The Middle English Apocalypse Gloss in British Library MS Additional 18633

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...

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Reviewed by: Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson Luke Penkett Eleanor Johnson, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2018 264 pp. Contemplative prayer, at last, is being discovered and utilized by a wider cross-section of people than ever before. No longer regarded as something that is restricted to the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics, there is a plethora of books, teachers, and workshops that we can employ to help us along this particular path of prayer. In this ground-breaking yet accessible book Eleanor Johnson argues convincingly that during the Middle Ages contemplation pervaded allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays alongside devotional prose and disengagement from the business of the world. She also shows how this genre enabled and enhanced literature, especially spiritual and theological literature, in its use of the vernacular. Moreover, Johnson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, demonstrates that medieval vernacular literature enjoyed a performative character, and that all three types of literature, poetry, prose, and drama, were participatory. Johnson’s boldness shines through in the chosen foci of her study: The Cloud of Unknowing, A Revelation of Love, Piers Plowman, The N-Town Mary Plays, Wisdom, and Mankind. Strange bedfellows one might think, but as she explains in her Introduction, “Middle English Contemplation: Forming Vernacular Participation,” all six foci, understood as contemplative texts, challenge the medieval and our understanding of contemplation. And it is by participatory encounter, she argues, that one arrives and enters the state of contemplation. Since the start of the twenty-first century there have been a number of fine studies—by scholars such as Beckwith, Brantley, Karnes, Despres, Biernoff, and Newman—which have expressed “sense-experience, conveyed through literary form, as a cornerstone of the initial performance of contemplative understanding” (9). Where Johnson breaks new ground is in her shift from the focus on sight, imagery, and visuality to aurality—sounds, rhythms, puns, rhymes, alliterations, and so on. In this shift she demonstrates that in the aurality of the English language, the language of the everyday, specific sensory effects may be enabled for contemplative audiences. Staging Contemplation is divided into three parts: “Participating in Time and Eternity,” “‘Kyndely’ Participation,” and “Vernacular Comedy and Collective Participation.” Part One examines the Cloud and Julian’s Revelation of Love. The Cloud presents union with God as a primary goal of participatory contemplation. Julian shows through her literary expertise how God can participate in both temporality and eternity as a contemplative goal. In both “Middle English becomes a formal structure in which the contemplative can perceive sensibly and thereby participate in the comforting and ever-present nature of God” and neither “could have been achieved in the same way in Latin…Middle English is [End Page 223] a choice with powerful sensory possibilities for producing active textual participation…that can initiate participatory contemplation of the divine” (70). The second part opens with an examination of how Piers culminates in a “formal, poetic staging of how self-knowledge and knowledge of God interrelate” (71). Johnson reflects that there are four ways in which we may know God “kyndely”: through synergy and synthesis; through Trinitarian similetics; by perceiving Christ as Everyman, the Samaritan, and as Piers; and through English. She concludes that “contemplative life must be overlaid with the social world” and suggests that Piers “functions as a quasi-dramatic fulcrum between earlier prose contemplative works and later, fifteenth-century dramatic ones” (107). Accordingly, the other text discussed in this part is the sequence of Marian plays from the East Anglian N-Town cycle of the second half of the fifteenth century. At this stage Nicholas Love’s The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ makes a guest appearance. Johnson argues that this work, of which a number of manuscripts were widely available in East Anglia, was “held up as a standard of orthodox, anti-Lollard, devotional writing despite its being composed in English…[which] bodies forth a theory of why the vernacular is not just a possible language for embodying contemplative truth but indeed a preferable...

