Cambridge University Library MS Research Articles

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Translating Lady Philosophy: Chaucer and the Boethian Corpus of Cambridge, University Library MS Ii. 3. 21

Abstract The fifteenth-century Boethian compilation, Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 3. 21, brings together major interpretive strands concerning why Lady Philosophy, the dialogue's authoritative figure, is represented as a woman. Working within the commentary tradition, Chaucer's Boece presents Philosophy's “norisschynge” of Boethius as the defining characteristic of Philosophy's authority, and the fullest expression of all three of her roles as teacher, doctor, and wet-nurse. In so doing, Chaucer treats translation into “our dames tonge” as inextricably feminine and pedagogical.

Michael Sherbrook, The Fall of Roche Abbey and the Provenance of Cambridge University Library MS GG. 3.33

Michael Sherbrook, The Fall of Roche Abbey and the Provenance of Cambridge University Library MS GG. 3.33

CHARTING BOETHIUS: MUSIC AND THE DIAGRAMMATIC TREE IN THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY’SDE INSTITUTIONE ARITHMETICA, MS II.3.12

AbstractThis article discusses a full-page schematic diagram contained in a twelfth-century manuscript of Boethius’ De institutione arithmetica and De institutione musica from Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.3.12), which has not yet been the subject of any significant musicological study despite its remarkable scope and comprehensiveness. This diagrammatic tree, or arbor, maps the precepts of the first book of De institutione arithmetica into a unified whole, depicting the ways music and arithmetic are interrelated as sub-branches of the quadrivium. I suggest that this schematic diagram served not only as a conceptual and interpretative device for the scribe working through Boethius’ complex theoretical material, but also as a mnemonic guide to assist the medieval pedagogue wishing to instruct students in the mathematics of musica speculativa. The diagram constitutes a fully developed theoretical exercise in its own right, while also demonstrating the roles Boethian philosophy and mathematics played in twelfth-century musical scholarship.

Wynkyn de Worde's Lost Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales:

Abstract Previous scholarship has argued that the manuscript (*W) used by Wynkyn de Worde for his 1498 edition of the Canterbury Tales (Wn) was derived from the same line of descent as Gg (Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27) and Ph1 (The University of Texas, The Harry Ransom Center MS 46). Most recently, Stephen Partridge, examining the glosses of Wn, has proposed a theory that two types of glossed text, an El-Ll2 type and a Gg-Ph1-Wn type, were derived from a common lost source, and that a further stage of copying of a Gg-Ph1-Wn type led to Gg and Ph1 with glosses largely omitted and Wn with glosses. My extensive textual analyses of Wn have advanced this theory, and show that Wn/*W is textually closer to Ph1 than Gg and retains more archetypal readings than these two manuscripts. These findings strengthen the possibility that a copying of *W led to the production of Gg and Ph1, or a manuscript behind them.

Praying with Boethius in <em>Troilus and Criseyde</em>

Abstract This article reconsiders Chaucer's use of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in his Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer criticism has often viewed the Consolation as a work of secular philosophy, but I argue that Chaucer shows awareness of, and interest in, the religious subtext of this important source. I focus on the two most substantial Boethian borrowings in Troilus—Troilus's hymn in Book III and his predestination speech in Book IV—and analyze these passages in light of Chaucer's translation practice in the Boece and the evidence of a significant Boece manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 3. 21. My claim is that Chaucer's nuanced interpretation of the Consolation enables him to present Troilus as a genuinely Boethian hero who channels philosophical insight into religious devotion.

The Mathew Holmes Manuscripts I: Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11 (review)

