Middle English Manuscripts and Their Legacies

As a collection of essays in honor of the great English manuscripts scholar Ian Doyle (1925–2018), this volume joins two earlier offerings, Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission (1994) and New Science Out of Old Books (1995).1 Beautifully produced, edited with evident care, and generously illustrated with color reproductions, this additional tribute reflects Doyle’s critical importance to Middle English studies in the decades following his retirement as Keeper of Rare Books at Durham University Library in 1983, and as Reader in Bibliography in 1986. Very simply, Doyle knew more about later medieval English manuscripts—the details of their material manufacture, the hands in which their texts were written, their ownership and later collection—than almost anyone, and the essays brought together here reflect the field’s collective indebtedness to his knowledge and, perhaps even more, to his intellectual generosity.Ralph Hanna begins the volume by reassessing a marginal note, preserved in a fifteenth-century Bohemian manuscript, referring to a certain “Gwilhelmus Stuops” [“William Stoups”] as the intimate friend of the great English mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349). This is an auspicious start indeed, in keeping with an interest in Rolle and his place in later medieval religious literature recorded already in Doyle’s doctoral thesis, seen in his essay on the transmission of Rolle’s works on the Continent, and given most extensive expression in the posthumous publication of Doyle’s updating of Hope Emily Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, edited and extended by Hanna.2 With Doyle-like precision, Hanna identifies connections between a family of Stoupses and Meaux Abbey, and he very plausibly suggests that Rolle’s companion could have been a Yorkshire Cistercian who had been given leave to wander, and who thereby came to know the mystic. This is a rare and valuable glimpse into the circle of Rolle’s earliest readers, and (though Hanna does not pursue the point) it could offer a useful corrective to the long-standing notion of generalized monastic hostility toward the irregular hermit.Similar precision is evident in deeply rewarding chapters by David Rundle and James Willoughby. Following on pathbreaking discussions by Doyle and Hanna, Rundle disentangles the career of the scribe John Dygon, who retired in 1435 to the Carthusian house of Sheen, from that of his younger contemporary, Andrew Holes (d. 1470), and in the process he casts light on the early assembly of the library of Magdalen College, Oxford, to which both men contributed books.3 Like Holes, whose volumes bespeak their owner’s enthusiastic participation in the literary culture of the papal curia, the subject of Willoughby’s chapter, John Erghome, roamed far afield to build up a massive personal library. This collection was most likely added to the conventual library of the Austin Friars at York, Willoughby suggests, when Erghome was called to Naples to take up his appointment as regent master in 1386, and Willoughby teases out Erghome’s role in the creation of the York convent’s catalog, and how his sizable gift was made to fit into the larger organization of this institutional collection. In both of these chapters, in addition to the careful weighing of paleographic evidence and reflection on the limits of what Rundle calls “our imperfect knowledge,” there is a valuable impulse to assess the English religious-literary scene as it drew on and contributed to international cultures of reading and devotion. The same could be said of Martha Driver’s chapter on the continued production of manuscripts following the advent of print. Though focusing on more general trends, Driver usefully puts a variety of English examples into conversation with larger European habits of making and reading books.Several other chapters in the collection present studies of individual manuscripts. Susan Powell provides a detailed description of a fifteenth-century English manuscript of (principally) the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi, purchased for the Biblioteca Statale di Lucca (where it is now MS 3540) for the sake of the vita of St. Zita (d. 1272) that appears on fol. 163r–v. This book had apparently caught Doyle’s interest owing to its description as “perhaps Carthusian” at the time of its sale in 1972, though Powell’s work makes that claim unlikely. Here Powell builds on notes on the manuscript now preserved among Doyle’s papers in the University Library at Cambridge (see 34n27), and it will be fascinating to see what other insights can be gleaned from this resource in the coming decades.In his chapter, William Marx returns to a book he has discussed elsewhere, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 5006, a gospel harmony in parallel Latin and English, completed in 1568 by the priest John Warrin.4 In addition to illustrating Warrin’s priorities as translator and, indeed, exegete, and emphasizing his intriguing decision to reserve non-biblical material (included in medieval Vita Christi texts) for a final section of Annotations, Marx fruitfully positions Warrin within the larger community of English Catholics in the second