Middle English Texts Research Articles

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo (review)

robyn malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 298. isbn: 978-1-4426-4563-9. $70.Malo's Relics and Writing opens up a new direction in the study of hagiography and religious texts, focusing on the rhetorical and ethical interrelations of signs, signifiers, and their interpreters. Having drawn her initial heuristic from the study of saints' relics and reliquaries to argue for a disconnect between relics and their material and verbal representations, Malo demonstrates how this significatory disjunction manifests in a wide array of Middle English texts. In considering the incommensurability of any desired object and the available ways of depicting it, Relics and Writing will be of considerable interest not only to students of saints' lives, but to all Middle English scholars.Relics and Writing centers around 'relic discourse,' Malo's phrase for 'the technical terminology, together with the metaphors and commonplaces, that writers in the later Middle Ages drew upon to construct the meaning of relics' (5). That meaning is neither as stable nor as self-evident as often assumed. Identifying a correspondence between reliquaries and writings about relics, Malo argues in her first two chapters that relic discourse became more elaborated in the later medieval period as shrines grew in size and relics became more distanced, spatially and visually, from pilgrims. Because bone fragments don't self-evidently signify 'saint,' and because bejeweled boxes signal material wealth rather than holy contents, relic discourse-and its central voice, the relic custodian-was necessary for giving both relics and shrines their spiritual meaning, even while that discourse inevitably foregrounds the gap between relics and their representations.The last three chapters consider how relic discourse operates widely across Middle English literature. Chapters Three and Four emphasize the ethical conundrums enmeshed in relic discourse, revealing the gap between the promise of access (penitents' prayers are answered and/or they can encounter the saint directly) and the actual distance between the devotee and the relic (only relic custodians and/or the perfectly holy can view the relic). Chapter Three reads the Holy Grail in Malory, the Alliterative Joseph of Arimathea, and Henry Lovelich's History of the Holy Grail as a blood relic. According to relic discourse's conventions, Malo's major argument runs, flawed Lancelot's appropriately penitent actions in Malory should have allowed him sight of the Grail, but they do not. …

Cos—A New Discourse Marker for Australian English?

A number of studies of clausal linkage in Modern English have suggested the causal marker because/cos is showing a change in progress from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (via the semantic bleaching of because and its phonological reduction to [kəz]). In this paper, I dispute the idea that paratactic because/cos is innovative. Drawing on various spoken language collections, including those from the Australian National Corpus (AusNC), and on historical examples from a number of Old and Middle English texts, I suggest that the different grammatical behaviour of because/cos is not the consequence of on-going grammaticalization, but a direct result of the complexity of causal relations and the different communicative needs of speakers versus writers.

What grammar reveals about sex and death: interdisciplinary applications of corpus-based linguistics

In this article, I present two case studies that show how biographical and intellectual history can benefit from corpus-based linguistics and how databases from different disciplines can cross-pollinate. (i) Combining information from the PASE.ac.uk prosopography and syntactically annotated corpora, I show that the choice of auxiliary with ofslægen ‘killed’ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is related to how the killing occurred, with wearð ofslægen consistently signalling death in battle. This finding sheds new light on the deaths of people like king Osred (716) and the earls Burghelm and Muca (822). (ii) The syntactic choice between it happened that X Y-ed or X happened to Y in late Middle English texts appears to determine whether the scribe/author believes X to be in control of what happens, providing novel evidence on medieval views of accountability levels with regard to adultery, sinning, and casualties. Particular attention is paid to the language use of the scribe of the late medieval Alphabet of Tales and how it reveals his pragmatic attitude towards sex outside marriage.