FACSIMILE OF A LUTE MANUSCRIPT The Mathew Holmes Manuscripts I: Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11. Two vols. and supplement in slipcase. Inventory and Bibliography: John H. Robinson. Commentary: Stewart McCoy. Image Processing: Craig Hartley. Co-ordination and Typesetting: Ian Harwood. (Lute Society Facsimiles, 7.) Guildford: Lute Society, 2010. [Vol. 1: Contents, p. iii-vii; color facsimile, p. 1-200. Vol. 2: Introd., p. 1-8; inventory, p. 9-26; commentary, p. 27-62; bibliog., p. 63-70. Tablature supplement: p. 1-8. ISBN 978 0 905655 71 0. £75.00.]For English readers, there are two main scholarly societies dedicated to the lute and similar instruments: the Lute Society of America, and its older British counterpart called simply The Lute Society. This is the seventh volume in the latter's Lute Society Facsimiles series, which began in 1987 with Partie in B flat Major for 11-Course Baroque Lute: Facsimile of a Manuscript (c. 1720) by Wolff Jakob Lauffensteiner (1676-1754). This first volume was edited by English lute scholar Robert Spencer (1932-1997), to whom the present volume is dedicated. The series continued in 2000 with volume 2: Krakow Mus. Ms. 40641 (ex Berlin) also edited by Spencer, and then four important English lute sources: volume 3 (2003): The FolgerDowland Manuscript (now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.280, with music by John Dowland but no longer thought to be in his hand; volume 4 (2004): The Welde Lute Book (now in the private library of Lord Forester at Willey Park, Shropshire; volume 5 (2007): Osborn fb7 (Yale University Music Library MS 13); and volume 6 (2008): The Wick- hambrook Lute Manuscript (Yale University Music Deposit), all with detailed critical notes and introductions. The series contin- ues here with one of the largest and most important English lute manuscripts, Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11.The facsimile contains three separate en- cased parts: (1) the full-color facsimile it- self, with over 200 pages, just slightly smaller than the original, which is 350 mm tall by 229 mm wide; (2) a second volume entitled Introduction, Inventory, Com- mentary, Bibliography by the English scholars John H. Robinson and Stewart McCoy; and (3) a short eight-page supple- ment in tablature clarifying illegible parts of the facsimile. Since this last part contains fragments of music difficult to read in the original, librarians would be wise to bind it separately from the facsimile volume so that both can be open and consulted at the same time. And obviously this is a volume for lutenists: the music is in French lute tablature with no effort to transcribe any- thing into modern notation. Those who cannot read tablature will have to tran- scribe or find editions of separate pieces elsewhere, although given the number of major composers represented, there are quite a few works here that are available in modern editions. Certainly the thirty-eight pieces by John Dowland, including such fa- vorites as Melancholy Galliard, Lachrimae Pavan, Orlando Sleepeth, and several well- known fantasias, are readily available in Diana Poulton's and Basil Lam's edition of his complete works for lute (The Collected Lute Music of John Dowland [London: Faber Music, 1974]). Other composers present in this large collection of 324 separate works include almost all the major English lutenists: John Johnson, Francis Cutting, Anthony Holborne, Richard Allison, and others (only Robert Johnson and Daniel Bacheler appear to be missing), as well as major contemporaneous continental fig- ures such as Emanuel Adriaensen and Matthaus Waissel. Italian and German lutenists from earlier generations, among them Francesco da Milano, Joan Maria da Crema, and Melchior Neusidler, are also represented. In addition, the manuscript is the major source for an instrument closely related to the lute: the bandora, a metal- strung chordophone with an unusual and immediately recognizable tuning (C1-D1- G1-C-E-A). …

Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

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

The Construction of Queenship in the IllustratedEstoire de Seint Aedward le Rei

AbstractCompleted about 1250, the version of La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei preserved in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.3.59 is the only known illustrated Anglo-Norman life of St. Edward, the last Anglo-Saxon king from the House of Wessex. The Cambridge manuscript was likely copied from the now-lost presentation copy made by Matthew Paris that was given to Eleanor of Provence following her marriage to King Henry III of England in 1236. Because the original was created amid Henry’s growing devotion to his saint-king ancestor and his renovation of Edward’s church at Westminster, much of the scholarship on the Estoire has centered on Henry’s religious and political inclinations. This focus has emerged despite the poem’s explicit dedication to Eleanor of Provence, which the Cambridge manuscript retains. The present study aims to reorient research on this manuscript by considering how the epithalamium introduces Eleanor as a reader of the Estoire and thus presents thirteenth-century English queenship t...

