Recent Books

摘要

This is a collection of selected essays by Ralph Hanna. Ten chapters are reprinted from elsewhere with some updated references, three others are new productions, and the final fifth of the book is a new extended study, a monograph in miniature, with its own bibliography. The first section of the book gathers writings on the polylingual state of medieval English books and texts, recording and studying the inter-penetration of what modern scholarship might see as separate languages. Its chapters are: 'Literacy, Schooling, Universities', 'Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England?' (first published here), 'Lambeth Palace Library, MS z6o and the Problem of English Vernacularity', 'Editing "Middle English Lyrics": The Case of Candet nudatum pectus', and 'Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26' (first published here). The essays of the second section all revolve around manuscripts which contain disjunctions and messy evidence of production and use. Its chapters are: 'Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission', 'Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93', 'A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited', and 'Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66'. The third section contains pieces which bring local history to bear on specific book-historical case studies. Its chapters are: 'Yorkshire Writers', 'Some North Yorkshire Scribes and their Context', 'Dr Peter Partridge and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 98', and 'John of Wales and "Classicising Friars'" (first published here). The fourth section, the miniature monograph, is a literary-critical study of the figure of Patience in Piers Plowman, and a sustained argument for the value of direct and precise reading in approaching Langland's poetry. The book as a whole models, inculcates, and implicitly argues for a type of scholarship which attends to the very immediate details of specific situations in books and texts from the past.