Realising (re)vision, manipulating manoeuvres: editing the English Middle Ages

This article discusses the importance and relevance of textual editing for students and scholars of historical literatures, especially Middle English texts. By surveying the different types of editions necessary for studying Middle English literature, the author argues that in the "digital age," an understanding of The Edition is necessary, not only for the preservation of cultural texts, but also for the contribution and understanding of interpretations fundamental to literary disciplines.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve by Eleanor Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve by Eleanor Johnson Barbara Zimbalist Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013) 254 pp. As a term of critical inquiry, “aesthetics” often evokes associations of the analysis, appreciation, codification, and even formulation of beauty. Yet as Eleanor Johnson shows in Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, the aesthetics of Middle English literature functioned in multiple and surprising ways: as the result and natural outgrowth of ideation in poetry and prose, rather than its antecedent; as a deliberately deployed mixture of literary modes and styles intended to effect ethical transformation in readers; and as a meta-category of literary-philosophical endeavor within which late-medieval authors engaged and reconfigured their classical and medieval predecessors. Johnson argues that Middle English writers reconfigured the Boethian prosimetric tradition in service of vernacular protrepsis. In making this argument, she defines and deploys analytical terms that will inspire new attention to what she calls “the Boethian paradigm of ethically transformative writing and reading”(94). These terms, specifically prosimetrum (the mixed form), protrepsis (ethical transformation through narrative), ethics, aesthetics, and (briefly) criticality, may be familiar; but Johnson’s meticulous analysis of mixed-form Middle English texts demonstrates their analytic power in service of new readings of some of the most well-known texts of the English Middle Ages. She shows how the twin traditions of mixed-form texts and ethically transformative narrative guided and shaped the literary endeavors of Late Medieval English authors, even as they revised, reconfigured, and remade that tradition into one of the most influential and widely used vernacular poetics of medieval English literature. Much of the book’s argumentative power derives from its self-proclaimed New Formalist approach. Indeed, the introduction, “Formalism and Ethics: the Practice of Literary Theory,” includes a short subsection titled “A Brief and Recent History of Formalism”—an extremely clear (if brief) overview of New Formalism as a critical movement and its intersection with medieval studies that will be useful for a variety of readers. Johnson divides her study into six [End Page 268] chapters framed by the theoretically-driven introduction and conclusion. Following the theoretical introduction, Chapter 1 explicates the prosimetric architecture upon which the edifice of ethical reading—protrepsis—is built. Johnson demonstrates the Boethian foundations of prosimetrum and protrepsis within the Consolation of Philosophy (and to a lesser degree the De institutione musica), as well as the tradition of ethical transformation achieved by sensible aesthetics: causality in prose and likeness in meter, both of which elicit rational and aesthetic responses from their readers. The chapter then turns to Boethius’s medieval reception in Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Guillaume Machaut’s Remède de Fortune. Johnson shows how each of these vastly influential texts, sharing didactic and dialogic narrative structures, rework Boethian prosimetrum for their own purposes, and in doing so, establish a tradition of adapting and reconfiguring the mixed form as a conceptual, formal, generic, and syntactical strategy of philosophical translatio. Chapters 2 through 4 turn to the Chaucerian re-figuration of the Boethian tradition. The second chapter, “Sensible Prose and a Sense of Meter: Chaucer’s Aesthetic Sentence in the Boece and Troilus and Criseyde,” argues that Chaucer’s deliberate decision to render Boethius’ mixed form Consolatio as Middle English prose was “rooted in a desire to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of prose form, and with how prose aesthetics might produce ethically transformative assent on its own, independent of metrical action”(57). This argument for the prosimetric quality and protreptic potential of vernacular prose demonstrates how Middle English reception of Boethius reconfigured the mixed form through through style, register, genre, tone, and meter—even prose meter. The implications of this argument for vernacular poetics are rich, and should inspire more explicitly formalist work on Middle English prose. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Chapter 3 argues that the Troilus formulates an aesthetically-driven ethics of tragic poetry, dependent on...

Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliot (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliot Gillian Adler Elizabeth Elliot, Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures (Farnham: Ashgate 2012) 170 pp. Recent scholarly directions in Boethian studies have raised important questions about the influence of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on late medieval writing. Eleanor Johnson’s Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve explores how Middle English texts received and manipulated inherited Boethian formal structures, such as the prosimetrum, to ethical ends. The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Miller, reveals the use of Boethian models in discourses of desire, loss, and consolation in a variety of medieval European literatures, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Johannes von Tepl’s Ackermann. Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures represents a significant contribution to discussions of the legacy of Boethius in the late Middle Ages. In this critical study, Elizabeth Elliot examines the medieval literary reception of the Consolation of Philosophy through an original selection of texts that range from Jean Froissart’s French Confort d’ami to Thomas Usk’s English Testament of Love to King James I of Scotland’s Kingis Quair. Remembering Boethius focuses on Boethius’s role in the social import of vernacular poetry and prose, the construction of aristocratic identity in literature, and the erotic subjectivities represented in the chosen texts. The works of Guillaume de Machaut, Froissart, Usk, and James I bear a likeness to the Consolation in the conditions of exile or [End Page 241] imprisonment in which the authors depict themselves or others within the text. Without attempting to identify positivistic connections between the historical experiences and life histories of Boethius and those of late medieval authors or literary subjects, Elliot explores how the Boethian model of suffering becomes a springboard for treatments of political issues and how the Consolation serves as “a valuable resource for the aristocratic reader who seeks to apply Boethian philosophy to political practice” (13). The social and political plight of the late antique philosophizing prisoner resonated symbolically for late medieval authors, who assimilated the Consolation to aristocratic tastes and found in Boethius’s work a storehouse of moral counsel and an inspiration for medieval life writing. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 construct a textual tradition that grounds Guillaume de Machaut’s Confort d’ami, Remède de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse in the thematics of the Consolation. Through her focus on the self-conscious politicization of Boethius’s text in Machaut’s writing, Elliot indicates how the philosophical, political, and exilic aspects of the Boethian model become an advisory cornerstone in the mirror-for-princes narrative that Machaut intended for his patron Charles II of Navarre, as the Confort d’Ami adapts from the Consolation the notion that the faculty of memory serves as an ethical compass and a tool for avoiding the vicissitudes of Fortune. Machaut’s Remède de Fortune similarly draws on memory as a tool for control in the face of Fortune and even for transcendence. This chapter represents a broader discussion in Elliot’s work of the association between wisdom and the cultivation of memory that appears in the Consolation and that becomes explored within late medieval texts that draw on the Boethian process of self-education. The third chapter looks at the use of Boethian allegory in the Fonteinne amoureuse to reimagine the situation of Jean de Berry, imprisoned and yet in a situation of inevitable moral edification because of his isolation and opportunity for self-reflection. Chapter 4, “Memory, Desire and Writing in Jean Froissart’s Prison amoureuse,” analyzes Froissart’s treatment of the Boethian themes of constraint, enclosure, and self-discipline and reads his text as “a meditation on the issue of controlling the appetitive will, in which the ability to construct an image of the desired object is imagined as a solution to the problem of frustrated desire” (15). Chapters 5 and 6 examine the Testament of Love and the Kingis Quair...