The sea monsters in the Madrid manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography (Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255)

The sea monsters in the Madrid manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography (Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255)

<i>Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern</i>, and: <i>Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, and: Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology Martha W. Driver Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern. Edited by Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 286; 39 illustrations. $65. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. By Thomas H. Ohlgren. With an Appendix: “The Dialects and Language of Selected Robin Hood Poems,” by Lister M. Matheson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 278; 12 illustrations. $55. Robin Hood has been the subject of poetry, ballad, prose fiction (most recently the novel Hodd by Adam Thorpe, published by Cape), illustration, film, and opera, among other media. The leader of the Sherwood Forest band of Merry Men continues to fascinate scholars as well, as the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies held in fall 2009 at the University of Rochester attests. The first of these two volumes is a close study of the early Robin Hood poems from manuscript to print. The second is a collection of essays on wide-ranging themes drawn from presentations at the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies. Both illustrated volumes include copious notes along with helpful and detailed bibliographies. In his monograph, based on his reading and teaching of Robin Hood texts over fifteen years, Thomas Ohlgren brings together essays he has published elsewhere since 2000, and elaborates and develops them more fully. It is good to have these essays all in one place. This volume addresses the complete poems that date from the 1460s in manuscripts and from about 1495 to 1610 in printed editions. Among many new findings is a reference to a royal wedding in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.35 that has been perhaps misidentified, placing the date of the manuscript and of its Robin Hood poem, Robin Hood and the Potter, thirty-five years earlier than previously thought. Ohlgren makes a good case for the identification of the scribe-owner of Cambridge University Library Ff.5.48, a manuscript that contains Robin Hood and the Monk. While this is usually said to be the first extant full poem about Robin Hood, Ohlgren argues here that Robin Hood and the Potter is in fact the earlier surviving poem (p. 137). Ohlgren locates the owner-copyist of CUL Ff.5.48, one Gilbert Pylkyngton who was ordained as a subdeacon, deacon, and priest from 1463 to 1465, in Lichfield and presents a reasonable argument for the use of Robin Hood and the Monk as a preaching text, despite its overt anticlericalism. The other Cambridge manuscript, CUL Ee.4.35, contains Robin Hood and the Potter, which is one of many texts in a household miscellany that belonged for many generations to the same middle-class family. A merchant’s mark and a signature appear on the final folio, the latter the name of an early owner, Richard Call. The mark belonged to Henry Bacon, a prominent Norwich grocer and guildsman, who married into the Call family. Richard Call was the bailiff for John Paston I during the last half of the fifteenth century who secretly married Margery Paston, and some 120 references to him survive in the Paston letters. A list of foods served at a royal wedding in this manuscript has caused scholars to conjecture this refers to the marriage of Margaret Tudor in 1503. Ohlgren, however, argues that the wedding in question was that between Margaret, youngest sister of Edward IV, and Charles, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468, placing the date of the manuscript in or around that year (possibly). A related text is a dramatic fragment of 1475 (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.2.64) that may originally have been among the Paston letters and may represent a version of a play performed in the Paston household in the 1470s. [End Page 416] In a subsequent chapter, Ohlgren turns his attention to A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, which was printed in London, Antwerp, and York in seven editions between ca. 1495 and ca. 1610. No manuscript copy of this poem survives. Ohlgren provides...

Could the Gospel Harmony Oon of Foure Represent an Intermediate Version of the Wycliffite Bible?

Notwithstanding the exhaustive work of Conrad Lindberg,1 the most complete edition of the Wycliffite Bible gospel manuscripts remains that published in 1850 in four quarto volumes and edited by Jos...

Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology (review)

