Early English Text Research Articles

The Early English Text Society in the Nineteenth Century: An Organizational History

During the nineteenth century, the Early English Text Society (EETS) printed or made generally accessible for the first time numerous Middle English texts, thereby identifying and disseminating, in conjunction with the Chaucer Society, almost the entire Middle English canon as we know it today. The way in which EETS operated as a publishing organization is interesting because the financial and material conditions under which its editorial work was carried out influenced the nature of its seminal publications. This article explores the origins of EETS in the Philological Society's New English Dictionary, and the nationalistic and egalitarian objectives that informed its work. The organizational structure and mode of operation of EETS are examined, with particular attention to the means by which editions were produced, marketed, sold, and distributed. Also examined are its various attempts to broaden its market, which was limited in size by the near absence of English studies in the universities. This factor also meant that the majority of its editorial personnel were unpaid amateur enthusiasts; the means by which such editors were selected, their varying levels of expertise and experience, and their use of amanuenses are discussed. Finally, the collaborative nature of EETS's operation is highlighted, as the organization is an excellent example of the co-operative middle-class activity that characterized the wider literary culture of the Victorian era.

Lay Literacy and the Medieval Bible

Among Arne Zettersten's impressive research publications are those on Middle English texts. His brilliant editions of The Anerene Riwle, published over years in Early English Text Society, have done so much to further our knowledge of this important religious work. Tracing sources of The Anerene Riwle author's quotations is indeed a complex task. Geoffrey Shepherd states that the Bible provides most of material of Rule medieval Bible, a vast indivisible unity, but perceived only by glimpses. Often it is a gloss which leads him [the author] to scriptural text, not to an initial memory of Scripture (1959: xxv-xxvi). 1 Shepherd goes on to show complexities involved in finding source of biblical paraphrases in The Anerene Riwle:

DAME ELEANOR HULL: THE TRANSLATOR AT WORK

The fifteenth-century translator Dame Eleanor Hull was until recently virtually unknown. In 1987 I gave a paper on her at the first University of Cardiff conference on the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages;1 in 1995 the Early English Text Society published my edition of her translation of a French commentary on the Penitential Psalms,2 and she will have her own entry in the New Dictionary of National Biography.3 This is an outline of what we know about her at present. Eleanor Hull was born the only child of Sir John Malet of Enmore in Somerset, probably during the last decade of the fourteenth century as her father was dead by 1395. Malet was a retainer of John of Gaunt and of his son Henry Bolingbrokc, later Henry IV. Eleanor Hull's mother, Joan Hylle of Exeter, was the sister of Robert Hylle, compiler of the Hylle Cartulary. Perhaps around 1407, the year her own mother remarried for the first of several times, and certainly by 1413, Eleanor Malet married John Mull, esquire, who was also in the service of the Lancastrians: probably much older than his wife, he was a retainer of John of Gaunt and later ambassador to Castile for both Henry IV and Henry V. Eleanor bore him one son, Edward (he was a small boy in 1417), who as Constable of Bordeaux was to die in the last engagement of the Hundred Years War in 1453. In 1417 Eleanor Hull was given a royal grant as servant to Joan of Navarte, Henry IV's second wife, and also in that year she, her husband, and son, like so many other Lancastrians, were admitted to the confraternity of the Benedictine abbey of St Albans. By 1421 she was a widow and seems to have spent much of her time when not at court at Sopwell Priory, a house of Benedictine nuns dependent on St Albans and less than a mile from the abbey. She probably went to France with her son in 1444 to attend the proxy wedding of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou: Edward became one of the queen's knights. She never remarried, and eventually retired to the Benedictine nunnery at Cannington, near the family scat of Enmorc, where she died in 1460, leaving a will written in her own hand.4Eleanor Hull's translations are preserved in Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.1.6,5 a large and unusually well-documented manuscript of religious verse and prose put together, and in part written out, by Richard Fox, steward or procurator of St Albans Abbey. When Richard died in 1454 he left a will referring to this manuscript in identifiable terms as still in quires, so it can be very precisely dated. CUL MS Kk.1.6 contains two texts attributed to Dame Eleanor Hull: a translation of a commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms (fols 2-147) and a translation of a collection of prayers and meditations (fols 148-179^sup v^). After the second text Richard Fox records that 'Alyanore Hullc drowc out of Prcnche all this bcforc-wrctcn in this lytylle booke', without further explanation. This attribution has been the starting point for all later research. The prayers and meditations arc also found, without the attribution to Eleanor Hull, in University of Illinois, MS 80, a manuscript that A. I. Doyle dates as certainly no earlier than CUL MS Kk.1.6.6It seems likely that Eleanor Hull made both translations during the early years of her widowhood, while she was staying at Sopwell and perhaps enjoyed access to the library facilities of St Albans. As an heiress, she must have received a better than average education that included English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman; as a royal servant in fifteenth-century England, she would naturally have a knowledge of spoken and written Ercnch, particularly as she had been in the service of the Erench wife of Henry IV. Further, she probably translated the prayers and meditations, which are written in a style of affective piety very familiar in late-medieval England, before the far more ambitious, and less superficially attractive, commentary on the Penitential Psalms. When Fox was compiling his manuscript in the 1450s she would have been still alive, but relatively inaccessible in the depths of Somerset. …

