This book examines the efforts of Middle English writers from the mid-fourteenth century onwards to reposition English as a language fit for writing across a wide spectrum of genres: political, devotional, scientific and poetic. It focuses on what these writers themselves said about their enterprise in prologues and epilogues. There is a rich seam of scholarship dealing with these topics already, which Mairey integrates well into her own study. Her footnotes and bibliography provide generous coverage both of broader studies of prologues and of articles and chapters on specific texts. She also sets the texts of her large corpus in proper context (dates, manuscripts, patrons, and so on). Readers seeking a bibliographical guide to this terrain will therefore find this a valuable contribution to the field.
The book distinguishes itself from earlier studies in two main ways. The first is the use of stylometric methods to map key words and collocations used in these prologues. This method produces hard facts, even if some of these facts are predictable, as Mairey acknowledges: we will not be surprised to learn, for instance, that the key words that co-occur in prologues are book, write, read, treatise, etc. The second innovation lies in the number and variety of prologues and epilogues examined here. This is not a close-up examination of a few selected case studies, like Elizabeth’s Dearnley’s Translators and Their Prologues in Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016), but a systematic trawl through the paratexts of twenty-nine diverse Middle English texts, some famous, such as Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and some obscure, such as George Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy (1471). When addressing the contents of the prologues to all these texts, Mairey poses an equally wide range of questions. Does the author mention a patron, comment on the language, give a short title, adduce any authorities, refer to Bible? The answers are conveniently summarised in two tables at the end of chapter 1. In later chapters, dealing respectively with the readership envisaged in these prologues and with the dissemination of these texts, other relevant questions are pursued. Was the intended audience lay, clerical, or mixed? In how many manuscripts does the text survive? Again, there are handy tables that make Mairey’s findings instantly accessible.
Interpretations of individual passages are not as uncontroversial as the tabulations. For example, when Hoccleve in his prologue to The Regement of Princes, lines 2137-2141, addresses Henry IV--“Yit if yow list of stories taken heede, / Sumwhat it may profyte, by your leeve; / At hardest, whan yee been in chambre at eeve, / They been good for to dryve foorth the nyght; / They shal nat harme if they be herd aright”--it seems rather a stretch to claim that Hoccleve “compare Henri à Chaucer” (193). Is the Eagle’s charge in The House of Fame that Chaucer is unsociable and reads even when he could be resting really on Hoccleve’s mind here? If a comparison between these two passages here has any such point it should be to emphasize the differences between them. The Eagle’s view that reading books is a waste of time contrasts with Hoccleve’s that histories offer wholesome entertainment, and the customs controller reading books privately and silently (“dom as any stoon”) contrasts with King Henry who, Hoccleve assumes, has servants to read them to him (“if they be herd aright”). Mairey provides ample quotations from these and other texts, along with translations which reproduce the general sense but are not always precise on detail. For instance, Lydgate’s Troy Book, I, lines 159-161, “For nere writers, al were out of mynde, Nat story only, but of nature and kynde / The trewe knowyng schulde have gon to wrak” (“Were it not for writers, everything would be forgotten, not just history but true knowledge of nature and the physical world”) has one main clause, not two, as Mairey’s translation suggests (Cars s’il n’y avait pas eu des écrivains, tout serait hors d’esprit, non seulement l’histoire, mais aussi la nature et l’essence; la vraie connaissance aurait disparu). The syntax (and with that the logic) of Troy Book II, lines 17-20, are likewise misconstrued.
Such weaknesses, however, are the flipside of the book’s strengths. This is well-informed, data-driven research, better at capturing general trends than the nuances of individual texts and passages.