The Index of Middle English Prose , Handlist xiii: Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library by O. S. Pickering, V. M. O’Mara, and: The Index of Middle English Prose , Handlist xiv: Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales by William Marx, and: The Index of Middle English Prose , Handlist xv: Manuscripts in Midland Libraries by Valerie Edden, and: The

Abstract

156 Reviews The Index ofMiddle English Prose, Handlist xm: Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Lib? rary. By O. S. Pickering and V. M. O'Mara. (The Index of Middle English Prose) Cambridge: Brewer. 1999. xxviii+133 pp. ?35; $60. ISBN 0-85991547 -6. The Index ofMiddle English Prose, Handlist xiv: Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales. By William Marx. (The Index of Middle English Prose) Cambridge: Brewer. 1999. xxvii + ioopp. ?35; $55. ISBN 0-85991-549-2. The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xv: Manuscripts in Midland Libraries. By Valerie Edden. (The Index of Middle English Prose) Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. xxvi + nopp. ?30; $55. ISBN 0-85991-587-5. The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xvi: Manuscripts in the Laudian Col? lection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. By S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson. (The Index of Middle English Prose) Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. xxii+140 pp. ?35; $55. ISBN o-8599i~595~6. The publication over two years of four new Handlists forthe Index ofMiddle English Prose is a matter of some celebration since it marks further slow but steady progress towards the goal of describing the Middle English prose material in various major repositories. In their trawl of the English medieval manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library forHandlist xm, Oliver Pickering and Veronica O' Mara have searched widely to find almost 800 relevant items in just over eighty manuscripts, five registers, and nine legal documents, including a number of post-medieval transcripts by Henry Wharton and material formerly held in Sion College Library. In Handlist xvi S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson has found seventy manuscripts containing Middle English prose among a collection of more than twelve thousand volumes donated to the Bodleian Library by Archbishop Laud in the years 1629-41. William Marx's search of the National Library of Wales for Handlist xiv?the first in this series to cover a na? tional library?has yielded up forty-nine manuscripts, most of Welsh provenance. Another eighty-one manuscripts have been added to the tally by Valerie Edden's search of twelve Midland libraries for Handlist xv, a search that has included the cathedral libraries of Hereford and Worcester, Gloucester, Lichfield, Peterborough, and Southwell Minster. Handlists xm-xvi thus index the relevant Middle English material in more than 320 manuscripts now held in fifteenmodern collections, the tip of an iceberg, perhaps, but also an essential first stage in preparing for a truly comprehensive general index ofthe Middle English prose corpus. Modern collaborative bibliographical expertise is very much in evidence in Hand? lists xm-xvi. Cross-references are made as appropriate to individual entries in previously published volumes of the series and these are emended as necessary. Attention is also sensibly drawn to useful descriptive accounts of individual texts and manu? scripts in library catalogues or other related sources of information, such as N. R. Ker's magisterial Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries in four volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969,1977,1983,1992). Where important recent critical and textual studies have been published, such as Lister Matheson, The Prose 'Brut': The Devel? opment of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), these too are noted (Handlist xvi only,in the case of this example). As a result, the careful reader of these volumes can gain an informed and essentially cumulative bibliographical understanding of what is or is not representative of the Middle English prose corpus, particularly the survival rates of certain widely copied items such as the WycliffiteBible, the Brut, numerous medical reeipes, scientific and informational texts, translations, sermons, and certain religious treatises. In sum, the descriptions of individual prose items for Handlists xm-xvi consistently provide us with the most up-to-date (sometimes the only) bibliographical profiles of some shame- MLR, 98.1, 2003 157 fully neglected Middle English material, where it is not uncommon to discover new texts of one kind or another hidden in unexpected places or remote archives. Often the cumulative weight of the descriptive evidence presented in succeeding Handlists is also significant since it testifiesto the intractable bibliographical difficultiespresented by the manuscript survivals and the provisional nature of modern systematic attempts to describe individual Middle English prose items according to a standardized...