Gower’s “bokes of Latin”: Language, Politics, and Poetry

Gower’s ‘‘bokes of Latin’’: Language, Politics, and Poetry Siân Echard University of British Columbia THE HEAD of John Gower’s effigy in Southwark Cathedral rests on three books, their titles presented to the viewer as Speculum Meditantis , Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis. While Gower’s three major works are in three different languages—French, Latin, and English— Latin here inflects the final presentation of John Gower’s oeuvre. Many would argue that Gower would approve; a more bookish poet could not be imagined, and to be litteratus in Gower’s day still meant to be Latinate . But Gower himself was highly conscious of his trilinguality. In the colophon Quia vnusquisque, which appears at the end of over twenty Confessio manuscripts, as well as at the end of five manuscripts of the Vox,1 the account of Gower’s books stresses the language in which each was composed. While there are some variations in the descriptions of the contents of each work, the sequence and emphasis are always the same: ‘‘First he published a book in French’’ (the Speculum, or Mirour de l’Omme); ‘‘The second book was written in Latin verses’’ (the Vox); and ‘‘This third book, which was made up in English . . .’’2 The structure of the Quia vnusquisque suggests two ideas. One is that Gower is a master of three tongues; the second, that he was evolving toward the use of English. 1 And possibly in more—there are quite a few manuscripts which now lack final folios. For a complete discussion of the treatment of the end matter, see my ‘‘Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis,’’ in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Richard Firth Green (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 2 John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1901), 2 vols.: ‘‘Primus liber Gallico sermone editus . . .’’; ‘‘Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus . . .’’; ‘‘Tercius iste liber . . . Anglico sermone conficitur . . . ,’’ ii. 479–80. This is the third recension version of the colophon. For more on the differences between the different recensions with respect to the colophon , see below. 123 ................. 10286$ $CH4 11-01-10 13:53:22 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER This medieval version of Gower’s progress through the languages offers no overt evaluation, but I will argue that when Gower’s practice and his politics become tangled up with the assumptions underlying current discussions of vernacularity,3 we become limited in our ability to understand how he works through his own relationship to language throughout his poetic career. In particular, the politicization of the vernaculars —the casting of vernacular languages as challengers to the hegemonic authority of Latin—4 characterizes Latin in such a way as to predetermine our response to Gower’s Latin writing. Sarah Stanbury has described this trend in recent Middle English criticism as a tendency to ‘‘romance the vernacular,’’5 arguing that the association commonly 3 There is a wealth of recent scholarship on the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in medieval England. Some of this work appears in the notes below. I take the opportunity here to refer to some important critics who are not directly addressed later: these would include Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the ‘‘Aeneid’’ from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and the edited collection Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John H. Fisher, ‘‘A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,’’ PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1168–80; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Two collections are also central to current views on these relationships: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and David Wallace, ed., Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge...

The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The 'Vernon' Text (review)

Short Notices 303 estimation. Yet Yates's account of the formation of Dee's ideas again assumes his wholesale acceptance of a ready-formed occult philosophy, rather than the complex, hesitant intellectual odyssey by which he travelled from exhausted Aristotelian orthodoxy, through selective responses to occult signs, towards a new world order. The methodological problems raised by her impatience with contextualising these ideas, in favour of obsessively reiterating their components, appear in the strongest parts ofthis book, where momentarily Yates places both the occult philosophy and its manifestations in Elizabethan literature into political context. Then even the most innocent student reader might become aware ofthe historical crudity in drawing a rhumb line from Pico della Mirandola to The Tempest, without considering the wide ocean of events in which all those strange creatures swam. Glyn Parry Department ofHistory Victoria University of Wellington Zettersten, Arne, and Bernhard Diensberg, eds., The English Text of the Ancren Riwle: The 'Vernon'Text (Early English Text Society O.S. 310), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xxx, 130; R R P £30.00; ISBN 0197223141. In 1976, Arne Zettersten edited the text of Ancrene Riwle from Cambridge, Magdalen College M S Pepys 2498 for the Early English Text Society, as part of a series ofdiplomatic transcriptions of the text in English, French and Latin. This edition of the text as it appears in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library M S Eng. poet. a. I) is thefinalvolume ofthe sequence. In the introduction to this edition, based on materials supplied by the editors, H. L. Spencer discusses the context for the inclusion of the thirteenthcentury Ancrene Riwle in the manuscript, produced in the second half of the fourteenth century in the West Midlands, along with other religious texts in the vernacular. Spencer argues that the presence ofthe text is witness to the continued popularity of Ancrene Riwle in the fourteenth century and its status as a safe and orthodox text, suitable for audiences that included female religious. Spencer also briefly introduces the complex question of the relationship ofthe Vernon recension of the Ancrene Riwle to other versions. The Vemon text 304 Short Notices represents a scribal attempt to collate a text similar to that recorded in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College M S 402, known in the E E T S editions as Ancrene Wisse, with the other branch of the textual tradition, which exists in more numerous versions. Vernon is the only text to incorporate a Latin Marian hymn by Marbod of Rennes (16-18). Following the editorial method used in earlier editions in the series, errors in the manuscript are reproduced in the text and corrected in the footnotes. Most abbreviations have been silently expanded. Collation has been provided with the Corpus text and the text of London, British Library, M S Cotton Nero A. xiv, which are closely linked to Vernon, and at times with other manuscripts. The publication of this volume completes part of a significant project, which will be of lasting importance for scholars both of the Ancrene Riwle and the Vemon manuscript. The current volume also forms a useful accompaniment to the Vemon facsimile published in 1987 by D. S. Brewer, with an introduction by A. I. Doyle. The next step for Ancrene Riwle textual scholarship will be the appearance ofBella Millett and George Jack's critical edition, also for the Society. Rebecca Hayward Department ofEnglish University ofAuckland ...

The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1250-1520 ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (review)