The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

alan j. fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks. Cursor Mundi 14. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012. Pp. x, 304. isbn: 978-2-50353-680-4. euro 80.Approached as a summa of Alan J. Fletcher's distinguished career to this point, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks repays attentive reading for its insightful treatment of a wide range of canonical Middle English texts. The book is really a loosely juxtaposed collection of essays, however, for its organizing logic amounts to little more than 'travels through the medieval English literary canon' (51) from a broadly historicizing perspective. Apprehended as a putatively unified whole, therefore, The Presence of Medieval English Literature adds up to rather less than the sum of its parts.This is unfortunate, since those constituent parts-chapter-length essays on The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Piers Plowman, works of Chaucer (chiefly The Canterbury Tales), and Malory's Morte Darthur-are often valuable on their own, individual merits. Chapters on Sir Orfeo and Pearl aie especially impressive, and I will treat them in more detail below. As I suggested above, however, the unifying logic by which the six core chapters have been stitched together is overly broad. Specifically, Fletcher's titular phrase, 'the presence of medieval English literature,' refers first to his selected texts' presence' today in the literary canon; his goal is to make these 'canonically privileged texts appear richer and stranger than they may hitherto have done...by restoring them to their [historical] moment in ways that allow aspects of their former presence to live again' (3). In practice, what this goal amounts to is historicist contextualization, typically the identification of an explanatory cultural lens for some element(s) of a given text (thus heresy for Chaucer's works, for example).Fletcher is at his most interesting when he bumps up against the limitations of this interpretive mode, as he does in the chapters on Pearl and Sir Orjeo; indeed, his chapter on Pearl is called, simply and powerfully, 'Pearl The Limits of History.' There, even as he identifies a new explanatory context for elements of the poem (preaching texts on the Feast of the Holy Innocents), he persuasively urges readers to 'guard against reading his [the /fc^rZ-poet's] text deterministically as if it were a thing available to be flattened into identity with matters that may have impinged upon it' (91). His chapter on Sir Orjeo, meanwhile, asks what explanatory contexts would have been available to medieval readers for the 'extraordinary chamber of horrors' (52) of folk taken to fairyland and then displayed there in various states of distress, death, or dismemberment. After considering three such explanatory contexts-aspects of Christianity, astrology, and fairy lore-that ultimately prove 'incapable of satisfactorily containing chaos in one totalizing explanation' (74), he concludes that 'the harper, and through him the consolidating power of performative culture that his harping represents, is allowed to become stability's champion' (79). These essays represent Fletcher at his best: widely read, intellectually curious, and interpretively nimble.The chapter on Malory will especially interest readers of Arthuriana, so I will summarize it at some length here. In 'Morte Darthur, the Endgame of Authority,' Fletcher argues that Malory's text is a meta-quest for stable sources of authority and meaning, and that although 'authority's traditional bedrocks may sometimes afford no absolutely secure foothold...Malory's sustained commitment to his authorityquest suggests his equally persevering belief, in principle, in authority's achievability (217). Most of the chapter is spent identifying 'tropes of authority' and 'formulas of authority' (I never fully understood the difference between these formulations, if any) that Malory evokes across his massive work. …

Where is Orkney? The Conceptual Position of Orkney in Middle English Arthurian Literature

Abstract In T.H. White's The Once and Future King, the “Orkney faction” of Morgause and her sons consistently opposes King Arthur's centralizing power and stands for the old, mystical “Celtic” power of the British Isles against Arthur's progressive, rational “Englishness”. In White's medieval sources, the name represents a distant, possibly exotic power and, again, frequently antagonistic to Arthur's British affairs. This paper analyzes selected accounts of Orkney in Middle English narrative texts, primarily Arthurian romances, illustrating how conceptual “Orkneys” develop in the literature overall but also serve the literary needs of each individual narrative. The ultimate aim of the analysis will be to determine “where” Orkney is in the conceptual cultural geography created by these medieval writers of Great Britain: “here” or “elsewhere”.

Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance ed. by Neil Cartlidge (review)

