Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honor of A. I. Doyle ed. by A. J. Minnis

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER consensual ones.Jocelyn Wogan-Browne takes on the easier job of arguing against boundaries rather than for them in '"Bet ...to ...rede on holy seyntes lyves ...': Romance and Hagiography Again. " Her study of the legend of St.Clement (in an unpublished Anglo-Norman version) sustains her contention that we should not consider romance and hagiography to be "fixed oppositions" (p.84); her suggestion that we should "treat romance and hagiography as forms of exemplary biography" (p.85) is plausible so long as we recognize that the ideologies exemplified in each case are quite different.Thorlac Turville-Petre 's"Havelok and the History of the Nation" argues that medieval writers thought of Havelok as a figure of history rather than of romance, noting that Havelok's attention to "legal practices and social institutions" (pp.122-23) and to the nation and nationalism are primary concerns of historical writing.Turville-Petre stops short of at­ tempting to reclassify Havelok as a historical text, effectively arguing that romance is sufficiently capacious to encompass historical figures and politi­ cal concerns. The high standard of this collection, its impeccable editing, and the range of texts and approaches its contributors consider make Readings in Medieval English Romance a welcome addition to romance studies. SUSAN CRANE Rutgers University A.]. MINNIS, ed.Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honor ofA. I. Doyle. York Manuscripts Conferences: Proceed­ ings Series, vol.3.Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1994.Pp.ix, 198.$63.0 0. Ian Doyle has made enormous contributions to the study of Middle En­ glish manuscripts, not only through his many publications, but perhaps even more through the advice and information he has given to so many who have consulted him.In acknowledgement of my own debt to him over many years, I am delighted to review this volume written in his honor, in which contributors frequently refer to his generous help.The eleven papers here, first given at a conference in York in 1991, are all of value, and if I concentrate my comments on just a few of them, that is simply a reflection of my own narrower range. Bella Millett's "Mouvance and the Medieval Author," an examination of 254 REVIEWS the issues confronting her as editor of Ancrene Wisse, was of particular interest to me. The fluidity ofsome medieval texts, constantly adapted over a period of time for new circumstances and new audiences, presents prob­ lems for the editor who wishes to produce a definitive text. Ancrene Wisse was copied over three centuries, primarily as a practical work with a partic­ ular function, and therefore it was constantly reshaped to meet new needs. It appears that the author himself took part in this process of textual change, and that the revisions in the Cleopatra and Corpus manuscripts are probably authorial. But even the more extensive revisions in Corpus are far from systematic, sometimes lack coherence, and in any case were not taken into the mainstream textual tradition. To make proper sense of the Corpus version, an edition must relate the state of the text to the overall develop­ ment of the work; it must, in other words, represent the mouvance of the text. Millett considers the practical solutions for the editor ofAncrene Wisse, for which transcriptions of nearly all the texts have been printed: to print one version and relegate all variants to a dustbin at the foot of the page misrepresents the textual situation; but electronic hypertext requires more resources than are available. She therefore proposes to exclude later scribal variants and to list only the early variants which are possibly authorial. This is sensible in the short term, but sooner or later I believe an editor ofa text ofthis importance will have to find the resources necessary for a hyper­ text edition, for that is the only fully acceptable solution. In "The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet," 0. S. Pickering points to the routine style of the South English Legendary, with its self­ contained couplets and its simple vocabulary and syntax, and contrasts a number ofpassages written in quite a different ,style. Here the verse is fluid and overflows the boundaries of the couplet...