The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350–1500. By Michael Johnston

‘THE CENTRAL THESIS OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH BOOK is that late medieval England witnessed a proliferation of manuscript forms’ (p. 2). After a lengthy Introduction this argument is developed over seven chapters: ‘Nomenclature’; ‘The Elaborate Book’; ‘The Streamlined Book’; ‘The Evolving Book’; ‘The DIY Book’; and two chapters on ‘The Proliferation of Scribes’, the first on ‘The Manuscript Evidence’ and the second on ‘The Historical Evidence’. There is a brief Coda and an Appendix that lists the manuscripts related to this study.

Johnston argues that ‘we need to think of the manuscripts underwriting [sic] Middle English literary culture as a very flexible medium, able to accommodate the needs of many kinds of readers and arising [sic] from the hands of many different kinds of scribes’ (p. 3). The assertion raises some questions including what is meant by ‘literary culture’, a term that is not defined. More broadly, one might ask how the choice of language is significant in terms of later medieval manuscript production. Do those written in Middle English differ in aspects of their material form from books written in Latin or French or in a combination of languages in this period? The lack of a comparative aspect makes it hard to understand why or how language may have been a determinant of production.

Matters are made more uncertain by Johnston’s evidence base for this book, which is focused on manuscripts of specific works. He has chosen four poems. Two of these are lengthy—the anonymous Prick of Conscience and William Langland’s Piers Plowman—and two are relatively brief—John Lydgate’s Dietary and his ‘Stanspuer ad mensam’. The justification for these choices is given in the Introduction: the Prick of Conscience is ‘among the most popular of all Middle English texts’ (p. 8), an assertion presumably based on the number of surviving manuscripts. For Piers Plowman we are told simply that ‘as a piece of literature, it is certainly my favourite Middle English text (which played no small part in its inclusion within my corpus)’ (p. 9). This may not seem to some the most secure criterion. The other two works are both much shorter and both by Lydgate, his quasi-medical Dietary and the courtesy guide ‘Stans puer ad mensam’. The rationale here is that ‘the manuscripts of Lydgate’s short poetry have received scant notice’ (p. 10). Once again, the proposition is uncompelling: neither text survives as a separate manuscript book, although they both appear frequently as parts of manuscripts. And the Dietary has received very detailed discussion quite recently, in 2015, in a valuable study by Jake Walsh-Morrissey that is included in Johnston’s bibliography (p. 267).

It is therefore possible to be unconvinced by the claim that ‘I constructed this corpus to be a diverse, representative sample of Middle English literature’ (p. 11). One wonders what ‘representative’ is intended to signify here. The omission of any prose work in Middle English is simply the most obvious question that comes to mind. Such popular verse categories as lyric or romance are omitted from consideration, as are a range of widely circulating works by authors other than Langland and Lydgate. And to have two of the four works by the same author seems neither ‘diverse’ or ‘representative.’

The kinds of texts that Johnston has chosen raise other difficulties. An issue that he circles around rather uneasily is speculative manuscript production. At one point he says that it ‘did not exist in the period (or, at least, was exceedingly rare)’ (p. 76). But a few pages later he points to a range of Middle English (and other) texts that may well have been produced at least to some extent speculatively (a list that could be extended), before concluding that ‘I find simply no evidence for it among the manuscripts of The Prick of Conscience, Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s “Dietary”, or Lydgate’s “Stans puer ad mensam”’ (p. 83). That he finds no evidence within such a limited range of materials may only indicate that his evidence base is too restricted to allow an adequate assessment of some questions to do with manuscript production within the period that he is examining.

The actual size of that evidence base, in terms of numbers of manuscripts analysed, poses further questions. Johnston tells us that the four texts that he has chosen have yielded ‘220 manuscript witnesses to these four texts, 107 of The Prick of Conscience, 46 of Piers Plowman, 45 of “The Dietary” and 22 of “Stans Puer ad mensam”. But once we exclude those manuscripts preserving multiple texts from the corpus, my study actually encompasses 202 individual manuscripts’ (p. 10). But neither number is easy to reconcile with those listed in the index of manuscripts (pp. 281–84). Leaving aside a number listed there that have no relevance to his under taking (for example, ‘Lytlington Missal’, ‘Macclesfield Psalter’, ‘Ormsby Psalter’, all cited without shelfmarks) this index records 175 manuscripts. But some of these do not contain any of the texts Johnston discusses: for example, Cambridge, Peterhouse 110, Cambridge University Library Ff. 1. 6 and Ff. 2. 38, Lincoln Cathedral 91, Oxford, University College 97, Winchester College 11; on the other hand, at least one that does, Cambridge University Library Hh. 4. 12, which includes ‘Stans Puer’, is omitted from the index. This is all rather hard to work out. But it seems to suggest that the number of manuscripts that Johnston actually draws on for his evidence is smaller than he indicates.

All in all, in both methodology and range Johnston’s undertaking seems not best conceived. Both his choice of the texts and the uncertainty about the extent of his evidence base raise problems. Overall, this book does not do justice to his abilities. His categories of types of manuscripts explored in chapters 2–5 are sensible, if unsurprising, and without the constraints of his evidence base could have been more extensively developed by drawing on a wider range of evidence. And often he has points of value to make in his observations on specific manuscripts. In such respects he is an able and thoughtful guide through the interpretative thickets of Middle English manuscript study. But this is not a book about ‘The Middle English Book’ so much as ‘Some Middle English Manuscripts’; the distinction is of significance.

A few points of detail invite reconsideration. On p. 67 the assertion that ‘The Prick of Conscience only receives an illustration [in] BodL Laud misc. 486’ is incorrect: an historiated initial appears in Durham, Ushaw College MS 50 and is published in an article by A. I. Doyle in 2000 cited in Johnston’s bibliography (p. 250). Curiously, the list of contents of BL Arundel 140 on p. 92 fails to mention that it includes Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee from the Canterbury Tales. On p. 236 the claim that the Beeleigh Abbey Foyle manuscript of the Prick of Conscience is ‘in private hands, thus inaccessible’ invites some clarification: it is indeed now in a European private collection, but is no longer at Beeleigh Abbey; it was sold, with other Foyle manuscripts, at Christie’s, 11 July 2000, lot 77 (£70,000 to Kraus). And two minor corrections to p. 237: the bifolium of Piers Plowman formerly owned by John Holloway was sold some years ago from the Schøyen collection and is now MS Osborn fa 45 in the Beinecke Library at Yale, which has been the owner and not merely the recipient on loan of the Takamiya manuscripts since at least 2017.