Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts ed. by Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (review)

Abstract

SUSANNA FEIN AND MICHAEL JOHNSTON, eds., Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press, 2014. Pp. 325. isbn: 978-1-90315-351-2. $99.A glance at the title of this volume might bring one to question what advantage might be gained from a collection so intensely focused on a single Yorkshire scribe who produced only two books, given that London has already been established to be the dominant culture of late medieval England's professional book trade. Yet it is in Thornton's very idiosyncrasy and his failure to 'fit any of the larger patterns in which most historians of English book production have been interested' (2), Michael Johnston argues, that his two books-Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 and London, British Library MS Add. 31,042-matter.Robert Thornton and His Books is the first book in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on Robert Thornton (c.1397-c.1465), the amateur scribe and compiler whose extraordinary books-the second-most substantial collection of Middle English romances-preserve an extraordinary quantity of literature which may well otherwise have been lost to oblivion, including the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This long-overdue collection brings together for the first time a fully realized account of Thornton's activity and its relationship to fifteenth-century English book production, Yorkshire social and literary networks, and lay vernacular devotional and reading habits.This volume serves the dual purpose of acting as a rallying point for current scholars and as a staging ground for future scholarly work by marrying the interests of codicological and paleographical analysis with literary criticism. Its first three articles address the manuscripts' physical characteristics. Susanna Fein's contribution offers a comprehensive account of the contents of Thornton's manuscripts that includes the location of scribal signatures, references to other manuscript witnesses, and the citation of scholarly editions. George Keiser follows this with an extended and lively review of Thornton scholarship, peppered throughout with new insights into his milieu, life, scribal practice, and texts. In addition to its comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts' structure and decoration, Joel Fredell's article situates Thornton's books in their fifteenth-century Yorkshire context, using the decorative features of the manuscripts to complicate our assumptions that Thornton's copying and compilation processes may be reduced to matters of convenience, and arguing that Thornton 'imposed his own organization' on them (120).No collection discussing Thornton would be complete without mentioning its most famous text, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This volume performs admirably on these grounds. In their provocative reassessment of the language of the Morte, Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre argue persuasively for the need to produce a new edition-one that incorporates the evidence from both the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English and from Malory, who 'had access to a text of the poem that was at some points more accurate and more complete than Thornton's' (141). …