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

 Written in an engaging and accessible manner, English Literature in the Age of Chaucer serves as both a lucid introduction to Middle English literature for those coming fresh to the study of earlier English writing, and as a stimulating examination of the themes, traditions and the literary achievement of a number of particulary original and interesting authors.  In addition to detailed and sensitive treatment of Chaucer's major works, the book includes chapters on his chief contemporaries, such as John Gower, William Langland and the Gawain-poet. It also examines the often underrated contribution to the English literary tradition of his successors John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as the interesting and original work of the Scottish poets, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, who also claim Chaucer as their model.  Apart from the narrative poetry of Chaucer and his followers, the book also contains chapters on the Middle English lyric; Middle English prose, including Mandeville's travels; the most original and imaginative writings of the Middle English mystics, in particular Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; and Thomas Malory's impressive prose compilation of Arthurian stories.

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

Whereas object pronouns regularly occurred before the main verb in Old and early Middle English, such word orders were to a large extent lost in Middle English prose by the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, some isolated later texts still show regular preverbal occurrences of object pronouns. Such word orders are most frequent with three texts that are translations of French sources. This article closely examines one of these texts, the Middle English prose Brut, and its source, and argues that contact influence is the most plausible explanation for its distinct behaviour with respect to object pronoun placement. It is also shown that the translator does not slavishly follow his source and that the contact effects are mainly of the statistical type in that word orders occurring very marginally in other texts appear with high frequencies in the Brut while such a contrast is not found for a word order that is unattested elsewhere. These observations are compatible with the equally exceptional but slightly different distribution of object pronouns in another translation from French, the Ayenbite of Inwyt. The findings of this article show that translation-induced contact and, possibly, contact in bilingual language use more generally can have important quantitative effects and that these have to be seriously considered in any syntactic analysis of historical texts based on a foreign source text.

Based on an analysis of the Innsbruck Prose Corpus, this paper gives evidence of the West Germanic heritage in Middle English fixed expressions. The samples include the non-French and non-modern use of prepositions and of the zeroarticle in prepositional phrases with adjectives (with loud word), moreover some seemingly German but in fact West Germanic idioms in Middle English, twin formulas with and marked by concatenating formal features, such as rhyme, alliteration and repetition, and the special syntagms Adj + N, N + N and a few comparisons with as. A final chapter deals with complex predicates headed byto do, to get, to work and to make. To make + N, as the youngest of the patterns investigated, shows that predicates with the same head may have different ages:to make haste is a relative oldtimer, to make war is an evergreen, and to make love a fairly recent coining.

1. Foreword 2. Introduction 3. Part I. Pragmatic and stylistic choices 4. Politeness in the history of English (by Jucker, Andreas H.) 5. The which is most and right harde to answere: Intensifying right and most in earlier English (by Mendez-Naya, Belen) 6. The diachronic development of the intensifier bloody: A case study in historical pragmatics (by Biscetti, Stefania) 7. Variation and change in the writings of 17th century scientists (by Moessner, Lilo) 8. Part II. Lexical and semantic change 9. The convergence of two need verbs in Middle English (by Loureiro-Porto, Lucia) 10. Rivalry among the verbs of wanting (by Akimoto, Minoji) 11. A look at respect: Investigating metonymies in Earle Modern English (by Tissari, Heli) 12. Germanic vs French fixed expressions in Middle English prose: Towards a corpus-based historical English phraseology (by Markus, Manfred) 13. Latin loanwords of the early modern period: How often did French act as an intermediary? (by Durkin, Philip) 14. Disseisin: The lexeme and the legal fact in Early Middle English (by McConchie, R.W.) 15. Was Old Frech -able borrowable? A diachronic study of word-formation processes due to language contact (by Trips, Carola) 16. Women and other 'small things': -ette as a feminine marker (by Kornexl, Lucia) 17. Index of subjects

