The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments ed. by Douglas Moffat

Abstract

R E V IE W S Douglas Moffat, ed., The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Frag­ ments (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1987). viii, 133. $45.00 This volume is an edition of a text found on ff. 63V to 66v of Worcester Cathedral MS. F. 174, a MS. consisting of thirty-three disconnected sheets of irregular size and shape. The first twenty-nine plus sheets contain a version of Aelfric’s Grammar and Glossary, and the bottom half of f. 6gr contains four­ teen long lines lamenting the decline of learning in England. These lines, the so-called “Bede Fragment,” plus the material edited by Moffat, constitute The Worcester Fragments (hereafter W F). The sheets were discovered by the antiquarian Thomas Phillipps in 1838, and since their discovery nine whole or partial editions of WF (excluding this one) have appeared. In addition, at least three dissertations have edited all or part of WF, including Moffat’s own (from which this edition arises) and mine (Sheffield, 1984), of which no mention is made by Moffat. Despite this relatively large number of editions, a new one is badly needed since the last published edition of the material on ff. 63V-66V was a German one by Richard Buchholz in 1890 (reprinted 1970) ; the last edition of the complete WF was Phillipps’s more-or-less diplomatic one in 1838! One might expect that as the inaugural volume in the Colleagues Press Medieval Texts and Studies series, and a volume so expensive to produce and buy, the work edited by Moffat would be of some intrinsic literary merit. And so I believe it is. But Moffat has chosen to see this text in an absolutely con­ ventional way and to edit it as it has traditionally been edited. This approach obscures the text’s inherent interest, to say nothing of failing to alert us to novel and exciting things which the text may be doing and may be about. One example of this edition’s cautious conservatism, or prudence as Moffat calls it (50), is the editor’s apparent failure to believe or take seriously his own arguments (44-49) that f. 66 properly belongs between f. 63 and f. 64. When he presents the text itself he keeps f. 66 where it has always been. As a matter of fact, I believe that f. 66 is best left where it is, but one would have liked E n g l is h Stu d ies in Can ad a , x iv , 3, September 1988 to have seen Moffat present the text in a way which he believes is better than the current, the conventional, order. Another instance of what we may call the edition’s cautiousness is Moffat’s virtual disparagement of the literary merits of this text. It is, he says, “transi­ tional verse” — can this ever be a term of approbation? — and he goes on to describe it as having “a kind of dull sameness in the lines” (33). His praise, when it occurs, is faint indeed: the authors of “transitional verse” “were neither as helpless [nor] as hopeless. . . as they have often been portrayed” (33) ; the author “is not. . . quite so artless a poet as it might first appear” (33). The discussion of the poem’s style which follows is hardly likely to whip (or even stir) up enthusiasm for the work’s artistic merits. Moffat justifiably points out the rhetorical repetitions in WF, and these do show, I think, some subtlety. But his list of “other particularly noteworthy rhetorical features” is modest, all the more so since elsewhere he takes away what he grants here. For example, on page 36 he mentions the “extended amplifications of the hedgehog simile” in lines 20-33 of his Fragment F. as one of these “noteworthy . . . features.” Yet his explanatory note to this image (102, nn. 20-Q1) describes the simile as “rather labored” and “ineffectual,” and goes on to say that the lines, in fact, “do not justify” the reading he has given them. I’m not sure what he means by this last phrase. In the image in question the soul describes the sinful man as...