Book review of Lucas, Peter J. 2024. Old English Poetry from Manuscript to Message. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 58. Turnhout: Brepols. Pp. xviii + 398. ISBN 9782503600314.

The language of Genesis is simple, says Ælfric in his preface to his translation of it, but its meaning is complex. Exactly the same is true of his preface—which therefore calls out for detailed interpretation, just as, in his view, does this book of the Bible. The commentary given here attempts to clarify these difficulties. The text, translation, sources and analogues (with translation) and parallel passages are given as aids to this end. Finally, the text is given again with the sources, analogues and parallel passages displayed.

Book review of Griffith, Mark. 2024. The Battle of Maldon: A New Critical Edition. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pp. xiv + 308. ISBN 9781835538067.

This discussion explores three plays from the Towneley collection, uniquely extant in San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 1, exploring their alimentary language within a context of late medieval holiday playing. Prima Pastorum, Secunda Pastorum and Mactacio Abel all contain verifiable references to a small area between modern Wakefield and Dewsbury. All feature language and imagery related to hunger, appetite, pleasure, satiation and digestion. Such references engage with the rituals of fasting, mass, procession and feasting which characterised feast-days, incorporating audiences’ somatic experiences into the devotional and didactic work demanded by Biblical drama. Two key aspects of the plays’ alimentary dramaturgy are discussed here: their use of food to produce feelings of spiritual joy, and their deployment of digestive metaphors to encourage thoughtful and engaged collective learning. As demonstrated below, this engagement with alimentation belies any polarising alignment of invisible food with the sacred and real food with the secular or profane.

Book review of Coker, Matthew D. 2023. Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. Pp. 154. ISBN 9781641894128.

This paper explores the results of a pilot study that made use of corpus linguistic and other big data tools to explore the literary and cultural function of knowledge in Old English literature. In particular, it focusses on Bad Knowledge, knowledge that lay outside the confines of social acceptability, and that was used to label people, objects or ideas as evil. Knowledge is a complicated idea in the medieval period, and the discourses around the moral qualitites of knowledge can be traced from antiquity, through to Ælfric of Eynsham, and beyond. However, there exists no easily discernible set of sources source that describe epistemological attitudes in vernacular Early English writing. As such, this paper breaks from traditional close reading practices, and turns to a novel, data-based, computational methodology to examine nearly two hundred sentences from ninety-seven different texts, all of which are related to Bad Knowledge. In doing so, it attempts to piece together a framework for what Bad Knowledge may have looked like in the Early English period, and explore the broader relationship of the connections between knowledge, order, and authority. Additionally, it seeks to demonstrate the relevance of computational methods to Old English, and provide a launchpad for future work.

Book Review of Hudson, Harriet. 2023. William Caxton’s “Paris and Vienne” and “Blanchardyn and Eglantine.” Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Pp. 352. ISBN 9781580445566.

Book review of Poveda-Balbuena, Miguel Luis, and José Belda-Medina. 2023. Armamento medieval inglés (1100–1500): Estudio lingüístico-histórico. Granada: Comares. Pp. 148. ISBN 9788413695983.

Book review of Kano, Koichi, ed. 2022. An Invitation to Chaucer’s Cosmos. チョーサー巡礼:古典の遺産と中世の新しい息吹きに導かれて. Tokyo: Yushokan. Pp. xvi + 548. ISBN 9784865820478.

Manuscript catalogues are rarely comprehensive. Thus, brief texts and/or treatises incorporated by later hands may have gone unnoticed. This is the case of two medieval manuscripts housed at Glasgow University Library—Hunter MS 461 and Hunter MS 513—which contain the same medical astrological tract, known as Astrologia Ypocratis in Latin or Þe boke of ypocras in English. Hunter MS 461 is an astrological and mathematical compendium written mainly in Latin in the thirteenth century and Hunter MS 513 is a medical miscellany in English dating from the fifteenth century. Close and direct reexamination of the contents gathered in both medieval manuscripts will uncover treatises, notes and later insertions which have passed unperceived by the eyes of scholarship so far. This study will provide a more detailed map of the context in which the medical astrological tract under consideration was copied during the Middle Ages and will also offer some new insights regarding the evolution of the status this tract enjoyed from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.