The history of the book is a thriving field and collections of essays offering a series of rigorous but quite unconnected micro-studies are legion. While not to be disparaged, they are generally more likely to be consulted on a chapter-by-chapter basis than read in their entirety. Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts is rather more. It is true that it offers a series of micro studies and that these cover so broad a range of materials that the editors' effort to summarize their collection's overall theme at first seems desperate: "The way that manuscripts are used and interpreted by their multiple readerships forms the focus for some of the essays here, while regarding the textuality of texts and their physical remediation attracts the attention of others" (2). But the unfamiliar term, "remediation," that is, the shifting of a text from one media to another, is an early hint of how methodologically diverse this volume will be. Martin K. Foys and Whitney Anne Trettien's heavily theorized chapter on the remediation of Beowulf and Pepys's Diary arguably marks the sharpest break with more traditional book history, but every piece in the collection offers a significant provocation. It is a book worth struggling with.
Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts is organized chronologically. It begins with Erika Corradini's discussion of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421, a collection of Old English homilies, mostly by Aelfric and Wulfstan, that was composed in the early eleventh century, probably at Canterbury. Later in the century the two manuscripts passed into the possession of Leofric, bishop of Exeter, at which point a number of minor additions were made to the text and the spelling was updated, notably by turning the "i" s into "y" s with the addition of an extra stroke. At about the same time, several quires were added from two other Exeter homiliaries, now Cotton Cleopatra B.xiii and Lambeth 489. Corradini not only demonstrates that the two Corpus Christi homiliaries are significantly more cohesive than might at first appear, but convincingly situates their evolving history in eleventh-century pastoral activity, showing how texts that were part of the monastic reform movement were reconfigured to help a bishop preach in synod. She notes in conclusion that at least in the case of CCC 421, "the manuscript's cultural and intellectual value was preserved by disrupting its original codicological integrity" (18).
Julia Crick examines Exeter Cathedral Library 3514, a collection of genealogies for the British, English, French, Norman, and Welsh rulers, down to Llywelyn ap Grufudd, king of Gwynedd, and a number of chronicles, including the Cronica de Wallia and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie. Crick argues that the whole was copied in Wales around the time of Llywelyn ap Grufudd's death in 1282, possibly by Cistercians. Drawing on the work of Jacqueline Stodnick and David Dumville, which shows how apparently innocuous regnal lists actually advance political visions, Crick argues that Exeter 3514 presents Welsh history within a broad European context in ways that are sympathetic to the Welsh but "resist reduction to the requirements of any one party" (35).
Orietta Da Rold offers a survey of recent work on "books written in England in the centuries before Chaucer" and "current trends in our understanding of manuscript production from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries" (43). This would be a daunting task, and in fact Da Rold has imposed certain limitations. Apart from the odd sentence, she makes no reference to Latin or French works, nor does she draw on Keith Busby's invaluable recent survey, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (2002). The chapter includes a handy list the fifty-seven West Midland manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that contain English texts, although readers will need to turn to the databases for fuller information.
In places Da Rold's survey of research and methods might reach out further. It would be worth noting some of the other projects that seek to build large databases devoted to medieval English manuscripts, notably the "Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature" run by Linne Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs. On the question of periodization, Da Rold refers only to the work of her co-editor, whereas Foys and Trettien offer a broader perspective. The essay also contains an alarming misrepresentation of research on the Auchinleck manuscript, when Da Rold suggests that "There may have been no scriptorium which produced the Auchinleck manuscript (it may have been a professional workshop)" (44), citing the discussion by D. Burnley and A Wiggins on National Library of Scotland's website on the manuscript in support of this view. Of course, what Burnley and Wiggins, following T. A. Shonk, are claiming is that the Auchinleck scribes, who probably worked within a few hundred yards of each other, were involved in loose collaboration and were not working under the same roof. Nor is this a recent re-evaluation: Shonk set forth his argument in Speculum in 1985 and it matched the general picture of the professional organization of the London book trade set forth by C. Paul Christianson in 1985 in Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall's classic study Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375- 1475.