Reviewed by: Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance ed. by Neil Cartlidge Raluca L. Radulescu Neil Cartlidge, ed., Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. pp. ix, 247. ISBN: 978–1–84384–304–7. £50 At 247 pages tightly typeset, Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance packs in no less than fourteen essays on types and anti-types in various late medieval narrative texts including—but not restricted to—romance. Organized in two sections (Part I: ‘Individual Characters’ and Part II: ‘Character-Types’), the collection showcases new talent alongside established scholars, with contributions on an array of characters, from the ubiquitous Arthurian villain Mordred to the single-text figure Ralph the Collier, but bringing in little known heroes as well (in René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer). Unlike recent volumes on medieval insular romance which purport to either provide an introduction to the field (A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, eds. Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009]) or provoke debate around a select group of romances (Pulp Fictions in Late Medieval England, ed. Nicola McDonald [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004], the present collection does not intend, in its editor’s words (Neil Cartlidge), to ‘impose or contrive any fixed or final definition of medieval anti-heroism (or indeed of romance)’ (2). Refreshingly honest, this statement might suggest a deliberate reluctance to engage with the intersections between chronicle writing, saints’ lives, and romance which are in fact explored in two essays contained in this volume: ‘Hengist,’ by Margaret Lamont, and ‘Harold Godwineson,’ by Laura Ashe, respectively. Due to the nature of their central topics, these two essays contribute—albeit not always explicitly—to modern critical debates over the interactions between romance and other genres, and, at least for the present reviewer, the new material and new approaches adopted here are most intriguing and path-breaking in their own right. Overall the selection of characters and types for this collection is varied and intriguing. The well-chosen bookends of the collection are, on the one hand, classical and legendary figures of Turnus (in Penny Eley’s essay) and Alexander the Great (in David Ashurst’s) and, on the other, ‘Ungallant Knights,’ by James Wade, and ‘Sons of Devils,’ by Neil Cartlidge. Thus the analyses of Turnus and Alexander, heroes whose development is explored in a range of Old French and Middle English texts, provide a foundation for the essays by Lamont and Ashe. The other bookend, the two chapters by Wade and Cartlidge, present fresh perspectives on topics usually treated differently: Wade’s is the only chapter to engage deeply with the manuscript contexts in which the selected Middle English romances survive, while Cartlidge’s provides a theologically- and chronologically-informed review of the development of devilish characters in medieval romance. To play devil’s advocate— pun intended—I could argue that there is more to Sir Gowther and Robert le diable than their devilish origins and behaviour, as there are more varied character types than Middle English romance ‘Crusaders’ (the essay by Robert Rouse) and ‘Saracens’ (by Siobhan Bly Calkin), since both latter types form the focus of much recent work on medieval romance. Yet this would be unfair, since all four essays in Part II are, as expected, fine contributions. [End Page 115] Among the other essays in the collection, some of the most accomplished are, unsurprisingly, authored by established scholars (Judith Weiss’ chapter on ‘Mordred’ from Part I stands out in its breadth of coverage in a most economical way), yet contributions from emerging voices are also welcome, in particular given the difficulty of the topics (due to extensive coverage elsewhere): ‘Merlin’ (by Gareth Griffith) and ‘Gawain’ (by Kate McClune). By nature controversial, the characters of Ralph the Collier and Gamelyn provide ‘food for analysis’ in the essays authored by Ad Putter and Nancy Mason Bradbury, respectively. Intriguing is also Stephanie Viereck Gibbs Kamath’s essay on ‘The Anti-Heroic Heart’ in René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer. Here the reader discovers a text rarely if ever discussed in traditional surveys of medieval romance, and thus another stimulus for debate. Both the typological approach...

The Doctrine of the Hert: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary and A Companion to “The Doctrine of the Hert”: The Middle English Translation and Its Latin and European Contexts

The Doctrine of the Hert: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary and A Companion to “The Doctrine of the Hert”: The Middle English Translation and Its Latin and European Contexts

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Teachable Henryson, Accessible Middle Scots

Review Article| April 01 2013 Teachable Henryson, Accessible Middle Scots Robert Henryson: The Complete Works. Edited by Parkinson, David J.. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Julie Orlemanski Julie Orlemanski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 387–390. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958539 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Julie Orlemanski; Teachable Henryson, Accessible Middle Scots. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 387–390. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958539 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Opening up Middle English manuscripts: literary and visual approaches

Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Glossary of Key Manuscript Terminology Note on Transcriptions and Transcription SymbolsTHE FRONT PLATES: Transcriptions, Scripts, and Descriptive Analysis for Learning to Read Literary Texts on the Manuscript PageHow to Transcribe Middle English / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton-Bare Essentials 1: A Transcription Is Not an EditionIntroduction: The Order of the Plates and Scripts Most Commonly Found in Middle English Literary Texts / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton1. The Land of Cokaygne (British Library, ms Harley 913) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton2. Ihesu (Newberry Library, MS 31) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton3. The Pricke of Conscience (Newberry Library, MS 32.9) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton4. Chaucer's Cook's Tale (Hg) (National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 392D, Hengwrt MS 154) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton5. Chaucer's Cook's Tale (Cp) (Corpus Christi College, MS 198) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton6. Omnis plantacio (formerly The Clergy May Not Hold Property) (Huntington Library, MS HM 503) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton7. Hoccleve 's Chanceon to Somer and Envoy to Regiment des Princes (Huntington Library, MS HM 111) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton8. Langland, Piers Plowman (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton9. Sir Degrevant (Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6, Findern MS) / Linda Olson10. Wisdom (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.354, Macro MS) / Linda OlsonChapter 1. Major Middle English Poets and Manuscript Studies, 1300-1450 / Kathryn Kerby-FultonA Brief Overview of Topics Covered in This ChapterI. BL MS Arundel 292, Archaism, and the Preservation of Alliterative Poetry c. 1300-c. 1450II. BL MS Harley 2253 and Principles of Compilatio, or: Why Read the Harley Lyrics in their Natural Habitat?-Bare Essentials 2: Anglicana Script and Profiling the Individual ScribeIII. Gawain and the Medieval Reader: The Importance of Manuscript Ordinatio in a Poem We Think We Know-Bare Essentials 3: Assessing Emendation in a Modern EditionIV. The Rise of English Book Production in Ricardian London: Professional Scribes and Langland's Piers Plowman-Bare Essentials 4: Some Basic Concepts of Editing, Types of Written Standard Middle English, and Scribal Handling of DialectV. Some of the Earliest Attempts to Assemble the Canterbury TalesVI. The Scribe Speaks at Last: Hoccleve as Scribe EChapter 2. Romancing the Book: Manuscripts for Euerich Inglische / Linda Olson-Middle English Romances in the Auchinleck, Thornton, and Findern ManuscriptsI. Englishing Romance: The Auchinleck ManuscriptII. Romancing the Gentry Household: Robert Thornton's Homemade Family Library-Thornton Names in the Lincoln and London ManuscriptsIII. Courting Romance in the Provinces: The Findern ManuscriptChapter 3. The Power of Images in the Auchinleck, Vernon, Pearl, and Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts / Maidie HilmoI. Looking at Medieval ImagesII. The Auchinleck ManuscriptIII. The Vernon ManuscriptIV. The Pearl ManuscriptV. Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts and the Ushaw Prick of ConscienceVI. ConclusionChapter 4. Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts / Kathryn Kerby-FultonI. Categories of Marginalia: The Annotating and Glossing of ChaucerII. The Annotations in Manuscripts of Langland's Piers PlowmanIII. Annotations and Corrections in the Book of Margery Kempe: Cruxes, Controversies, and Solutions-Appendix on the Red Ink Annotator and Previous Annotators in BL MS Add. 61823IV. The Quiet Connoisseur: The First Annotator(s) of Julian of Norwich's Showings in the Amherst Manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 37790)Chapter 5. Illuminating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Portraits of the Author and Selected Pilgrim Authors / Maidie HilmoI. IntroductionII. The Decoration and Borders of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere ManuscriptsIII. The Historiated Initial with an Author Portrait: A Further Development of the Hengwrt TraditionIV. The Ellesmere Traditions: Illustrated Pilgrim AuthorsV. ConclusionChapter 6. Swete Cordyall of Lytterature: Some Middle English Manuscripts from the Cloister / Linda OlsonI. Nourishing the Spirit of Religious Women: Vernacular Texts and ManuscriptsII. Monastic Manuscripts of Chaucer: Literary Excellence under Religious Rule-The Contents of London, British Library, MS Harley 7333III. Lots of Lydgate and a Little Hoccleve: Chaucer's Successors in Monastic HandsIV. Sadde Mete for Mind and Soul: Contemplative and Visionary Texts in the CloisterV. Taking it to the Streets: Middle English Drama from the CloisterReferences Cited Illustration Credits Index of Manuscripts and Incunabula General Index

The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (review)