THOMAS H. OHLGREN, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465-1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology, with an Appendix: The Dialects and Language of Selected Robin Hood Poems by Lister M. Matheson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 278. isbn: 0-87413-96-3. $55. Two issues have dominated Robin Hood studies for the past half century. Historians have sought the 'real' Robin Hood in archives and in references to people, places, and events in the early poems. Literary critics have tended to dismiss this path through the Greenwood as an impossible quest, choosing instead to interrogate the social and cultural identity of the audiences that read and listened to those early poems. Thomas Ohlgren's new book deliberately avoids the first question to concentrate on the material reality of the poems as a means of uncovering their intertextual and cultural contexts. In so doing, he produces a fascinating and provocative revision of prevailing views on dating, ownership, and provenance. The texts central to this study are the earliest extant Robin Hood poems in manuscript known as Robin Hood and the Monk (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.48) and Robin Hood and the Potter (Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.35) and the earliest Robin Hood poem in print, A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, which survives in seven whole or fragmentary editions. In the case of the first two, Ohlgren provides the fullest and most reliable descriptions of the physical condition and appearance of the manuscripts to date. He further details the contents of the manuscript miscellanies in which the Robin Hood poems are embedded and explores the meaning and consequences of interpreting the inscriptions of ownership. He locates Gilbert Pilkington, owner of Robin Hood and the Monk, as an ordained priest from the diocese of Lichfield and his acquisition or copying of the poem as post 1465. Richard Call, owner of Robin Hood and the Potter, is assumed to be the chief bailiff of the Norfolk family of Pastons and the date of the manuscript, on the basis of the list of food prepared for the marriage banquet of Margaret Tudor and Charles, duke of Burgundy, included in the miscellany, as 1468. This predates previous estimates of the manuscript by some 30 years. A similar review is made of the names that appear in the Wynkyn de Worde edition of A Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode and the other texts with which it was originally bound. One of those claiming ownership was a woman. Ohlgren identifies her as Audrey Holman born about 1573 with parents from neighbouring villages in Surrey and an older brother who became a wealthy grocer and citizen of London. Such information adds enormously to our understanding of the ownership and readership of the early Robin Hood poems. Equally important for Robin Hood scholars is Ohlgren's indispensable and careful bibliographical analysis of the seven editions of the poem. He convincingly revises the chronology of the editions-though it should be noted that on page 98 the publication date for the Copland edition should be 1560 and not, as given, 1550-and provides the most complete concordance of the text available. This scrutiny of the poems as physical objects is a necessary and valuable contribution to Robin Hood scholarship. The distinction with which it is carried out might lull the unwary reader into accepting the contextual, cultural, and ideological findings that follow as equally certain and confident. …

A Makeover Story: The Caius Manuscript Copy of Guy of Warwick

A Makeover Story:The Caius Manuscript Copy of Guy of Warwick Alison Wiggins This study analyses the way that a much older romance was made over to meet the tastes and demands of a later fifteenth-century readership. Produced in the 1470s, the copy of Guy of Warwick in Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, MS 107/176 has been subjected to linguistic revision and literary reshaping. The result is a special rendition of the romance, an airbrushed version, in which the hero and his exploits are partially modernized and sanitized. The high quality of the manuscript's material production and visual presentation, especially by comparison with other manuscripts of non-canonical Middle English metrical romance, suggest a number of further questions and conclusions regarding the book's origins, audience, and level of "intentionality."1 The ultimate aim of this study is to locate the book culturally: to describe its origins and to assess the value and function it had for its early reading communities.2 It is well known that late medieval verse romances underwent verbal change during transmission, and a number of studies give attention to the roles of scribes and editors in this process.3 The Caius copy of [End Page 471] Guy of Warwick is an especially complex instance of verbal evolution. Comparison with the other extant manuscript copies of Guy of Warwick indicates that the Caius Guy has been adjusted and revised at a number of different linguistic levels and is comprised of at least two different redactions. The first half of the text, Caius pp. 1-149, is based on Redaction 1 of Guy of Warwick, whereas the following and penultimate sections, 150-75 and 195-242, are from Redaction 4 (there are two earlier Redaction 1 texts: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 19.2.1, the "Auchinleck Manuscript," fols. 108ra-46vb, and the single-folio fragment British Library Sloane MS 1044; there is one later Redaction 4 text: Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, fols. 161-239).4 The section of text between these two, 175-95, and the final section, 242-71, are not based on any other existing redaction and will be referred to here as Redaction α. The Caius Guy of Warwick MS pages Redaction Lineation (from Zupitza) Total number of lines 1-149 1 1-7444 4412 150-75 4 7445-8218 774 175-95 α 8219-8809 591 195-242 4 8810-10,231 1419 242-71 α 10,232-11,095 964 The sections of the Caius text from 1-175 and 195-242 can be confidently identified as descendents of Redactions 1 and 4 through close line-by-line comparison with the Auchinleck, Sloane, and Cambridge University Library (CUL) texts. Here the Caius Guy is very closely affiliated with Redactions 1 and 4 from these manuscripts, and the texts are consistently either identical or very close in their rhymes, phrasing, and couplet order. The only notable exceptions, and an important [End Page 472] feature of the Caius text, are the repeated omissions of long and short passages from Caius Redaction 1, 1-149. This disparity in length between Caius and the earlier Redaction 1 texts is marked. Whereas the Auchinleck couplet Guy is 6922 lines, the corresponding section of narrative from the Caius text is only 4412 lines; that is, Caius is 2510 lines, or 36% shorter than the earlier Auchinleck version. Similarly, the Sloane fragment is 216 lines, whereas the corresponding section of narrative in Caius is only 84 lines; that is, Caius is 132 lines, or 61% shorter than Sloane.5 How, then, should these textual complexities in the Caius Guy be accounted for? One possibility is that the scribes were working from one or more damaged exemplars. This explanation has, in fact, been suggested by Maldwyn Mills, who regards the Redaction a passages as simply a continuation of Redaction 1, which due to loss or damage of some kind was patched together with the two passages from Redaction 4.6 The idea of an exemplar pitted with holes would also account for the substantially shorter length of the Redaction 1 section of the Caius text, 1-149. The model implied imagines scribes who had to...