One might suppose that by this point there was little left to be said about the Ellesmere manuscript, yet drawing on his profound knowledge of Middle English literary manuscripts, A. S. G. Edwards manages to make several striking observations, beginning with the suggestion that Ellesmere can be understood as a "an immediate response to Chaucer's death by those eager to commemorate his memory through the appropriate preservation of his work" (60). Edwards further notes that the illustration of Chaucer in the Ellesmere, complete with his penner, an illustration which clearly represents Chaucer in his capacity as a poet, comes at the beginning of what many would consider his dullest work, the Melibee. Here the manuscript does indeed generate a crux in the interpretation of the poem and "problematises the idea of the poet" that is found elsewhere in the manuscript (71). Like many profound insights, this seems obvious once it is made, but I confess that it not occurred to me.
In their chapter Foys and Trettien explore the theory of "remediation," that is, the way in which texts pass from one medium to another, often retaining much of their earlier structure. After a succinct summary of the current theoretical models of remediation, which are suitably opaque, they turn to the two case studies, for Foys the representation of runes in the various iterations of Beowulf, and for Trettien the representation of Pepys's shorthand in editions of his Diary. In both cases the writing systems are widely held to have been secret, whereas, Foys and Trettien argue, they were actually utilitarian, commonplace, and easily read. Both demonstrations have something of the bravura quality of Jerome McGann's work, with small details (the rune ethel that is actually used in the Cotton Vitellius manuscript; the allegedly concealed word "prick," which might equally be expanded "primick" in Pepys's shorthand) revealed as pivotal in the meaning of the text. In both cases, the various editions are shown to have fundamentally misrepresented the original texts not through individual bad readings but through systematic misprision inherent in the editorial activity. This kind of critique has often been advanced in terms of ideology, as in the much-repeated claim that modern literary canons have been constructed by editorial attitudes rooted in Romantic nationalism. Here the argument is laid out in the language and models of media studies, a new set of tools that book scholars will need to take into account.
Among other riches, Foys and Trettien offer a detailed account of the impact of new writing materials, including the "fountain inkhorn," a precursor of the fountain pen, which came into use in the seventeenth century. Their passing reference to "modern tools such as erasable wax tablets" (109), however, is puzzling. The classical and medieval use of wax tablets is well known; these tablets, like all wax tablets, were erasable, and what is noteworthy is that such tablets were still in use as late as the seventeenth century.
As David Gants notes, the explosion of all kinds of digitized texts creates a major challenge for bibliography: how to describe these new and volatile constructs. Gants mentions some of the efforts to describe, authenticate, or archive what are now known as "born digital" texts, that is texts "created in an electronic domain with no physical precursors" (123), but he sees more possibilities for bibliography in those digital texts that have some grounding or pre- existence in print. Drawing on G. Thomas Tanselle's "Thoughts on the Authenticity of Electronic Texts," which appeared in 2001, and Fredson Bower's classic Principles of Descriptive Bibliography, Gants attempts to describe three digital works. The first is Robert Pinsky's "electronic novel" Mindwheel, which first came out in 1985 and had five different software packages, one designed for a Commodore 64, another for an Atari. The second is the Oxford Electronic Text Library Edition of the Riverside Chaucer; the third the William Blake Archive. Gants is persuaded that digital bibliographers have the same goals as their predecessors, "collecting, organising and presenting all the evidence which can be determined through the application of analytical bibliography to a book, whether that book is on vellum, paper or hard drives" (140). His analysis suggests how difficult describing the third kind of book will be, but it offers an invaluable starting point for those who will have to try nonetheless.
