The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The 'Vernon' Text (review)

Abstract

Short Notices 303 estimation. Yet Yates's account of the formation of Dee's ideas again assumes his wholesale acceptance of a ready-formed occult philosophy, rather than the complex, hesitant intellectual odyssey by which he travelled from exhausted Aristotelian orthodoxy, through selective responses to occult signs, towards a new world order. The methodological problems raised by her impatience with contextualising these ideas, in favour of obsessively reiterating their components, appear in the strongest parts ofthis book, where momentarily Yates places both the occult philosophy and its manifestations in Elizabethan literature into political context. Then even the most innocent student reader might become aware ofthe historical crudity in drawing a rhumb line from Pico della Mirandola to The Tempest, without considering the wide ocean of events in which all those strange creatures swam. Glyn Parry Department ofHistory Victoria University of Wellington Zettersten, Arne, and Bernhard Diensberg, eds., The English Text of the Ancren Riwle: The 'Vernon'Text (Early English Text Society O.S. 310), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xxx, 130; R R P £30.00; ISBN 0197223141. In 1976, Arne Zettersten edited the text of Ancrene Riwle from Cambridge, Magdalen College M S Pepys 2498 for the Early English Text Society, as part of a series ofdiplomatic transcriptions of the text in English, French and Latin. This edition of the text as it appears in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library M S Eng. poet. a. I) is thefinalvolume ofthe sequence. In the introduction to this edition, based on materials supplied by the editors, H. L. Spencer discusses the context for the inclusion of the thirteenthcentury Ancrene Riwle in the manuscript, produced in the second half of the fourteenth century in the West Midlands, along with other religious texts in the vernacular. Spencer argues that the presence ofthe text is witness to the continued popularity of Ancrene Riwle in the fourteenth century and its status as a safe and orthodox text, suitable for audiences that included female religious. Spencer also briefly introduces the complex question of the relationship ofthe Vernon recension of the Ancrene Riwle to other versions. The Vemon text 304 Short Notices represents a scribal attempt to collate a text similar to that recorded in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College M S 402, known in the E E T S editions as Ancrene Wisse, with the other branch of the textual tradition, which exists in more numerous versions. Vernon is the only text to incorporate a Latin Marian hymn by Marbod of Rennes (16-18). Following the editorial method used in earlier editions in the series, errors in the manuscript are reproduced in the text and corrected in the footnotes. Most abbreviations have been silently expanded. Collation has been provided with the Corpus text and the text of London, British Library, M S Cotton Nero A. xiv, which are closely linked to Vernon, and at times with other manuscripts. The publication of this volume completes part of a significant project, which will be of lasting importance for scholars both of the Ancrene Riwle and the Vemon manuscript. The current volume also forms a useful accompaniment to the Vemon facsimile published in 1987 by D. S. Brewer, with an introduction by A. I. Doyle. The next step for Ancrene Riwle textual scholarship will be the appearance ofBella Millett and George Jack's critical edition, also for the Society. Rebecca Hayward Department ofEnglish University ofAuckland ...