No, I had not heard of Sidrak and Bokkus, either (hereafter simply Sidrak)--at least not recently. I might have noticed it in The Index of Middle English Verse (entry 217, also included in the Supplement) or Utley's revision of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English. The poem has been called "a didactic romance" and a "catechism on science and Biblical lore...a comprehensive medieval encyclopedia...in dialogue form" (xxvi). Burton's Introduction to this first critical edition of the Middle English version of this originally French poem makes clear that, while Sidrak does not easily fit our contemporary literary categories, it exemplifies a favorite literary type of the Middle Ages: encyclopedic dialogue (like the Old English Prose Solomon and Saturn). As Burton points out, It is evident, from the large number of manuscripts and printed editions surviving, in several languages, from the period of the twelfth to the sixteenth century, that Sidrac[Burton's designation for the tradition, as opposed to the Middle English version] enjoyed enormous popularity in the late Middle Ages. The British Library alone has no fewer than eight complete manuscripts, one Dutch manuscript, four different French printed editions, another printed edition in Italian, one in Danish and two in Dutch. (xxxii) With Sidrak soon to be available in every library, those of us teaching Middle English can begin using it in our classes. The text will reward the effort in part because it provides such a wealth of medieval topoi, while its combination of genres provides a multileveled look at medieval English literature. Students of Middle English know the size of the gulf between our literary genres and "popular" works of the fifteenth century. There were more folks reading Piers Plowman than Chaucer, and an awful lot of them, it seems, might also have been reading Sidrak. When Caxton began his printing business, he was far more likely to produce saints' lives and long didactic poems than the witty repartee and crabbed conceits that later typify 'English literature.' Chaucer was, originally, in the minority: his deification as the father of English poetry took shape in the sixteenth century through such works of literary criticism as Sidney's "Defense of Poesy". Ideas about literature change, and it took work of a particular kind to shift literary expectations and the popular imagination from its old moorings to the new. We have our work cut out for us when we try to give our students some sense of medieval genres and medieval reading habits. Sidrak gives us an opportunity to think about what changed and why, and also the opportunity to read, not a gripping narrative yarn (although Sidrak has its share of story), but a compendium of thoughts quite different from the modern. It makes us think over our notions of genre and value, and makes us curious not only about types of literature, but about the 'sciences' (as we now think of them) in the Middle Ages. Sidrak matters, for its lexicon and for its contents.
Editor T.L. Burton has spent decades bringing this volume to press. He has made a number of wise and practical decisions, which his introductory material explains in detail. First, after years of work with the extant manuscripts (there are eight, and they vary in length), Burton decided to produce a parallel-text edition of the poem. The right-hand page has what Burton designates Type 1 of the rhymed Middle English version, exemplified by London, British Library MS Lansdowne 793. The left-hand page prints Type 2, exemplified (mostly) by Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 559. This edition would obviously warm the nineteenth-century heart of Rev. W.W. Skeat, and in these new twentieth century EETS productions the parallel text is just as inspiring as the series' previous numbers. Maybe more so: there is nothing like a parallel-text edition to demonstrate the instability of text. Even the Early Modernists are catching on, as witnessed in the Norton Shakespeare's two different versions of King Lear. While not the exclusive province of the medievalist (God knows), these concrete examples of textual instability enable all kinds of fruitful exercises in manuscript transmission, Middle English poetics, and dialect difference.
Burton's edition comes with precise and lengthy apparatus with every detail of the manuscript tradition along with the history of both Sidrac and Sidrak, from its reputed Biblical origins to its appearance in early printed books. The Commentary (130 pp) joins three Appendices: "Linguistic Profiles" (of each manuscript), "The Base Manuscripts and Chancery English: A Summary Comparison of Preferences", and "The Devels Grype: Equivalents in Selected French Manuscripts." This last appendix details fascinating alternative readings in the French Sidrac that indicate that the English 'grype' could be translating 'claw', 'sewer', or 'griffon'. Good editor that he is, Burton does not hide these challenges, but puts them in his reader's lap. Most importantly, however, he includes an "Index to the Questions," a work of totally original scholarship. These questions (there are 406 of them) and their answers are the heart of Sidrak.