148arthuriana jocELYN woGAN-BROWNE et al., The Idea ofthe Vernacular: An Anthology ofMiddle English Literary Theory, 1250—1520. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. isbn: 0-271-01758-9. $24.95. The social position of English underwent both rapid change and great scrutiny in the later Middle Ages. English was the subject of legislation—from the statute of 1362 mandating that pleas be made in English, to the Oxford Constitutions of 1407, which prohibited (among other things) the making or unlicensed possession ofEnglish Bibles since the time ofJohn Wyclif. The language was also achieving renewed status as a literary medium, most notably with the work ofChaucer (who wrote in Flnglish rather than Latin or French), Gower (who wrote in English as well as Latin and French), and the numerous religious writers whose diverse works are now treated under the general rubric of vernacular theology. Yet for all this activity, we have no sustained treatise from the period on the theory ofwriting in English, and certainly nothing comparable in scope to Dante's De vulgari eloquentia. The Idea ofthe Vernacular seeks to frame and address the question ofwhat exactly Middle English writers thought they were doing. Drawing on recent work on medieval literary theory, the editors are appropriately cautious. Thus, while dedicated to the proposition that 'there is such a thing as Middle English literary theory and that it needs to be taken seriously as a specific field' (xvi), they also acknowledge that 'the sustained analysis oftexts and language found in Latin theoretical discussions and in vernacular texts from the sixteenth century is rare' (315). Middle English literary theory is at once distinctly pragmatic and, as the editors put it, 'heavily situated' (316). Not only do discussions ofEnglish reading and writing occur in a wide array of specific contexts, it also seems that such discussions tend to remain tethered to those contexts. Perhaps because Middle English writers recognize the diversity ofvernacular reading occasions, practices, and goals, they rarely venture to make universal claims. The evidence for such an argument must—and I believe it does—ultimately lie in the anthology itself. There may be no grand theoty of the vernacular in medieval England. But after reading the fifty-seven prose and verse extracts collected in this anthology, one is convinced that Middle English writers were searching for and developing models to conceptualize the nature, authority, and likely effect of their work. Since most ofthe passages are from prologues, there are predictable patterns and thus useful points of comparison. But equally important is the sense of heterogeneity, which makes one aware ofjust how experimental the notion ofEnglish writing was. In this sense, perhaps it is fortunate that there was no grand theory to obscure what individual Middle English writers were actually trying to do with their medium. This anthology clearly has many strengths. One is that it provides easy access to materials otherwise available only in manuscripts, dissertations, or antiquated editions from the Early English Text Society. And the editor for each selection offers basic information and a useful discussion of recent scholarship, thus providing a partial update of Severs and Hartung's Manual ofMiddle English. For these reasons alone, the volume will be a useful resource for scholars and may spur further scholarship REVIEWS149 and new critical editions. Another strength is its organization. The main part ofthe text presents selections under one of three headings, each with its own brief introduction: 'Authorizing the Text and Writer,' 'Addressing and Positioning the Audience,' and 'Models and Images ofthe Reading Process.' But following several useful essays—including Nicholas Watson's excellent survey, 'The Politics of Middle English Writing'—an appendix provides alternate organizational schemes: by date, by genre, by region, by profession or background of the author or translator, by circulation (manuscript or print), by source language (for translations and adaptations). One can quibble with some of these categories, and much of this information is frankly conjectural. Nevertheless, the editors do successfully challenge readers to reconfigure, and thus reconsider, the texts. A useful glossary as well as a lengthy and up-to-date bibliography round out the volume. T he Idea will not satisfy everyone. Some, for example, will take issue with the...

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (review)

222 Reviews A final point about Lemer's chosen subject matter sheds further light on the problem. The subtitle 'Medieval Millenarians and the Jews' is misleading, not only because it does not engage with the millenarian violence ofwhich Cohn writes, but also because it equates this millenarian 'philo-Judaism' with Joachism per se. To support his suggestion that Joachim was a Jew, Lerner adduces Geoffrey of Auxerre's remark that Joachim's ideas were 'Judaistic' and that he had been born Jewish and educated in Jewish doctrines (p. 24). But such accusations resonate in other, pre-Joachite contexts as rhetorical dismissals of millenarianism. Immediately after the discussion of Joachim's possible Jewish heritage, Lerner acknowledges that Andrew of St Victor had drawn on Hebrew learning for his literal exposition of the scriptures, for which he became well known (p. 29). What remains unmentioned is that Richard of St Victor called his confrere Andrew a 'Judaizer' and a companion of the Jews because ofhis literalist interpretation of millenarian prophecies. Millenarianism itself wa according to the standard Christian interpretation, a 'Jewish' mode of thought. It seems more likely, then, that Joachite millenarianism was 'philo-Judaic' because Augustinian tradition branded it so than because it had anything to do with innovative thinking by Joachim or connections with Jews by his disciples. Such problems perhaps re-direct our appreciation of the important and often poignant story that Lerner tells in The Feast of Saint Abraham, but they do not substantively undermine any of its many virtues. I commend it to all who are interested in medieval prophecy, eschatology, and Christian-Jewish relations. Lawrence Warner Australian Academy of the Humanities Matthews, David, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (Medieval Cultures 18), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, cloth, pp. xxxvii, 231; R.R.P. US$39.95; ISBN 0816631859. More than a social history, but perhaps slightly less than a construction o ideological practice, this book describes the development of Middle English studies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the efforts of a number of individual and idiosyncratic scholars. Beginning with Thomas Percy and his contemporaries, Joseph Ritson and Thomas Warton, the book moves on to Walter Scott and then to the founding fathers ofmedieval literary scholarship, Frederic Madden and Frederick Fumivall, Reviews 223 pausing on the way to consider the contribution ofclubs and societies specialising in medieval publications. There was clearly more at stake than mere antiquarianism. Frederic Madden, 'an implacable opponent of anything hinting of radicalism' (p. 116), was prepared to defend the manuscripts of the British Museum against a possible Chartist attack. Furnivall, losing his faith and finding socialism instead, chose to lecture on Piers Plowman 'because of its sketch of working men in the fourteenth century' (p. 146). What is at stake among these various lives, as Matthews shows, is the construction of the self, by gender, class and nationality. All the early editors of medieval texts were men, either b o m to high social status, like the founders of the Roxburghe Club, or, morefrequently,aspiring to status through the patronage that came with their antiquarian and editorial efforts. Matthews draws attention to the parallels between the feudalism found in the medieval texts and the 'somewhat feudal relations between aristocrats and aspiring litterateurs' (p. 87). For most of these early scholars, the study of medieval literature was a crucial link between their personal ambitions and the patrons w h o could help them rise above their modest origins, just as the choice of romance as the high-status genre positioned chivalry as a contemporary class marker. The book also argues, mainly in the last two chapters on Furnivall and Chaucer studies, for the use of Middle English literature as an intellectual structure supporting English nationalism. A s Matthews makes clear, this nationalist project coincided with the entry of Middle English studies into middleclass educational institutions as an academic and professional, rather than antiquarian and amateur, pursuit. Largely through Furnivall's foundation of the Early English Text Society, medieval English was 'reinvented as national heritage' (p. 158). In a fascinating piece of empirical research, Matthews shows how the subscribers to the E E T S changed from the 'country...

THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT OF JOHN LYDGATE'S "SIEGE OF THEBES": ITS SCOTTISH OWNERS AND INSCRIPTIONS

John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes has received increasing attention in recent years: scholars have debated its date of composition (probably in 1421), its conception as an additional `Canterbury Tale', and, above all, its structure and precise significance.1 The poem was certainly popular with medieval readers, surviving in at least twenty-nine manuscripts. The copy now in the possession of Boston Public Library (MS f. med. 94) was, like several others, unknown to the editors of the poem for the Early English Text Society.2 This manuscript has a particular interest in that its scribe has recently been identified, in important articles by Professor A. S. G. Edwards and Dr A. I. Doyle, as Stephen Dodesham (d. c.1482), who in later life was a Carthusian monk, first at Witham in Somerset, and then at Sheen, near London.3 Most of the manuscripts copied by Dodesham were religious and devotional, and it seems likely that this and two other copies of The Siege of Thebes also made by Dodesham (Beinecke Library, MS 661, and Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 3137) belong to the earlier part of his career, as a lay scribe, before he entered the Carthusian order. On the evidence of the decoration, Professor Edwards conjecturally places the Boston manuscript in the 1430s, Dr Doyle more cautiously dates it c.1430-60. This article, however, is concerned not with the origin and production of the Boston manuscript but with its later history. Various entries, such as owners' names and short pieces of verse, provide valuable, if scrappy, evidence concerning Lydgate's reception in Scotland, and the literary interests of certain Scottish families in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nearly twenty years ago Professor Edwards called for a more systematic study of Lydgate manuscripts and their early owners, yet this aspect of the manuscript has been curiously neglected.' The Siege of Thebes was certainly known to Gavin Douglas, and there is evidence that it and other poems of Lydgate were popular in Scotland.5 The Boston text of the poem lacks marginal annotation, but this does not necessarily imply that it was read inattentively. The additional entries occur (as is common enough) on the blank leaves at the beginning and end of the manuscript (now foliated, in a modern hand, as 1, 2, 74, 75, and 76). They are written in a number of different hands, and in several languages - Latin, French, and Scots - and, as these leaves are dirty and badly worn, are often extremely difficult to decipher (see item no. 5 below, p. 94). The manuscript contains only one date (1592), but the other entries, which were evidently made at various times, cannot be dated so precisely. The first owner, who was almost certainly English, probably commissioned the work from Dodesham some time in the mid-fifteenth century. The earliest entries occur on fol. 76^sup r^: `Te deum laudamus te dominum confitemur' (repeated) and Pour dieu Remembres Vous de moy Remembres Vous de moy pour dieu. This second inscription, which is written down the outer margin at right angles to the first, is in the same `neat fifteenth-century secretary hand', which Dr Doyle considers English rather than Scots.6 He notes also that a piece of verse in Scots (no. 6 below) appears to be later and to be written over the first word of the second inscription. This French inscription might perhaps imply that the manuscript is a gift from one person to another, but, if so, it is impossible to identify the moy and vous. By the last decade of the fifteenth century the manuscript was undoubtedly in Scotland. Some inscriptions on fol. 75' show that it was then in the possession of the Lyle family, who owned estates in Renfrewshire. Some of these, unfortunately, are mere scribbles, such as `Sum scriptyr talis' and 'Ioanne', and many words are now almost illegible. Nonetheless one Latin entry contains the names `Robertus lyle' and 'Mareota Lylle'; and a little below this is written: Memorandum that Robert lylle borruyt a buk fra maryown lylle lade off huston [. …

Performing Reform: Lay Piety and the Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the N-Town Cycle

Performing Reform: Lay Piety and the Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the N-Town Cycle Emma Lipton University of Missouri–Columbia The cult of the Virgin Mary was strong in the late Middle Ages: the life of the Virgin was told in many texts, and new feasts of the Virgin were added to the Ecclesiastical calendar.1 Curiously little attention, however, was given to the subject of her marriage. There was no feast for the marriage of the Virgin and few of the late-medieval English texts that tell the life of the Virgin devote more than passing mention to it.2 This lack of emphasis is particularly odd given the important role the Virgin’s marriage played in the development of the theology of the sacramental nature of marriage, from Augustine to I would like to thank Sarah Beckwith, Lee Patterson, Judith Ferster, and Gail McMurray Gibson for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1 See R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 40–61, 97–115. New feasts of the Virgin added in the late Middle Ages include The Visitation (1389), The Compassion of the Virgin (1497), and The Presentation of the Virgin (1372). 2 On the uniqueness of the attention devoted to Mary and Joseph in the N-Town plays, see Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1972), pp. 161. For other late-medieval English texts recounting the life of the Virgin, see Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter, and Vernon T. Gallagher, eds., A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Duquesne Philological Series, no. 2 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961); Roscoe E. Parker, ed., The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS], o.s., 174 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928); and Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992). Earlier versions of the life of the Virgin also give little attention to the subject of her marriage, including the acknowledged sources for the N-Town Mary plays, most notably The Golden Legend. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The story of the Life of the Virgin is contained in the Greek Protevangelium, the Latin Gospels of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, and later in the Legenda aurea and the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. 407 ................. 8972$$ CH13 11-01-10 12:22:10 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, which became the basis for the canon law practiced in the courts of England throughout the Middle Ages. However, the subject of the Virgin’s marriage was given unusual emphasis in the late-fifteenth-century manuscript BL MS Cotton Vespasian D.8.3 This manuscript contains one of the four surviving English mystery play cycles, a composite and in many ways unique dramatic collection, commonly known as ‘‘N-Town.’’ Compared to the other cycles and other late-medieval English Lives of the Virgin, the manuscript pays unusual attention to the subject of her marriage, devoting an entire play to the subject, ‘‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph,’’ that contains within it a wedding ceremony enacted according to contemporary liturgy . The cycle’s preoccupation with the marriage is also evident in ‘‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph,’’ in which a conspicuously pregnant Mary and her husband are tried for adultery. The emphasis on the life of Mary in the N-Town cycle may be explained by the probable existence of an separate and self-contained Mary Play added to preexisting cycle material when the manuscript was compiled .4 Both ‘‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’’ and ‘‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’’ are believed to have been part of the original cycle, although the former probably also contains material from the Mary Play.5 3 A date of 1468 written on the manuscript gives a terminus ad quem for the cycle, but the play may have been performed or written down...

Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology by Christopher Abbot (review)

Reviews christopher abbot, Julian ofNorwich: Autobiography and Theology. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Studies in Medieval Mysticism 2. Pp. xiv, 197. Bibliography, index. isbn: 0-85991-548-4. $60. When Sister Ritamary Bradley titled her hook, Julian's Way: A Practical Commentary, she called attention to the need to not only study, but to live, Julian's contemplative life. Sister Benedicta Ward, however, stated that Julian was never a nun. Christopher Abbot has bravely sailed into this storm and written an academic book that overflows boundaries, bringing to it his sharing ofJulian's life, himself knowing both worlds, ofthe university and ofthe monastery. He readsJulian in lectio divina, and his reading is wide and deep. Much Julian scholarship is secondary, scholars quoting scholars, building upon faulty premises. The major fault lies in the commonly believed ordering ofJulian's texts, the Short Text first, the LongText later, and the Westminster Text ignored. An edition ofthe Julian ofNorwich ShowingofLove manuscripts and their more probable ordering is about to be published. Christopher Abbot has mercifully not set about proving the progress from one text to the other, but instead sought to understand Julian. On page 8, Abbot queries 'xxx' as being 'yowth.' But in the Lynn, Norfolk, Promptorium Parvulorum (Early English Text Society, Extra Series 102, 'Agis sevyn,' column 7), we are given the Roman sense of youth as up to fifty, certainly beyond thirty, years of age. In his careful reading of her text he becomes aware that she is speaking of an earlier time and desire, prior to her vision and her writing of the Showing. He parallels her autobiographical strategy to John in his Gospel. He notes parallels also to Catherine ofSiena and Birgitta ofSweden's writings. And he speaks of Benedict's Rule, Guigo Hs Scala, Augustine's Confessions, Bernard's On the Song of Songs, Aelred's De Institutione Inclusarum, on contemplative lectio divina. Especially fine is his perception, 'The mystical coinherence through Christ ofthe personal and the ecclesiological implies a dissolution of the gap between Julian as differentiated subject of religious experience and the total community of her fellow Christians' (45). His chapters on the Lord and the Servant use Anselm and Augustine, and discuss the slade as also the Virgin's womb. Those on The City of God discuss the enclosing Adam/Christ. 'Human nature was/is created in a primary sense for Christ himselfso as to be shared with all human beings, the adopted children ofthe Father and Christ's own brothers and sisters' (114). He then cites Julian, 'Thus our lady is our moder in whome we are all beclosid and of hir borne in Christ; for that she is moder of our savior is moder of all that shall be savid in our savior' (160). He ARTHURIANA 9.4 (1999) 116 REVIEWS117 continues by saying, 'much more important to Julian than the details of Mary's appearance are "the wisedam and the trueth of hir soule,"' for she is 'fulfillid of grace,' of Gabriel's words 'gratia plena,' (161). He ends with the womb image, the birthing, the beginning, citing the work of my former colleague, Edward P. Nolan. This book is highly recommended for all Julian scholars and lovers. JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY Hermit of the Holy Family, Fiesole, Italy barbara ?. altmann, The Love Debate Poems ofChristine de Pizan. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Pp. 294; 4 illus. isbn: 0-8130-1478-2. $49.95. This is a beautifully produced, scholarly edition ofChristine de Pizan's three debate poems, Le Livre du Débat de deux amans, Le Livre des Troisjugemens, ana Le Livre du Dit de Poissy; all were composed in 1400 or shortly thereafter. Prepared by an expert on Christine's debate poems, this is the only modern edition other than Maurice Roy's in his Oeuvrespoétiques de Christine de Pisan (1886-96). The two lovers' debate revolves around the question ofwhether love is a source ofgreater good or suffering for loyal lovers; the Livredes Troisjugemens considers three cases ofamorous infidelity; the first half of Le Livre du Dit de Poissy recounts in detail Christine's visit to her daughter at the Convent ofPoissy, followed by two stories...

The Cambridge history of medieval English literature

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). xxiii + 1043 pp. ISBN 0521-444209. L65.00. With the publication of this book the literary history of the period 1100-1500 has developed, perhaps for the first time, a demanding intellectual pressure. Certainly previous literary histories have been monumental in their way: Warton's History of English Literature (1774-81) effectively established the subject, and, slightly more than a century later, the first two volumes of The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-8) capitalized impressively on the editorial work of the Early English Text Society that had so thoroughly recharged the subject since 1864. Coming itself almost a century after the first Cambridge history, then, this latest volume begins the third century of later medieval English literary history. Its intellectual pressure derives, however, from demonumentalizing the history of `English' `literature'. Those earlier volumes framed discussion of individual authors within a set of underlying progressivist assumptions: the worthy but struggling Middle Ages led to the enlightened Renaissance; literary discourse (itself an unproblematic category) was the repository of transcendent cultural value, most fully expressed in the works of individual geniuses; and the triumph of vernacular English was an implicit synecdoche for the triumph of England itself. Thus to characterize those histories is of course to iron out significant differences between them, and to condescend to their real and undogmatic achievement within their respective historical moments. It is also naively to suggest that we have ourselves broken free of this nexus of Whig assumptions. For all that, the volume under review cuts a figure both stylish and substantial as revivified literary history. Because literary history in the latter half of this century had either lost faith in, or felt embarrassed about, the underlying Whig assumptions just described, it tended to retreat into fetishistic inventories of `what's there'. Such `histories' dutifully listed authors and briefly described their works with touches of belletristic comment, so as to produce effectively useless books lacking any overall narrative, and, therefore, any claim to be history. Only Derek Pearsall's Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977) pointed the way out of this neutralization of history by returning transcendent `literature' back to the material instantiations in which it survived. The Wallace volume by no means ignores the kind of issues raised by Whig history; on the contrary, it is confidently yet unobtrusively assured of an alternative set of scholarly (and political) persuasions that effectively challenge the cultural assumptions of progressivist Whiggism. These scholarly practices could be defined as a set of injunctions: look to the larger political history into which `literary' works project themselves; undo categories of analysis even as you work from them; remain conscious of what is suppressed and becomes `marginal' in narratives of the ascendant; reinsert authors into the cultural and institutional context from which they have been artificially extracted; destabilize any single narrative that claims to tell the whole story; and, finally, situate discussion in the scholarly history of the subfield. Always historicize! No single chapter manages to fulfil all these injunctions, but to look wholly to single chapters is in any case to miss the point of this collective project's subtle organization. Just as the ideology informing this volume is suspicious of borders, so too do its individual chapters themselves frequently overlap with others. The cumulative effect of these overlaps within and across sections is to suggest larger diachronic narratives within which smaller synchronic narratives occur. The first three sections exemplify this commitment to overlap: section I is chronological (`After the Norman Conquest'); section II geographical (`Writing in the British Isles'); while section III is broadly institutional (dealing with the `literary' significance of, respectively, monks, friars, schools, and secular clergy; the courts, `the people', and the institutions responsible for biblical translation). …

