According to the Psalmist, the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” For the Middle English author (or, as he styles himself, compiler) of The Doctrine of the Hert, quoting Gregory the Great by way of his Latin intermediary, “Þer is noþing so flittyng as is þe hert” (81). Little surprise, then, that a substantial program of textual discipline would be necessary to keep this flighty organ in order. Or, considered another way—as the seat of the emotions and the storehouse of the memory—it should be unsurprising to find the heart turned into a literary catchall, a structuring device allowing for the rehearsal of a wide range of medieval devotional literature's most vivid images and motifs.Both of these aspects of the heart inform the early fifteenth-century Middle English text edited by Christiania Whitehead, Denis Renevey, and Anne Mouron. The heart must be disciplined in seven stages, constituting the book's seven chapters: it is prepared, preserved, opened, kept stable, given, lifted up, and, finally, cut. Within each of these chapters, the text's imaginative discipline takes the form of a series of devotional commonplaces: the heart is prepared, for example, as a house for a guest, as meat for a meal, and as a spouse for her husband. Owing to such imagistic capaciousness, therefore, though it only survives in four manuscripts, the Doctrine offers important insight into the devotional scene of England in the age of Chichele and Henry VI. The editorial work undertaken by Whitehead, Renevey, and Mouron, together with the valuable essays collected in the edition's Companion volume, should ensure this text's place in subsequent criticism of Middle English religious literature.One of the greatest strengths of the edition and essay collection as a set is their extensive cross-referencing. The reader should begin with the introduction in the edition, which provides, in small, discussion of essential points that are then treated at greater length in the Companion's essays—and the links between the two are indicated throughout the notes. Thus the edition's introduction starts with a discussion of the De Doctrina Cordis, the thirteenth-century Latin text adapted and abridged by the later Middle English compiler, and in the Companion one finds essays on the authorship of the De Doctrina (Nigel Palmer) and on its various generic affiliations (Whitehead). Likewise, the introduction's short discussion of the different translations of the De Doctrina into Continental vernaculars (xvii–xx) is expanded in the Companion with a series of essays on the French (Mouron), Dutch (Marleen Cré), German (Karl-Heinz Steinmetz), and Spanish (Anthony John Lappin) versions of the text. As noted in the edition's introduction (xvii n. 24), only discussion of the Italian translation is lacking.While essays on its source and its analogues in other vernaculars provide useful context, the focus of the Companion and edition is, clearly, the Middle English translation. In the Companion volume, the Doctrine is the subject of a core group of four essays. Mouron demonstrates that, rather than being a close translation of the De Doctrina, or even a close translation of an abridgment of the Latin text, the Doctrine is best considered an adaptation on the model of Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Yet, if the compiler has freely adapted the Latin text to suit the needs of his vernacular audience (made up, at least in the first instance, of nuns), his approach to biblical translation appears to be markedly different. As Annie Sutherland observes, the Doctrine author, with very few exceptions, presents his biblical quotations first in Latin before providing a Middle English translation. While Sutherland (Companion, 127–28) suggests that the compiler did not expect his readers to be able to understand the Latin, and that the inclusion of the Latin is a “product of a post-Arundelian devotional climate, anxious to foreground its awareness of Latin as the authoritative language of divine revelation” (116 n. 33), the presentation of these translations indicates instead that the compiler thought his reader could work back from the English to make sense of the Vulgate's Latin text. Which is to say, the presentation of biblical quotations in the Doctrine would appear to have much in common with such texts as Rolle's English Psalter, moving from Latin quotation, to English translation, to English exposition. (For particularly clear examples of this treatment of the biblical text, see Doctrine, 15, 37, and 80.) Regardless, Sutherland's essay remains one of the highlights of the collection, charting the various ways in which a Middle English writer can transform a scholastic apparatus of biblical citations into an affective and dramatically engaging vernacular devotional text.A second highlight of the Companion is Vincent Gillespie's essay on the Doctrine's imagistic richness. Gillespie tracks the Middle English translation as it elaborates its Latin source's representations of space; the imagery of cooking meat in a household kitchen, for example, is at once familiar and foreign to the nuns for whom the translation was made, and this domestic imagery also allows the text to appeal to a wider, lay readership. (This consideration of imagined spaces could fruitfully be extended to include certain grammatical texts, which use the inventories of various rooms to teach nouns commonly associated with those rooms.1) Demonstrating his characteristic mastery of this corpus, Gillespie extends his discussion beyond the Doctrine, exploring the ways in which representations of space in various Middle English texts underpin the mouvance evinced in their transmission histories—their ability to be appropriated, adapted, revised, or rewritten to suit a variety of audiences. This central group of essays in the Companion is then completed by Catherine Innes-Parker, who reads the Doctrine alongside the devotional texts with which it travels in two manuscripts, The Tree and The Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost. Innes-Parker argues that the compilations presented in these two manuscripts (Durham, University Library, Cosin V.III.24 and Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, McClean 132) were intended to move the reader from