Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure by Murray J. Evans

Abstract

REVIEWS each word used by Chaucer, including names, and also reprints the complete line in which each reference appears. Unless one needs a Chaucer name dictionary at home, and few ofus do, I would see no rea­ son to purchase the CND. DAVID RAYBIN Eastern Illinois University MURRAY J. EVANS. Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric ofComposite Structure. Montreal and Kingston; London; and Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. Pp. xx, 203. $44.95. In the preface to his monograph Murray Evans explains, "The present study focuses on the structural implications ofphysical layout and dec­ oration in twenty-six manuscript collections that contain romances" (p. xii). However, one page later Evans states that, in fact, he has lim­ ited his attention to fifteen ofthese manuscripts. On this puzzling note begins a very puzzling book. The first chapter is a discussion of compilatio and ordinatio (without defining either term or distinguishing clearly between them) and physi­ cal layout and decoration (which support ordinatio). To illustrate these terms, Evans has very brief discussions of, first, two manuscripts and, then, the presentation of Guy of Warwick in the Auchinleck MS (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1). Chapter 2-replete with large and unattractive pie charts and other graphs-surveys the use of seventeen manuscript conventions (incipits, explicits, display scripts, etc.); data concerning these conventions have been fed into a computer database for the purpose ofcomparing their use with romances and other kinds ofwritings. (The fact that the numbering ofthe pie charts illustrating distribution ofthese conventions in the man­ uscripts does not correspond to the numbering of the sections in which the conventions are discussed presents the reader with a particular chal­ lenge.) In the next two chapters Evans looks at individual romances in their manuscript contexts and considers the definition of two subgenres of romance, the homiletic romance and the Middle English (Breton) lay. The concluding chapter discusses the "rhetoric of composite structure": 235 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "a set of relationships that encourages a reading of Middle English ro­ mances in their original manuscript contexts" (p. 114). This monograph is not an insignificant piece of scholarship, and it ought not be ignored by those undertaking serious study of romances and romance manuscripts. However, before taking on this monograph, the reader would be well advised to be in control of a good deal of in­ formation about romance manuscripts and to have, as this reader did, facsimiles and microfilms of the manuscripts at hand. Very little is explained about the origin and nature of the fifteen manuscripts dis­ cussed, and for information about them, particularly their contents, the reader has to resort ro tables at the end ofthe book (which fill forty-two pages in all). Using these charts is somewhat trying because, with the omission of page numbers and running headlines on these forty-two pages, the reader must hold the book on the vertical and look below the table proper and above the list of contents to discover which part of which manuscript is the subject of the table on the page. In his treatment ofthe fifteen manuscripts, Evans fails to provide suf­ ficient and necessary information about their original readers, even though that is well known in several cases and is, potentially, impor­ tant to his arguments. To take the most obvious and troubling exam­ ple: Evans's discussion ofOxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 261 does not explore and exploit pertinent information. Evans does report that the book is dated 1564 and was copied by "E.B." from printed texts. However, he fails to make clear that this is certainly not a medieval manuscript, and any comparison of it with medieval manuscripts re­ quires cautious explanation ofthe fact that the scribe, Edward Banyster, copied not only the texts, but also the illustrations (and there are sev­ enteen more than the four that Evans's chart indicates), the initials, and the emblems from printed texts. To put information about this manu­ script into a database consisting of information about medieval manu­ scripts is hardly appropriate, for its scribe-a recusant and an anti­ quarian who owned at least eight pre...