half of the sixteenth century, in which context his project appears as one of several works anticipating the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible (1582/1609–10).Two other chapters take up the handling of individual manuscripts of religious literature in the hands of later printers and editors. Veronica O’Mara provides an overview of the publication history of John Fisher’s sermon for the month’s mind of Margaret Beaufort, drawing attention to a manuscript, St. John’s College Archives, SJCA/D91.23, which O’Mara identifies as a witness to the text independent of the first printing of the sermon in 1509. Margaret Connolly tracks the fate of a copy of the Middle English Mirror now divided between Manchester, John Rylands University Library MS English 109 and Norwich Cathedral MS 5, mutilated (at least in part) by Charles Clark (d. 1880) in the course of his enthusiastic effort to illustrate what he variously called The Style of Preaching Four Hundred Years Ago and Pulpit Oratory Four Centuries Ago, these being the titles of pamphlets issued from his printing press in 1837 and 1839, respectively. Among other fascinating details, Connolly notes that Clark apparently sold the manuscript back to the dealer from whom he had bought it, John Russell Smith, only to write to Smith again, in an effort to track the book down and reacquire it. As Connolly observes, this “convoluted” example should challenge “the usual (and entirely reasonable) thinking . . . that a manuscript will have passed from owner to owner seriatim in a chronology that never double-backed on itself” (292).Several other chapters focus on manuscripts of secular literature not strictly relevant to the present journal, and which I can (for the sake of length) only note in passing: Julia Boffey’s useful survey of manuscripts containing two or more lyrics by Geoffrey Chaucer (chapter 3), Carol Meale’s tour through the letters of the Trevelyan family, focusing especially on George Trevelyan (chapter 6), Richard Gameson’s reappraisal (with more Doyle-like precision) of the provenance of Oxford, Trinity College MS 49 (chapter 10), and Kathleen Scott’s proposed identification of the corpus of a heraldic painter in the court of Henry VII (chapter 11).In addition to these studies, variously indebted to Doyle’s work and following the model provided in his writing, the volume is especially useful for a series of chapters that reflect on Doyle’s career and, more generally, on the study of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. Thus Richard Beadle reconstructs Henry Bradshaw’s successful efforts to acquire a 1535 imprint of the Coverdale Bible, and in the process he recovers some of the methods and motivations that led Doyle to value Bradshaw’s “wide but latent contributions to many areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bibliographical, historical, and literary scholarship, and the consequent appearance of many of his discoveries in the publications of others” (295). Pamela Robinson’s account of “Ian Doyle as a Palaeographer” is likewise illuminating, usefully stressing both Doyle’s commitment to paleography as an international enterprise (and therefore requiring nomenclature descriptive across various national traditions), and her insistence (following Doyle) that identifying “the handwriting of an individual scribe” is “not just a matter of distinguishing . . . characteristic letter forms, but of seeing them in context, a process which requires one to look at rather than for” (367). The context in which Doyle did such looking is, finally, reconstructed in a pair of chapters by A. S. G. Edwards, on Doyle’s time in Cambridge, and at greater length by Elizabeth Rainey, on his time in Durham. These chapters go far in explaining the nature of Doyle’s scholarly publications, which certainly bear out what Rainey calls his perfectionism (see 359), and with his remarkable Cambridge doctoral thesis (especially the “appended notes” in volume 2) giving rise to various essays—all the more important in light of the limited time afforded by his work as a librarian.In his meticulous essays on scribal œuvres and the transmission of English religious writings, his technical introductions to manuscript facsimiles and his extensive correspondence with other scholars, Ian Doyle revealed a seemingly unmatched ability to retain and recall details of the making, circulation, and collection of medieval manuscripts. For the foreseeable future, any work on a manuscript of later medieval English religious writing should begin with the question of what Doyle had to say about it. Rainey and Edwards’s bibliography of his publications (393–409) will therefore prove especially useful to future research, and, indeed, I wonder if we will in the near future see a volume collecting Doyle’s most significant (and, in some cases, now relatively hard to access) chapters in one place. Such a volume would fittingly sit beside this one, the collections from the mid-1990s, and, when it finally appears, the catalog of Durham University Library’s manuscripts to which he devoted so much time and care (cf. 362), all bearing witness to Doyle’s remarkable attentiveness and incisive scholarly mind

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