The English Mediaeval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths

Citation

Van Kampen, K.L. (2001), "The English Mediaeval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 99-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.2.99.10

This collection of studies of the book in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is dedicated to the life and work of Jeremy Griffiths, the late manuscript scholar, bookseller, and co‐editor of the annual series English Manuscript Studies 1100‐1700. Griffiths is memorialized throughout the contributions by his friends and peers, who anchor their own research on the impetus of their scholarly and social interaction with Griffiths. The preliminary materials offer two accounts of Griffiths’ professional accomplishments and Edwards has prepared a bibliography of Griffiths’ publications. Short of editing and publishing Griffiths’ private hoard of notes and catalogues, The English Medieval Book succeeds as a fitting testimonial to the life work of an individual which is both personally touching and intellectually beneficial.

Contributors to this work make up a handlist of representatives of the diversified field of modern scholarship of the medieval book, including a palaeographer, bookseller, art historian, librarian, bibliographer, text critic, and independent scholar. Unlike currently fashionable treatments of this period through the investigation of a profusion of documentary materials, this collection brings fresh insights into well‐known manuscripts and texts of the traditional Middle English canon: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Caxton, as well as sermons and biblical texts. The majority of the contributions offer copy‐specific, codicological descriptions with photographs (generously provided by collector/scholar Toshiyuki Takamiya), and the work as a whole enlightens that period of time in England in which the book – as a vehicle of language, social order, and belief, as much as of learning – began to have a wider and more controversial context.

Stephen Partridge examines the manuscript tradition of two Canterbury Tales, The Cook’s Tale and The Squire’s Tale, treating each work as autonomous from the whole by investigating scribal variation specifically in relation to spacing. He attempts to arrive at Chaucer’s own intentions for order and arrangement of these two tales in particular. N.F. Blake provides a textual analysis of exemplars to Caxton’s second edition of Canterbury Tales (1482), and reconstructs the options and choices of both the publisher and his compositors on this enigmatic edition. A number of new scribal or derivational discoveries are herein presented: A.I. Doyle attributes the hand from a fragment of the Prick of Conscience as that belonging to the copier of two other important and obscure English texts; Linne R. Mooney documents Griffiths’ discovery of a new manuscript in the hand of the prolific “Hammond Scribe”; Christopher de Hamel’s cameo contribution to this collection is the identification of a previously unknown Sarum Book of Hours from the Bohun Library.

Julia Boffey enhances our knowledge of medieval book usage with her explanation of the often idiosyncratic miscellanies known as “Household Books” and their application to fifteenth‐century domestic life. A.S.G. Edwards discusses the problem of the conception of authorship in fifteenth‐century literary culture as evidenced in verse collections of the time. Kathleen Scott discusses the illustration of the Register of the Fraternity of the Holy Trinity at Luton Church, and the role of this document in the spiritual life of that body.

Several studies consider the development of prominent libraries and collections of mediaeval books. Kate Harris, Librarian at Longleat House, presents an anecdotal chapter in the formation of that formidable library, and Andrew Watson reports on the collecting practices and contents of the personal holdings of the recusant Robert Hare.

In a collection of essays that considers the fourteenth‐ and fifteenth‐century book in England, it is mildly suprising that there is virtually no mention of the Lollards, nor representation of the vibrant academic interest in this group whose legacy is defined by book production and the democratization of learning. On the other hand, the greatest offering of The English Mediaeval Book is its investigation into the intellectual product of the Augustinian orders and the composition and propagation of vernacular texts for which they were responsible. Vincent Gillespie’s account of the formation and administration of the library at Syon Abbey complements Ralph Hanna’s inquiry into the Augustinian canon in general. Both articles expand our understanding of their historical, scientific, religious, and classical pursuits. In contrast to previous conceptions, Hanna and Gillespie convincingly identify a broad intellectual curiosity on the part of this order, often considered “backward” in comparison to others, and in particular, link the Augustinians to the progress of vernacular spiritual discourse that had its triumph in the sixteenth century.