Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375-1425. By LINNE R. MOONEY and ESTELLE STUBBS.

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Thisbookseekstoofferwhatittermsa ‘newvision’ of ‘the copying and dissemination of Middle English literature in the age of Chaucer’ (the same phrases appear on both pp. 1 and 7). In fact, it offers rather less than this. It is concerned to identify the scribal corpora of a number of clerks in London associated with the Guildhall who, it is claimed, were active from the end of the fourteenth century on into the early decades of the fifteenth. The chief of these clerks are identified as Richard Osbarn, John Marchaunt, Adam Pinkhurst and John Carpenter; their putative activities form the bulk of this study. Such a study of the identification of scribal corpora depends crucially on the methodology employed to establish secure identifications that can link diverse manuscript materials, both literary and documentary, to specific individuals. On the cogency of such criteria everything in this book depends. The basis for such identifications is clearly stated. They are made ‘through matching idiosyncratic elements in the handwriting of London documents with literary manuscripts’ (p. 7). Later we are told that ‘key letter-forms for the identification of late medieval scribes are a, d, g, h, r, s, w and y’ (p. 42). It is not explained why, or in what ways these forms are ‘key’: a footnote (no. 11) refers the reader to a website, but this does not appear to contain any further substantial information on the matter.