basic devotional discipline to more abstract contemplative speculation, and she supports her claim by adducing various other manuscripts that suggest similar reading programs with other texts.In various respects, then, this edition and Companion point the way forward for criticism of Middle English religious literature—not least by undertaking the careful editorial work necessary to make another witness of this vast body of literature available for wider critical scrutiny. (And, happily, various notes in the edition and Companion suggest that further editorial efforts are currently under way.) In at least one respect, however, the edition and several essays in the Companion are hampered by a scholarly habit that by now seems to look backward rather than forward, that is, the continued exaggeration of the influence exercised by Archbishop Arundel's Oxford Constitutions. I have already noted Sutherland's suggestion that the compiler's preference for the Vulgate, rather than simply offering the biblical text in English, could be a symptom of Arundel's strictures on biblical translation. Similarly, Whitehead suggests that the compiler was responding to “the restrictions placed upon the production of religious writing in fifteenth-century England, in the aftermath of Archbishop Arundel's censorious Constitutions of 1409” (Companion, 77). And in the edition's introduction, one finds the confusing suggestion that the Constitutions proposed a “ban of vernacular texts” generally (xx).Yet, if the Doctrine compiler were really responding to the Constitutions' prohibitions, he would not have given both Latin and English texts of his biblical quotations, for the Constitutions banned the translation of “any text of Holy Scripture into English or any other language, by means of a book, libel, or treatise” (“aliquem textum sacrae Scripturae … in linguam Anglicanam vel aliam transferat, per viam libri, libelli, aut tractatus”).2 The notion that a preponderance of vernacular authors felt constrained by this ban seems unlikely, simply in light of the numbers of surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts that contain Middle English biblical material, including roughly 250 of the Wycliffite Bible. To read texts like the Doctrine as responses to Arundel's attempts at episcopal oversight therefore runs the risk of undervaluing the intellectual work that such texts expect from their readers. As recent volumes such as After Arundel and Wycliffite Controversies make clear, the contours of early fifteenth-century English reading culture are still very much a matter of debate, but those contours will be harder to discern as long as we persist in thinking of literature from this period as responses to, or reactions against, Arundel.3Following the introduction and text, the edition of the Doctrine provides a lengthy “Textual Commentary” and apparatus of variants, an index of Scriptural citations, appendixes offering material from the Latin source text, and a glossary of Middle English words. The Companion concludes with a lengthy and useful bibliography and a subject index. In the edition, the “Textual Commentary” presents a mix of different materials, including biblical citations and examples of analogous imagery in other Middle English religious texts. The inclusion of passages from Hugh of St.-Cher's Postilla, all taken by the editors from the work of Guido Hendrix on the De Doctrina (see 95), is potentially confusing: This material would seem to reach the Middle English compiler only by way of the De Doctrina, so it cannot properly be considered the compiler's source, and its usefulness in the present edition, apart from the intermediating De Doctrina, is unclear. Similarly confusing is the editors' decision to indicate the text lost owing to a missing folio in MS L (12–13, ll. 288–334) in the commentary (107–8) rather than the apparatus (cf. 184).The volumes present only a small number of errata. In the edition, on page xxii, for Botoph read Botolph; on page xlviii, for probably read probable; on page 63, line 165, for communicacoun read communicacioun. In the Companion, on page 209, for intrumental read instrumental. Likewise, in some cases in the Companion, material quoted in the text is dropped from the translation in the footnotes: for example, on pages 62–63, note 19, omitting translation of “et charitatem desponsationis tuae, quando secuta es me in deserto” (which could be translated “and the love of your betrothal, when you followed me in the desert”); and on page 90, note 17, omitting modernization of “Dust greot as ʒe seoð. for it is isundret nan ne halt to oþer” (Dust and grit, as you can see, for it is sundered and nothing holds it together).On page 71, for lines 105–7, the editors have inserted a phrase that is not found in any of the manuscripts, and the resulting text reads: “A, sister, [yif þou wilt axe me] wheþer he, þat so arose be his owne strength so myghtly, may not now areyse bodyes and soules fro deth to lyve graciously? Yis, trewly.” MSS M, L, and T all simply lack the phrase added by the editors, while the scribe of MS C, also lacking the added phrase, has supplied wher for his exemplar's wheþer (see apparatus, 197). In a footnote explaining this emendation, the editors suggest that “the sentence does not make sense as it stands in M and other Middle English MSS” (71 n. a). Yet this is incorrect: as one finds in the Middle English Dictionary (s.v. “whether,” adv. and conj., 2), the question given in this sentence can indeed be read as it stands in MSS M, L, and T, with wheþer meaning “Is it the case that …?” This is precisely how the Doctrine compiler uses the word later in the text, translating the Latin nunquid: “Wheþer an egle … shal be lifte up at þi biddyng, and make his nest in high places?” (82, ll. 84–85).Such minor missteps aside, the editors of the text and the contributors to the Companion have done admirable work in presenting The Doctrine of the Hert and establishing its place as an important witness to the religious and literary culture of fifteenth-century England. The Doctrine is an intriguingly rich and engaging text that, thanks to the valuable service of its editors and first commentators, will now doubtless be the subject of new and exciting work on Middle English religious culture.