In their introduction, the editors of Revisiting the Medieval North of England rightly identify that a “southern perspective on medieval history, language, literature and culture has for a long time permeated scholarship in the different disciplines” (1). The nine essays in this collection are an attempt to redress the imbalance by focusing on the literary production of the north of England. After an introduction from the editors that establishes “the north as a centre of manuscript production, dissemination and reception” (3), Denis Renevey describes two Middle English manuscript witnesses to Richard Rolle’s Encomium oleum effusum nomen tuum, arguing that the variations “offer interesting evidence as to northern features (spiritual, linguistic, etc.) that compiler/scribes feel the need to accommodate, modify or suppress to satisfy a non-northern, more particularly, non-Yorkshire, audience” (15). Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa situates the Middle English translation of Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae in the “late fifteenth-century, predominantly female, aristocratic northern reading circles” (33) of Yorkshire through looking at the reading practices of Cecily Neville (1415-1495). Both Renevey and Yoshikawa orient their discussions around trends in late medieval piety: devotion to the Holy Name and the Sacred Heart respectively. Merja Stenroos examines three corpora of Middle English texts (LALME, MEG-C, and MELD) to determine both “what kinds of texts from the late medieval period contain linguistic forms defined as ‘northern’” (45) and “how ‘northern’ is the language of texts actually produced in the north of England in the late and post-medieval period” (49). She argues that “northern dialect could still be the expected choice of competent scribes in the late fifteenth century” (55). The volume moves back to devotional manuscripts and their “spiritual culture” (61) with Marleen Cré’s discussion of the Middle English translation of Walter Hildon’s Epistola ad quemdam seculo renunciare volentem; she argues that “the exchange of texts between the north and the Midlands” (61) facilitated a nuanced translation. Ralph Hanna’s contribution takes the largest chronological span, discussing the eremitic practices of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne in the seventh century, Robert Flower of Knaresborough at the turn of the thirteenth century, and the fifteenth-century Dominican John Lacy. Based on a close reading of the York mystery plays, Richard Beadle then argues that approximately one-third of the speaking parts in the cycle must have been played by children, demonstrating that the dramatists carefully constructed both small parts for beginning actors and “major roles, both male and female, for young actors who were expected to perform in much more accomplished and sophisticated ways” (104). Anita Auer remains with the York mystery plays, using them as a source for the development of regional variation in dialect. She traces changes in the use of the third person singular present southern dialect markers (-th) and northern dialect markers (-s) between two scribes. Christiania Whitehead examines the relationships between hermit-saints in northern England and Scandinavian traders in twelfth-century hagiography, including Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis and Geoffrey of Durham’s vita Bartholomaei, arguing that northern saints could be “reoriented” to the North Sea (125). The final essay by Marcelle Cole examines the orthography of Old Northumbrian (ONbr), arguing that West Saxon orthography did not supplant all other forms: “even in second half of the tenth century at the height of the Benedictine Reform...ONbr texts exhibited a distinctly northern character” (143).
This collection of essays, proceedings from a 2015 conference in Lausanne, will be particularly useful for literary scholars of the late Middle Ages. By exploring connections between north and south and questioning received wisdom about the centrality of southern English dialects in both Old and Middle English, Revisiting the Medieval North of England provides suggestive ways of reframing the literary developments of the region. It is regrettable that the promise of interdisciplinarity in the subtitle is not fully achieved. With one exception, every author writes from an English department; other disciplinary perspectives would have enabled the volume to meet its editors’ ambitious goals. More careful framing in chronology would also have been desirable; in the introduction, the editors define the chronological boundaries of the volume as “the late medieval period” (2) while on the next page, they identify “the Old and Middle English period” (3) as the volume’s chronology. This ambiguity contributes to an organization that sometimes feels disjointed; the rationale for the order of the essays was not clear. Images were presumably were cost-prohibitive, yet particularly in Renevey’s discussion of London, British Library, MS Add. 37049 and in Hanna’s discussion of Oxford, St John’s College, MS 94, they would have been useful. Nevertheless, this volume is a valuable contribution to literary studies, particularly in Middle English, and it is to be hoped that scholars in other disciplines will respond to the “invitation for further exploration” (9) of northern England that the volume presents.