The Chronicle of Brother John Stone, "a monk of Christ Church Canterbury" (51), was previously only accessible to the majority of scholars via W. G. Searle's 1902 edition, a well-known work which provides the complete Latin text of the Chronicle, and which is still used by monastic historians of the later middle ages. [1] More recently, the excellent resource "Parker Library on the Web," produced by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Stanford University Libraries, and Cambridge University Library, has made the unique manuscript of Stone's work instantly accessible to those wishing to view a digital copy online. [2] Nevertheless, while Searle's edition and the Parker web images make excellent tools for the experienced researcher confident with medieval Latin, they are not particularly helpful to anyone less than competent in Latin who wishes to read Stone's unique text to expand their knowledge of late medieval monastic life. Meriel Connor's new edition seeks to rectify this problem by making available, for the first time, an English translation of "representative selections" of Stone's substantial work (1).
From the outset, Connor should be congratulated for choosing to publish her work with the TEAMS Documents in Practice Series. The aim of the series is to offer primary-source materials from the medieval period in a student-friendly format, and to contextualise them within a wider cultural framework by means of some historical generalization, thus allowing students to explore a range of interdisciplinary and multi-layered interpretations of the text. In offering a first-hand account of fifteenth-century life at the Benedictine priory of Christ Church Canterbury, Stone's Chronicle is ideally suited to the Documents in Practice Series, and Connor's work is very successful in highlighting specific ways in which the text offers an insight into monastic life. Yet the edition also goes beyond this, often alluding to the priory's relationship with the outside world, and, for this reason, it is not only invaluable to students of religious culture, but to the wider academic community of medievalists in general.
Connor's translation is prefaced by a forty-six page introduction, which launches, somewhat hastily, into an account of what a "chronicle" is (1) before focusing on six distinct sections: "The Manuscript: Its Purpose and Value," "The Life of John Stone," "Liturgy and Ritual," "Saints and Relics," "Sickness, Death and Remembrance," and "Christ Church Brotherhood and Confraternity." Though the discussion of "chronicles" is undoubtedly necessary and useful to students unfamiliar with the various forms of historical writing in medieval Europe, Connor's decision to begin with the thorny issue of genre, and her casual observation that "there can be no fixed definition of the term" (1) seems to impede what otherwise goes on to become an interesting and informative prologue to the text. [3] A discussion of the key facts known about John Stone, details of which are not given until pages nine to sixteen, would have been far more useful as an opening. This structural quibble aside, the rest of the Introduction works well and is entirely fit for its purpose.
In each of the subsequent sections, Connor places Stone's work within the context of religious life at Christ Church Priory by introducing key features of monastic practice and utilising specific aspects of the Chronicle to illustrate a particular custom or concept. In "Liturgy and Ritual," for example, the importance of the liturgical calendar and the rituals associated with daily life in Stone's community, such as feast days and the observance of the horarium, or canonical hours, is carefully explained and elucidated by the Chronicle's account of Brother John Sheppey, who died on 26 December 1439. Stone's observation that the "commendatory prayers for [Sheppey's] soul and exequies were delayed until 31 December" highlights, Connor explains, the precedence that the liturgy took over everything else during the Christmas period (19-20). While this section of the Introduction employs terminology that the intended student audience might find difficult, Connor explains the concepts competently and provides additional support for unusual or unfamiliar technical terms in a "Glossary" at the end of the edition.
Though she admits that it is "beyond the scope of this work to investigate in great depth the relationship of the monastic community of Christ Church Priory with the world beyond its walls" (4), Connor underlines the many possibilities for research that Stone's work offers, thereby providing scholars with enough detail to begin exploring such avenues themselves. The "arrival in and departure from Canterbury of kings, magnates, and rebels" during the Wars of the Roses, for example, is briefly, but frequently chronicled (6), as is the likely influence of newsletters on Stone's account of the battles fought in this turbulent period (7). Canterbury's centrality as a place of pilgrimage (22-30) and its important network of secular patrons and confréres (43-46) are likewise emphasized and illustrated with hand-picked extracts from the Chronicle, diagrams of Canterbury Cathedral and its precincts, and genealogical tables.
There is no escaping the fact that a full translation of the Chronicle would have been more desirable than the "representative selections" that Connor translates over the eighty-one pages devoted to the text (1); however, the entries that are translated are, in almost every respect, well chosen. Much of the material that is omitted--largely death notices of the Christ Church monks, successions, visitations, and ordinations--is understandable (not least because such entries tend to share the same formulaic phrasing as those examples that are translated and they are not essential reading for the class-room environment that the Documents in Practice Series is aimed at). Happily, the "Tables" in the Appendix go a long way towards compensating readers for the omitted death notices and successions by providing information on each of the successive Archbishops of Canterbury and Priors of Christ Church for the period covered by the Chronicle (Table 1), and detailed information about the dates of death, years of service, and funerary rites observed for 144 monks (Table 2; Connor mentions 148 monks in the notes to this Table, but only 144 are listed).
A few brief entries on secular figures, which would have been useful to have in translation, have been overlooked, such as the death notices of John Lynde and Richard (sic) Belknap (i.e. Philip Belknap), mayors of Canterbury; the election of William Bolde after Belknap's death; several references to Richard, earl of Warwick; a visitation to Christ Church by George, duke of Clarence; and several entries concerning Henry VI and Edward IV. Logically, the interest that these entries show in secular lords falls beyond the edition's immediate focus on monastic life, but their presence in Stone's work is nevertheless important, especially given the partisan nature of some of the later entries, and their inclusion would have been of interest to scholars working on late fifteenth- century history, politics and literature.
In spite of the aforementioned omissions, Connor's text provides a clear and, from the sample of translations checked by this reviewer, faithful edition of the Chronicle. The selections offered cover a fascinating array of events from the solemn rituals and processions that governed the monks' lives (e.g. 68), and the unnerving rebellion headed by Jack Cade in Kent (87-89), to the curious gift of four dromedaries and two camels given to Edward IV and his queen by the Lord Patriarch of Antioch (116), and extreme weather conditions (e.g. 69, 112). Though the edition aims to equip students with the material necessary to appreciate the symbiotic relationship between Stone's writing and the religious context that facilitated it, the volume actually succeeds in providing a much greater wealth of material for medievalists.
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Notes:
1. William George Searle, ed., Chronicle of John Stone: Monk of Christchurch Canterbury, 1415-1471 (Cambridge: Antiquarian Society, 1902).
2. See: http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions/page.do?forward=home. Stone's Chronicle is extant in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 417.
3. For a rigorous evaluation of the same question, see Graeme Dunphy's "Chronicles (Terminology)" in Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. R. G. Dunphy (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2010), pp. 274-82.