Reviewed by: The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts by Lydia Zeldenrust Tania M. Colwell lydia zeldenrust, The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. xii, 272. isbn: 978–1–84384–521–8. £60/$99. Lydia Zeldenrust's fine examination of the Mélusine tradition across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century western Europe is a welcome addition to the scholarship of this romance which also broadens our understanding of the contemporary printing industry. Tracing how the French Mélusine romance acquired its status as a European bestseller through the production of vernacular translations and their transregional circulation in print, this study extends recent discussions highlighting the interdependence of medieval cultural networks beyond the national boundaries conventionally imposed upon studies of literary production (p. 10). The author [End Page 94] supplements her command of at least five medieval languages with an interdisciplinary blend of philological, art historical, and book historical approaches to analyze how linguistic, material, and geographic translations of the romance from French sources transformed the Mélusine tale for new audiences. Zeldenrust examines how translators, printers, and artists re-interpreted and reshaped the romance through the lens of the hybridity characterizing Mélusine and her sons (pp. 3–4). Chapter One analyzes the hybrid nature of Mélusine and her progeny and differences in their portrayals between the French prose Mélusine and poetic Roman de Parthenay. Subsequent chapters each focus on a specific translation context (German, Castilian, Middle Dutch, and Middle English), examining the corpus of surviving texts and likely sources, and bringing new editions to light. They then analyse the impact of the translation and its various reproductions on the re-presentation of Mélusine and her sons. This approach allows chapters to draw attention to both the idiosyncrasies within, and the characteristics shared across, individual translations. Idiosyncrasies in form and content feature among several translations. A particularly distinctive example is Gheraert Leeu's Middle Dutch Meluzine, printed in 1491. This edition integrated episodes from the poetic romance into its translation from a French prose incunabulum, thereby creating a 'complete narrative' of the Mélusine romance (p. 180). Tracing the likely source of woodcuts illustrating these poetic episodes to a German prose edition of the Parthenay romance, Zeldenrust characterises the Middle Dutch translation as the potential product of 'multiple cross-cultural exchanges' taking place across the European print industry in this period (p. 149). In contrast, a textual and iconographic paradox was shared among many of the translations which increasingly dominated their sixteenth-century printed lives: the textual effacement of Mélusine's hybrid nature in the latter stages of the romances was accompanied in the editions by woodcuts depicting the fairy in her half-female, half-serpentine form. The standardization of Mélusine illustration is traced to a textual variation within Thüring von Ringoltingen's 1456 German prose translation of the Parthenay romance, whereby the fairy transforms into a hybrid woman-serpent, and not into the fully serpentine figure of the French source. This unique variation was translated visually into German manuscripts and then into the earliest European edition of the Mélusine romance, Bernhard Richel's 1473–74 Basel incunabulum. The author traces how Richel's iconographic program not only informed later German editions, but subsequently influenced the earliest printed editions of the French, Castilian, Dutch, and possibly, Middle English, narratives. Tracking these iconographic relationships allows Zeldenrust to demonstrate how printed editions were central to circulating, and inspiring new translations of, the Mélusine romances across Europe. This argument is extended by the identification of networks between the European printers responsible for producing these translations, several of whom—such as Juan de Parix and Estevan Cleblat, who published the first Castilian edition of the prose Melosina in 1489—enjoyed close relationships with centers of Germanic and/or French print culture at the end of the fifteenth century. These networks corroborate central [End Page 95] claims about both the significance of the German translation and print industry for the circulation of the Mélusine romance, and the importance of situating European literature within transnational as well...

Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature: 4. Old English Prose of Secular Learning. By Stephanie Hollis and Michael Wright, with Gwynneth Mills and Adrienne Pedder. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer. 1992. xii + 383 pp., followed by 21 pages of indices, un‐paginated. Price: £35.00. Anglo‐Saxon Exeter: A Tenth‐Century Cultural History, Studies in Anglo‐Saxon History, 4. By Patrick W. Conner. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press. 1993. xii + 279 pp. Price: £45.00. Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late‐medieval England. By Seth Lerer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1993. 309 pp. Price: US $39.50. Chaucer's Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius (Chaucer Studies 18). Edited by A.J. Minnis. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 1993. x + 203 pp. Price: £39.50. The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist VIII: Manuscripts containing Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries. Edited by S.J. Ogilvie‐Thomson. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 1991. xxix + 198 pp. Price: £35.00/$70.00. William Caxton and English Literary Culture. By N.F. Blake. London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press. 1991. xi + 315 pp. Price: £35.00. Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623. By Gary Taylor and John Jowett. Oxford Shakespeare Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. xi + 333 pp. Price: £40.00. Index of English Literary Manuscripts. Volume III: 1700–1800. Part 3: Alexander Pope — Sir Richard Steele. With a first‐line index to Parts 1–3. Edited by Margaret M. Smith and Alexander Lindsay. London: Mansell. 1992. Price: £170.00. Pope, Homer and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth‐Century Classical Learning. By Carolyn D. Williams. London/New York: Routledge. 1993. 220 pp. Price: £37.50. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. By Joanne Shattock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. ix + 492 pp. Price: £19.95. Language, Text and Context; Essays in Stylistics. Edited by Michael Toolan. London and New York: Routledge. 1992. xv + 320 pp. Price: £12.99 pb.

