The Court of Sapience ed. by E. Ruth Harvey

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER E. RUTH HARVEY, ed. The Court ofSapience. Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, vol. 2. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1984. Pp. xlv, 226. $35.00. The Court of Sapience is an attractive fragment, a poem of learning perhaps written toward the middle of the fifteenth century. The author, after narrating the debate between the Four Daughters of God, a debate resolved with the aid of the title figure, describes the entire world of knowledge. His goal is to show how human virtue (and thus salvation) depends upon wisdom and learning. The only previous edition of the poem, by Robert Spindler (1927), is valuable primarily for destroying Stephen Hawes's attribution of the poem to Lydgate; moreover, a fourth manuscript version of the text-Columbia University Library, Plimpton 256-has appeared since Spindler's edition. The time is ripe for a modern look at the text, and this Ruth Harvey's edition offers. On the whole, Harvey does a solid job on the poem. She provides a fairly conservative transcription of the text as printed by Caxton and exhaustive textual annotation. The notes to the text are properly billed as a "Textual Commentary," since they give extensive information about a variety of learned topics which emerge in the course of the poet's description of the Seven Liberal Arts and of two of the theological virtues. Particularly impressive is Harvey's tracing down every possible use of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum, a source for an extensive block of natural description in the middle of the poem. But in spite ofsolid achievement, this edition leaves one only whetted, not satiated. Harvey clearly knows enough to provide an edition of The Court which will satisfy (as Spindler's has done) the next half century's worth of scholars of fifteenth-century poetry. For reasons which are not clear to me, since performing these tasks would seem to follow logically from a decision to edit the poem, Harvey fails to provide a good deal of information I should have thought to be central to her task. Harvey nearly ignores what should haveformed the most pressing reason for a new edition-the opportunity to improve upon Spindler's text. Iffor no other reason than his ignorance of the Plimpton copy, Spindler is inadequate. Moreover, the addition of a new textual source should imply the presentation of a full collation and some attempt at an authoritative text with explanation of variant readings. On this score Harvey simply demurs. She does make an effort at explaining manuscript relations (pp. 200 REVIEWS xvi-xviii) but finds that "no decisive conclusions" are possible. As a result she opts for a conservative presentation and offers the text of Caxton's print, corrected as necessary. Such a presentation would leave no room for argument, were Harvey careful in her further procedures. As she notes (p. xx), Caxton's text provides the best copy text since it is the fullest version of the poem-fuller than the Trinity manuscript that Spindler printed. But if part of the justification for an edition rests on the discovery of Plimpton, then its readings need to share top billing with Caxton: the manuscript deserves a full and useful collation. In fact, the textual variants are selective, less extensive for the same manuscripts than Spindler's. They are selective on no very discernible principle ("all significant variant readings") and are buried in the back of the book (pp.163-87), where they are extremely hard to use in conjunction with the printed text of Caxton. Moreover, cor­ rections of this copy text are not marked by brackets in the text (pp. 3-80). And at least some of Harvey's retentions of Caxton readings might be thought to require some explanations in the Textual Notes: excepting the question of metrics, the volume probably shies further away from matters explicitly textual than it should. In the notes that do appear, including those offering translations of the text, Harvey leans a little too much on "perhaps" for my taste. One's confidence in an editor depends a good deal on how assured she appears to be in handling that text about which...