The Index of Middle English Prose , Handlist XVII: Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge by Kari Anne Rand Schmidt (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.4,2003 951 The Index ofMiddle English Prose, Handlist xvn: Manuscripts in theLibrary ofGonville and Caius College, Cambridge. By Kari Anne Rand Schmidt. (The Index of Middle English Prose) Cambridge: Brewer. 2001. xxvi + 168 pp. ?35; $60. ISBN0-85991-611-1. The seventeenth published Handlist for the Index of Middle English Prose describes just over four hundred Middle English prose items that Kari Anne Rand Schmidt has found in fifty-fourmanuscripts and one set of binding fragments belonging to Gonville and Caius College. The Gonville and Caius manuscripts have been described previously, notably in an anonymous early register ofbook loans forthe years 1406-1 o, then by Thomas James in 1600, with more recent catalogues of the collection prepared by J.J. Smith in 1849 and by M. R. James in 1907-08 (followed by a supplementary volume by James in 1913). Building upon this work and other bibliographical schol? arship on college history, Schmidt describes how some three hundred manuscripts have been held in the library since its foundation in 1348-49, with the Gonville and Caius collection subsequently augmented by several important early bequests and split from an early date between the manuscripts that formed the core of a working library and the other volumes that were made available for lending. It is striking in this respect that over half of the manuscripts indexed in Handlist xvn once formed part of one of the largest post-medieval bequests of manuscripts to Gonville and Caius, a collection that had earlier been the property of William Moore (1590-1659), college fellow and University Librarian. It is also notable that many of the Middle English items described by Schmidt form a fairlyminor component in much larger manuscript collections. Much of the Middle English material listed as macaronic in Handlist xvn, for example, enjoys the status of vernacular glosses, Latin-English vocabularies, or synonymy notes, while other material sometimes survives as short English passages embedded in Latin chronicle versions (MS 249/277), or as English prose phrases in Latin sermons (MSS 334/727, 441/636), or as marginalia, glosses, or flyleaf notes, including the comment (s. xiv) that 'Paston is a good felaw seyth norwych ye gentelman' on fol. 72 in MS 36/142^ volume of unknown provenance that was described as belonging to Gonville and Caius by Thomas James in 1600 and contains no other relevant Middle English material. Given the pattern established by the other published handlists in this series, it is completely unsurprising that medical and related scientific and informational Middle English material predominates in Handlist xvn. In English Studies, 75 (1994), 423-29, Schmidt has written forcefully and well on the knotty bibliographical issues raised by indexing late medieval medical reeipes, but for the task at hand she somewhat reluctantly concedes that she has had to adopt the more pragmatic approach favoured by the editors of this series. At many points in her descriptions of individual reeipes, charms, prognosticatory items, uroscopies, treatises on bloodlettings, and larger clusters of such material, Schmidt's undoubted expertise enables her to offerimproved bibliographical accounts of the convoluted textual histories witnessed by some of the relevant Gonville and Caius items. Some duplication of information with the de? scription of similar such material in earlier handlists is obviously unavoidable. On the other hand, it is worth emphasizing that the development of a fully searchable and updatable electronic database for the Index of Middle English Prose would have re? moved the necessity forsuch overlap and would have gone some way towards meeting Schmidt's reservations concerning the manner in which individual Middle English prose items are sometimes described in the handlists. Queen's University Belfast John J.Thompson ...