“To thenke what was in hir wille”: a female reading context for the Findern anthology

This article argues that close, critical attention to the selection, organization, and layout of texts in the Findern Anthology (Cambridge University Library MS Ff 1.6) provides evidence that the manuscript’s readers and compilers exercised interpretive control over its construction. The activity of female scribes in compiling the manuscript indicates that a literary culture of female readers may have driven the construction of the manuscript. Through analysis of texts by Gower, Chaucer, and Richard Roos, this article demonstrates that substantial alterations in the format indicate close critical readings of the texts by interested female readers who interpreted the court writing tradition through their more local experience and perspective. Far from being a merely “provincial” manuscript, however, this analysis reveals subtle interventions in the texts transmitted, suggesting a sophisticated reading of the court tradition that draws out crucial thematic inter-relationships. Foremost among the manuscript’s major themes are the power of female eloquence (as demonstrated in Gower’s story of Peronelle and Richard Roos’ translation of Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame Sans Mercy) and the tension between female choice and social compulsion (as demonstrated in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Gower’s story of Rosiphelee).

Thisbe Out of Context: Chaucer's Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript

In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, with its angry and hermeneutically challenged God of Love, its obsequious and misunder stood poet-narrator, and its generous queen Alceste, Chaucer poses the question: how did medieval audiences, particularly women, respond to representations of women in texts? One place to seek answers is in the reception history provided by manuscript evidence. The manuscript most frequently cited as evidence of female reaction to the Legend of Good Women is the Findern Manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6, a fifteenthand sixteenth-century compilation of poetry that contains, among other texts, the excerpted Legend of Thisbe.1 The Findern MS has long been accepted as having been owned, read, and perhaps even partially compiled by women.2 Most recently, two scholars, Carol Meale and Nicola McDonald, have drawn conclusions from the contents of the Findern MS about women's

The Middle English Mirror: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library, MS Holkham misc. 40. Edited by Kathleen Marie Blumreich. Pp. xlviii+558 (MRTS 182; Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 9). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in collaboration with Brepols, 2002. £48

