TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ash-Irisarri,, Kate
AU2 - Atkinson,, Laurie
AU3 - Bateman,, Mary
AU4 - Black,, Daisy
AU5 - Dow,, Anna
AU6 - Greene,, Darragh
AU7 - Grossman,, Joel
AU8 - Lazikani,, Ayoush
AU9 - Pascual, Rafael, J
AU1 - Pattwell,, Niamh
AU1 - Perry, R, D
AU1 - Sawyer,, Daniel
AU1 - Wolf,, Johannes
AB - Abstract This chapter has 14 sections: 1. General and Miscellaneous; 2. Theory; 3. Manuscript and Technical Studies; 4. Religious Prose; 5. Secular Prose; 6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; 7. Piers Plowman; 8. Gower; 9. Older Scots; 10. Drama; 11. Secular Verse; 12. Religious Verse; 13. Romance: Metrical, Alliterative, Prose; 14. Early Middle English. Section 1 is by Mary Bateman; section 2 is by R.D. Perry; section 3 is by Daniel Sawyer; section 4 is by Niamh Pattwell; section 5 is by Johannes Wolf; section 6 is by Rafael J. Pascual; section 7 is by Joel Grossman; section 8 is by Laurie Atkinson; section 9 is by Kate Ash-Irisarri; section 10 is by Daisy Black; section 11 is by Darragh Greene; sections 12 and 14 are by Ayoush Lazikani; section 13 is by Anna Dow, with contributions from Mary Bateman in section 13(a). 1. General and Miscellaneous The Fifteenth Century XVI: Examining Identity, edited by Linda Clark, marks the most recent volume in the series. This instalment contains a wealth of important contributions which promise to examine various kinds of identity: ecclesiastical, secular, national, social. The majority of the essays in this volume concern aspects of identity in the Church, ranging from the collective (Macht, Gosling, and Atkinson) to the individual (Lane and Lepine). Desmond Atkinson’s reassessment of ordinand titles (‘Getting Connected: the Medieval Ordinand and his Search for Titulus’, pp. 45–61) provides a focused case study of titles relating to the diocese of Salisbury, concluding that both local geography and the pull of Oxford University influenced the provision of titles at this time. Daniel F. Gosling’s ‘Edward IV’s Charta de Libertatibus Clericorum’ (pp. 83–104) offers a fresh perspective on this text. Instead of interpreting the charter as a cynical attempt to pacify the ecclesiastical community in a time of political instability, Gosling considers the Charta in light of what it can tell us about recent grievances between Church and monarch, and suggests some reasons for its failure. While Gosling’s focus is the relationship between the sovereign and the Church, Claire Macht’s essay, ‘Changes in Monastic Historical Writing Throughout the Long Fifteenth Century’ (pp. 1–26), concerns the interplay between the Church and the lay public. Macht’s analysis of changes in the praxis of monastic historiography in the fifteenth century sheds light on the ways in which religious houses constructed and communicated their identities. Macht challenges the view that the colourful details of earlier monastic chronicles (biographies of abbots, or foundation histories and pseudo-histories) were simply purged from chronicles after the fifteenth century in favour of a more pragmatic administrative approach. Instead, Macht demonstrates that these lively details were ‘migrated’ to formats more accessible to a visiting public within the architectural environment of the church, abbey, or monastery. These formats included stained-glass windows, funerary monuments, and tabulae, mediated in some cases by monks or chaplains acting as guides for pilgrims. Macht’s contribution is original and timely. Most intriguing of all is the conclusion that the transmission between text and tabulae was not a one-way affair, but rather that material ‘could be rewritten back into chronicles via church tablets’ (p. 23). In addition to these meaningful conclusions, Macht also includes a thoroughly researched catalogue of all thirty-two known tabulae (only three of which survive), along with their contents, date, and location—something that researchers across disciplines will undoubtedly find useful. Another standout contribution in this collection is Samuel Lane’s lively essay on ‘The Political Career of William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury (1438–50)’ (pp. 63–82). Ayscough has long been characterized as a villainous political schemer; but Lane demonstrates persuasively that Ayscough was in fact another casualty of the propaganda machine focused on smearing Henry VI’s immediate circle and the duke of Suffolk’s ‘clique’. This began even in Ayscough’s own lifetime. In rehabilitating Ayscough, Lane makes clear the need to revisit our assumptions about other figures in William de la Pole’s immediate network. David Lepine, in ‘“Such Great Merits”: The Pastoral Influence of a Learned Resident Vicar, John Hornley of Dartford’ (pp. 24–44), also takes a biographical approach, assessing the extent of Hornley’s influence on the devotional life of the parish. The remaining items in this collection relate to the interactions between and intersections of different national and social identities. Brian Coleman, in ‘An English Gentry Abroad: the Gentry of English Ireland’ (pp. 123–36), challenges the queasiness regarding the use of the term ‘gentry’ to describe the leading families in the English colony of Louth, Ireland. Drawing on the criteria set out by Peter Coss in the 1990s, Coleman concludes that there is a clear stratum of ‘lesser nobility’ apparent among the upper echelons of the Dublin environs during the fifteenth century. Two perspectives on a life (and death) are compared in Charles Giry-Deloison’s essay, ‘Dying on Duty: A French Ambassador’s Funeral in London in 1512’ (pp. 155–76), in which the author presents a study and editions of two different accounts (one English, one French) of the funeral of Antoine de Pierrepont. Zosia Edwards engages with the collection’s identity theme directly in her article on ‘Identity Theft in Later Medieval London’ (pp. 137–54). Although all the essays in this collection relate in some way to the overarching ‘identity’ theme, Edwards’ and Coleman’s contributions perhaps go the furthest in truly ‘examining’ what identity really means with regard to their respective subject matter. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, an essay collection edited by Elizabeth et al., pays homage to the life’s work of Helen Cooper. In her ground-breaking book The English Romance in Time [2004], Cooper demonstrated how the biological concept of ‘meme’ could help us to understand the malleable but recognizable qualities of romance, and its influence across other medieval and post-medieval genres. ‘Meme’ is defined as ‘an idea that behaves like a gene in its ability to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt, and therefore survive in different forms and cultures’ (p. 3). Today, ‘memes’ are instantly recognizable as multimedia artefacts which can be reshared and adapted for different purposes across social media channels. In the introduction to this collection (pp. 1–24), Megan Leitch draws out other similarities between the digital and romance worlds, such as the tangle of intertextual references in romance that resemble a kind of ‘hypertext’ (p. 16). The first section, ‘Romance Disruptions’, comprises three essays which pay attention to the various disruptive and uncontainable qualities of Middle English romance. Neil Cartlidge’s chapter (pp. 27–48) refers to the ‘mischievous’ qualities of medieval romances—not the playful ‘mischief’ we know today, but the uncomfortable, edgy, and unpredictable qualities present in Middle English romance. Reading these romances in the constant naive expectation that they must communicate a ‘deeper meaning’ of some sort means that carefully constructed surface elements are often sadly overlooked (or, as Cartlidge puts it, ‘stripped’, p. 30). Cartlidge’s findings shake these romances from the cosy, reassuring place that they hold in our cultural consciousness, a position which is sometimes reflected in the recent editions of these texts. Cartlidge’s observations about the discomfort of Middle English romance is bolstered by the following chapter by Marcel Elias (pp. 49–66). Elias focuses on three contagious romance motifs or ‘memes’: the hostile challenger; the noble Saracen; and the ambivalent hero (p. 49). Elias traces the ways in which these motifs were adapted and reworked during the course of the fourteenth century, arguing that their adaptation echoes several contemporary anxieties of the period. This included concerns at home (the fragility of chivalric culture following the Hundred Years War), away (Christianity’s failure to take hold in the East), and the points of connection in between (the speed and extent of the Ottoman invasion in Europe). Christopher Cannon’s chapter on the relationship between comedy and tragedy in Malory’s Morte Darthur (pp. 67–82) is discussed below in Section 13(a). The following section, ‘Romance and Narrative Strategies’, includes a disparate but excellent selection of essays which engage with narrative technique, and the ways in which material is re-formed into new texts. Jill Mann’s focus is Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (pp. 85–102), and the ways in which the tale’s narrative is constructed to emphasize ‘the arbitrary nature of its events’ (p. 92). This is partly achieved through the text’s episodic, aventure-driven narrative structure, a result of the text’s romance refashioning from its epic original, Boccaccio’s Teseida. Mann concludes that the text prompts a central question that cannot be answered, ‘does human life have a final meaning?’ (p. 103), an interesting observation in light of Neil Cartlidge’s criticism, earlier in this collection, of the contemporary romance reader’s ‘quest for meaning’, and the texts’ constant ability to resist such readings. Yeager’s chapter, which follows (pp. 103–14), considers another romance incorporated into a tale collection: ‘The Tale of Apollonius’ from Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Because of its focus on Gower, this chapter is discussed below in Section 8. Elizabeth Archibald’s essay on Malory (pp. 115–32) is discussed below in Section 13(a). The final essay in this collection, by Barry Windeatt (pp. 133–52), takes a broad view, examining body language and gesture across a wide range of Middle English romances. Windeatt’s overarching project is to create a ‘lexicon’ of body language in English vernacular romance, which will enable us to understand another semantic layer in these texts that has previously been hard to read. A study like this is invaluable in helping us to understand the emotional contours of Middle English romances, which have too often been criticized for their perceived lack of interiority and emotional depth. Marco Nievergelt’s study of Sir Cleges also challenges widespread assumptions about insular romance, this time concerning the ‘homiletic romance’ (pp. 155–72). As a sub-category of romance, homiletic romances tend to be viewed as didactic; but in Nievergelt’s view this is approach is reductive, ignoring the interconnectedness of sacred and secular ideals in these romances, and thus overlooking these texts’ complex theological possibilities. Nievergelt’s case is built around his reading of the connections between largesse and divine grace in Sir Cleges, connections which Nievergelt reads as a kind of ‘economy’. The author’s argument leans on previous work by Ad Putter on gift-giving in Sir Amadace, another so-called ‘homiletic’ romance. We should not, Nievergelt argues, think of these as ‘homiletic’ romances, but rather ‘theological’ romances. The following contribution, by Miriam Edlich-Muth, also considers the genre-bending possibilities of romance (pp. 173–88). Edlich-Muth focuses on the ways in which the generically diverse ‘memes’ in the romance Chevalere Assigne were reworked as the text’s framework was adapted from a supernatural tale centred around magic into a divine and providential one. In the final essay of this section, Corinne Saunders ‘lifts the veil’ on multisensory visions in Malory’s Morte Darthur, from disembodied voices to visual experiences (pp. 189–206). The final section deals with later romances, and nods to Cooper’s own work on the long afterlife of romance. Ad Putter (pp. 209–28) discusses the neglected romance The Court of Love, defending against previous disparagements of its literary qualities and arguing the case for its quality as a piece of allegorical writing. Putter also explores possibilities regarding the poem’s authorship. Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards consider Middle English romance in print in their study of The Squire of Low Degree (pp. 229–40), published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1520. Tantalizingly, this romance has no known source. Boffey and Edwards argue that the Squire represents a turning point in de Worde’s publishing tastes, which were unusual in that he seems to have actively pursued the publication of romance when his peers did not. The final essay in this collection, by Andrew Lynch (pp. 241–56), takes us forward several centuries to consider the ways in which medieval romance tropes, and in particular the question of chivalry, provided an ideal site for nineteenth-century authors to explore the complexities of youth at war. Lynch argues that Walter Scott and Charlotte M. Yonge contested and redefined chivalry to focus specifically on youth at war, echoing Malory’s negotiation of the ideals and problems implicit in chivalry that had come years before. In sum, this collection provides an important contribution to scholarship on Middle English romance, considering these ‘popular’ forms as a group of texts to be studied together and in their own terms, rather than as the poor sister to French courtly romance. Laura Varnam’s excellent monograph The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture offers a sensitive and nuanced study of the different ways in which sacred spaces such as churches and cathedrals were ‘read, constructed, and contested by their communities’, and how the sanctity of the spaces themselves was ‘manifested and understood’ by the people who used them (p. 2). The value of Varnam’s study lies in her truly interdisciplinary approach. This is not a literary study which merely nods at art history, spatial theory, and the history of the built environment, but rather a fully integrated piece of research which combines these four methodologies seamlessly in order to say something new about sacred spaces in medieval England: that they were not only built for the people who used them, but also built (both physically and also metaphysically in terms of their sanctity) through the ways in which they were used. Chapter 1 (pp. 33–60) begins by considering the moment when a church first becomes sacred space: the consecration ceremony. By considering this liturgical ritual in light of its performative elements, Varnam elucidates the ways in which the sacred space of a church is first called into being, and the ways in which the initial act of consecration shaped subsequent sacred practice within the church. The second chapter (pp. 61–122) offers a case