Saint Erkenwald ed. by Clifford Peterson

Abstract

REVIEWS but still real expense of correction. Shirley may well have then given the unfinished but still handsome ms to the first Anne Neville, or the book came into the possession of one or the other Anne Neville by still other means. The date is no real problem; the fact that there is no (other) evidence of Shirley's book-trading activities before the 142o's would not seem to be a strong argument. The possibility that Shirley may have played some role in the creation of the ms still seems to the reviewer an attractive hypothesis. All in all, a worthy venture, both the original and this twentieth-cen­ tury version. The facsimile is bound, not handsomely but serviceably, in brown buckram, and is in every way well finished. DONALD C. BAKER University of Colorado CLIFFORD PETERSON, ed., Saint Erkenwald. (Haney Foundation Series, 22). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977. Pp. x, 147. $22. Saint Erkenwald represents an exquisite illustration of the flowering of alliterative poetry in late fourteenth-century England. Noted for its in­ tricate webwork of themes and structure, its skillful use of parallelism, and its unique lexical value, the poem-written in a late fifteenth-cen­ tury hand-is preserved in a single manuscript (British Library MS. Harley 2250, ff. 72v _7Sv ). Inasmuch as the poem, composed in the North­ west Midland dialect, is often linked with the works of the Pearl-poet, one might expect that many features of Erkenwald would be illuminated by modern scholarship. Strangely enough, apart from a few investiga­ tions of the poem's language, meter, and alliterative patterns; numerous source and authorship studies; several dissertations and articles; Horst­ mann's edition,1 the first printed version of Erkenwald; and the later editions of Gollancz,2 Savage,3 and Morse,4 Erkenwald's inner luster 1 "St.Erkenwald," in Altenglische Legenden: neue folge, ed. Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Gebr. Henninger, 1881), pp. 265-74. 2 St. Erkenwald (Bishop of London 675-693): An Alliterative Poem, Written about 1386, Narrating a Miracle Wrought by the Bishop in St. Paul's Cathedral, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1922). 3 St. Erkenwald: A Middle English Poem, ed. Henry L.Savage, Yale Studies in English, No. 72 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1926). 4 St. Erkenwald, ed.Ruth Morse (Cambridge, Engl.: D.S. Brewer, 1975). 193 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER has been largely ignored by critics. The appearance of Peterson's new edition of Erkenwald, then, is indeed propitious, for such a study may stimulate scholars to recognize the artistry of this poem. Based upon a fresh transcription of the manuscript, Peterson's con­ servative text rightly discards the idiosyncratic methodology-division of the poem into quatrains-adopted by Gollancz and Savage. Although Peterson employs the chief features of the manuscript, a continuous lineation as well as a single ms division at line 177, he argues perceptively for two other structural divisions-the first follows the initial thirty-two lines, a "prologue" evoking a mood of "time past" (p. 26); and the sec­ ond appears after line 320, a thirty-two line "epilogue" signalizing "a spiritual state that transcends time as it is known by the participants" (p. 26) in the events of the poem. Such breaks, indicated by additional spac­ ing between the appropriate lines, emphasize the thematic design of Erkenwald. Furthermore, with an accurate reflection of the manuscript and a modern audience in mind, Peterson reproduces through expanded forms and italics the scribal uses of an ambiguous final e. Unfortunately, these italicized markings, reminiscent of the lettering found in EETS editions published during the nineteenth century, seem intrusive and may suggest to the reader editorial emendation rather than precise tran­ scription of the manuscript. Peterson, likewise, silently expands all normal abbreviations, including contractions, suspensions, and important scribal flourishes. Although Peterson's expansions are generally noted for their scholarly accuracy, he distorts the meaning of wt by viewing this abbreviation as a contraction for wyt. As E. V. Gordon notes clearly (p. lix) in his edition of Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), "Wt is a form of the preposition 'with,' which when written in full is sometimes spelled...