Kathleen Marie Blumreich's edition of the Middle English version of Robert of Gretham's mid-thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Miroir ou Evangiles du Domnées is a welcome contribution to the developing study of the textual formations of late medieval English vernacular religious culture and their often elusive and complex ideological hinterlands and affiliations. The Mirror, a collection of sixty homilies on the Gospels, extant in at least six manuscripts from the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (plus an extract in the Wyclifite compendium on translation, Cambridge University Library MS Ii. vi. 26), offers further evidence of the problematic and conflicted ‘grey area’ (Anne Hudson's phrase) of religio-political debate in late medieval England, with radical Lollardy at one extreme and increasingly authoritarian and prescriptive ‘orthodoxy’ at the other. In the middle lies an indeterminate but capacious zone where precise religious and ideological orientations and positions become difficult to identify. For example, a pusillanimous anti-clericalism (one of the central and defining issues in the Lollard heresy, but of course of venerable pedigree), a fudged notion of the ever-contested boundary between teaching (appropriate for the laity) and preaching (restricted to the clergy), and an uncertain awareness of the resonances and implications of Gospel commentary in the vernacular seem to find expression in this collection. What therefore were the nuances of its reception in late medieval England (whatever the date of the postulated original translation) when all the extant manuscripts were copied? Would the text have appealed to a range of readerships, or would it have appealed more to those with heterodox sympathies? After all, a Lollard compilator thought it appropriate to include the Prologue to the Mirror in a polemical collection in defence of scriptural translation into the vernacular; another compiler (that of the Holkham manuscript) put it alongside the four Gospels with prologues in the earlier Wyclifite version; yet another compiler (that of Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498) evidently found the collection suited to a heavily biblical and pseudo-biblical compilation, including English versions of the Psalter and the Apocalypse as well as a Gospel harmony. The Mirror is yet another text which complicates our vision of the contours of the religious landscape in England in the decades leading up to and following Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions (1407–9).

Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 by Leonora Neville (review)

REVIEWS 268 contemporary of Abelard, whose largely epistolary poems belong to the first metrical category. Hilary’s poetry is the most explicitly sexual of the poetry addressed in this book and speaks to the tension of homoerotic desire that may have arisen between a schoolmaster and his pupils. In his playful poetry, Hilary also pokes fun at the questionable sexual habits of his fellow clerics. Afterward, Moser goes on to discuss the changing verse forms that are exemplified in such erotic poetry as “Iam dulcis amica” from the Cambridge manuscript mentioned earlier. These new forms represent the concordant changes that were inspired by new liturgical and extraliturgical church songs. The latter parts of chapter 6 are dedicated to three poems from Bodleian MS Additional A.44 and one poem from Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.17(I). Moser demonstrates that in these poems, poets who wrote Latin erotic lyric and who also experimented with verse form were among a group of clerics who sought to combine their interests in classical exegesis with the scientific humanism of the Neoplatonists. In chapter 7, Moser turns his attention to British Library MS Arundel 384, the largest single collection of Latin erotic poetry in England. In his close study, Moser argues for a single author for the Arundel manuscript, citing the fact that “the thematic, structural, and verbal parallels” evident in the poems imply that a “single mind” is at work (242). Whether this “single mind” is the Peter of Blois who wrote many letters or the Peter of Blois who was a canon at Chartres is somewhat irrelevant. In either case, the poetry of the Arundel manuscript continues the theme of the anxious poet philosopher who is at odds with the role of sexuality in his orderly life. Finally, Moser concludes with a chapter on the importance of myth to the erotic poet. He argues that “the reflex to think mythologically was much more than just an effort to imitate Ovid, it was part of how twelfth-century humanists learned to think about the world.” The importance of myth, moreover, needed to be present because such elements could be understood on multiple allegorical and literal levels; levels in which the level of the audience’s education did not affect the comprehensibility of the text. Moser examines three myths in particular: Hercules, Orpheus, and Leda. In his readings of these myths and in his conclusion to his book, Moser points out the uniqueness and complexity of the Latin verse in their ability to both recreate their authors’ anxieties and interact with a past and present that embraced the sexuality of classics yet still held onto a Neoplatonist world view. Although A Cosmos of Desire is ostensibly about Latin lyric in English manuscripts, it is equally enlightening as an introduction to Latin lyric in France. This synthetic work is friendly to the novice, complete with full translations of the Latin text and helpful bits of information that aid in situating erotic lyric in a larger context. It is in his close readings of the poetry, however, that Moser’s ability to deconstruct the poems’ meanings shines through. The analyses are dense with insightful commentary and fast-paced in their approach, covering a substantial amount of material in a relatively short amount of time. Both advanced and beginning scholars will find A Cosmos of Desire a valuable read. JENNIFER A. TRAN, English, UCLA Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) xi + 210 pp., map. REVIEWS 269 The author’s main premise in this book is that the imperial administration of tenth- and the eleventh-century Byzantium only lightly touched on provincial society, concerning itself exclusively with the maintenance of imperial sovereignty , the suppression of revolt, and the collection of revenue. At the same time, social regulations were undertaken by individual provincial households. Thus personal freedom in the provinces was constrained more by neighbors and rival households than by the imperial government. The novelty and originality of Neville’s approach to the Byzantine tenth and eleventh centuries is in focusing on the provinces instead of the capital in both her choice of sources and in the questions she asks...