The imitation of Christ. The first English translation of the ‘Imitatio Christi’. Edited by B. J. H. Biggs. (Early English Text Society, 309.) Pp. lxxxix+249+frontispiece and 3 plates. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the Early English Text Society), 1997. £30. 0 19 722312 5

The imitation of Christ. The first English translation of the ‘Imitatio Christi’. Edited by B. J. H. Biggs. (Early English Text Society, 309.) Pp. lxxxix+249+frontispiece and 3 plates. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the Early English Text Society), 1997. £30. 0 19 722312 5 - Volume 50 Issue 2

The Cloud of Unknowing ed. by Patrick J. Gallacher (review)

REVIEWS Ayenbyte oflnwyt, introducing a story which seems to us to offer the grossest material incentive to charitable giving. Foster also over-glosses. It is a difficult balance to strike, and it is not always easy to imagine what, in particular, students might find difficult, if not everything, but there arc dangers in providing too many glosses. Students may grow impatient at being told repeatedly that a duk is a 'duke' (ducks do not play a latge part in medieval romance) or told that clepyd means 'named' two lines after being told that ycleped means the same. It is best, aftet some fairly heavy glossing in the opening stanzas, to leave the reader to get on with the poem and pick up sense, where it is not obvious, from the context. It is then that the editor needs to be alert to what might be misleading or deceptively comprehensible rather than the unfamiliar words that by now should be in the reader's memory-bank. But these are minor quibbles with what is on the whole an excellent edition, and a worthy addition to the TEAMS series. One comment that might be made about editions such as this has to do with spelling. It is difficult to know what exactly is the justification for following scrupulously in every detail the anomalous and eccentric spelling of some of the manuscripts in which these romance-texts are contained. Many such spellings, including random doublings of consonants and random additions of final -c that have nothing to do with either grammar or metre, make comprehension unnecessarily difficult (e.g.: 'one' for 'on'). Robert Thornton, the scribe ofthe manuscript that is used for the text of Octavian here, is a notorious offender: he scatters final -e's around like confetti and doubles consonants as if suffering from a nervous tic. It is hard to say, also, what would be lost if, say, ofioffand the/theev/erc to be distinguished according to modem usage. The argument is not for modernised spelling, nor even for regularised medieval spelling, but for the removal of oddities and nuisances. The common objection to such a procedure—that it would give a false impression of such texts, making them more regular and therefore more modern-looking—is an objection that might be raised to every modern form of text presentation othet than facsimile. Another possible objection—that regularised spelling obscures possible phonological or other linguistic developments (e.g., that trowghthe reveals how gh has become a mere graph)—is not one that seems relevant to student editions ofthe kind under review. The real objection—that it would take more time, and demand a greater degree oflinguistic skill from the editor to know what was significant in spelling and what was not—is difficult to counter DEREK PEARSAI.L Harvard University PATRiCKj. Gallacher, ed. The CloudofUnknowing. Kalamazoo MI: Western Michigan University, 1997.teams: Middle English Texts. Pp. ix, 132. Introduction, Bibliography, Text with Textual Gloss, Notes, Glossaty. isbn: 1-879288-89-3. The Middle English Texts Series is designed for classroom use, making available texts adjacent to the more frequently published classics by Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet and Malory. The Cloudof Unknowingls already available in an edition by Phyllis 112arthuriana Hodgson for the Early English Text Society, Original Series, 218, and thus available in most academic libraries. But the present edition has an excellent introduction placing the Middle English text in the context of mystical theological writings, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the Victorine Thomas Gellus and the Carthusian Hugh of Balma; it has an up-to-date, though brief, bibliography; and its text, presented without the Middle English manuscripts' thorns, yoghs, and italicized contractions, makes for easier reading for the undergraduate student. It is pleasing that the editor chose to boldface the chapter headings, which the EETS editot had not done. Medieval manuscript scribes took care to differentiate their scripts by engrossing, holding or rubricating in this manner. Phyllis Hodgson consulted all manuscripts but chose as base text one that did not reflect East Anglian/Scandinavian characteristics. Similarly the three manuscripts Gallacher consulted do not come from those families. Those manuscript families tend also to include 'doctrine schewyde ofgod...

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Seven Psalms. A Commentary on the Penitential Psalms translated from French into English by Dame Eleanor Hull. Edited by ALEXANDRA BARRATT. Pp. xli + 326. Frontispiece. (Early English Text Society, 307.) Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0 19 722309 5. £30. LEO CARRUTHERS LEO CARRUTHERS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 48, Issue 1, April 1997, Pages 311–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/48.1.311 Published: 01 April 1997

The Towneley Plays

This new edition of The Towneley Plays (c. 1500) replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called Wakefield Master from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines.

Pleyne Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks ed. by Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, Sharon Butler