Reviewed by: The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin Marianne O’Doherty Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, eds. The Production of Books in England 1350–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xx, 375. £60.00; $99.00. This stimulating collection of essays is presented in Derek Pearsall’s “Foreword” to the volume as a successor to Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths’s Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 (Cambridge, 1989). As Pearsall notes, the differences between the two volumes function as an index of how manuscript studies have changed over the last twenty years. The earlier volume navigated between survey and case study. In the section on book ownership in the 1989 volume, for example, surveys of the evidence for book ownership and the relationship between book ownership and social status sit somewhat uneasily alongside a case study of book ownership in Scotland. Similarly, the “Book Production” section in the 1989 volume comprises a series of case studies of production among different, specific groups, whether defined by geography, vocation, or community. In contrast, The Production of Books in England aims at the comprehensiveness of a field-defining work of [End Page 401] reference. Its thirteen chapters on subjects such as “Materials” (Orietta Da Rold), “Decorating and Illustrating the Page” (Martha Driver and Michael Orr), “Bookbinding” (Alexandra Gillespie), and “Compiling the Book” (Margaret Connolly) combine state-of-the-field survey with new research on specific books, scribes, and modes of production. The result is a collection of articles essential not only as a first port of call for postgraduate students and researchers embarking on the study of manuscripts and early printed books in the British Isles in the late medieval period, but also as a guide to current trends in research. While the chapters divide the study of book production into sections, they nonetheless simultaneously draw attention to the interconnectedness of all fields of codicological study. “Materials” may not be the most alluring chapter title I have seen, but Da Rold’s essay itself does much not just to state, but to demonstrate “the significance of the study of materials in British books” (12). Through a case study of the use of different paper stocks in the so-called Winchester Malory, Da Rold demonstrates that careful attention to paper use has much to tell literary scholars about the nature and completeness of exemplars to which scribes had access, and thus about the early circulation of literary works. Similarly, Daniel Wakelin (“Writing the Words”) invites us to rethink theoretical assumptions. He points out that close attention to modes of scribal copying can provide a research base “against which to test theories of scribal ‘variance’ “ (50). In cases where copies of Middle English texts can be compared directly with exemplars, Wakelin suggests, it is not the variability but the “consistency of scribes,” and the remarkable feats of “auditory and visual memory” required to achieve such consistency that are striking (53). The volume’s chapters on the “Commercial Organization” of manuscript production (Erik Kwakkel) and “Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and Their Scribes” (Linne R. Mooney) are complementary, exploring distinct aspects of book production from different angles. Mooney reconstructs the professional scribe’s varied workload by tracing his hand in surviving documents and volumes. Kwakkel, on the other hand, looks at what the documentary evidence and the material forms of surviving books have to tell us about the organizational structures and processes that brought support, script, decoration, and binding together into book form, and considers the relationship between commercial concerns and material form. Together, the two chapters put the scribe and the book into multiple, overlapping contexts. [End Page 402] There are some areas of study that are conspicuously missing from this volume. The studies of the owners and readers of medieval books that filled more than a fifth of Pearsall and Griffiths’s 1989 volume have no counterpart here; the volume interprets the “production” of its title strictly, and, in any case, since 1989 the histories of book ownership and reading have grown into areas of study in their own right. One could argue that the attention paid in the volume to books containing canonical...

Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic TextsLevinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts. Edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pp. x+374.

<i>Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson</i>, Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts<i>Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts</i>. Edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pp. x+374.

John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments

Book Review| October 01 2012 John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments. Edited by Claire Sponsler. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Pp. vi + 182. $15. Maura Nolan Maura Nolan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2012) 111 (4): 541–543. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.4.0541 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Maura Nolan; John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 October 2012; 111 (4): 541–543. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.4.0541 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Gamelyn’s Place among the Early Exemplars for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Application of standard techniques from natural language processing on n-gram models of spelling enables quantification of the similarity between Middle English texts despite their lexical differences. Three studies employing similarity metrics confirm that a scribe’s spelling always is biased in the direction of his exemplars. This bias opens up a window on the number of scribes behind the exemplars for a text executed in a single hand, when other variables such as authorship and poetic form are held constant. A fourth study addresses nine manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem the Canterbury Tales with early textual contents. A one-way ANOVA/Tukey’s Range Test shows that none of these manuscripts is based on exemplars written in more than three hands, when allowance is made for variation due to poetic form. The results point to unified exemplars for the full text as the normal format for the poem’s transmission. The discussion suggests that the final tale ordering found in the first manuscripts is a product of collaboration between the poem’s first two scribes, probably working after Chaucer’s death and spuriously adding the Tale of Gamelyn.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (review)