Robin Hood and the Monk and the Manuscript Context of Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 5.48, with Dialect Analysis of CUL MS Ff. 5.48

<i>Robin Hood and the Monk</i> and the Manuscript Context of Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 5.48, with Dialect Analysis of CUL MS Ff. 5.48

Contexts for Women's Manuscript Miscellanies: The Case of Elizabeth Lyttelton and Sir Thomas Browne

ABSTRACT This article examines the manuscript miscellany of Elizabeth Lyttelton (Cambridge University Library MS Add. 8460), daughter of Sir Thomas Browne. From both her father's correspondence and her own manuscript it is clear that the extended family provided a congenial context for Lyttelton's literary activities. She compiled, and sometimes emended, extracts from the books she read to her father; poems about and by family members, Norfolk friends, and her father's and brother's associates; popular literature of the later seventeenth century. She shared her father's Royalist sympathies and his religious conformity, and she helped preserve his writing in print and manuscript. Dear Sister Betty, Though I make many journeys, yet I am confident that your pen and pencil are greater travellers. How many fine plaines do they passe over, and how many hills, woods, seas doe they designe? You have a fine way of not onley seeing but making a world; and whilst you sit still, how many miles doth your hand travell! I am only unfortunate in this, that I can never meete you in any of your voyages. (1) So wrote Edward Browne to his sister Elizabeth on 5 July 1669 from Venice. In this letter, written when Elizabeth was about nineteen years of age, Edward is contrasting his actual travels through Europe (printed in two accounts of 1673 and 1677, and revised in an edition of 1685) with her imaginary travels guided by her pen and pencil. Edward may have been referring primarily to her ability to draw and paint, skills we know she practised frequently from the references in the correspondence of their father, Sir Thomas Browne (for example, 'Beside limning, Bet. practiseth washing in black and colours and doth very well'), (2) but this passage is also an eloquent metaphor for Elizabeth's literary activities. Later in life she herself was to travel (to Guernsey, after her marriage to George Lyttelton in 1680) and to send home descriptions of that journey and her new life there, much appreciated by her father ('Thy letters are still our best divertion' and 'You discribed yr voyage very Prettyly', he wrote in letters of June 1681); (3) for a brief period her body joined her hand in its travels. Her brother's description places her in a private, domestic sphere, recording and even creating a world, but not actually experiencing it. Her literary activities, recorded in her father's correspondence and in her miscellany, however, demonstrate that she was in contact with a circle of like-minded people, that she had access to some of the most popular literature of the day, and that she was interested in playing an active role in the preservation of her father's literary reputation after his death. For Elizabeth Lyttelton the family offered a congenial space for manuscript compilation. Women did not typically have access to the main venues in which maleauthored miscellanies were produced: the universities and the Inns of Court, and also the tavern. (4) None the less, women were readers, owners, and later contributors to university miscellanies, as is the case with ElizabethWellden (Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.162) and Elizabeth Clarke (Folger MS X.d.177). Wellden added to a miscellany compiled in the 1630s at Christ Church, Oxford by several family members (Stephen Wellden and N. Wellden, who have signed the first folio) and Elizabeth Clarke transcribed two verses of a song into a licentious collection of jests and poetry compiled at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1595. Women also contributed to miscellanies produced at court, such as the early-sixteenth-century Devonshire manuscript (British Library MS Add. 17492) and Anne Cornwallis's collection from the 1580s (Folger MS V.a.89). (5) But the extended family was perhaps the most common context for the production of women's miscellanies. Ann Bowyer (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 51) included poems by Ralegh, Churchyard, and Donne with the help of siblings, amidst handwriting exercises and moral precepts. …