At present, the study of Middle English scientific and medical prose has the distinction of being one of the most interdisciplinary, most international, and fastest changing areas of medieval scholarship. It draws together traditional philological pursuits with the methods of discourse analysis, linguistics, and the history of science. Electronic resources have rendered new bodies of evidence widely accessible and have catalyzed innovative research. This collection of eleven essays, written by scholars in Finland, Scotland, England, and (mostly) Spain, is a sign of the ongoing vitality of research in Middle English scientific writing. It appears in a prolific series dedicated to studies in linguistic theory and applied linguistics. While there is indeed a good deal of interest to linguists here, I still found myself, based in an English department and writing on medieval medicine and literature, compelled by the topics treated. Unfortunately, the volume does little to frame or orient its contribution to the field's ongoing interdisciplinary conversation and is marred by typos and errors of English usage. It would have benefitted from more assertive and more careful editing throughout.
The collection consists largely in analyses carried out on two electronic databases: the electronic corpus Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), compiled by scholars at the University of Helsinki in 2005 and including almost half a million words; and the unfinished Annotated Corpus of Middle English Scientific Prose (ACMESP), which "records several late Middle English Fachprosa treatises" totaling "about 300,000 running words" and which is "based at the University of Málaga, developed in cooperation with the Universities of Oviedo and Glasgow" (126-7; see http://hunter.uma.es/). Had these electronic corpora been detailed in the editors' introduction, they may have provided the volume with a sense of occasion and unity that it otherwise lacks. Instead, the two databases are described anew in individual essays; the descriptions grow repetitive and vary awkwardly from one essay to the next. For instance, it is not until the eighth essay that the reader is given the official name of the ACMESP. A clear introduction and editorial standardization would have clarified matters immensely.
Textual Healing's contents appear in the alphabetical order of authors' names. Had they been grouped instead around shared concerns, this would have given their diverse topicsranging from paleography to descriptive grammar, from dialectology to bibliographya greater sense of cohesive organization. Two of the essays do effectively provide broader perspectives, however, and I will discuss in some detail David Moreno-Oralla's and Antonio Miranda-García's "An Annotated Corpus of Middle English Scientific Prose: Aims and Features" and Irma Taavitsainen's "Early English Scientific Writing: New Corpora, New Approaches," before outlining more briefly the remaining studies. This pair of essays would make an excellent starting point for interested readers.
Moreno-Oralla's and Miranda-García's contribution is a much- appreciated introduction to the "tagged corpora" of electronic texts. The authors explain the different ways in which texts may be labeled and annotated, and they list the electronic resources currently available to scholars of Middle English (123-5). They then describe in detail the ambitions of the ACMESP, which aims "to recreate the physical browsing experience of a MS in a virtual environment," while also being a powerful research tool, with "physical description[s] of the MSS," "transcriptions of the texts," and "linguistic analysis" in the form of morphological tagging (126). They make explicit the special benefits that minimal "editorial interference" may have for, say, scholars of paleography and dialectologybenefits that are capitalized on by other contributors in the collection (127). The authors also offer a clear account of exactly how the ACMESP is annotated. This articulation of the corpus's own editorial method will be valuable to anyone who uses the database and wishes to understand fully the data he or she is querying. It also serves as a primer in the production of such tagged electronic resources. This essay would have made a useful first piece in the sequence of contents.
Taavitsainen, the most widely published of the contributors (at least in the field of early English scientific writing), makes the most ambitious and programmatic contribution to the collection. The social-science ethos that informs corpus-based research is explicit in her essay, where she writes that "[t]he arm-chair linguist has given way to the empiricist; corpus linguists do not believe claims about language use without empirical evidence, preferably with statistical backing" (179); and, further on, "There seems to be a paradigm shift going on in the humanities: team work is replacing the individual scholar's lonely toil in the ivory tower" (187). In their introduction, the editors evince a similar perspective, observing that a particular study "has been conducted using corpus tools and techniques [], thus basing the results on real data rather than on isolated examples" (vii). The present reviewer feels rather more ambivalently about the distinction between "real data" and "isolated examples," but nonetheless Taavitsainen's investigations into "changing thought-styles in the history of English" will be of interest as much to many historians of science and literature as they are to philologists and linguists (178). Faculty members in literature departments may already have faced some of the methodological challenges posed by electronic corpora thanks to Franco Moretti's much-discussed program of "distant reading." But lacking the enormous and centralized vernacular archives of, say, Early English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online, medievalists perhaps have not yet fully addressed this particular convergence of humanities and social-science research styles. As more medieval texts are digitized and become searchable, humanities scholars will presumably want to contribute to the identification of new research questions and to the design of resources to answer them. Paying attention to the claims made on behalf of current research is therefore critical.