Reviewed by: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Derek Pearsall Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated, with notes, by Joseph Glaser, and an Introduction by Christine Chism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011. Pp. liii, 83. ISBN-13: 978–1–60384–618–9. $10.95. Since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first became an object of attention to scholars and students following the first publication of the poem by Frederic Madden in 1839, it has been widely admired. It is, or was until recently, the most frequently read Middle English text among undergraduates after Chaucer, unless Langland crept in between them. But the language is difficult: the author writes in a north-west midland dialect remote from the London English that was becoming standard, employs rare dialectal words and many loan-words from Old Norse and Old French, and himself enjoys extreme lexical innovation and experimentation. Though one would normally deplore the resort to translation, or more properly modernization, with such comparatively transparent Middle English as that of Chaucer or Langland, Gawain is different. The assumption must be that the poem’s story is strong and imaginatively compelling enough in itself to make translation worthwhile, despite the inevitable dilution and degradation. Translators can use prose and try to keep close to the literal meaning of the original, sometimes providing a parallel-text of the original; or they can use an unrhymed long line and try to preserve the word-order and alliterative patterns of the original, with lexical substitution when necessary; or they can use a different verse-form and treat the original freely in order to create a poem that will be aesthetically pleasing in its own right. Of the three forms of modernization-translation, Joseph Glaser chooses the second, which is perhaps the most challenging of the three, given that it demands not only a high level of technical skill but also a struggle and final decision with every impossible-to-decide-on connotative richness. He generally follows the alliterative pattern of the original, that is, with alliteration on the first three staves (stresses) of a regular four-stress line (aa/ax, where the slash marks the caesura between two well-marked half-lines), though he allows himself more freedom than the original in the use of variant forms such as aa/xa and xa/aa. As for meter, instead of the variable syntactic-metrical patterns of the original, Glaser tends towards a steady four-beat quasi-anapaestic line, regular but not thumpingly insistent. As a specimen of his method, I use the opening lines (following the text of the original as given in the specimen on p. lii) so as to ensure a choice of example that it not subjectively determined. [End Page 104] Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye, Þe borʒ brittened and brent to brondez and askez, Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroʒt Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe: Hit watz Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde, Þat siþen depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome Welneʒe of al þe wele in þe west iles. Once the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, The city battered and burnt down to brands and ashes, The man who entangled that town in his treason Was impeached for his perfidy, the purest on earth. It was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kin, Who put down whole provinces to make themselves princes Of well nigh all wealth in the isles of the West. The first two lines run smooth and close to the original, though ‘city’ replaces borʒ so as to avoid the third alliteration in the first half-line and the suggestion of a third (hypermetric) stress (a frequently employed variant in the original, though in reality the apparent third stave is usually absorbed into the meter of a two-stress a-line). In the third line, the translator faces tulk, one of the many synonyms for ‘man’ that make alliteration easier for the fourteenth-century poet. He abandons any search for an alliterating substitute and simply shifts the alliteration to the last three staves (xa/ aa, a rare and irregular...

Rewriting English Literary History 1042-1215

The last 10 years have seen a swathe of revisionary scholarship on the afterlife of Old English texts in the 12th century. This article places this research beside work on the earliest Middle English texts and contemporary writing in Latin and French to suggest that the time is now ripe for a new, synthetic literary history of the period. In particular, the article identifies three key aspects of post-Conquest literary culture which have been neglected because they chafe against the conventional paradigms of literary history, with its expectation of a literature national, monolingual and constantly original. The 12th-century norms, by contrast, were regionalism, multilingualism, and the habitual recycling of older texts. Medievalists must insist these differences should inform wider discussions about the form and purpose of literary history in the 21st century.