study of a particular text: the fifteenth-century English translation of the twelfth-century Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church. Varnam deftly manages several strands of enquiry here: the fifteenth-century Middle English translation of the Book; the space of the church itself; and the political and ecclesiastical life of the Book’s English translator, whom Varnam identifies as Roger Walden. Chapter 3 (pp. 123–78) is a close study of ‘pastoral care in the parish church’, and it is this chapter where the relationship between the laity and the church is especially clear. This section exemplifies one of the most interesting aspects of Varnam’s argument: that the laity could have a major impact on the sanctity (or profanity) of the church space based on their own behaviour within it. Varnam’s key sources here are pastoral care materials that are ‘shared between the textual and visual fields’ (p. 133), including wall paintings, stained-glass windows, sermons, conduct poems, penitential handbooks, and a host of other material geared towards ‘educat[ing] the laity in the basic tenets of the faith’ (p. 124). Of particular interest is Varnam’s material on the demons that can unexpectedly appear in the didactic text and imagery of the church, such as Tutivillus (pp. 136–8). While chapter 3 sheds light on the relationship between the church and the laity through the eyes of the clergy, chapter 4, ‘Placing the People at the Heart of Sacred Space’ (pp. 179–240), flips the perspective. The very existence of the physical church in terms of its buildings was up for debate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this chapter, Varnam gets to the heart of this debate by comparing both orthodox and Lollard discussions of what the church ‘betokeneth’, particularly in terms of the relationship between lay people and the church building (p. 180). This chapter is the most focused section of the monograph, providing a major contribution to our understanding of the place of the parish church in the emotional and imaginative landscape of the late medieval laity. Varnam closes her book by recounting her own experiences of sacred space following a visit to St Botolph’s church in Slapton, Northamptonshire, demonstrating how some of the strategies used in the later Middle Ages to engage the laity with sacred space still prove remarkably effective (and indeed affective) today. The first instalment of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, focused on the Middle Ages and authored by Karen A. Winstead, provides an overview of medieval life-writing in all its variant forms. The series is intended for ‘the needs of a general as well as an academic audience’, and indeed the broad-based and accessible format of this volume will mean that it finds a happy place on the shelves of academics, undergraduates, and the general reader alike. Over-simplified shibboleths about medieval life-writing are dissolved: several previous volumes on life-writing do not mention any medieval authors other than Margery Kempe, whose Boke is often dubbed ‘the first English autobiography’. In this volume, Kempe does not make an appearance until page 69, and she appears alongside a wealth of other life-writing subjects. Winstead’s main focus is life-writing in English, but complementary examples from elsewhere are brought to bear on the volume, such as the writings of Abelard and Héloise, the vidas and razos of the Provençal troubadours, and Hildegard of Bingen’s self-fashioning. Saints’ lives are a particular specialism of Winstead’s, and the chapters on hagiography are especially good. As Winstead argues, the demarcations that we often turn to (sometimes problematically) to define life-writing can prove awkward when it comes to analysing medieval texts of this type, which tend to defy the definitions of the life-writing genre. Thus, a description of an individual saint’s life is not always that. For example, Winstead references Gregory of Tours’ assertion that ‘it is more accurate to speak of the life of the saints … than the lives of the saints’, because ‘the lives of the blessed all manifest Christ’s life’ (p. 3). Similarly, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, always fuzzy when it comes to life-writing and particularly the performative self-fashioning of autobiography, become even hazier when it comes to medieval life-writing. Winstead clearly grasps this complexity, presenting three ‘fictional’ case studies at the end of the volume—Beowulf, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin, and a selection of ‘hagiographical fictions’. However, there are moments when the complicated relationship between medieval fictionality and non-fictionality is oversimplified, such as Winstead’s assertion that the whole of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae is ‘Geoffrey’s invention’ (p. 99). Galfridian scholars are still not in agreement as to this subject, and in the absence of textual sources and any new evidence it is still not possible to conclude that this is definitively the case. Moreover, the texts that we view as conclusively fictional would not have been seen that way by their medieval audiences, and it may have been helpful to avoid the use of fictionality as a structural strategy for the book. This said, the book’s structure effectively foregrounds the life-writing aspects of Beowulf and the other ‘fictive’ texts, an element which is one of this volume’s strengths. In sum, these are minor quibbles with a book that is impressively wide in scope and an effective opening volume for a life-writing series. In a time when a more globalized pedagogy of the Middle Ages is growing increasingly crucial, this volume makes a welcome contribution to understanding, and would no doubt be a valuable addition to course reading lists. 2. Theory As with previous years, this section covers both works that use medieval theoretical material to discuss Middle English texts and works that discuss Middle English using modern and contemporary theories. This year saw the publication of two important books devoted to the use of critical race theories. The first, and more wide-ranging, is Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Perhaps the most important contribution of the book is a succinct yet encompassing definition of race as it pertains to the Middle Ages, and one that will no doubt show up in works interested in this critical period for the foreseeable future; the long definition and its ramifications, therefore, deserve to be outlined in full here. ‘Race’, Heng explains, ‘is one of the primary names we have—a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes—that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups’ (p. 3; the entire definition is in italics, which I have dropped). Race, therefore, is only a quality insomuch as it is actively made one, and such an activity also means that it is subject to specific historical situations and alteration as history itself changes: ‘race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of people for differential treatment’ (p. 3). For instance, Heng points out that ‘in addressing the nested discourses formative of race in the European Middle Ages, it was particularly important to note that religion—the paramount source of authority in the medieval period—could function both socioculturally and biopolitically’ (p. 3). As the institutional and political co-ordinates of religion might change in different times and in different places, so to would its race-making function. As this example of institutional religious practices suggests, Heng shows that race-making is more than a set of individual decisions and prejudices: ‘race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences rather than a substantive content’ (p. 3). After an opening overview of the history of critical race studies’ engagement with the past, as well as modern and medieval theories of racial difference, the book turns to a vast corpus of examples and instantiations of race-making. Geographically, this book seeks to cover all of Europe and Europe’s engagement with the rest of the Old World (the Middle East, the Far East, and Africa) as well as the New (through Viking contact with Native Americans); aesthetically, it draws from literature, various sorts of artworks, and historical materials. One of the most interesting discussions in the book is about the statue of the Black Maurice of Magdeburg, but—like much of Heng’s book—by pertaining to a sculpture as well as a German artwork such a discussion lies far outside the scope of this overview. In terms of its engagement with Middle English materials, there is an extended discussion of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale in the second chapter ‘State/Nation—A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England’ (pp. 81–90). The King of Tars makes sporadic appearances throughout chapters 3 and 4, ‘War/Empire: Race Figures in the International Contest: The Islamic “Saracen”’ and ‘Color: Epidermal Race, Fantasmatic Race: Blackness and Africa in the Racial Sensorium’ respectively (most extensively on pp. 138–40 and 214–18). And Mandeville’s Travels is discussed at length in chapter 6, ‘World II: The Mongol Empire: Global Race as Absolute Power’ (pp. 349–82). The second book devoted to critical race theory is Matthew X. Vernon’s The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. Vernon’s project is one of intellectual recovery. He acknowledges, and begins by discussing, the way that the Middle Ages have been used in the history of American racism in particular, but his book is also invested in promoting a counter-narrative. He points out that ‘African-Americans throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have utilized the critical matrix of meaning bound up in the Middle Ages’—and by this he means ‘its association with individual nobility, the cultural reconciliation and hybridization implied in the Anglo-Norman period, theories of feudal land attachments, the sociolinguistic implications of speaking and writing in English, even the notion of Anglo-Saxon slavery’—all of which serve ‘to expose the fantasy that underpinned discourses of citizenship and to suggest alternative terms of belonging within the nation’ (p. 18). As such, Vernon’s book is a sort of ‘anti-genealogy’ that traces forms of ‘surrogated kinship’ that work against the ‘seemingly literal kinship that undergirds many discussions of the Middle Ages and whiteness’ (p. 29). The book, then, is interested in those ‘strategic misreadings’ that ‘function as a way to forge kinship across the boundaries of time and the constructions of race’ (p. 31). As the first chapter—largely a work of intellectual history—explains, African American thinkers in the decades following the Civil War turned to the Middle Ages because it ‘offered narratives of power, subjection, encounter, and national foundation that African-Americans could wield to position their cultural experience as integral to the larger arc of American history’ (p. 49). For instance, The Anglo-African Magazine, a short-lived periodical published between 1859 and 1862, was interested in the way that “the term Anglo-Saxon itself … implied hybrid identity’, and led the editors of the magazine to understand the early medieval period, full of the migration and intermingling of peoples, as a way to understand and reclaim their own experience (p. 61). In terms of Middle English literature, the book presents an extended reading of Gloria Naylor’s use of Chaucer (and Dante) in her fiction (pp. 203–45) and it returns to Carolyn Dinshaw’s famous meditation on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, in Getting Medieval, in order to understand the way that Tarantino’s Django Unchained and its main character’s use of the Siegfried myth depict the persistence of both the medieval and the legacy of the Civil War in the contemporary moment (pp. 247–62). In feminist theory, Carissa Harris’s Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain investigated the uses of obscenity to teach men and women in medieval England how to behave. Obscenity can be put to different uses by men and women, and it can support different values, either degrading to women or resistant to oppressive actions and institutions. As Harris puts it, ‘some men deploy obscenity when teaching their peers how to dominate and dehumanize women’, and Harris consistently and powerfully shows throughout the book how such practices are still very much with us today (p. 3). But, she also explains, ‘other [men] use it to challenge dominant narratives about masculinity and to propose alternatives, a practice that scholars and activists have identified as one of the key sites of rape prevention more generally’ (p. 3). In terms of pedagogy between women, Harris is interested in the way that ‘obscenity enables women to voice their dissatisfaction with the sexual status quo, to instruct their partners about pleasure, and to teach each other strategies for negotiation’ (p. 3). For example, Harris expounds on the way that rape culture is taught in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, especially in the Miller’s Tale, Reeve’s Tale, and Cook’s Tale, but in a way that can be expanded to all of the fabliaux in that work (pp. 26–66). She also looks at Middle Scots flytings and a wide variety of Middle English lyrics. At the intersection of feminism and queer theory, the postmedieval special issue ‘Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism’ edited by Ruth Evans begins with a valuable overview, ‘Gender Does Not Equal Genitals’ (Postmed 9[2018] 120–31), of medieval reactions to intersexuality and the languages used to describe such individuals in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Two further essays in the issue pertain to Middle English texts. M.W. Bychowski’s ‘The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in the Middle Ages’ (Postmed 9[2018] 161–78) seeks the literal and figurative locations of intersexuality in the Middle Ages, exploring the Hereford Mappa Mundi and, especially, the Isle of ‘Hermaphrodites’ from the Book of John Mandeville, to map the way that intersexuality disrupts the assumed centrality and universality of gender dimorphism both in the Middle Ages and today. Jonathan Hsy uses the work of Alexandre Baril and José Esteban Muñoz to look at the bilingual (French and English) poetics of John Gower and Charles d’Orléans and see how trans identity and bilingualism disrupt the supposed stability of bodies, languages, and national identities (Postmed 9[2018] 196–208). Moving into feminist-influenced affect theory, Nicole D. Smith, in ‘The Thinking Heart of Female Spirituality and the Apostles’ Creed in A Christian Mannes Bileeve’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 227–60), argues that this little-studied Middle English text presents a form of piety, directed at women, that creates a ‘combination of Latin and vernacular, intellect and affect’ through ‘the image of the thinking heart’ (p. 229). Wan-Chuan Kao’s ‘Cute Chaucer’ uses Sianne Ngai’s theory of cuteness to understand the aesthetic and affective qualities of Sir Thopas (Exemplaria 30[2018] 147–71). The ‘infantilization and feminization’ of Chaucer’s text ‘trigger both caretaking and sadistic aggression’, ending with the Host’s dismissal of the tale as excrement, demonstrating the ‘labile fungibility of adoration and disgust’ (p. 148). Foucault appears in two different essays. In the second part of a special double issue on the ‘Provocative Fifteenth-Century’ from Exemplaria, edited by Andrea Denny-Brown, Alexandra Gillespie’s ‘Are the Canterbury Tales a Book?’ (Exemplaria 30[2018] 66–83) uses Foucault’s reflections on empiricism to interrogate the ‘philosophical or historical underpinnings’ of manuscript studies (p. 67). She does so in order to explore the tensions between Chaucer’s idea of the Canterbury Tales and its individual instantiations in books, finding ultimately that ‘if none of them quite matches Chaucer’s idea of the Tales, that is because they are books, not ideas’ (p. 77). Paul Megna’s ‘Chaucerian Parrhesia: World-Building and Truth-Telling in The Canterbury Tales and “Lak of Stedfastnesse”’ (Postmed 9[2018] 30–43) uses Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia—a kind of fearless truth-telling—in order to discuss Chaucer’s ‘desire for and anxiety about’ the concept in the Tale of Melibee or the Manciple’s Tale; Megna also argues that Chaucer’s ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’ constitutes an instance of parrhesia directed at King Richard II that modern scholarship has failed to notice as a result of our assumptions about Chaucer’s subtle politics. Under the rubric of ecocriticism, Gillian Rudd’s ‘Farewel my bok: Paying Attention to Flowers in Chaucer’s Prologues to The Legend of Good Women’ (Postmed 9[2018] 410–19) uses Michael Marder to discuss how a superficial and dilettantish relationship to flowers focuses our attention on the present as a space for ethical and empathetic engagement. As for scholarship that uses literary theory created in the Middle Ages, the opening two chapters of the essay collection Thinking Medieval Romance, edited by Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald, attempt to explicate theoretical modes of thought native to medieval romance in general and Middle English Romance in particular. The first, ‘The Wonder of Middle English Romance’ by co-editor Nicola McDonald (pp. 13–35), seeks to understand the ubiquitous marvels and wonder that are strewn about Middle English romances as constituting a ‘theory of wonder’ (p. 15). McDonald teases out that ‘it is the limits of knowledge that define wonder’ (p. 16) and, while ‘it is the foreign or exotic that most readily exposes the narrow compass of our knowledge’ (p. 17), the domestic too can be wonderous, so long as it is out of bounds or out of measure; such concern with bounds and measure is due to the fact that wonders do not simply expose the limits of our individual knowledge, but show that ‘the systems that are used to measure, to know the world are … faulty or completely inadequate to the task’ (p. 18). James Simpson’s ‘Unthinking Thought: Romance’s Wisdom’ (pp. 36–51) likewise tries to account for romance’s unique form of knowledge production, although Simpson places it in contrast to the way romance has been understood by a modern theoretical school: Marxism. Simpson argues that the Marxist problem with romance stems from ideology critique, and ‘argue[s] that imaginative literature keeps its audience suspended in a zone of thought-neutralization, in which the interests of one class are made acceptable to another’ (p. 37). By contrast, Simpson believes that romance recognizes that sometimes an issue, especially something like ‘shame’, ‘requires a holiday from explicit, rational thought’, that is, it requires a kind of ‘unthinking’ that allows for a ‘subtle form of cybernetic (in the etymological sense of “self-governing”) reformism’ (p. 37). Finally, as for scholarship that explores the medieval influence on modern theorists, Paul Megna’s ‘Existentialist Medievalism and Emotional Identity Politics in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Useless Mouth’ (Exemplaria 30[2018] 241–56) reads de Beauvoir’s play, with its medieval siege setting, as an exploration of emotional ethics applicable to existentialist thought and identity politics. The postmedieval issue on ‘Queer Manuscripts’ is covered below, in Section 3. 3. Manuscript and Technical Studies The Early English Text Society published one edition in 2018, Petrarch’s ‘Secretum’, edited by Edmund Wilson, completed and introduced by Daniel Wakelin. Petrarch’s Secretum is a Latin prose text of self-examination, framed as a dialogue between the author and St Augustine. The Middle English text in this edition translates the prologue and the first book of the Secretum into verse, the former in octets and the latter in couplets. It dates from either the middle or the second half of the fifteenth century, and constitutes only the fourth English translation of any text by Petrarch (after Chaucer’s ‘Canticus Troili’ and Clerk’s Tale, and an anonymous translation of De remediis utriusque fortunae); the editors note some codicological hints at the possibility of performance (pp. lii–lv), and if this text was performed then it also has a claim to be considered an example of early English drama. Only one manuscript copy is known to survive, as one of the texts transmitted in London, British Library, MS Add. 60577, and this copy only came to light in 1979. Wilson and Wakelin therefore present a transcription of this manuscript, with emendations of obvious errors. They append detailed explanatory notes, a glossary, and a table of correspondences between the Middle English translation and its source, facilitating further study. The introduction outlines the characteristics of the manuscript, which originated at Winchester Cathedral Priory, and explores the extant copies of the Latin source text which are known to have been in England. None of these, the editors conclude, can have been the precise copy with which the translator worked, but they are able to identify some copies of the Latin text which are probably closer than the others to the translator’s material. The Middle English Text Series (METS) of the Medieval Institute at Kalamazoo produced three new editions in 2018. All three follow standard METS practices in regularizing some aspects of orthography with an eye to undergraduate readers. David J. Parkinson put out a second METS edition of Gavin Douglas’s Palyce of Honour, building on linguistic and textual-critical advances since his 1992 first edition. The first edition is based on the text printed in Edinburgh by Ross and Charteris in 1579; the second edition is based on the text printed in London by William Copland, possibly in 1553, and Parkinson’s introduction proposes that this earlier printing might contain useful evidence despite its geographical distance from Scotland. Parkinson crafts a base-text edition from the London printing with some silent emendations of obvious errors taken from the Edinburgh printing, and a full reporting of emendations and other substantive variants in the textual notes. He also provides a useful set of explanatory notes and a glossary. Theresa Coletti’s edition of The Digby Mary Magdalene Play is discussed below in Section 10. Finally, Emily Wingfield and Rhiannon Purdie edited Six Scottish Courtly and Chivalric Poems, Including Lindsay’s ‘Squyer Meldrum’. David Lindsay’s two Squire Meldrum poems are edited from their earliest (1594) printing, without the thorough collation of later printed copies; the editors present one other Lindsay poem, his Answer to a flyting from James V of Scotland, also edited from its earliest printing, in 1568. The other three texts edited fall within the fifteenth century: the Balletis of the Nine Nobles, New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) 1181, edited from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 171 (the ancestor of all other surviving copies); the Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland (NIMEV 3430), edited from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 8 with some variants adopted from Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 7397 and (unusually for the METS) some conjectural emendations; and the Talis of the Fyve Bestes, edited from its only witness, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 16500. Purdie and Wingfield provide introductions and explanatory and textual notes for each poem, and an appendix of family trees to contextualize the Meldrum poems. Further editions appeared in journal articles. When Wynkyn de Worde printed the Middle English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, he provided a new prologue and first book for the text; A.S.G. Edwards published the first full edition of the replacement material in ‘De Worde’s Edition of Trevisa’s Translation of De proprietatibus rerum (c. 1495) and Its Relationship to MS Plimpton 263’ (JEBS 21[2018] 185–96). New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 263 served as de Worde’s setting copy for most of the text, and Edwards hypothesizes that the start of the text differs because the first quires of this manuscript were unavailable to the printer. David Carlton and Richard J. Moll highlighted and edited for the first time ‘The Arundel Coronacio Arthuri: A Middle English Sword in the Stone Story from London, College of Arms MS Arundel 58’ (ArthL 34[2018] 130–61). This text is interpolated within a copy of Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle; Carlton and Moll reveal evidence that the interpolation was translated directly from the French Prose Merlin into MS Arundel 58. They present the text with its marginal annotations from the manuscript, offer explanatory notes, and append a linguistic profile and a short glossary. Daniel Najork published ‘The Middle English Translation of the Transitus Mariae Attributed to Joseph of Arimathea: An Edition of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 26’ (JEGP 117[2018] 478–504). The Transitus Mariae tradition is a vast body of apocryphal texts treating the final earthly days and subsequent Assumption of Mary. The prose text in All Souls College, MS 26 is not known in any other witness, and so was perhaps not widely read. It does, however, possess significance among Middle English accounts of the Assumption as the sole surviving ‘direct translation from a Latin apocryphal narrative instead of from multiple sources or intermediary texts’ (p. 490). Najork offers a transcription of the manuscript text with editorial capitalization and punctuation, and some explanatory notes discussing the scribe’s practice and the translator’s choices. George Manning presents ‘A Hitherto Unnoticed Copy of “Wit Hath Wonder”’ (N&Q 65[2018] 301–2); a fragmentary copy of the beginning of this poem (NIMEV 4181) survives, he has discovered, in Oxford, Christ Church, MS 147. ‘A New Text of the Middle English Short Charter of Christ’ is highlighted by Eric Weiskott (N&Q 65[2018] 478–80). The text concerned (NIMEV 4184) survives in the seventeenth-century manuscript which is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 26. Weiskott provides a transcription and some initial comments on textual affiliation, and points out that other copies survive in early modern manuscripts, revealing an enduring reading history for this poem which defies modern periodization. In ‘“Erthe upon Erthe” Revisited’, Nancy P. Pope publishes and classifies transcriptions of seven ‘Erthe upon Erthe’ texts, six of which are published here for the first time, with notes on their age and dialectal features (JEBS 21[2018] 53–95). Pope argues that ‘Erthe upon Erthe’, now known in thirty-five manuscript forms, should be regarded as a tradition made up of multiple partially or wholly original compositions, rather than as one work with highly divergent texts. This article will be foundational for future work on the diachronically and diatopically wide body of ‘Erthe upon Erthe’ material. Several 2018 articles treated textual-critical topics or offered methodological comments on editing. David Moreno Olalla presented ‘Notes on the Latin Original of the Middle English Northern Macer Herbal’ (Manuscripta 62[2018] 33–56). The as yet unedited Northern Macer herbal, a translation of the Latin De viribus herbarum, survives in six copies, in various states of fragmentation and various arrangements. This article offers evidence that one of these six copies, Bodleian Library, MS Additional A.106, is the best surviving witness, while the other copies are the results of further interventions in the text and ordering. The topic arrangement in this manuscript, Moreno Olalla reveals, quite closely matches a 1540 printed edition of the text, and this discovery allows him to hypothesize about the text’s transmission to England and into English. In ‘Errors in the Malory Archetype: The Case of Vinaver’s Wight and Balan’s Curious Remark’ (SB 60[2018] 95–106), Ralph Norris explores two points in the text of Le Morte Darthur where the archetype, the ancestor of both the ‘Winchester Manuscript’ (London, British Library, MS Additional 59678) and Caxton’s printing of the text, probably erred. Norris proposes emendations in each case, arguing from comparisons to Malory’s normal syntactic and lexical choices. His work extends recent interest in using Winchester and Caxton’s print of the text together to develop a text closer to Malory’s own version, rather than choosing to elevate one witness conclusively over the other. Helen Cooper treated a related topic in her article ‘Punctuating Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (JEBS 21[2018] 171–84), which reflects on her own experience preparing an edition of the Morte. Comparing the punctuation found in Winchester and Caxton’s printing of the text, Cooper argues that Winchester ‘is a text punctuated to facilitate reading aloud, whereas Caxton follows a practice closer to that established for Latin texts’ (p. 173). She also adduces some persuasive, though not binding, evidence that the two scribes of Winchester were influenced by their exemplar’s punctuation. John Scahill engaged in some textual archaeology in ‘Caxton at Work: How the Temporale of the Golden Legend Was Made’ (JEBS 21[2018] 197–214). Caxton claims to have created this text using French, Latin, and pre-existing Middle English versions of the Legenda aurea; Scahill shows that Caxton’s primary working method was the translation of the French Légende dorée, with the Middle English Gilte Legende serving primarily as a lexical storehouse. Tim William Machan’s article ‘Finding English: Written Texts and Everyday Language’ (SP 115[2018] 219–41) asks what, if anything, can be known of ‘everyday medieval English’ (p. 221). Machan takes a sceptical position, proposing that, in the absence of reliably identifiable ‘non-literary’ language and of metalinguistic material, it is hard or impossible to substantiate judgements about usage. Machan’s reflections on the possibly circular nature of relationships between editorial choices and tools for the study of language history will interest textual critics. One essay collection took the practice of scholarly editing as a major theme: Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx, edited by Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu. A.S.G. Edwards turns in his opening chapter to ‘Aspects of Method in the Athlone Edition of Piers Plowman’ (pp. 21–34). The textual-critical practice of the Athlone Piers Plowman has of course drawn plenty of comment over the years; Edwards raises questions about the capitalization, punctuation, imposition of headings, and construction of apparatus in George Kane’s edition of the A-text. Some of these matters, such as capitalization, are rarely discussed explicitly by editors, and Edwards’s chapter usefully shows what is at stake in such decision-making. Ronald Waldron’s contribution, ‘Whose Punctuation Is It, Anyway? A Sampling of Some Manuscripts of the Polychronicon’ (pp. 35–68), sets out to ‘determine what can be said about the attitude of individual scribes to the punctuation of the text they were copying’ (p. 36). To this end, Waldron compares the punctuation of the same short passage in the Polychronicon across several English and Latin witnesses, including one manuscript thought to be Higden’s working copy of the Latin text. His conclusion paints a picture of scribal agency: it appears that the scribes studied did not assiduously attempt to reproduce the punctuation of their exemplars when copying in either language, even when copying in some proximity to the author or translator. Janet Cowen contributes a chapter titled ‘London, British Library, MS Additional 10304: Caesural Pause Marks—A Help to the Reader?’ (pp. 69–82). The manuscript in question contains the sole surviving copy of an anonymous Middle English translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris. The text’s metre appears to possess a consistent and metrically significant caesura after the second beat, in imitation of Lydgate. The only common form of punctuation in this manuscript is a virgule, usually but not entirely consistently positioned at this caesura. Cowen considers various possible explanations for the scribe’s punctuation choices, and proposes that he might have been trying to capture the visual appearance of manuscripts transmitting Lydgate, thus codicologically furthering the anonymous poem’s textual project. The same text comes under further scrutiny when Hans Sauer investigates ‘Binomials in the Middle English and Early Modern English Versions of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris’ (pp. 83–108). By comparing sample passages, Sauer finds that both English versions use binomials more frequently than Boccaccio’s text does, and that the Middle English uses more binomials than the later English translation. Sauer uses his evidence to question, at least for this case, the theory that binomial pairs in Middle English were primarily a clarifying response to translation issues. A series of chapters on the editing of chronicle texts follows. Erik Kooper examines ‘The Case of the Cutting Copyist; or, How London, British Library, MS Sloane 2027 of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle Lost 4000 Lines’ (pp. 109–32). Kooper conducts the first detailed study of the previously unrecognized abbreviation of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle in this manuscript; he reveals that the abbreviator and the scribe were separate people, and that one significant effect of the abbreviation was to trim the text down to focus on (largely secular) history. In ‘English Chronicle Narratives of the Rising of 1381’ (pp. 133–54), Andrew Prescott delves into the historiography of 1381, both fifteenth-century and modern, demonstrating the under-recognized value of accounts of the rising written in Middle English. Raluca Radulescu’s chapter, ‘The Middle English Brut Chronicles and the Modern Editor’ (pp. 155–72), surveys prospects for the study of the Middle English prose Brut, and argues from some short case studies for the value of further editorial work on this text. Julia Boffey contributes ‘Robert Fabyan’s Two Hats: Compiling The Great Chronicle of London and The New Chronicles of England and France’ (pp. 173–90), looking into the intriguing differences between two historical accounts written by the same man: the two texts appear to anticipate different audiences, and because they are interrelated rather than simply being ancestor and descendant the editor of either one can use the other as an aid. The book’s closing section turns to religious texts, broadly construed. Oliver Pickering’s chapter, ‘Verse to Prose or Prose to Verse? A Problematic Text of The Nine Points Best Pleasing to God’ (pp. 191–210), considers a version of the prose Nine Points which, he argues, is a hybrid text, taking on aspects of verse without fully committing to one consistent form. In her ‘Further Thoughts on Editing the Festial’ (pp. 211–28), Susan Powell notes a series of additions and explications to details in her edition of John Mirk’s ‘Festial’. Some of these items might be minor matters individually, but this provision of ‘aftercare’ for an edition is a laudable idea which could be more widely adopted. In a similar vein, Margaret Connolly uses her chapter, ‘The Edited Text and the Selected Text and the Problem of Critical Editions’ (pp. 229–48), to reflect on ways in which her own edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God might have occluded, through its processes and language, the existence of aberrant forms, successors, or even predecessors of that text. Veronica O’Mara thinks through ‘Problems in Indexing and Editing Middle English Prayer as Illustrated by the Chester Processional Texts’ (pp. 249–66); O’Mara’s chapter and Connolly’s contribution preceding it, taken together, are a valuable demonstration of the editorial challenges offered by successful and mutable Middle English writings which might be excluded from the category of the traditionally ‘literary’. Mayumi Taguchi then takes up the topic of ‘The Use of Sources in The Historye of the Patriarks and Caxton’s Golden Legend’ (pp. 267–84). Taguchi demonstrates that the use of multiple sources simultaneously, rather than sequentially, a technique previously noted in Chaucer, was a common and perhaps even standard approach to the activity of ‘translation’ in fifteenth-century writing. In ‘Revisiting Nychodemus Gospell’ (pp. 285–316), Martha Driver considers the woodcuts used in the eight editions of this text printed in pre-Reformation England. These woodcuts were modelled on those used in printing dramatic texts in France, and Driver shows how they were deployed by different editors of the Gospell. John J. Thompson contributes the closing chapter, ‘Reformations, Reading Practices, and Textual Afterlives: The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition, c.1400–1600’ (pp. 317–30), in which he considers the reception and possible audiences for English reflexes of the Meditationes vitae Christi. Connolly and Radulescu have co-ordinated a fittingly impressive tribute to William Marx, and the essays within indicate many of the problems and opportunities current in the editing of Middle English. A number of articles in 2018 noted or recontextualized Middle English texts in manuscript. In ‘Douce 228, Richard Coeur de Lion, and The King of Tars’ (N&Q 65[2018] 8–11), Marisa Libbon points out that the copy of the Middle English romance Richard Coeur de Lion in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 228 varies from other witnesses in introducing the king of ‘Tars’ as a minor character. Libbon places this variant in the context of both the Middle English romance The King of Tars and other evidence of interest in the Tartars in the manuscript’s time and place of origin, fifteenth-century Norfolk. Lori Jones published ‘Unrecorded Versions of John of Burgundy’s Plague Tract and Identifying “Lost” Copies of the Same’ (N&Q 65[2018] 14–17). John of Burgundy’s plague tract is a later Middle English prose text which enjoyed wide manuscript circulation, significant alteration, and regular sixteenth-century printings. Jones identifies a previously unknown manuscript witness to the tract in Wellcome Library, Western MS 674, which contains sixteenth-century copies of two different versions of the text. Jones also traces three copies of the tract which were mislaid in previous scholarship. A.S.G. Edwards offers ‘Notes on the Text of John Skelton, “Vpon the dolorus dethe … of the … Erle of Northumberlande”’ (N&Q 65[2018] 17–18), proposing that five readings transmitted in modern editions might be scribal errors, and that two other readings are rejected wrongly in the most recent edition. K.A. Murchison investigates the riddle presented by ‘A Presumed Lost Leaf of Lydgate’s Testament’ (N&Q 65[2018] 177–9). Henry Noble MacCracken’s edition of Lydgate’s Testament contains readings from the lost last leaf of the copy of the poem in Leiden University Library, MS Vossius Germ. Gall. Q. 9, and yet this leaf was already lost when MacCracken carried out his research. By identifying errors in MacCracken’s collation from surviving parts of this witness, Murchison shows that his knowledge of the manuscript was limited and that the variants he reports from the lost leaf are probably inventions. Margaret Connolly unearths ‘Unrecorded Copies of Middle English Verse and Prose in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 352’ (MÆ 87[2018] 133–6). The Middle English texts concerned are extracts from Dives and Pauper and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and some devotional Middle English verses. Connolly indicates the possible manuscript affiliations raised by these contents, and notes that some of the material in the book might have been copied from print sources. Daniel Davies and A.S.G. Edwards describe ‘A New Manuscript of Knyghthode and Bataile’ brought to light by Nigel Ramsay, London, College of Arms, MS R. 25 (MÆ 87[2018] 137–41). This witness differs from the three previously known copies in its presentation, and offers a less accurate text. Ruth Mullett brought some Middle English manuscript glosses in an incunable to light in ‘In situ Manuscript Fragments in the Incunables of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: A Fragmentarium Case Study’ (Frag 1[2018] 111–20); the incunable in question is a medical-botanical work, the second of the two bound together as Oxford, Bodleian Library, incunable 4o I 1 Th. Seld. Though the article is not directly about manuscripts containing Middle English, Joshua Ravenhill’s note on ‘The Earliest Recorded Spectacle Makers in Late Medieval England: Immigration and Foreign Expertise’ (N&Q 65[2018] 11–13) might have implications for the potential longevities of scribe and readers. Daniel Wakelin’s Designing English: Early Literature on the Page examines design choices in the transmission of both Old and Middle English, with numerous high-quality colour photographs. The first chapter surveys the marginal and ephemeral existence of premodern English in some books, finding design even in such cases. The second examines elements of thought and choice in the selection of writing supports and the laying out of pages. The third argues for the thoughtfulness of clarificatory and navigational paratexts, and the fourth turns to illustrations and decorations. In the fifth chapter, Wakelin investigates performance, with particular attention to verse and music. The final chapter considers the manuscript addition of medieval English to objects other than codices: rings, tombs, walls, tableware, food, windows, and rolls. Designing English is a thoughtful survey. Its plethora of examples and wide range will make it a productive read for manuscript studies scholars. The closing chapter, in particular, will be useful to researchers seeking an overview of the many places besides the codex in which medieval English could be found. Since the book is accessibly written and beautifully produced, it will also suit students and interested non-specialists. Richard Gameson published The Medieval Manuscripts of Trinity College, Oxford: A Descriptive Catalogue, the first full set of analytical descriptions of that institution’s medieval manuscripts, admirably equipped with colour illustrations, lists of manuscripts by number and date, a supplementary list of pastedown fragments, appendices on books from particular owners and on the library’s catalogue history, a general index, and indexes of iconography, manuscripts in other collections, and provenances. This is a model publication in general, but the catalogue’s particular interest for Middle English studies will be found in Gameson’s descriptions of MSS 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16A, 16B, 21, 29, 38, 49, 57, and 93. Other articles and book chapters contributed to manuscript studies, palaeography, and codicology more generally. Jessica Brantley examines an interesting conjunction of literary writing and what might be called a ‘genre’ of book in ‘The Provocations of Orthodoxy: Lydgate and Late-Medieval Books of Hours in Literary Culture’ (Exemplaria 30[2018] 2–19). Brantley observes that although books of hours might seem profoundly orthodox objects, they can offer spaces for ‘formal experimentation and literary expression’ (p. 3). She pursues Lydgate’s ‘Fifteen Joys of Our Lady’ through a variety of manuscript settings, including one book of hours, and explores how other more obviously literary manuscript compilations might have a liturgical aspect. Brantley shows how scholarship can benefit from seeing the book of hours as in some ways central to book production, literary writing, and readers’ ideas of what books are. Chelsea Silva considers an unusual manuscript containing Middle English in ‘Opening the Medieval Folding Almanac’ (Exemplaria 30[2018] 49–65). Medical folding almanacs in England normally transmitted Latin texts, and London, British Library, MS Harley 937 is the sole surviving Middle English example. Silva begins by offering a useful survey of scholarly attitudes to folding almanacs. She then argues that this manuscript is overtly and somewhat reflexively didactic in its use of the English language and in its adaptation of material from Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. She finishes by considering the tension between the folding almanac’s mobile but resolutely three-dimensional material form, on the one hand, and its flat existence in digital facsimile on the other. In ‘Instruction and Inspiration: Fifteenth-Century Codicological Recipes’, meanwhile, Carrie Griffin turns to a category of texts with much to offer manuscript studies (Exemplaria 30[2018] 20–34). Griffin examines the possible number of surviving recipes, and then contextualizes some surviving recipe collections which, she suggests, might have been works serving a non-specialist audience with a growing interest in amateur, domestic book production. She closes by considering the ways in which such recipes invite readers to imagine books, and this article will interest anyone working on the