I turn now to the balance of the essays. Francisco Alonso-Almeida's "Null Objects in Middle English Medical Texts" is a focused contribution to descriptive grammar, which uses the MEMT corpus to identify and analyze the omission of verbal objects. Alonso- Almeida provides a detailed review of the current linguistic scholarship on null objects and a competent account of his methods and results. One factor notably absent from his considerations, however, is translation. The omission is perpetuated throughout Textual Healing, in an oversight curiously out of synch with the evidence. Most, if not all, of the Middle English writings under consideration were shaped by processes of translation from Latin or French, and the work of Linda Voigts and others has made clear that bi- and trilingual manuscripts and macaronic texts were the norm in late medieval British medicine. If the largely monolingual composition of these and similar electronic corpora tends to bias research against the analysis of translation, this tendency might be consciously corrected for.
Graham D. Caie, in "The Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow," provides a general history of the library collection and a description of the specific manuscripts selected for inclusion in ACMESP. Paleographical insights are sought in Javier Calle- Martín's "Line-final Word Division in Late Middle English Fachprosa: G.U.L. MS Hunter 497," which investigates the division of words at line-endings. He discovers that phonological (or syllable-based) division far outweighs morphological division in this careful copying of Macer Floridus' De viribus herbarum. But having studied just one text, written by a single scribe, Calle-Martín is unable to generalize much from his observations. Paleographical concerns are again central to María Laura Esteban-Segura's "Punctuation Practice in G.U.L. MS Hunter 509," wherein she likewise closely considers a single scribe's work.
Mark Chambers's essay, "What is this, a betell, or a batowe, or a buskyn lacyd? : Lexicographical Confusion in Medieval Clothing Culture" is unfortunately quite out of place in Textual Healing. It does concern the utility of a new electronic resource, "The lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c. 700-1450," which "will endeavor to create a searchable database of lexical, graphic and archaeological evidence" (65). But Chambers's comments are not focused on Middle English technical writing, nor does the essay show itself to be in dialogue with corpus-assessment research.
The essay of most interest to scholars of literature is perhaps Javier E. Díaz-Vera's "Analysing the Diffusion of Scientific Metaphors through a Corpus of Middle English Medical Texts." Díaz-Vera offers a cogent summary of the metaphors informing medieval medicine; most prominent among them are "the body is a building" and "medicine is a war" (88). Studies such as this one promise to yield a better sense of the general semantic network within which specific authors' metaphors acquire meaning.
The ACMESP's practice of conserving irregular word forms is put to use in Teresa Marqués-Aguado "The Dialectical Provenance of G.U.L. MS Hunter 513 (ff.1r-37r)." Marqués-Aguado provides an admirably clear description of how she employs two sophisticated philological tools, the electronic corpus and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Her essay suggests the fruitfulness of combining these resources to arrive at localizations as accurate as possible for Middle English technical writings, even as she also acknowledges persisting methodological uncertainties.
Nadia Obegi-Gallardo's "Lexical study of The Book of Operation (G.U.L. MS Hunter 95 ff. 82r-156v): Illnesses and Treatment" pursues a somewhat overwhelming number of aims with respect to the plant names, verbs, and terminology for illnesses, instruments, and treatments in a surgical treatise. The essay distractingly makes use of four illustrations from an unspecified eighteenth-century book of surgery to explicate some of the Middle English vocabulary. Elena Quintana- Toledo's "Orality in the Middle English Medical Recipes of G.U.L. Hunter 185," the final essay in the volume, is based around a questionable premise: "Remedy books have been frequently considered to be the result of a popular tradition in contrast with academic books whose origins tend to be traced back to a more learned one" (153). While the audience for remedy books indeed differs from that of academic treatises, source studies have generally unearthed origins every bit as erudite as those of academic texts. Quintana-Toledo's theoretical framework is derived directly from Walter Ong's 1982 Orality and Literacy and would have benefitted from reference to more recent scholarship, such as Joyce Coleman's work on late- medieval English "aurality" or the considerable body of scholarship on medieval healing charms.
This collection is both the manifestation of a compelling area of scholarly practice and something of a disappointment. Still, several of the essays suggest new subjects and methods of inquiry for the welter of disciplines presently concerned with Middle English scientific writing. I look forward to seeing what further insights are generated from the Annotated Corpus of Middle English Scientific Prose, Middle English Medical Texts, and other electronic archives.