By the early 1980s, Derek Pearsall’s scholarship exposed the “tyranny exerted by the ‘critical edition,’” and “scholars [were] learning the value of ‘bad manuscripts.’” [1] This work played a major role in turning medieval manuscript studies toward the kind of tripartite methodology that Professor Susanna Fein was also beginning to define and practice. The methodology generally wrought by the early editors of texts from medieval manuscripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the Early English Text Society, for instance, created what I have called “a ‘Frankentext’—a regenerated pastiche made from parts of different texts.” [2]
When I undertook my study of the Middle English Prose Alexander, the first item in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91, one of the two miscellanies compiled by Robert Thornton in the early fifteenth-century, I fully embraced the, to me, logical editorial arguments of Derek Pearsall, Susanna Fein, and others. Their work helped those of us just starting out to perceive the flaws inherent in the earlier editorial system grounded in the editor’s auctoritas rather than that of the manuscript, its scribes, its glossators, etc. The old way promoted the modern concept of individual achievement and recognition of the creators, i.e., the editors, over the evidence surrounding and embedded in the cultural artifact, the manuscript itself, and its makers.
The literary historical artifacts, the manuscripts that scholars must read, analyze, and render in their editorial work, have been engaged by more careful, thorough, and detailed efforts, in large part because of the work of all three editors of this current collection of scholarly essays that honor the work of Professor Susanna Fein. The late Derek Pearsall’s magisterial career teased out the many facets of the study of medieval literature while Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s perceptive arguments, among other manuscript issues, highlighted scribes whom she called the “clerical proletariat.” The ten scholars’ essays gathered in this volume embody the kind of investigations of manuscripts, scribes, and literary texts that Susanna Fein was most concerned with in her scholarly endeavors. Together, the essays create rich and provocative arguments and, as Susanna Fein did for all of us, room for future work in the field.
Michael Johnston’s introduction to this volume of essays honoring Professor Fein reveals, reflects on, and analyzes the three significant aspects of Fein’s editorial methodology. These he identifies as her “careful attention to both literary meaning and material form,” her “belief that small details matter to larger narratives of cultural history,” and her assertion “that editing is an act of service to the field which, when done with care and dedication, can advance our knowledge of medieval England as much as books and articles can” (2). The ten essays that follow his introduction have been situated under three separate but connected sections.
Section I of this collection focuses on “Manuscripts and Meaning,” each of the four scholars taking up the task of illuminating in detail the aspects of the literary and cultural artifact at the center of their work.
Martha W. Driver’s “Visualizing Susanna: Another Look at ‘The Pistel of Swete Susan’ and Later Imagery in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries” examines the biblical Susannah’s diverse iterations in manuscript form. Driver finds a “fluidity of the imagery” around this text in medieval manuscript illustrations, illuminations, and poetry, exploring the biblical Susanna as represented in medieval liturgy, art and literature, as well as the interesting pairing of Susanna with Bathsheba. Driver includes “‘the first known Book of Hours’” as Professor Fein pronounced this English manuscript created in 1240 and its treatment of the story of Susannah. Driver finishes her argument with a discussion of the “strikingly visual and highly detailed” Pistel itself (40). She reveals how this biblical story captured its audiences “in manuscript and printed Books of Hours” for centuries.
Phillipa Hardman explores the place of Gamelyn in late medieval romance in her essay, “Finding a Context for Gamelyn: Between Romance and Canterbury Tale.” As she unravels the “reception, context, and narrative achievement” of this “paradox among Middle English romances” in its 27 occurrences in extant manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (47), she notes that the narrative’s “credentials as romance has been repeatedly questioned” by scholars (48). In an insightful comparative analysis of Gamelyn in relation to the medieval and modern conceptualizations of medieval narrative, Hardman finds it ultimately an amalgam of romance with more distinct concerns about the contemporary social issues of male inheritance and consequent violence. For example, Hardman recognizes that the romances included in the Lincoln Thornton, Gamelyn not among them, “embody the concerns of gentry families” not surprisingly in a collection which Robert Thornton created as an aid for educating his own sons. Interrogating such other manuscript evidence along with critical responses to Gamelyn, Hardman achieves a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of Gamelyn in relation to other Middle English romances, greenwood outlaw tales, and contemporary social commentary. More violent than most romances, Gamelyn more straightforwardly addresses the abuses inherent in primogeniture while offering a way to justice for the younger sons, albeit achieved through fratricide.