perception of books, or the cultural role of the concept of the book, as well as scholars with a practical interest in how manuscripts were made. Sarah Wilma Watson contributed another name to a small but growing list in ‘Another Woman Reader of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307’ (JEBS 21[2018] 159–70). Extending past work by Kate D. Harris, this article describes Jacquetta of Luxembourg’s use of signatures and her motto to inscribe herself into the book concerned, and notes the resonances between the poem and Jacquetta’s involvement in high politics. Another reader of Middle English verse is discussed in Nicole Clifton’s study of ‘Anthony Foster of Trotton and London, Lincoln’s Inn MS 150’ (YLS 32[2018] 77–126), which draws attention to the copious later sixteenth-century marginal responses to Middle English romances and to Piers Plowman in this manuscript. Clifton clarifies this manuscript’s provenance with additional details of Foster’s writing elsewhere, and surveys comparable manuscripts. Foster was exceptionally prolific in his marginal comments on the romance King Alisaunder, annotating with a focus on kingship and on military activity. Clifton’s work here contributes to the growing area of work on early modern writings in premodern manuscripts. Maidie Hilmo continued her investigation of the drawings in the Pearl manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.X, in ‘Re-conceptualizing the Poems of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript in Line and Color’ (ManuSt 3[2018] 383–420). Hilmo’s work in previous years, assisted by technological investigations, has established that the ink used in the underdrawings in this book is the ink used for the text, perhaps increasing the probability that the same scribe-artist was responsible for both. She has proposed, however, that the paint used to colour the drawings might have been added by a different hand. In the present article Hilmo draws on new findings about the mixing and layering of colour pigments, and argues that hints of purposeful response to the text can be found in some of the colouring choices. She finds some common iconographic and pigmentary elements which might form programmatic threads running through the miniatures attached to the manuscript’s various poems. Hilmo appends her original project request, thereby making her research questions available for scholars interested in similar pigment investigations in other manuscripts. The journal postmedieval hosted a special issue titled ‘Queer Manuscripts’, edited by Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt. The theoretical and Chaucerian elements at play in this issue fall outside the present summary’s purview, but codicologists and textual critics might find that some of its considerations of manuscripts are useful tools for thought. ‘Queer’ in the issue’s title is, Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt explain in ‘Towards a Queer Philology’ (Postmed 9[2018] 252–68), ‘here intended capaciously as the non-normative’ (p. 256), and scholarship can certainly benefit from examining the relationship between the normative and its opposite, as well as the assumptions made about which entities fall into those categories. Jonathan Hsy’s article ‘Queer Environments: Reanimating “Adam Scriveyn”’ (Postmed 9[2018] 289–302) raises questions about the effort to pin historicity on the ‘Adam’ of this poem, questions consonant with recent stylistic and codicological arguments that the poem is not by Chaucer and does not refer to a particular scribe. Malte Urban, meanwhile, demonstrates the challenges offered by the textual tradition of Confessio Amantis and surveys the potential benefits of digital editing in ‘Gower out of Time and Space’ (Postmed 9[2018] 303–17). Lucy Allen-Goss’s article ‘Queerly Productive: Women and Collaboration in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6’ (Postmed 9[2018] 334–48) turns to the famous ‘Findern Manuscript’ and speculates about the collaboratively written nature of some of its texts; her remarks might prove useful to textual critics grappling with texts produced by groups. In ‘From England to Iberia: The Transmission of Marginal Elements in the Iberian Translations of Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ (in Griffin and Purcell, eds., Text, Transmission, and Transformation in the European Middle Ages, 1000–1500, pp. 119–40), Tamara Pérez-Fernández observes that in these translations Gower’s Latin poetry is cut entirely, while his Latin rubrics are translated into the same vernacular as the rest of the poem. In both translations, as they survive today, the Latin glossing is reduced, but the Portuguese translation preserves some while the Castilian translation, in the form which remains, appears actively to eliminate it. She also unpicks some of effects of the tables of contents provided for the Iberian translations. The evidence she adduces suggests the circulation of multiple copies of the Confessio in Iberia. Joe Stadolnik sheds further light on Iberian connections in ‘A London Expatriate Scribe? John Vale in Portugal’ (JEBS 21[2018] 243–50). John Vale is known as the scribe of London, British Library, MS Additional 48301A, and as the owner of three other surviving manuscripts. Stadolnik reveals that Portuguese records place ‘João da Vala, Englishman’ in Tavira, in the Algarve, in 1499, and presents circumstantial evidence that makes it probable, though not certain, that this is the same man. Amy Conwell offers some reflections on palaeographical method and a worked example in ‘Dating by Ductus: Differentiating Pen Stroke from Pen Angle in the Construction of Anglicana “d”’ (JEBS 21[2018] 260–74). Conwell draws on present-day calligraphy and on practical experimentation to test M.B. Parkes’s account of the mechanism behind changes in the shape of anglicana d. She argues that this change was produced not, as Parkes suggested, by altering the angle of the shaft of the pen, but rather by a shift in ductus. Methodologically, she suggests that palaeography could benefit from more practical attention to the knowledge of modern calligraphy. The European Book in the Twelfth Century, edited by Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thompson, contains, as one might expect, little discussion of writings in English. However, the book as a whole will provide useful context for work on Early Middle English, and Ian Short’s chapter ‘Vernacular Manuscripts I: Britain and France’ (pp. 311–26) offers some useful reflections on the number and nature of surviving English books, among other types (pp. 313–15). A.S.G. Edwards and Pamela Robinson wrote an obituary for ‘Ian Doyle, F.B.A.’ (Library 19[2018] 376–81) which will hold personal and professional interest for many in the field. 4. Religious Prose Tamás Karath, in Richard Rolle: The Fifteenth-Century Translation, considers the legacy of Richard Rolle through the fifteenth-century translations of Rolle’s writings. Karath addresses the ‘changes of devotional mentalities and mystical discourse’ in the later part of the Middle Ages, but is also interested in the ‘history of late medieval translation’ (p. 12). In the first of four chapters (pp. 13–34), Karath explores the ‘legacy of Rolle in the fourteenth century’, noting the difficulty in establishing a precise oeuvre. He considers the ‘role and place of translations in Rolle’s own career’ (p. 11), commenting that Rolle, like other authors, tended to use the vernacular for more personal writing, maintaining a more scholarly public stance when he wrote in Latin. In the following three chapters, Karath considers fifteenth-century translations of Rolle’s own work. In chapter 2 (pp. 35–76), he looks at Latin translations of the English epistles, Ego dormio and The Form of Living, describing the translation of these items in a single manuscript (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, MS 140/80) as ‘an isolated experiment in the afterlife of Rolle’ (p. 36). In chapter 3 (pp. 77–140), he examines Richard Misyn’s translation of Rolle’s Incendium Amoris, demonstrating that Misyn offered his own interpretations of Rolle’s mystical ‘experience’, in line with Misyn’s membership of the Carmelite order. It is in chapter 4 (pp. 141–238) that Karath discusses the changing attitudes to the discourse of late medieval mysticism. He examines a number of independent translations of Emendatio Vite, considering their reception and textual strategies, including the translators’ approach to the challenge of using the affective language of mysticism in the culture of censorship of religious vernacular writings of the fifteenth century. The chapters are supported by seven appendices, the first four of which address the various differences in Misyn’s translations; the fifth lays out Misyn’s translations of Rolle’s calor; the sixth looks at the ‘omissions and additions in the Version C Translation of Emendatio vite in the New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Takamiya Collection, MS 66’; and the seventh examines the ‘Version F Translation of Rolle’s Emendatio Vite’. Arriving too late for consideration in last year’s volume, Rebecca Krug’s Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader adds to the significant number of articles that focus on Kempe and her books in this year’s review. This single-author study is prompted by Krug’s desire to know why Margery Kempe wrote her book. Examining the Book of Margery Kempe as an expression of a life in process, Krug focuses her study through three concepts: revision, collaboration, and autobiography, all of which are carefully discussed in the introduction. Krug understands Kempe’s Book as an act of reinterpretation of received ideas, as well as an engagement with books which leads to ‘writing that has the potential to reshape personal and collective understandings’ (p. 10). Both Kempe’s reading and writing are explored as collaborative ventures, dependent upon a community of readers and writers for the understanding of her spiritual journey. Drawing upon a contemporary concept of ‘autography’, Krug argues that Kempe writes to explore religious experience rather than present theological insight. Throughout the volume, Krug explores the Book in the context of late medieval piety. Unlike the classical understanding of tribulation, where grief must be eradicated so that the citizen can return to full participation in society, Krug notes that negativity and wretchedness are necessary precursors to experiencing the comfort of God. She considers a number of Middle English prose writings in her survey, including Flete’s Remedies Against Temptations, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and the anonymous Twelve Profits of Tribulations. Krug suggests that Kempe, in contrast with those medieval writers on tribulation, experience joy and comfort, in the face of their fallenness, ‘without letting this negative sense of self destroy them’ (p. 57). Suicidal ideation was a particular challenge for the devotee faced with self-abjection and ‘negative thinking’, but Krug argues that Kempe’s acceptance of despair and pain as an ongoing condition is a first step in not succumbing to despair. It is, however, the act of confession, at first in the enumeration of her sins, as part of the ‘confessional culture’ of the late medieval Church, but later in the narration of conversations and shared experience, that ultimately helps Kempe to overcome despair. Again, it is the narrative of the composition of the Book, which Krug identifies as the tool to ‘revise and re-understand’ the experience of shame, which is the theme of the third chapter. Krug outlines Kempe’s ‘methods for resisting its destructive power’ (p. 21). In chapter 4 (pp. 135–72), the emphasis is on fear, which Kempe came to accept as a step towards a personal relationship with Christ: ‘fear allowed her to know emotionally and intellectually that she mattered’ (p. 137). In the fifth chapter (pp. 173–210), loneliness or isolation, often understood as a requirement for true communion with the divine, is considered. Krug notes that Kempe moves away from her family, to live a life of isolation, and persecution on her pilgrimages, before returning to reinstate herself in her family and community and, in the writing of her book, to create a community of like-minded readers. This, then, is the solution to the question posed by Krug at the outset of her book: ‘the written text attempts to resolve the problem of loneliness by offering a permanent solution to the fracturing of friendship and fellowship’ (p. 23). In the process, Krug offers a compelling and compassionate reading of the Book and the ways in which its protagonist works with and against the inflections of late medieval piety. Laura Kalas Williams, in ‘The Swetenesse of Confection: A Recipe for Spiritual Health in London, British Library, Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe’ (SAC 40[2018] 155–90), is also interested in the concept of spiritual health and comfort. She examines a late fifteenth-century addition to the only extant manuscript of the Book of Margery Kempe, which is a recipe for ‘remedial sugar candy or dragges’ (p. 165), an addition that Kallas Williams interprets as a fifteenth-century (or possibly early sixteenth-century) reader’s recognition of the attainment of spiritual health by Kempe at the conclusion of the book. The article plays artfully with the description of heightened religious experience in terms of sweetness, but also provides good contextual knowledge of the recipe and its ingredients. Annotations in the manuscript are also the focus of Samira Lindstedt’s article, ‘The Examination Dura of Margery Kempe: Annotation as Authentication in Additional MS 61823’ (TMJ 7[2017] 73–102). She argues that appreciation of Kempe and her Book is not ‘something wholly new’, as some of the critical discourse would have us believe. Features such as the original binding, the mise-en-page, and the annotations and glosses which link incidents in Kempe’s life to other texts illustrate that she enjoyed a certain ‘status and spiritual cachet’ (p. 75) among her peers, most notably among the Carthusians. In a second shorter, though no less interesting, note on Margery Kempe, ‘Questioning the “Book of Life” as Evidence for the “Illiteracy” of Margery Kempe’ (N&Q 65[2018] 302–3), Lindstedt explores the question of Kempe’s illiteracy or literacy. Here Lindstedt rereads the famous passage in the Book where Margery is unable to see her own name in the ‘book of life’ and thus must have it read to her, against Revelation 20:12. Lindstedt argues that this verse requires those who are saved to have their name read aloud for the purpose of validation, so Margery must have her name read to her by the angel. In sum, Lindstedt is arguing that we cannot take the passage in the Book of Margery Kempe as evidence of her illiteracy. Alicia Kowalczewska, in ‘Margery Kempe: The Paradox of the Religious Liberating the Social’ (Magistra 24[2018] 91–108), reviews The Book of Margery Kempe as a story of emancipation. She sees Kempe’s experiences as ‘a series of