REVIEWS Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, eds., Pleyne Délit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks. 2nd ed. and rev. (Toronto: Uni­ versity of Toronto Press, 1996). xxviii 172. $45.00 (U.S.) cloth, $17.95 paper. To produce some 140 medieval recipes in modern English with transcriptions from their sources might seem to be a straightforward if time-consuming scholarly task. But one soon discovers that the results are so unique that they are unlikely ever to be emulated. For the editors enjoyed a remarkable empirical approach. They tackled and tested the recipes hands-on, seemingly with as much zest as medieval cooks whose practical jokes in the kitchen included making a pot boil uncontrollably (by adding soap) and producing meat that appeared to be full of worms. Thus, despite the interest in the subject that was treated as far back as Apicus in Roman times, despite the numerous works that wholly or partially describe medieval cookery, no one has attempted to follow the example set in the first edition of Pleyn Délit edited and published by Constance B. Hieatt and the late Sharon Butler in 1976. A recent claim that culinary history has only become a serious field of study in the last few decades is obviously not true; nor can we agree that previously the study of food was regarded as “comic and trivial; rarely rising above the level of Charles Laughton, drumstick in hand, playing Henry vill.” In 1863 a fourteenth-century Tuscany collection with many recipes from earlier Latin manuscripts was published, and, in 1896, from France came the late fourteenth-century Le Ménagier de Paris. The Early English Text Society also published culinary works from earlier times, and some of these appear in a useful bibliography and index in the second edition of Pleyn Délit. Certainly the study of culinary manuscripts has become more extensive than it was, and two published in 1992 are of par­ ticular relevance to our study: Du manuscrit à table: Essais sur la cuisine à moyen âge ... , edited by Carole Lambert, and La Sociabilité à table, edited by Martin Aurell, Olivier Dumoulin, and Françoise Thélamon. Lambert’s work ranges over recipes from France, Italy, the Arab world, Holland, Spain, and Newfoundland, and also includes culinary items to be found everywhere English Studies in Canada, 23, 1 , March 1997 from Aberystwyth to Wolfenbiittel. Constance Hieatt herself contributes substantially to the first volume and throws light on some of the difficulties inherent in the study of various manuscripts compiled by writers who may know nothing about cooking or be able to cook but not to write. The first edition of Pleyn Délit depended on printed texts. Then a study of the manuscripts began, and Brenda Hosington published a French version on Pain, Vin et Veneison in 1977. Curye in Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fifteenth Century (including the ‘Forme of Curye’) by Hieatt and Butler appeared in 1985. After publishing a fifteenth-century collection of recipes, An Ordinance of Pottage, in 1988, Hieatt with her colleagues’ assistance produced this present volume. This new edition rep­ resents a fundamental revision and includes new recipes. It is the result of years of intensive study and practical application, and is a striking testimony to the scholarly integrity of all three participants, Constance Hieatt, Sharon Butler, and Brenda Hosington. In an age of “fast food,” when abominations such as pizza (which I once thought was modern American speech for “piece of” ) seem to be a weekly or even daily fare, when the custom of shamelessly “grazing” from the fridge is common, one admires the editors’ faith in the existence of keen and enter­ prising cooks. One must hope that the recent Cooking with Three Ingredients which aims “to make gourmet cooks of just about any kitchen klutz” does not fairly indicate the limitations of most people’s current culinary aspirations. For the imaginative and determined cook all the recipes seem possible, and the results should taste delicious. For the wistful browser a close read­ ing is also to be recommended both for the intriguing descriptions of the ingredients of the dishes, and for details that give a brief but...

The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers , and: Ælfric's Prefaces (review)

Reviews 213 regional shifts. H e concludes that in Denmark regions specialised in different products, predominantly live steers and grain; that there was a division of labour between the nobles and the peasants in the production of these goods in which both profited even though the greatest benefit accrued to king and noble. In Bothnia, however, the terms of trade moved against the region in the sixteenth century which led to a return to self-sufficiency not reversed until from 1610 onwards renewed demand for pitch and tar led to widespread changes in the commercial structure and the establishment of towns. While other regions had somewhat different experiences, the two studied, in Dr Maarbjerg's view, represent the extremes within which the others fall. Dr Maarbjerg's study is based on a painstaking analysis of numerical data drawn from the central archives of Denmark, Sweden and Finland. He has been able to reconstruct the differing fortunes of the peasant, merchant and noble classes and to offer at least a partial explanation for the shifts in social relations. While the presentation is pedestrian, the argument is clear and well sustained. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Magennis, Hugh, ed., The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers (Durham Medieval Texts 7), Durham, Durham Medieval Texts, Department of English Studies, University of Durham, 1994; paper; pp. iv, 128; R.R.P. £4.00. Wilcox, Jonathan, ed., /Elfric's Prefaces (Durham Medieval Texts, Number 9), Durham, Durham Medieval Texts, Department of English Studies, University of Durham, 1994; paper; pp. viii, 202; R.R.P. £7.00. These books are useful additions to the Durham Medieval Texts series, which has supplied accessible editions of texts in Old and Middle English and Old Norse since 1978. The series, which appears to beflourishing,with the publication of five new volumes between 1993 and 1995, is designed primarily to provide texts and apparatus for the use of students. Within this frame of reference, however, volumes may serve different levels and purposes, as a comparison of the books under review demonstrates. The legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, rooted in myth and folklore, may have originated in a Greek version close to the time of the events it describes as a Christianised adaptation of legendary material 214 Reviews carefully developed for doctrinal purpose: namely, to reinforce the dogma of the resurrection of the body. The legend isfirstattested in Syriac narratives of the late-fifth or early-sixth centuries, and became widely disseminated throughout the Near East and Europe. The anonymous Old English homily, like the independent short account by iElfric, derives from a Latin version (L), based on a Greek narrative, which is one of two major Latin sources for European versions; the other is Gregory of Tours' Passio Septem Dormientium. The anonymous homily is preserved in the principal manuscript of Mine's Lives of Saints, B L Cotton Julius E.vii (J), and fragmentarily in another £ilfrician collection, along with other non-jElfrician lives of saints, Cotton Otho B.x (O). In Skeat's edition (JElfric's Lives of Saints, Early English Text Society O.S. 76, 82, 94, 114. London, 1881-1900) the work is presented as jElfric's own. O n stylistic and linguistic grounds, however, it has been recognised as another writer's. Magennis's edition is the first published to treat the text in its ownright,though R. J. Alexander edited the text in his unpublished dissertation: 'A Critical Edition of the Old English Seven Sleepers Homily,' (University of Wisconsin, 1973). With its detailed introduction and apparatus Magennis's will no doubt prove to be the standard edition for some time to come. Magennis's Introduction begins with consideration of the origins and development of the legend of the Seven Sleepers, the manuscript context of the Old English version, and the source (L) identified by P. M . Huber (Die Wanderlegende von den Siebenschlafern: Eine Literargeschichtliche Untersuchung. Leipzig, 1910). Magennis further refines Huber's work by identifying manuscripts of L whose Latin most nearly mirrors the translator's source. In an appendix he prints the text of one of four such manuscripts (BL, Egerton 2797: an eleventh-century manuscript...

Macaronic Sermons, Bilingualism, and Preaching in Late-Medieval England by Siegfried Wenzel

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER undergraduate edition will not be a task undertaken by Professor Cawley, who regrettably passed away in 1993. This Early English Text Society edition is, however, a worthy testament to his scholarly achievements, as well as to the more than able editorial work of Martin Stevens. VICTOR I. SCHERB University of Texas at Tyler SIEGFRIED WENZEL. Macaronic Sermons, Bilingualism, and Preaching in Late-Medieval England. Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts Se­ ries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pp. ix, 361. $52.50. This book answers many questions and raises others of a controversial na­ ture, because the author puts forward arguments that call into question the influential theories advanced by Owst and Lecoy de la March regarding the delivery of macaronic sermons. A high proportion of the sermons surviving in England from the period 1350 to 1450 contain mixtures of English and Latin. Wenzel argues that the texts as we have them represent the way in which they were delivered. This draws attention to the linguistic competence of both the preachers and of the congregations who heard the sermons. Sometimes there is very little mixing of Latin and English, perhaps just a piece of vernacular gloss­ ing (e.g., "habeatis internum dolorem, an inderlych sorwe in herte," p. 15). Sometimes a whole sentence of a Latin text is translated into English. Elsewhere we find Latin expressions stitched into a sermon whose main language is English. To all these differing types of linguistic mixture the author applies what he felicitously calls "taxonomic rigor" (p. 29), and presents full analyses of every type according to his classification. The ma­ terial is complicated, and so is the taxonomy, and readers will have to be as painstaking in their attention to this book as the author himself. Fortu­ nately, the introductory chapters are helped by the inventories of manu­ scripts and sermons, which make up Appendix A. Forty-three sermons are classified as "fully macaronic." These are ser­ mons that contain "a significant amount of English material embedded in the Latin context" (p. 29). Sermons of this type form the most important part of the analysis and are to be found in thirteen separate manuscripts, 302 REVIEWS which "belong to three different kinds or types of late-medieval manu­ scripts: the notebook, the miscellany, and the sermon collection" (p.60). None of them contains macaronic sermons exclusively nor "any explicit statement that would tell us for whom or for what purposes the material was collected" (p.63).Stylistic analysis shows that they were deliberately constructed in macaronic register, and the controversial question as to the form in which they were actually delivered has to be addressed.The exem­ plars on which these extant sermons are based have disappeared, and with them the answer to this question. Wenzel discards the explanation that a preacher composing a sermon in Latin would switch to English because he was unfamiliar with a technical term in Latin: "...rather their switching is a random phenomenon for which all-encompassing causes, whether linguistic, stylistic, or psychologi­ cal are hard to find" (p.101).The explanation he advances is that the preachers deliberately switched between English and Latin for rhetorical effect, and the condition in which they survive suggests that they were written for perusal by clerical readers.The base language was English, with a mixture of Latin.In other words these sermon writers are to be regarded as "functionally and fluently bilingual" (p.112), and their sermons were delivered macaronically.Wenzel's thesis contradicts the long-held opinion that sermons for the clergy were preached in Latin, and those for the laity in English.He presumes that the laity would have been comfortable and informed while listening to sermons containing a mixture of English and Latin. This theory makes us think about contemporary remarks concerning the laity's command ofLatin.One thinks of a sermon preached by Archbishop Richard FitzRalph "in processione Londoni facta pro rege" (dated 1346-47 ?) in which he says that he will deliver the sermon in English rather than do everything twice, in Latin and then in English, because the "insipiditas" ofthe lay members ofthe congregation would prevent them...

The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling

This edition of the medieval Chester cycle - 24 plays dramatizing the history of the world from Creation to Doomsday - is based on all eight extant manuscripts. Drawing on his earlier scholarly edition of the plays from the Early English Text Society, Professor Mills here presents a simplified edition of the full text. Marginal glosses and introductory essays to each play are provided and modern English spelling and punctuation is used throughout.

Pearl in Its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited

Pearl in Its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited John M. Bowers University of Nevada Las Vegas Tfuu, poems of Brit;,!, Libmcy M,nuwipt Cotton Nero A, have long been regarded as the chance survivors of a fringe culture that flourished unexpectedly at some backwoods court in Cheshire.1 Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were upland masterpieces, it was thought, composed in a dead-end dialect whose ambitions as a literary language were thwarted by the triumph of Chaucer's London English. A. C. Spear­ ing succinctly expressed this common view: "These poems, then, originate in an area remote from the metropolis and from the cultural influences which, especially under Richard II, radiated from the royal courr."2 Such a notion of a rustic genius accorded perfectly with the Romantic ideology that prevailed when these texts were initially offered to modern readers, first in Sir Frederic Madden's 1839 edition of Gawain, then in Richard Morris's 1864 edition ofPearl, Cleanness, and Patience in the inaugural issue of the Early English Text Society.3 The idea of a provincial master 1 Angus McIntosh, "A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology," ES 44 (1963): 5, has localized the dialect to "SE Cheshire or just over the border in NE Staffordshire." I cite the five poems in the following editions: E. V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Norman Davis, rev., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Cleanness, Patience, and Saint Erkenwald in Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson, eds., Casey Finch, trans., The Complete Works of the "Pearl" Poet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 2 A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 3. 3 Sir Frederic Madden, ed., Syr Gawayne: A Collection ofAncient Romance-Poems by Scottish and English Authors, Relating to That Celebrated Knight ofthe Round Table, Bannatyne Club, vol. 61 (London, 1839), pp. 3-92 and 299-326; Richard Morris, ed., Early English Alliterative Poems in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century, EETS, o.s., vol. 1 (London, 1864). These nineteenth-century assumptions have been examined by Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), esp. pp. 3139 , 49-56, and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding ofMedieval Literature (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 9-18. 111 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER also appealed to what has been perceived as a critical bias in favor of middle-class creativity against the sterility of royal culture, even for a poet such as Chaucer with documented attachments to the court.4 Pearl's formalistic brilliance made it, specifically, a favorite of New Critics for whom the quest for authorship, so vigorously pursued at the beginning of the twentieth century, was gladly abandoned.5 What was abandoned, too, was any attempt to situate the poem in a precise historical context. Though Ian Bishop's "Pearl" in Its Setting (1968) spoke of recon­ structing "literary, intellectual, cultural and ecclesiastical traditions,"6 those traditions turned out to be medieval, in a monolithic sense, rather than specifically fourteenth-century English. John Burrow's Ricardian Po­ etry (1971) was more forthright in disavowing any direct connection be­ tween the monarch and the vernacular poetry of the period over which he reigned. For Burrow's purposes, the term "Ricardian" serves almost exclu­ sively as a chronological marker.7 During the past two decades, however, Michael J. Bennett's studies of the social and economic structures of Cheshire culture have reached the remarkable conclusion that the poet's dialect region did not contain any aristocratic court with sufficient wealth, stability, and sophistication to have supported the Pearl poet or served as his original audience. A more likely milieu would have been the Ricardian "court"--a complex network that embraced the king's chamber, the royal household, the council, the offices ofstate, the chief law courts, even the Parliament, as well as the far­ flung affinity of royal servants, lesser officials, church appointments, king's knights, archers, and yeomen of the Crown.8 And a more likely audience 4 In...