Carissa M. Harris’s contribution, “Wayward Maidens and Cuckold-Makers: Multilingual Female Lyric Voices in BL MS Egerton 3537,” attends to individual word usage in both of the bilingual lyric fragments placed at the top of one folio in Egerton 353, And I war a madyn and Mi love is gone to London, which she is the first to discuss. In an exemplary study, Harris pays careful attention to the details of manuscript form while unpacking the texts and the scribe’s motivations. She analyzes the scribe William Raynton’s imperfect Latin translations of the lyric lines and the ways in which he purposes them for his own ends. Harris asserts that Raynton sought “to improve their [his family’s] social rank” during the sixteenth century, evidenced by his treatment of the lyrics and the ways in which this may have furthered his agenda. Harris teases out Raynton’s reliance on and manipulation of popular song and lyric to support his obvious need to first learn and then perpetuate the masculine agenda of his class.
Michael Johnston’s essay, “A Lydgate Anthology: The Codicological Vicissitudes of Rawlinson C.48,” provides a detailed examination of the Rawlinson manuscript and argues convincingly for a “scribal partnership” (87). The two scribes in their “seemingly convoluted efforts” created “a manuscript imparting economic and moral lessons to the paterfamilias of a late medieval household” (90) with a memento mori shadow. In doing so, he recalls the single scribe, Robert Thornton, and his two fifteenth-century miscellanies (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91 and BL Add. 31042). He determines that the Rawlinson manuscript’s two scribes compiled the Lydgate anthology while they “maintained a strict division of labor” to produce a manuscript made up of parchment for the Latin writings and an unusual mix of parchment and paper for the Middle English ones (87). As he virtually unravels the quires of this manuscript, he asserts that, in spite of the distinctly different scripts and material used by the two scribes, they did not work independently. Johnston’s concluding explanation of “thematic coherence” in the manuscript leads us to a possible scribal intention in the creation of Rawlinson C.48 (103).
Section II “Honoring the Small Details” includes essays that do just that, with each scholar interrogating manuscripts to tease out and explicate their details.
Julia Boffey’s “Making Sense of Anelida’s Complaint: The Fifteenth-Century Reception ofAnelida and Arcite and its Stanza Forms” offers a detailed account of the afterlife of Chaucer’s short poem from the earliest manuscript version by John Shirley in 1420 to late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printed editions. In doing so, Boffey acknowledges the confounding elements of this “formal experiment with the effects to be achieved with varieties of line length, rhyme scheme, and length of stanza” (113). As she unpicks the various scribal artifacts of this verse form, Boffey guides the reader through the French antecedents and the later Scottish forays of both narrative and complaint, especially focusing on “the formal intricacy of Anelida’s complaint...[which] posed special difficulties for those who copied it” (121).
Richard Firth Green’s essay, “Pearl’s Rhymes,” demonstrates his linguistic vigor as he separates out the rhymes in Pearl that he believes have been misinterpreted or misrepresented in modern editions of the poem. He identifies the issues systematically, dividing the rhymes into three types—Imperfect Rhymes, Uncommon Rhymes, and Inappropriate Rhyme-Words. Supporting many of his assertions by referencing Chaucer’s “verbal sophistication” against that which is “less conspicuous in the Pearl-poet” (142), Firth Green rightly challenges the “universal expression of admiration for [the Pearl-poet’s] skills as a prosodist” (133). This essay reveals Firth Green’s careful attention to the evidence of the sole manuscript of Pearl alongside the subsequent and often heavy-handed editorial impositions, allowing the reader to gain a new perspective on the poet and his prosody as manifested in the structure of Pearl.
Wendy Scase’s “Pedagogy and the Proverbs of Hending” returns our focus to the household in her analysis of the Hending tradition of proverbs as pedagogic tools in domestic settings. This tradition in Latin, French / Anglo-Norman, and English crosses paths with proverbs from the preaching handbooks of the same period. This, she argues, allows the preachers to present “their knowledge of the corpus and their wit and skill in its application” while flattering and encouraging the pedagogic process in “multilingual, Francophone households in England” (171). The use of dialectic in the proverbs in each language lends itself most naturally to the pedagogic nature and uses of these proverbs.