The Index of Middle English Prose. Handlist I: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Henry E. Huntington Library by Ralph Hanna III, and: The Index of Middle English Prose. Handlist II: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prase in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester and Chetham’s Library, Manchester by G. A. Lester

REVIEWS CX2- (in Manuscnpts in the Fifty Years After the Invention ofPrinting, ed. J. B. Trapp [London, 1983], pp. 6-8) or of A. L. Hench's identification of the setting copy for Tyrwhitt in Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950):265-66. It is regrettable that this volume shows evidence ofa lack offinalrevision. Professor Boyd has assembled much useful material in this volume. With a little more effort its reliability, particularly in textual matters, could have been greatly increased, and fuller justice done to her industry and scholarship. A.S. G. EDWARDS University of Victoria LAUREL BRASWELL. The Index ofMiddle English Prose. Hand/ist IV: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Douce Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cambridge and Wolfe­ boro, N.H.: D.S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. xix, 110. $32.50, ,£19.50. It is encouraging to see the steady accomplishment of ambitious designs in the publication of substantial parts of a large scholarly project such as The Index ofMiddle English Prose.Since such collaborative projects are, by their very nature, vulnerable, it is of considerable credit to the general editor and coeditors and the editorial board that this fourth handlist, a list ofmanuscriptscontaining Middle English prose in the Douce Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, appeared within three years of the publica­ tion of the first handlist (with others now also out or imminent and the invaluableIndexofPrinted MiddleEnglishProse [IPMEP] also published). T he present handlist usefully identifies those items of specific interest to Middle English specialists in the large and diverse Douce Collection, listing fifty-four manuscripts containing Middle English prose, ranging from the ubiquitous collections of medical and other recipes to a translation of Vegetius De re militari; a copy of the Master ofGame; several copies of the Wycliffite translation of the Bible; a romance, Ponthus; a manuscript of devotional treatises of Carthusian provenance; and so forth. A concise introduction categorizes the types of Middle English prose texts found in the Douce manuscripts and offers a resume of the formation of the collec­ tion as a whole, as well as of Douce's career as a collector of diverse objects and as an unexpected benefactor ofthe Bodleian Library. Given all this, it is 191 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER a great pity that in detail Handlist IVdoes not seem to fulfill the expecta­ tions raised by the businesslike tone of its introduction, nor the high standard set by earlier handlists in the series, such as the exemplary list of MiddleEnglish prose in the HuntingtonLibrary that appeared as Handlist Ithat has become, with IPMEP, an invaluable reference point for any study of this material. A sample of three entries in the present handlist, chosen at random, reveals, when checked against the manuscripts, an unfortunate number of inaccuracies. And so, in the opening lines of the Three Kings ofCologne, which begins imperfectly in MS 301, "pis" in the first line of the transcrip­ tion should read "pat"; in line 3, in the account of Paul's road to Damascus experience, the text should read "conuerted to Crist" andnot "connected to crist"; in line 4, "propre heryes" should read "prophecyes," and the un­ biblical "zhalaam" should read "Balaam"; in the following line, "his bokes" should read "in he(r) bokes" (and in the transcription of the final lines "three," incidentally, should read "thre"). And again in the transcription of the opening lines of a copy of the Brut Chronicle in MS 323, "surreye" should read "Surrye"; "a noble kyng and myghty a man of grete renoun" in fact has an additional ampersand after "myghty"; "dyoclissian" should read "Dyoclician" (and is it really necessary to avoid capitals [cf. the general editor's note, p. v, paragraph 4], at times even in the face ofmanuscript practice, when an equally arbitrary decision to capitalize all proper names would help the reader considerably?). The transcription of the closing passage of the Brut, which is said to begin on folio 101v but in fact begins on the recto, contains two mistranscriptions: "toke pytye" for "toke pe pylfre" (a radically different effect in the context of the aftermath of a battle between the Scots and the English) and "scotte" for "Scottes." (In...