It's not easy to appreciate Sidrak without having these volumes on your desk, but let me try to give you a taste of its delightful and entrancing character. The heart of the text is the lengthy dialogue of question-and-answer between King Bokkus and "the greet clerke" and "astronomyere" Sidrak. The frame narrative has its charms: rhymed octosyllabic couplets narrate jolly good battles along with a conversion narrative. King Bokkus, pagan, eventually sees the light because of Sidrak's wisdom-driven battlefield successes and his extraordinary stubborness. The frame narrative includes reversals of fortune in the hagiographic romance tradition: the bad guys die after making heaps of trouble, and, in the blush of his success, Sidrak agrees to answer King Bokkus's questions. This dramatic introduction takes about a thousand lines: the rest of the 12,000-line poem, but for a cleaning-up narrative spate at its end, is comprised of about 400 questions, followed by about 400 answers.
Are we too sophisticated to appreciate these questions? Can we ever read this text sensitively despite our medicalized and professionalized vocabulary? Does Sidrak paint a picture of a childish and Monty-Pythonesque-silly Middle Ages? It is interesting to observe that scholasticism's detractors so often use questions to demonstrate the absurdity of previous eras: 'How many angels could dance on the head of a pin?' But we should not make ourselves immune to the charm of these questions, if only because questioning is the wellspring of knowledge. The didacticism of Sidrak, evident in its rhymes, its lists, its own indexing functions, opens a way for us to talk about the dialogue form and to involve our students in questioning as a pedagogical tool and an intellectual necessity.
Sidrak constructs its authority in interesting ways. Here's Sidrak's answer to a medical/encyclopedic commonplace, "Whiche ben [what are] the worthieste thinges thre--/Is it not worde, grasse, and stoon, as thinketh the?" (lines 1511-2): God 3af [gave] to thinges thre Right miche [much] vertu and pouste [power]: To worde, to grasse, and to stone, And to mannes help euerychone [each and every one]. The worthiest worde and most of might Forto seie here day and night Is to worshepe heuene kyng. . . Also gresses ther ben [are] fele [many] (Alle God made to manis hele [health]) But of all 3it ther is oon That may werst be forgoon-- That is whete to foode of man . . . Also there ben many stones Of miche vertu for the nones [awhile] But mylne [mill] stoones ben here tho [the ones] That man may not wel forgoo. . . . A medical commonplace, the "words, stones, herbs" formula, [1] is here turned to social commentary. Sidrak reminds us of the "three needful things"--food, drink, and clothing--of Piers Plowman while also turning the medicinal herbs of the herbarium into wheat for food, and the medicinal stones of the lapidary into the practical stone of the miller. The connection between health and diet becomes explicit, social, and poetic. These are the kinds of treasures to find in Sidrak.
Do not the following perennial questions send a Sartre-like frisson down the spine? (Question 34) "Weren soulis made at the firste for ay Or ben thei made 3it euery day?"(Question 37) "Hou many worldis beth of alle And hou now doth men hem calle?" In a series of articles, Sidrak editor T.L.Burton has explored a wealth of fascinating medieval contexts inspired by this long, seemingly unclassifiable poem: lore concerning the crocodile, [2] the definition of daftness, [3] and reproduction and sexual love. [4] It is evident that his publications only begin to mine the rich fields of reference this text depends on. He has surely done us all a great service, and Sidrak and Bokkus should take a prominent place in our Middle English studies.
NOTES
1. See Faye Getz, Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus (Madison, 1991), p. 286 and notes.
2. "The Crocodile as the Symbol of an Evil Woman: A Medieval Interpretation of the Crocodile-Trochilus Relationship," Parergon 20 (1978), 25-33.
3. "Defining Daftness," Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle, ed. Myra Stokes and T.L. Burton (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 165-74.
4. "Sidrak on Reproduction and Sexual Love," Medical History 19 (1975), 286-302.