margaret connolly and raluca radulescu (eds). Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain.

The Review of English Studies Advance Access published December 18, 2015 REVIEW CONNOLLY and RALUCA RADULESCU (eds). Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain. Pp. xviii + 330 (Proceedings of the British Academy 201). Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 2015. Hardback, £70. MARGARET The Review of English Studies, New Series s The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press 2015; all rights reserved Downloaded from http://res.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on December 18, 2015 Our brains ﬁnd patterns. A 2008 study by Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky on ‘illusory pattern recognition’ exposed some of the ways in which a lack of control prompts people to perceive ‘a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli’ (‘Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception’, Science, 3 October 2008, 115–117). Precisely what is perceived is similarly complex—hungry people see food in ambiguous images more frequently than non-hungry people, and cultural differences affect the nature of the patterns seen. Apophenia, the tendency to perceive patterns amidst unconnected points, lies at the heart of our encounters with randomness, and the many ways in which we attempt to make meaning out of it. Any collection of essays on medieval miscellanies is bound to be, well, a bit miscellaneous. The editors deftly wield the variety of the essays here to construct interesting resonances throughout the volume. Broadly, the introduction, 15 essays, and an afterword offer a sustained and very detailed focus on a remarkable number of late fourteenth-, ﬁfteenth-, and sixteenth-century manuscripts. The almost 300 entries in the welcome Index of Manuscripts attest to the learning on display here. The breadth of manuscripts under consideration is noteworthy, moving beyond the usual suspects in English manuscript study (Digby 86, Harley 2253, Auchinleck, the books of Robert Thornton, John Shirley, and Richard Hill) to include Welsh, Scottish, and Tudor manuscripts. These reimagined cultural, linguistic, and chronological borders put fascinating pressure on ideas of miscella- neity that have been primarily derived from late medieval English manuscripts. Not unexpectedly, most of the essays argue for ways in which a number of these manu- scripts do or do not combine homogeneous or heterogeneous texts in French, Middle English, Latin, and Welsh in meaningful ways. Many of the essays work to expose some sort of previously unrecognized logic connecting the texts and contexts of particular manu- scripts. They do so on linguistic, temporal, and historical grounds. Other essays survey a range of manuscripts that might be considered miscellaneous on generic or linguistic grounds. A third group of essays argues instead for ways to theorize or deﬁne the core and contested idea of the medieval miscellany. Methodological disagreements amongst the constituent essays are honest, though not always productive. Where Emily Wingﬁeld interestingly employs the idea of ‘material intertextuality’ (p. 216) to make sense of CUL MS Kk.1.5 as ‘a composite and thematically coherent whole’ (p. 230), Andrew Taylor worries about ‘how tricky the business of clas- sifying becomes as it involves a judgment not just on the contents but on the compiler’s original intention’ (p. 150). Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards attempt to move from scribal intentionality to a ‘speciﬁcs of time and place’ (p. 267) of manuscript production as a way to distinguish between ‘purposive and accretive copying’ (p. 277). Yet, Dafydd Johnston’s exemplary essay on ‘Welsh Bardic Miscellanies’ argues compellingly that NLW MS Peniarth 54, written by 18 different hands in the late ﬁfteenth century, and localizable to neither place nor time, is an emphatically coherent assemblage.