Reviewed by: The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes by Christine de Pizan Karen Green Christine de Pizan, The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, ed. Hope Johnston, trans. Brian Anslay (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 457), Tempe, ACMRS, 2014; hardback; pp. lxvii, 622; 13 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $90.00, £69.00; ISBN 9780866985086. With this new edition of the Middle English translation of Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, the purchaser gets two editions for the price of one, for the book incorporates both the text of Brian Anslay's English translation, published in 1521, and an edition, in Middle French, of an early exemplar of Christine's famous defence of women, London, British Library, MS Royal 19.A.xix (L), a manuscript that may have been consulted by the English translator (p. xxv). As the editor, Hope Johnson, notes, by printing both the French and English on facing pages, comparison of the two texts and the identification of places where they deviate is greatly facilitated. Since the only other easily available edition of the French text, that prepared by Earl Jeffrey Richards and Patrizia Caraffi (Luni Editrice, 1997), comes with an Italian translation, the inclusion of the French along with the Middle English significantly enhances the publication's usefulness for English speakers. The introduction offers a brief account of the contents of Christine's defence of women, a short account of her life, with brief details of her other works, a biography of the translator, Brian Anslay, a discussion of the minor ways in which the translation deviates from the original, an account of the editorial history of the [End Page 155] Cité des Dames, some details concerning the printer, Henry Pepwell, and details of the signature irregularities, provenance, and marginalia of the five surviving copies of the English publication. There are extensive notes, which detail the ways in which the text of L diverges from British Library, MS Harley 4431 (R), the authoritative version prepared for the French queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, in 1414. A bibliography and selective glossary of Middle English words that are likely to cause trouble make up the volume. An enormous amount of detailed work has gone into the preparation of this pair of texts, and I find the conjunction of the Middle French with the Middle English is an aid in reading both. When the French is obscure, the English helps, and vice versa. As others have noted, Ansley's translation follows the French almost word for word, so that someone with French, and whose Middle English is weak, could use the French to familiarize themselves with Middle English, or the other way around. I suspect that this will make the edition of use to students of both languages. The ease of comparison also promises 'multiple interpretative possibilities for future scholars to consider' (p. li). This is a very careful, scholarly edition. If it has any fault, it is that it is so careful not to go beyond the available evidence that it offers no interesting new speculations concerning the circumstances of the translation or the influence of it and its French original on later English political debates concerning women's capacity to rule. We learn that the translator was a yeoman who attended Henry VII's funeral and the coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Both events took place in 1509, and at the latter event he was assigned to the 'Queen's Chamber' (p. xl). He was a yeoman of the cellar, married to Anne Polsted, and lived in Kent not far from William Thynne, the 1532 editor of Chaucer's Works. Thynne's nephew, Sir John Thynne, acquired one of the surviving copies of the translation, that at Longleat, which bears the name of William Brereton, who was charged and executed on the grounds of adultery with Anne Boleyn' (pp. xliii, lxi). Given the timing of its production—when after eleven years of marriage, Catherine of Aragon had provided Henry VIII with only a female heir—, and in the light of Susan Groag Bell's discoveries relating to the contemporary 'city of ladies' tapestries', which are mentioned...