The final section of this collection, Section III, entitled “Fein’s Editions at Work” offers three scholarly essays that in their methodology directly answer Fein’s clarion call to “recognize a class of ‘literary scribes’...who engaged with and mediated the texts they copied” (179).
Marjorie Harrington’s “The Role of the Interpreter in the Estoyres de la Bible (British Library, MS Harley 2253),” breaks down the trilingualism of the Harley scribe, whose approach to texts has been identified across various manuscripts besides Harley 2253. Yet, her focus is on “the single longest text copied by the Harley scribe,” in Harley 2253, the Estoyres de la Bible (183), in which he managed to interpolate his own views by way of his choice of stories and the languages he used to convey them—Hebrew, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. In her careful study of the scribal products, she asserts that he has made clear that the “Estoyres are fundamentally about translation” (183). As the embodiment of Kerby-Fulton’s “clerical proletariat,” the scribe consciously controlled the texts he chose and how they would be interpreted. Even though obviously not conversant in Hebrew, the Harley scribe left a trail of aids for understanding Hebrew terms that he encountered and/or applied in his work. Harrington argues that in his manuscript oeuvre the Harley scribe primarily “produced manuscripts that bring Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Latin into conversation with each other” (194). She believes that the Harley scribe’s choice of texts also reveals his concerns about national identity. Subsequently, she concludes with this question: “Did the Harley scribe feel that some situations (or in this case literary genres) required him to set aside his own national language in favor of the literary court language?” (195).
Jennifer Jahner’s “Prediction, Prognosis, and the Efficacious Book” investigates how thesortes texts included in household books such as the one she engages, Royal 12 C.xii, a manuscript of the Harley scribe, differ from the Latin elite tradition of such texts. The sortes in this manuscript, are a “vernacular version...fit comfortably alongside household management texts” that attempt to regulate “domestic economies” (212). For the general household usefulness of Royal 12 C.xii, the sortes “philosophical ambit” makes way for the “contingent circumstances of the everyday” (215). Further, she explores Harley 2253’s psalmic prayers, as a “merger of...the devotional meditation and the charm” (219) and the evidence of the scribe’s presentation of texts in Latin to create phylacteries to “bind or burn...in conjunction with the recitation of various psalms,” a practice long condemned by the Church (219-20).
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s “Writing Inclusively for Educated Women: Clerical Proletarian-Patroness Relationships and the Shaping of Audelay’s Poetry of Beatific Vision and Spiritual Intimacy” provides “another glimpse into this household world” (225) of those scribes that she termed “clerical proletariat” and defined as “underemployed clerks, eligible by training for church career success which, however, did not materialize, leaving them to earn a living working in secular or lay settings” (223). [3] These scribes then must make their livings from diverse sources, including the households of manor lords and noblemen, whose wives, in Audelay’s case, could be intellectually as well as spiritually inclined. Kerby Fulton identifies the ways in which John Audelay (fl. 1417-?1432), along with his contemporaries, John Shirley and John Walton, “learned to write inclusively and to be considerate of women of higher social status, especially those upon whom they were dependent” (223). In doing so, Audelay attempts through his devotional poetry not only to serve his learned patronesses in these households but, perhaps even more importantly for him, to express his theological position. Kerby-Fulton’s extensive study of Audelay clearly reveals his literary and linguistic abilities as well as his social awareness and sensitivity. Kerby-Fulton also opens a brief window into the similar situations of Audelay’s peers, John Shirley and John Walton, who shared Audelay’s concern with and attempts to counter the monastic antifeminism of other poets, such as John Lydgate.
Underpinning all the essays in this collection is Professor Fein’s tripartite methodology: an astute pathway for discovering the lives and afterlives of medieval manuscripts, their scribes, and the literary texts they wrote. These authors’ essays honor her, indeed.
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Notes:
1. Derek Pearsall, Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 1.
2. Julie Chappell, The “Prose Alexander” of Robert Thornton: The Middle English Text with a Modern English Translation (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 11.
3. See also Kerby-Fulton, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).