Ralph Hanna returns to Bodley 647, a collection of Wycliffite and Orthodox texts in English and Latin, which brings in Latin material "to provide unimpeachable precedents for Wycliffite opinions" (144). Hanna offers a subtle reading of the conflicting tendencies within the codex, showing both its thematic coherence and its oscillation, and finding no "pristine" intention or argument. Hanna stresses the crucial role of the Latin material, such as excerpts from Gratian's Decretum, in providing not just material but interpretive and organizational models for what has so often been regarded as "the archetypal vernacular Lollard collection" (158). He also shows how powerfully the manuscript has been appropriated, first by John Bale, then by Thomas James, the Bodley librarian, and finally by the nineteenth-century editors of Select English Works of John Wycliffe.
Robert Romanchuk is not the first to draw attention to the scandalous ignorance of Byzantium on the part of most western medievalists, but he offers an unusually pointed demonstration of the distortions that can result. His topic is the heart as a figure for the self, and the distinctly less bookish tradition of this figure in Greek and Slavic Christendom. For the west, as Eric Jagger and Mary Carruthers have shown, the heart is often a metaphor for the book, its memorization, and the self that is built around that memorization, but the Byzantine tradition is different. Romanchuk traces alternate figures of the eyes and ears of the heart, and of the earth of the heart, which receives good seed. For the desert Fathers, such as Pseudo-Macarius, the earth of the heart has little reference to books; it evokes "a subject seeking grace directly from God, unmediated by Scripture" (173). When the book is invoked as an image for the human soul, it is in an eschatological context, the record that will be opened at the Last Judgment. While the metaphor of the heart can imply a reading subject, the reader is conceived as a student conversing with a teacher; the metaphor is pedagogic not mnemotechnic. Here Romanchuk returns to Augustine's famous account of the silent reading of Ambrose, drawing on the discussion of Aleksandr Gavrilov, and, with some significant reservations, that of Carruthers, to argue that what really surprised Augustine was not silent reading per se but silent reading in the presence of those he might otherwise have instructed.
Margaret Smith examines the use of red by early printers, arguing that it was no mere decoration but part of a book's "textual articulation," that is part of the "the system within a book that signals to the reader the structure of the text and the relationship of parts of a text to each other" (187-88). She offers a case study of the German Dominican Johannes Nider's De morali lepra (On moral leprosy), a work for confessors, which was printed by Ulrich Zel, Cologne's earliest printer, in 1470. As Smith notes, while early printers did occasionally try to print in red, they usually found it cheaper to have their books rubricated by hand. As a consequence, each copy has to be examined individually. Smith discusses the various kinds of rubrication in seven copies of the De morali lepra. She concludes by noting that "eventually the printers took back to themselves all the decisions about what to mark and how to mark it, turning the book from a multi-colour to a monochrome object" (199). Unlike the other contributors, Smith retains a strictly technical focus, but her conclusion has general implications, providing further material for those who wish to break down the division between print and manuscript and for those who argue that the control of the printed text was a gradual, not sudden, development.
Liberty Stanavage turns to the civic register that contains the texts of most of the York Corpus Christi pageants, arguing that while the register has been cast as "a (possibly abortive) attempt to close down performance variants" (202), it was actually a shifting document, repeatedly transformed in response to changes in performance. Examining a number of small additions, such as the note by the town clerk that the Girdlers' performance bore no relation to the text, Stanavage makes a strong case for the fluidity of the register. Whether the signs of its failure to impose control can be credited with agency as "the manuscript's own insistence on its mutability and its continually revisionary sense of its own identity" (213) seems less clear to me. Stanavage's essay leaves no doubt, however, that future discussions of the political struggle over the York pageants should attend to the small but telling modifications in the register and provides a fine example of how to do so.
Stanavage's praise of the textual variant and her hope that digital media "will allow us to surpass the limitations of print reproduction" (204, n8) stand in sharp contrast to the examples of limiting remediation offered by Foys and Trettien, just as Hanna's insistence on the polylingualism of medieval England stands in sharp contrast to the overwhelming concentration, in this volume and elsewhere, on English texts. These are just some of the methodological tensions that make Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts such a thought- provoking collection.