The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers. Edited by jill mann and maura nolan. Pp. xv + 296. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Cloth $75.

Abstract

Most of the essays in this volume were presented at a 2001 conference at least in part marking Notre Dame's acquisition of an interesting Middle English manuscript. This book, now University of Notre Dame MS 67, acquired in the Foyle sale at Christie's a year previously, contains the prose life of Christ known as The Mirror to Devout People. While predictably several studies here address this new acquisition and its contexts, the weight of the volume is elsewhere, in a series of four important and diverse essays. Two of these—indeed a deliberate pairing—represent professorial inaugural lectures, delivered on other occasions by Notre Dame's two medievalist chairs, Michael Lapidge and Jill Mann. Each author enunciates a polylingual conception of literary community, for each addresses the impact of Latin texts, largely communicated through educational training, on English compositions. The essays are a pregnant reminder that, whatever the fashionable emphasis of ‘vernacular studies’, ‘the vernacular’ has always drawn inspiration from and been in secondary, imitative relations with learned (or learnéd) discourses.