is. This procedure is the counterpart to scrutinizing a canvas for underlying layers of paint: the examination of objects can be as crucial to reconstructing textual histories of works in intangible media as it is for those in tangible media. Textual critics must of course assess whatever evidence is available to them, but the process must take into account the fact that some evidence may be transmitted by media different from the medium of the work itself. Furthermore, the textual history of a work proceeds beyond the point at which the creator or creators of the work die or cease to make changes in it. The discipline of textual criticism has traditionally focused on the evolution of texts only up to that point, though the evidence often has to come, by default, from later...

���� � Buhler MS 17 of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1 contains in the main (fols. 5r‐133r) a copy of the Liber ruralium commodorum (Book of Rural Profits) by Petrus Crescentius (Pietro de Crescenzi), probably composed between 1304 and 1309. This treatise on medieval gardening and other country matters has attracted some attention, 2 both for its text and for the miniatures that accompany it in some manuscripts, among them the French translation in Morgan MS M.232. 3 On the spare leaves preceding and following the Liber, Buhler MS 17 preserves, in addition, a number of short Latin and Middle English texts. The present article will offer a discussion of the English texts in the volume, together with a transcription of the unedited Middle English prose texts. The English verse texts in Buhler MS 17 provide some clues about its dating. Previous cataloguers have dated both the main part of the manuscript and the flyleaf texts to the early fifteenth century. 4 Folio 4v preserves a verse stanza excerpted from Walton’s Middle English translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae ; 5 since manuscript colophons date Walton’s Boethius to 1410, 6 this excerpted stanza can be no earlier than that date. Folio 2r‐v preserves a copy of the first redaction of John Lydgate’s “Verses on the Kings of England,” 7 to which the MED assigns a date of ante 1449, that is, before Lydgate’s death. But the poem in its various incarnations can probably be more narrowly dated. The last stanza in the Buhler MS version concerns Henry VI:

Reviewed by: Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc Elsa Strietman Clifford Davidson, Martin W. Walsh, Ton J. Broos, eds. Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. TEAMS, Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Pp. vii + 104. $13.00. That Everyman’s story has been, and still is, all things to all men is evident from the many guises in which this tale was disseminated in Western European literature from the late Middle Ages onwards. It can in fact be traced back even to earlier, non-Christian models and variations. The Dutch Elckerlijc appeared in print in the late fifteenth century and soon translations and adaptations followed. Everyman was published between 1510 and 1535 in the Low Countries and Germany both in the vernacular and in Latin, the latter of which was used as school drama. The translation and adaptation of the Dutch text for the English market demonstrates [End Page 129] that, notwithstanding the differences in style and presentation of the two texts, the subject matter was of interest to readers and audiences on both sides of the Channel. And how could it be otherwise: Elckerlijc/Everyman is set against a background shaped by contemporary reality, a mercantile society in which time is money and keeping ahead of the game is not always compatible with the best moral practice. Into this environment the protagonist is brought up short against the values of a different reality (life after life on earth) and found woefully unprepared and disbelieving. The subsequent process of being stripped of all that one holds dear and considers important is painful and frightening. It is however precisely the change necessary to think of Everyman’s impending journey not as an end but as a beginning (as something that ought to have been calculated in the whole journey of life), and this is poignantly portrayed. The author and the adaptor/translator bring this process “to life” for their intended audience and readership by making use of various venerable traditions of representation of this life-to-death pilgrimage. Although the editors’ focus is on Everyman, they pay due attention to the original text Elckerlijc, its textual history, its dissemination in Latin and in German, its use by Catholic as well as Protestant adaptors and translators, and its translation into a text deemed suitable for an English audience. Pleasingly, the Dutch text is included in this edition, a fact that immediately increases the scholarly value of the enterprise as a whole. The form chosen solves a problem too: as one cannot have three facing pages, Elckerlijc and Everyman are on facing pages and the editors have made room at the bottom of each Elckerlijc page for a translation into modern English. It is not clear whose translation this is but presenting it in this way works well. The Dutch text presents itself as “een schoon boecxken, ghemaect in den maniere van eenen speele ofte esbatemente” (a lovely little book made in the manner of a play or drama; 16); the English text is offered slightly differently: “here beginneth a treatyse … and is in manner of a morall play” (17). The Dutch is slightly ambiguous: it is a book in the form of a play. There are other examples of printed texts meant for reading and yet laid out in a dramatic form: Mariken van Nieumeghen has a similar textual ambivalence. Elckerlijc is reputed to have won a prize at a Rhetoricians competition but that fact has never been substantiated; Mariken almost certainly was a reading text but laid out in what was clearly thought to be an appetizing form, that of a play. There is no contemporary evidence for performance of either text and yet they have been found to be very suitable for performance in modern times. Similarly, Everyman has had to wait until the twentieth century before being staged (1907). The Dutch text fits seamlessly into the tradition of the Rhetoricians in terms of language, use of allegory, subject, and setting. Their poetic and dramatic [End Page 130] activities began in the first decades of the fifteenth century and their societies, the Chambers of Rhetoric, developed into the most prominent disseminators of popular education and entertainment in...

Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.7.5 contains an early eleventh-century copy of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which was subject to significant correction in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As such it was produced and intensively used at the peak of the popularity of Bede’s historical text in medieval England, which Antonia Gransden and R.H.C. Davis long ago linked to the renewal of monasticism in the North in the long twelfth century. This essay explores how this manuscript, which has been accepted to be of northern provenance, fits into this wider context. It interrogates the evidence provided by additions to the manuscript and annotations of the text itself to argue that this copy of the Historia Ecclesiastica, which has hitherto not been linked to a specific religious house, was in the possession of the canons at Hexham from shortly after their re-formation as an Augustinian community in 1113 until the Dissolution. In doing so it demonstrates how, against the wider backdrop of the Historia Ecclesiastica as an inspiration for religious renewal in the North, the interests of the canons of Hexham in the text in the twelfth century were motivated by specific issues of jurisdiction.

The Doctrine of the Hert: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary and A Companion to “The Doctrine of the Hert”: The Middle English Translation and Its Latin and European Contexts

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches