Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts

This book is a collection of thirteen papers, mostly by established and distinguished scholars, as a Festschrift for Christina von Nolcken, as specified by the dedication and by Sharon Rowley's introduction, which reviews von Nolcken's research on Wycliffite textuality. Rowley argues that the textual reception of medieval texts in each generation that has edited and responded to them has in significant ways created the scholarly interests and approaches used in that generation—and sometimes in succeeding ones. That premise follows from von Nolcken's scholarship, which, over four decades, pays “close attention to cultural perspectives, textual production, the material book and memorialization” (p. 2). Given that thesis for the volume, it is perhaps a little unexpected that the papers are assembled in three traditional groups: one on Middle English that is nearly all Chaucer, one on the Lollards (here “lollards”), and one on the afterlife or reception history of Old English.It seems worth following Rowley's hint and taking the papers in rough order of the times in which the scholarship being practiced was developed and published. Anne Hudson, in one of the last papers of her long and very distinguished scholarly career, offers a starting point as she examines how Frederic Madden's editing career developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the edition with Forshall of the Wycliffite Bible, with the early and late versions on facing pages. Hudson exhaustively studies Madden's notebooks and journals for clues as to which manuscripts he was locating, borrowing, collating, and having transcribed, as well as the pressbooks and records at the Oxford University Press for the setting up and printing of the five volumes (which was done piecemeal for each section of each volume from 1834–1850). She even identifies one Cambridge manuscript that was signaled in the introduction as not available in time, but by searching the printer's accounts for 1849–50 she determines that in fact quires previously printed were redone with the relevant collations, no doubt to the annoyance of the printers and their accountants. Along the way she points to several future lines of research that should be developed, not just on Frederic Madden, and concludes that “No modern edition has matched FM's achievement even in part” (p. 145). She thus rehabilitates an editor who had not enjoyed the measure of respect he deserves and notes that the modern researcher can depend on Madden's work “with some confidence” (p. 146).Even earlier than Madden was Samuel Pegge (1704–96), the eighteenth-century antiquarian who was greatly interested both in the Textus Roffensis and in the life of his predecessors, William and Elizabeth Elstob. Andrew Rabin here presents a lecture Pegge delivered at the Society of Antiquaries on 18 June 1767 (revising for the next seventeen years until publication in 1784), entitled “An Historical Account of that venerable monument of antiquity the Textus Roffensis; including memoirs of the learned Saxonists Mr. William Elstob and his Sister.” Rabin provides helpful expansions and clarifications of Pegge's original footnotes and some pages of annotation and commentary, but the meat of the article is Pegge's detailed analysis of scholarship in the field in the eighteenth century, even including vicissitudes of the manuscripts themselves. The Textus Roffensis itself, for example, fell into salt water at some point when it was being carried from Rochester to London and back, but “was happily recovered, and without much damage” (p. 338).A longstanding scholarly tradition in Medieval Studies, well represented here, investigates sources and historical connections among texts. Jenny Adams takes a refreshing new approach to Chaucer's Clerk, arguing that Chaucer uses him “to highlight the ways formal education depends on, and also produces, economic exchange even as academics themselves often seek [to] recast academic labor as detached from worldly interests” (p. 81). Rather than demonstrating the poverty and love of books of a modern graduate student, the Clerk managed lands and cash and was heavily involved in the teaching economy of the university. Specifically, Adams discusses the loan chests (by the fourteenth century, there were sixteen of them) that contained the books that together were worth more than all the University buildings of Oxford.Ann Astell and Anne Winston-Allen also address the Clerk's Tale, having discovered a new analogue. The Dominican founder of a confraternity, Alanus de Rupe (1428–92), prepared a Marian version of the tale called, in the edition and translation provided here, “Mary the Charcoaler's Daughter,” published in 1492 in Augsburg, Germany. Astell writes a paper arguing “that Chaucer's numerous allusions to Mary in the tale disturb an untroubled reception of Grisildis as Stoic heroine and Christian saint” (p. 46), placing Chaucer's version of this tale on an historical continuum with the highly Marian version of Alanus at one end. She proposes that the text is a failed Pietà, a tale in which there is no grieving mother as a way of criticizing the sacrificial myth underlying the story. Winston-Allen's translation of the German text, first published in 1997, is republished here along with a transcription of the original and an introduction to the five Griselda versions available in the mid-fifteenth century for Alanus de Rupe to alter into a Marian text.Clerks are also important to Susanna Fein, who here continues her scholarly work with the Harley scribe, investigating the arcane lore, partly the prognosticatory science material from the twenty-two booklets in the three manuscripts: British Library MSS Harley 2253 with seven booklets, Harley 273 (also seven booklets), and Royal 12. C. xii (eight booklets) in which the Harley scribe wrote texts or corrected or annotated them. Her analysis interweaves a relatively detailed comparison of the Harley writer-scribe to Chaucer's clerks a few generations later, noting the polymathic abilities of these clerks and focusing particularly on the dream lore of Chaunticleer in the Nun's Priest's Tale with various dreams in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English texts from the Harley scribe's materials.Two papers address the work closest to von Nolcken's heart, a more recent development in the field of Medieval Studies: the lollards and their accomplishments. Matti Peikola here begins his work on “a set of fifteenth-century Middle English prologues associated with the transmission of the Wycliffite Bible” found in Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 108 and focuses on the sources for eleven Pauline epistle prologues: the Glossa ordinaria, Lombard's magna glosatura, and Nicholas of Lyra (p. 151). Jill C. Havens briefly considers the unique metrical prologue to Richard Rolle's English Psalter and Canticles in Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 286 for its information about the production of that text and then proposes that lollards were involved in the earliest circulation of Rolle's psalter, not just in later and more “heretical” iterations, examining seven manuscripts which added five canticles to Rolle's original seven with polemical passages in the Benedictus canticle. Havens identifies two separate groups of manuscripts and extrapolates her argument to the remaining sixteen copies of Rolle's psalter.Finally, several scholars offer studies in the vein of recent scholarship reconsidering sainthood and martyrdom. Susan Kim offers a short meditation on martyrdom in the early Christian church and its associations with language and the body, quoting Victricius and Augustine, and finding the martyrdom of Cassianus (who was literally written to death by his students) in Gregory of Tours. Her focus is the life of St. Christopher in the Nowell Codex and the monstrosity that affects how sign and meaning lodge in the martyr's tortured body. Mary Dockray-Miller addresses a similar “text” of the latter part of early medieval England by examining what she calls the “failed masculinities” of Tostig Godwinson. She addresses this historical figure, brother of a king, of mixed Danish and English ancestry, as a negative exemplar, not a saint and martyr but their mirror image, a man who failed at every conceivable role. Tracing Tostig through the many annals and references, Dockray-Miller extends her analysis to his sons Skuli and Ketel after his ignominious death in the service of his own desires rather than those of his family and elder brother, as well as his widow Judith of Flanders (whom she previously studied in a monograph). Fiona Somerset investigates a copy of Insurgent gentes, a tract against mendicants which was frequently attributed (wrongly) to Hildegard of Bingen and which appears heavily redacted in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.50, an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite manuscript (transcribed and translated in appendices to her chapter). She notes parallels between the Middle English and Bohemian copies of this text and focuses on the extended preface, the conclusion, and some variants in the Trinity copy that reveal lollard fervor for Hildegard as prophetically opposed to the fraternal orders, as saint, and as sexually pure and virginal. She includes a useful table of copies of this text from Britain, Prague, and Vienna, with comparison of lollard themes.Von Nolcken's interest in textual scholarship and close attention to detail are well served by her colleagues in this collection. It continues many conversations: on lollards, on Chaucer's marriage debates, on saints and martyrdom, on the complications of editing and the textual history of manuscripts and books. In all, a satisfying and productive read.

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