contradictions’ (p. 108), but ultimately concludes that her religious experiences brought her a form of emancipation which allowed her to ‘cross customary boundaries’ (p. 97). In ‘Queer Eye for God: Reading Margery Kempe as Female Masculine’ (Magistra 24[2018] 39–61), Margaret Sheble explores Kempe’s transcendence of normative female roles and sexuality in the Middle Ages. She works on the understanding of ‘queer’ as anything or anyone that transcends established ideas or societal norms. In this regard, Margery Kempe is explored not just as queer, as already outlined by Dinshaw [1999], Hsy [2010], et al., but queer in the context of her marriage to God. According to Sheble, Kempe ‘performs passivity associated with femininity’, but through her relationship with God, particularly a God or Christ who is also queer, she assumes privileges associated with masculinity (p. 41). Simone Kügeler-Race, in ‘Carnal Manifestations of Divine Love in the Mystical Writings of Elsbeth of Oye, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Margery Kempe’ (Neophil 102[2018] 39–58), provides a comparative study of The Book of Margery Kempe against the continental writings of Elsbeth of Oye [1340] and Mechtild of Magdeburg [c.1250]. She focuses her attention on literary depictions of the body which provide opportunities for personal encounters with Christ and, in the case of bodily longing, suffering, and despair, a form of imitatio Christi. In this shared understanding of the body, she firmly locates Kempe and her Book in the tradition of continental female mysticism. A number of articles address the question of pastoral care and religious instruction. Samantha Sabalis, in ‘Beyond St. Anne Teaching the Virgin: St. Monica, St. Birgitta and Teaching Children the Faith in Fifteenth-Century England’ (JMRC 44[2018] 77–104), explores the role of mothers in the pastoral instruction of the family in a number of Middle English writings: John Capgrave’s Life of St Augustine, the Middle English translation of Revelation, the Middle English translation of Archbishop Gregersson’s Officium Sancta Birgittae; and Richard Pynson’s 1516 edition of The Lyfe of Seynt Birgette, published as part of The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande. Sabalis demonstrates that mothers, other than St Anne, were often represented as influential figures in their children’s faith, although with some nuance: mothers are often represented as tearful castigators of errant children; and there is significant emphasis on clerical supervision, suggesting that the final responsibility for pastoral instruction remained in the hands of the clergy. Nicolette Zeeman, in ‘Pastoral Care by Debate: The Challenge of Lay Multiplicity’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 435–59), foregrounds the use of debate strategies in the pastoral instruction of the laity in two late medieval texts: Piers Plowman and Dives and Pauper. While acknowledging that debate is central to both texts, she is clear that their approaches are inherently different. She selects two key concepts in Dives and Pauper—prayer (second commandment) and killing (fifth commandment)—to demonstrate the scholastic method of the Dives and Pauper text, which she contrasts with the more irresolute nature of debate in Piers. For Zeeman, ‘debate is a response—and a conversionary strategy—formulated in the face of the bewildering diversity of possible human responses and reactions to Christian pastoral care’ (p. 436). Religious instruction is also the focus of Nicole Smith’s article, ‘The Thinking Heart of Female Spirituality and the Apostles Creed in A Christian Mannes Bileeve’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 227–260). She discusses the little-known 12,000-line religious instructional text addressed to women religious. Extant in four manuscripts, largely written in prose, but with some intervening lyrics, she locates the text amidst the late medieval flourishing of religious instructional literature that followed the 1215 Lateran Council. In A Christian Mannes Bileeve, however, she reads a more ‘cohesive’ approach to education that blurs the lay-secular, Latin-vernacular, prose-poetry and pastoral-devotion as well as gender binary to revise ‘the idea that formal learning necessarily excludes affective experience’ (p. 228). Daniel Najork also draws attention to a little-known text, the Transitus Mariae, which he presents as an edition in ‘The Middle English Translation of the Transitus Mariae Attributed to Joseph of Arimathea: An Edition of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 26’ (JEGP 117[2018] 478–504). Najork examines this version against other versions of the Assumption story to ascertain that ‘it is the only one that preserves a direct translation from the Latin apocryphal narrative’ (p. 490). His study offers a comprehensive overview of the Transitus tradition, including a list of Middle English texts that also carry this story: John Mirk’s Festial, Gilte Legende, the Southern Assumption South English Legendary, Lyf of Oure Lord and the Virgin Mary, N-Town plays, and ‘Mary’s Death and Assumption’ in the York Cycle. Of particular interest is the special edition of Reading Medieval Studies, which published seven papers arising from a conference held in Reading on the topic of male devotion from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period. Only one paper, however, is specifically related to this section. Sarah Macmillan’s article, ‘Well Saved in Suffering: Male Piety in Late-Medieval Tribulation Texts’ (RMSt 43[2018] 55–78), examines two fifteenth-century books on tribulation, Twelve Profits of Tribulation and The Book of Tribulation, to demonstrate how books of piety in the hands of ‘gentry audiences’ refocused the reader from ‘his outward facing social identity to his interior spiritual self’ (p. 56). Found in a complete form in three manuscripts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 423; London British Library, Harley 1197, and British Library, Arundel 286), The Book of Tribulation was not written exclusively for a male audience, but it does shape idealized masculinity of late medieval piety as one requiring ‘self-command and active submission’ as essential elements (p. 55). Natalie Calder also considers ‘tribulation’ in ‘Remedies for Despair: Considering Mental Health in late Medieval England’ (in Tweed and Scott, eds., Medical Paratexts from Medieval to Modern: Dissecting the Page, pp. 93–110). In a chapter that resonates with some of the issues raised in Krug’s book, she challenges the general understanding that the only way that mental disorder in the Middle Ages was understood was as a ‘lack’ or ‘fault’ of the physical composition of the body such as excess of the humours. Instead, she suggests that devotional texts such as William Flete’s Remedies Against Temptations (late fourteenth century) and the writings of Syon brother, William Bonde’s A devote treatyse for them that been tymorous and fearfull in Conscience [1529] consider despair, largely through ‘scruplosity’, as a form of mental disorder that religious writers attempted to remedy. A Marian miracle story, ‘The Widow’s Candle’, is the focus of Gina Brandolino’s ‘Working Miracles: Seeing Active Supplicants in Marian Miracle Stories’ (Viator 49[2018] 173–85). It survives in a number of Middle English texts: Caxton’s Golden Legend, the Gilte Legende, the Northern Homily Collection, Mirk’s Festial, the Stanzaic Life of Christ, and the Speculum Sacerdotale. Through comparison and analysis, Brandolino demonstrates the complexity of the miracle story genre, in which the supplicant often acts more aggressively and forcibly than one might expect, demonstrating that both supplicants and Mary often ‘defy norms and expectations of the genre’ (p. 175). Also arguing for a more subversive reading is Murielle Michaud in ‘Woman, Resurrected: The Lives and Deaths of Cristina the Astonishing in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 114’ (Magistra 24[2018] 62–73). She demonstrates that the story of Cristina’s appearance after death (she died three times, apparently) is not revivification as one finds in the biblical Lazarus, but is instead a resurrection story evident in the ‘transformation and retention of corporeality’ (p. 67). Cristina’s pious acts after her death, including willingness to die or suffer, lead Michaud to conclude that Cristina is a type of female divine figure. Manuela Ceballos, in ‘Life and Death by the Book: A Dramatic Reading of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls’ (ELN 56[2018] 183–96), explores the relationship between the author’s body and her text, both of which were condemned to fire. Ceballos argues that the silence of Marguerite during her trial is often posited as a dismissal of language’s ability to embrace experience (apophasis), but should also be understood as ‘a theory of textual performance in which language is and transforms matter’ (p. 183). Ian Johnson’s ‘Theoretical and Pragmatic Dialogics in and through Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’ (English 67[2018] 97–118) addresses the intertextual nature of the fifteenth-century Vita Christi. Johnson explores the various ways in which the narrator explicitly engages with his source material—authorities, glosses, mater—to configure a series of dialogues. Working the medieval practice of compilatio to its full advantage, Love’s work facilitates a diversity of reader responses. Johnson focuses on specific passages, namely the death scene of Christ and the presentation of food to conclude that, ‘[t]aken together, the features discussed in this article configure a network of phenomena and connections serving variously to observe and generate Christological meaning and experience’ (p. 118). Laura Moncion, in ‘Bodies that Talk: Julian of Norwich and Judith Butler in Conversation’ (Postmed 9[2018] 216–30), offers a more nuanced approach to reading medieval texts alongside postmodern theories. She argues for ‘a conversation between past and postmodern’ (p. 217) rather than the more common suggestion of reading the medieval text through a lens or superimposing the postmodern theory on the medieval text. By allowing the medieval text to talk back to the ‘now familiar’ theories, Moncion, in her exploration of the gender binary, arrives at a shared understanding of ontology as ‘not a foundation but a fountain constantly flowing and overflowing’ so that any understanding of ontology is ‘contingent and provisional’ (p. 227). Three articles consider the ‘afterlife’ of Middle English religious vernacular texts. John Scahill, in ‘The Wycliffite Bible as a Source for Caxton’s Legend of Judith’ (ES 99[2018] 848–53), argues that the Early Version (EV) was influential, possibly a source, for one of the Old Testament narratives added by Caxton’s Golden Legend. Going against previous scholarly opinion, he sets out a number of tables to demonstrate agreements (and contrasts) between the awkward Latinate structures of the EV Wycliffite and that of Caxton’s rendition of the book of Judith. Ryan D. Perry and Alan Westphall, in ‘Gathering Good Corn from the Weeds: Theological and Pastoral Engagements with the Prickynge of Love in Post-Reformation England’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 301–40), focus on Stephen Batman’s annotations of the copy of The Pricking of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.19, comparing them with those of the anonymous annotator of the same text in Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 223. Perry and Westphall argue that Batman’s crossings out and annotations are less a stern rejection of Romish piety and more an act of salvation or recuperation. Under a careful selection of headings—'Mary and the Saints’, ‘Free Will’, ‘Predestination and Election’, ‘Obedience’, ‘Confession’, ‘Augustinianism’, and ‘Reformation’—they explore the points of contact between medieval and early modern piety. Perry and Westphall’s concluding remarks suggest that the question of appropriation and engagement with medieval texts by post-Reformation readers is ‘ripe for further work’ (p. 333). Margaret Connolly’s article on ‘Unrecorded Copies of Middle English Prose and Verse in Dublin, Trinity College MS 352’ (MÆ 87[2018] 133–6) is discussed above in Section 3. 5. Secular Prose Substantial contributions to the study of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur have appeared this year. Tory Pearman’s Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur undertakes a monograph-length reading of the Morte through the lens of disability studies, focusing on the performance of ability and non-ability in knights of the narrative. The first chapter, ‘Disability, Lovesickness, and the Chivalric Code’ (pp. 20–45), reads lovesickness in Pelleas, Gareth, and Alexander the Orphan as disabling and argues for an economy of feminine care and healing underpinning chivalric culture. Occasionally, Pearman argues, this economy reverses gendered power dynamics—something for which characters like Morgan le Fay are punished. Chapter 2 (pp. 46–63) continues this theme by examining instances of love-madness with a focus on the experiences of Tristram and Lancelot. Here soundness of mind is the focus, allowing Pearman to argue that both physical and mental disability are considered as obstacles to full participation in masculine chivalric culture. The third chapter (pp. 64–91) explores the potential of disability to unsettle the heteronormative assumptions underpinning masculine relations in the text. Here the repeated motif of the thigh wound becomes a symbolic castration designed to limit sexual deviancy—marking in the process the disabled body as also queer. These arguments are brought together in chapter 4, ‘Vessels of Blood’ (pp. 92–120), where the Grail is read as embodying the feminine role of healer in an unstable spiritual intrusion into the Morte. Experiences of disability—represented by Lancelot, Percival’s sister, and Galahad—fragment in this unusual terrain. In the final chapter (pp. 121–50), the resonances of the Grail quest are traced through Lancelot’s experiences in the final parts of the Morte, where the wounded knightly body comes to suggest the fictional foundations of any claim to stability and wholeness. Two chapters of Medieval Romances across European Borders, edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, also discuss elements of Malory’s Morte, here in their multilingual source context. In ‘Translation Treason: Shameful Death in French and English Romances of Arthur’s Last Days’ (pp. 155–76), Roger Nicholson examines the last two books of the Morte Darthur with an eye on the changes Malory makes to his sources. Nicholson sets Malory’s work in the context of the Wars of the Roses and late medieval theories of loyalty to argue that the Morte’s use of the concept of treason gives ‘vivid force to an ancient story’ (p. 173). In ‘Between Father and Son: Interpreting Motherhood in L’Estoire de Merlin and its Middle English Adaptations’ (pp. 177–204), Suxue Zhang discusses episodes from the Morte Darthur and the fifteenth-century prose Merlin as part of her exploration of motherhood and procreation in the tradition stemming from the Vulgate Merlin. Zhang stresses the varying representations of motherhood in her texts, arguing that it is not ‘a mere biological status, but .. a social identity’ (p. 190). The Morte was also the subject of a number of journal articles published this year. Joanna Benskin’s ‘Perceval’s Sister as Spiritual Authority and Eucharistic Symbol in Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (JEGP 117[2018] 360–89) explores the role of Perceval’s sister as a guide during the Grail quest, arguing that the full implications of her role in challenging ‘systematic and ideological misogyny in the Morte have gone unrecognised’ (p. 360). Benskin argues that Perceval’s unnamed sister functions as a spiritual authority and, in her own sacrifice, a moment of eucharistic union. A similar theme is taken up by Sarah B. Rude in her ‘Seeing Is Believing and Achieving: Viewing the Eucharist in Malory’s “Sankgreal”’ (Arth 28[2018] 3–27), which explores the relationship between the Grail quest in the Morte and eucharistic theology, arguing that key concepts such as Holy Communion and transubstantiation and medieval theories of optics are key to understanding the varying degrees of success experienced by Gawain, Lancelot, and Galahad on their quest. Focusing on a different element of the Morte, ‘“Here is my Glove”: Introductory Oath-Taking and Trial by Combat in Le Morte Darthur’ by Aubrey Morris (Arth 28[2018] 20–37) analyses the representation of the oaths that introduce trials by combat in Malory’s Morte, arguing that the indecisive nature of the final duels of the book fit ‘into a larger pattern of failed justice at the end of the Morte’ (p. 32) and precipitate the downfall of the kingdom. In ‘Standing Up for the Stanzaic-Poet: Artistry, Characterisation, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (Arth 28[2018] 86–113), Fiona Tolhurst makes a case for the aesthetic integrity of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and argues that Malory employed the stanzaic version not only for a source, but as inspiration for his characters and thematic work, in his focus on characterization and the tragedy of the narrative arc. Laura Ashe’s ‘Killing the King: Romance and the Politicisation of History’ (in Little and McDonald, eds., pp. 55–67), also contributes to the study of prose romance with an investigation of the relationship between history and fiction. Ashe traces the development of a fictional account of the poisoning of King John from its origins in rumour to its representation in the Prose Brut. She argues that ‘the structures of romance’ offered the author of the Brut ‘a way of thinking about … events which unfolded their fullest political implications’ (p. 61). Medical and technical texts have also received considerable attention in book chapters and journal articles this year. In ‘Similes We Cure By’ (NML 18[2018] 183–210), Hannah Bower challenges assumptions about the literary worth of medical recipes and explores the poetics and rhetorical structures extant in remedy collections contained in manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Trinity College Library (Cambridge), and the British Library. An examination of similes in particular, Bower contends, allows for a renewed appreciation for ‘the different ways that the aesthetic and the utilitarian can interact in practical texts’ (p. 185). Overlap between medical and literary textual practice is also the subject of Rebeca Cubas-Peña’s ‘Echoes of Medical Writings in the Romances of the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript and Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 2.38’ (in Düzgün, ed., Texts and Territories: Historicised Fiction and Fictionalised History in Medieval England and Beyond, pp. 121–45). Cubas-Peña draws parallels between the interests of the remedy collections (such as the Liber de Diversis Medicinis) and romances (including the Prose Life of Alexander) found in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript and Cambridge UL MS Ff. 2.38. She argues that the prevalence of specialist terminology in romance suggests a widespread understanding of medical principles in a lay vernacular audience. Sarah Star gives an account of the texts of the Dominican Henry Daniel in ‘The Textual Worlds of Henry Daniel’ (SAC 40[2018] 191–216). Daniel is responsible for the production of a series of medical texts in Middle English, including the Liber uricrisiarum and a herbal. Star gives an account of the mixed medical communities for whom Daniel writes, the stylistic and poetic peculiarities of his work, and their contributions to the history of the English language. In ‘Instruction and Inspiration: Fifteenth-Century Codicological Recipes’ (Exemplaria 30[2018] 20–34), Carrie Griffin reads the codicological recipes that survive in substantial number from medieval England, including in collections such as The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys, suggesting that they ‘offer seductive glimpses of books that may only have taken shape in the mind of the reader’ (p. 22). Medical treatises also form part of the capacious analysis of the Middle English term ‘merriment’ in Philippa C. Maddern’s ‘“It Is Full Merry in Heaven”: The Pleasurable Connotations of “Merriment” in Late Medieval England’ (in Hanegbi and Nagy, eds., Pleasure in the Middle Ages, pp. 19–38). Maddern’s analysis includes readings of the Paston Letters, medical materials such as Andrew Borde’s A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth, John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and the Tudor Hundred Merry Tales alongside carols and devotional material such as The Book of Margery Kempe. Maddern concludes that the term ‘merry’ is serious and capacious in late medieval England, carrying ‘connotations of health, well-being, renovation, revival, and salvation of body, mind, and soul’ (pp. 35–6). A wide variety of travel writing is discussed by Christina K. Zacher in ‘A Taxonomy of Medieval English Travel Writings’ (in Gastle and Kelemen, eds., Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture, pp. 43–56). Zacher offers a taxonomy of medieval travel writing, noting that as the medieval period progresses there is an increasing interest in travel for the sake of exploration and curiosity. Texts discussed include Mandeville’s Travels, pilgrimage guides, and the fifteenth-century ‘Advice for Eastbound Travelers’. 6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness Clerical corruption was, of course, an important concern for fourteenth-century polemicists such as John Wyclif and Richard FitzRalph, as well as a prominent theme in the works of poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition, Ethan Campbell argues that anticlericalism was likewise a major preoccupation for the Gawain-poet, even if he dealt with this topic in a subtler way than most of his contemporaries. Campbell’s monograph consists of six chapters, the first two of which are introductory. In the introduction (pp. 1–32), Campbell analyses the poet’s most overtly anticlerical remarks, which appear at the beginning of Cleanness. Chapter 1 (pp. 33–90) provides an outline of the development of the fourteenth-century anticlerical tradition in England, mainly on the basis of the evidence furnished by Wyclif’s and the Lollards’ treatises. Each of the remaining chapters individually focuses on one of the four poems in MS Cotton Nero A.x. Concentrating on the understated anticlericalism implied in the poet’s handling of priest-like figures such as the Old Testament prophet Jonah and the Green Knight, Campbell concludes that it is only through the lens of fourteenth-century anticlericalism that a satisfactory account can be reached for some of the most perplexing features of these four poems (including, for example, the organization of Cleanness’s exempla and its characterization of God as an extraordinarily wrathful figure; Patience’s departures from the biblical book of Jonah; and the Green Knight’s priest-like absolution granted to Sir Gawain). Campbell’s monograph is an insightful and historically sensitive study that will be of interest to Middle English literary critics and historians. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also at the centre of two article-length studies published in 2018. In ‘Etaynez þat Hym Anelede of þe Heʒe Felle: Ghosts of Giants in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (Comitatus 49[2018] 77–101), Dustin Geeraert reads the poem in the light of Germanic myth as reflected in sources such as Snorri’s Prose Edda, a reading that he finds justifiable on the grounds of the remarkably high incidence of Norse-cognate vocabulary in Sir Gawain. This approach allows Geeraert to account for some important narrative elements in the poem, such as the protagonist’s attempt to live up to his reputation at Hautdesert. In ‘Kynde in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (Arth 28[2018] 28–52), Evelyn Reynolds analyses the seven occurrences of Middle English kynde in Sir Gawain and explores the implications that usage of this word has for the overall interpretation of the poem. Although kynde is usually taken to mean ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘ecology’, Reynolds concludes that this word has in Sir Gawain a much wider variety of senses (all of them closer to ‘identity’ than to ‘ecology’), and that such semantic ambiguity complicates attempts at reaching any definitive moral judgement about the poem’s protagonist. Two articles on the works of the Gawain-poet in their manuscript context also appeared in 2018. In ‘Simul iustus et peccator: The Theological Significance of Shifts of Perspective in the Middle English Cleanness and Patience’ (Parergon 35[2018] 61–78), Piotr Spyra construes the juxtaposition in the manuscript of these two poems (the former of which characterizes God as an exceptionally wrathful figure while the latter focuses on divine mercy) as a reliable indication that the poet was influenced by Augustinian thought. Spyra also argues that the dual vision of God offered by these two poems constitutes a theological statement that anticipates the stance taken by Martin Luther a century and a half later. Sarah J. Sprouse, in ‘Lady Bertilak’s Pearls: Instrumenta Dei and the Stone Imagery that Unites the Cotton Nero A.x. (art. 3) Poems’ (Arth 28[2018] 25–45), contends that the representation and signification of precious stones in the manuscript’s first three poems are essential for the interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the fourth and last poem in the codex. More particularly, Sprouse’s main point is that the appearance of Lady Bertilak in pearls indicated to the audience that her function within Sir Gawain is analogous to that of the Maiden in Pearl. According to Sprouse, therefore, stone imagery furnishes brand new evidence in support of the common authorship of the Cotton Nero poems. 7. Piers Plowman No monographs were published on Piers Plowman in 2018, but a number of significant articles appeared. Michael Mandrinkian, in ‘Authorship and Error: Reconsidering the B Revision of Piers Plowman’ (YLS 32[2018] 177–233), offers a reconsideration of the scribal history of the B-text. This article reconsiders the widely accepted history of B, most notably set out by Kane and Donaldson’s Athlone edition, which was produced on the basis that B’s differences to the A and C texts stem from an archetype, Bx, which was heavily corrupted from Langland’s original ur-B-text. This led many of B’s idiosyncrasies to be viewed as textual corruptions and encouraged editors to replace these corruptions with readings from A which are little attested in the majority of B manuscripts. Mandrinkian uses an extensive analysis of AB agreements across manuscripts to dispute the possibility that they result from later scribal activity, and instead argues that Langland himself incorporated scribal errors from A into his own revisions when producing the B-text. In the process, Mandrinkian offers a new textual history where corrupt readings in the B-archetype, Bx, were already present in A before Langland made his revisions, rather than assuming that AB agreement is the result of later scribal activity. Such studies into the B-archetype, Bx, will be supported by the publication of John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre’s edition, Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype (Bx). The edition, available online since 2014, similarly refutes some of the central editorial principles of Kane and Donaldson’s Athlone edition. Most notably, it questions their belief in the corruption of B witnesses, and the need to amend B readings with reference to the A-text. The editors argue that Bx is largely reconstructable, and they build upon the work of Robert Adams to do just that, taking the manuscripts known as L and R (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 581 and MS Rawlinson Poetry 38) as their key sources. The print edition does not significantly add to the materials already available online, and some of the benefits of a digital interface are lost in print. However, readers may find the layout more accessible in this format, particularly the notes on the text. In either case, the B-archetype marks a step towards the creation of a new critical edition of Piers Plowman. There have also been important contributions to authorship studies this year. Most notably, Andrew Galloway’s extensive article outlining new findings about the life of William Rokele: ‘Parallel Lives: William Rokele and the Satirical Literacies of Piers Plowman’ (SAC 48[2018] 43–111). This essay extends our knowledge of the life of Rokele, offering new sources as well as reassessing existing ones, to further corroborate the identification of Rokele with William Langland. The article is particularly a response to Robert Adams’s 2013 study of Rokele, taking a sceptical approach to the narrative that sees Rokele move from a wealthy life of material comfort to private aestheticism, and reads this biographical story into the textual history of Langland’s poem. Galloway examines a range of legal and financial documents relating to Rokele and his relative John. In particular, many of the transfers of land, which have previously been read as an abnegation of wealth, are recontextualized as complex strategies of prearranged land-holding, distribution, and transfer designed for the economic benefit of John and his circle. The evidence, Galloway suggests, points to William Rokele’s consistent role as a trusted land agent for his associates. One implication of Galloway’s investigation is that many of the disparate William Rokeles increasingly look like a single geographically mobile figure, identifiable as the Piers Plowman-poet, moving from Easthorpe to Redgrave to Colchester to Newton. It also suggests that William had a detailed knowledge of the medieval legal world satirized in his poem. In the final section, Galloway considers why Rokele would satirize practices in which he himself participated, arguing that the corruption attacked in the poem is very different from the transactions Rokele undertook for John. Rokele’s financial dealings were dependent on a mutual trust or leute which is one of the key principles of Truth in the poem. Another article to discuss authorship issues was Sebastian Sobecki’s ‘Hares, Rabbits, Pheasants: Piers Plowman and William Longewille, a Norfolk Rebel in 1381’ (RES 69[2018] 216–36). This article takes as its starting point Langland’s cryptic self-naming in B.XV.152. Although external evidence has led to the identification of the narrator as Will Langland, the line itself points to the name Long Will. Manuscript marginalia demonstrate that at least one contemporary reader read the name in exactly this way. Following previous suggestions that nobody of this name existed in the fourteenth century, Sobecki identifies one example: William Longewille, a defendant in a poaching case in Norfolk. However, Sobecki suggests that this name is a rebel pseudonym directly inspired by Langland’s line. The act of poaching is similarly read as a deliberate act of political provocation, similar to other cases occurring during the peasant uprising. The details of this case point to the fact that both the name and the act are inspired by Piers’s halfacre and the failure of the Knight to fulfil his contractual duties. Sobecki uses this case to posit that the reception of the B-text amongst rebels owes much to Benedictine, and especially Cluniac, circulation of the text across Norfolk. His conclusion offers something of a challenge to authorship studies, claiming that such non-authorial pseudonyms are more significant for our understanding of the poem’s reception than identification of the ‘real’ author of Piers Plowman. Two articles this year consider speech-acts in Piers Plowman and their relationship to religious practices: Andrew Escobedo’s ‘Claudius and the Robber Apologize: The Variety of Speech Act in Protestant and Catholic Repentance’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 461–89), and Erika Harman’s ‘Evasive Manoeuvres: Inquisitio and the Lollards’ (YLS 32[2018] 127–75). Harman’s essay examines the rhetorical strategies of Lollards and their detractors. It attempts to define the Lollards as a speech community defined by their conversational techniques, especially regarding their use of, and responses to, questioning. Although only partly devoted to Piers Plowman, Harman demonstrates how Langland utilizes and critiques Lollard conversational techniques. Langland’s text is shown to be adaptable by Lollards because its relationships of teachers and learners (or authorities and non-authorities) often resemble Lollard strategies. This is notable in Piers’s rebuttal of the priest prior to his tearing of the pardon, and the rejection of Franciscan claims in B.VIII. However, Langland also emphasizes learners’ duties in asking questions. The responses to Will’s ill-advised questions by figures such as Holy Church and Reason demonstrate that, unlike in Lollard texts, learning in Piers Plowman also requires the learner to control their own tongue. Escobedo’s essay examines two incomplete acts of penitence, those of Piers Plowman’s Robert the Robber (B.V.462–71) and Claudius in Hamlet. It begins with a consideration of whether contrition is taken as a cause or a sign of divine mercy. While these two acts are often equated with Catholic and Protestant doctrine respectively, Escobedo argues that any rigid distinction underestimates the interplay of cause and sign in both theological approaches. As with Harman’s essay, Escobedo uses pragmatic linguistics, and specifically the sub-field of speech-act theory, to analyse verbal acts of penitence. Rather than the theological distinction between sign and cause, Escobedo focuses on apologetic speech acts: whereas Catholic contrition is a petitionary speech act (seeking to make something happen in the world), Protestant contrition is a representative speech act (seeking to affirm something about the world). Within this framework, the essay reads Robert the Robber’s petitionary response as an attempt to invite a divine response, whereas Claudius’s representative speech act is less a request for mercy than a personal revelation. Ultimately, examining these issues through speech-act theory is an attempt to view these acts of penitence not as clear statements of theological doctrine, but as attempts to relate their linguistic outpourings to the world around them. Two examinations of Piers Plowman’s personification allegory this year apply new approaches to shed light on Langland’s practice. Jacqueline Cordell, in ‘Priming Text Function in Personification Allegory: A Corpus-Assisted Approach’ (L&L 27[2018] 218–39), turns to corpus linguistics to compare Piers Plowman’s use of personification allegory to twenty-eight other Middle English poetic sources. Cordell’s approach focuses particularly on whether the grammatical construction around a personification primes the reader to expect animacy, for example by using pronouns or articles to convey agency. The study finds two main classes of linguistic allegory in Piers Plowman: property allegory, in which a conceptual or ideological property is personified, and class allegory, in which a type or subset of people is personified. As might be expected, personifications of abstract properties were found much more commonly to prime the reader for animacy than personification involving classes of individuals. Perhaps more revealing is the way that these classes of allegory map onto two classes of text-function: fictional (which denotes something in-world) and thematic (which relies on a denotational meaning outside the text). Personifications of abstract properties and social types map onto these two textual functions respectively, suggesting that while abstract properties such as Conscience prime the reader to view them as in-world characters, class allegories like the Friar point to thematic concerns outside the text. It is worth noting that Cordell’s article is using Piers Plowman as an example to test the applicability of current text-function approaches to the complexities of personification allegory. Michael Calabrese, in ‘Posthuman Piers? Rediscovering Langland’s Subjectivities’ (YLS 32[2018] 3–36), examines what insights posthuman theoretical approaches might bring to Piers Plowman. Calabrese immediately notes that posthumanism’s critique of the singular, unified subject fits with many investigations into Langland’s complex poetic ‘I’. The essay explores three ways in which Langland’s poem overlaps with posthuman concerns. First, the poem’s various personifications do not represent a single coherent subjectivity but may exist in multiple versions across the poem. So the various incarnations of Sloth cannot be said to represent a single biographical person, but instead a dispersed subjectivity. This fluidity of subject is exacerbated by the fluidity of the text itself, whereby any character is subject to reattribution or recompilation. Secondly, the poem’s allegory animates and gives subjectivity to non-human elements, as Calabrese shows in a reading of the feast at B.XIII. Finally, the unboundedness of subjectivity in the text becomes central to the multivalence of Christ and the radical meeting of human and divine in a single figure. Calabrese ends with a cautious note about the anachronistic potential of readings like this, but argues that, used appropriately, such theories can help to illuminate a text like Langland’s. Nicolette Zeeman’s ‘Pastoral Care by Debate: The Challenge of Lay Multiplicity’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 435–59) reads Piers Plowman alongside another text, the Middle English dialogue Dives and Pauper. Both texts are understood as using debate to answer a particular challenge for medieval religious figures: how to provide pastoral care given the social and psychological variety amongst the ‘lay multiplicity’. Dives and Pauper is shown to use a systematic scholastic approach in which debate leads to resolution. Piers Plowman, on the other hand, exploits the ‘conversionary potential of the conceptual divisions and narrative gaps that are opened up by the poem’s verbal and narrative oppositionality’ (p. 436). Zeeman reads the variety of Piers Plowman, its variable viewpoints, and partial or imperfect authorities as a version of lay multiplicity, that is, the need to be all things to all men. She focuses particularly on B.X–XII, in which Will repeatedly calls for more teaching without putting his lessons into practice or synthesizing them. Zeeman does not, as some critics have, see this practice as a form of infinite regression, preferring to see the gaps within the text as a necessary demand placed upon the reader. It is in these gaps that the reader is exposed to the conceptual and conversionary possibilities of the poem. The pedagogical possibilities of Piers Plowman’s various gaps are also at the forefront of Spencer Strub’s article, ‘Learning from Shame’ (YLS 32[2018] 37–75). Strub examines the significance of shame as both a pedagogical and a textual device in Piers Plowman, with particular focus on the third dream vision in the B-text. The essay argues that shame, as a process of learning, maps onto the textual strategies of the B-text in which knowledge is consistently incomplete; the narrative becomes a series of repeated loops in which knowledge, and especially self-knowledge, is broken down and rebuilt. The first section of the essay uses a range of devotional texts to outline three fourteenth-century approaches to shame: individual shame, tied to sinful acts; collective shame, reflecting on the actions of others within the community; and the righteous shame or abjection which marks the persecution of righteous Christians. Strub then argues that Will’s shame in B.XI does not fit any of these conceptual categories. It produces a tension between outward speech and inward reflection. For Will, every public discussion requires a movement inwards in which, as Imaginatif demonstrates, shame is the ultimate teacher. In the final section of the essay, Strub suggests that the same process of shame as a means of self-revision is also at the heart of Langland’s own revisions to his text, something present in Will’s defence of his poetic work. The special cluster in this year’s Yearbook of Langland Studies was entitled ‘Chaucer’s Langland’, introduced by Stephanie L. Batkie and Eric Weiskott, following their roundtable discussion at the 2016 New Chaucer Society Congress. The first essay, Baktie’s ‘Of Poets and Prologues’ (YLS 32[2018] 245–70), looks at the soundscape, or lack of it, in the prologues to Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer’s introduction, the narrator’s own voice in his conversations with the pilgrims is notably omitted. Will is similarly silent in his prologue, a silence not due to omission but to the fact that it is his hearing, and not his voice, that takes centre stage. Baktie’s reading of both texts considers the idea that sound management is akin to textual management, and both texts use sound to consider their own acts of poetic making and social critique. The key difference outlined in the essay is that, while the reader’s perceptions in the Piers Plowman prologue are filtered entirely through Will, in the Canterbury Tales ‘the speaking subject is deliberately dispersed amongst multiple voices’ (p. 267). Although Baktie is sceptical of the possibility that Chaucer was directly responding to Langland, she argues that the suppression of noise is echoed across both texts. Frank Grady, ‘Chaucer’s Langland’s Boethius’ (YLS 32[2018] 271–87) investigates Langland’s use of the Consolation of Philosophy as a narrative device. Grady reads Holy Church and Meed, associated with Boethius’s Philosophy and Fortune respectively, as a Langlandian thought experiment which asks what would happen if Boethius’s narrator had to return to the world. The movement from the abstract ideal of Holy Church to the worldly temptation of Meed is read as a ‘narrative swerve’ which prevents closure. Grady suggests the same Boethian swerve occurs at B.XI and B.XX, each time the philosophical or theological ideal is abandoned as the narrator is seduced by a more worldly figure. The essay concludes with two key ideas: Langland’s use of Boethius should be read alongside that of his contemporaries, and Langland was a Boethian before Chaucer ever was. Elizaveta Strakhov, in ‘Political Animals: Form and the Animal Fable in Langland’s Rodent Parliament and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (YLS 32[2018] 289–312), explores a curious connection between Chaucer and Langland. While both writers generally avoid topical references, both choose to include them in the form of beast fables, notably in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the ‘belling of the cat’ episode. Strakhov maps out the key forms of beast fable which can be generically broken down into predator–prey dialogues and intrusions into an enclosed ecosystem (such as a farm). While Chaucer and Langland take these two forms respectively in Chaunticleer’s engagement with the fox, and the intrusion of the cat into the mouse parliament, both writers are shown to place the two modes in conversation with each other. Strakhov’s examination of the interplay between power imbalances and stable ecosystems inherent in the two fable genres provides novel readings of both episodes, and their topical considerations of sovereign power. Ultimately, she argues that both urge the need to accept the damaging effects of sovereign power by deflecting them away from the domestic ecosystem and towards externalized foreign targets. In this, Strakhov suggests that both episodes are less conservative, and better disposed towards the commons, than has previously been accepted. Two articles in this cluster consider the apocryphal Chaucerian story ‘The Plowman’s Tale’. Christopher Cannon, in ‘The Ploughman’s Tale’ (YLS 32[2018] 315–31), posits a thought experiment, asking which Canterbury tale is most Langlandian. He suggests that it is Melibee that is the true ‘Plowman’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s collection. Cannon’s essay pays particular attention to Langland’s and Melibee’s shared common ground of classroom instruction, and their reliance on a common school textbook, the Distichs of Cato. The two texts, Cannon suggests, do not just share the maxims of school Latin, they present Latin quotations in the manner that was taught at school. Whatever their differences, Cannon suggests that both authors learned to write English from the same pedagogical system. Mimi Ensley, ‘Framing Chaucer’s Plowman’ (YLS 32[2018] 333–51), examines the manuscript and print history of this pseudo-Chaucerian text. As with Cannon’s article, Ensley examines the use of Latin quotation, demonstrating that, like Langland’s poem, the earliest version of the ‘Plowman’s Tale’ utilizes Vulgate glosses, separated from the main text. In both cases the glosses invite reader participation and encourage, or allow for, more complex or controversial interpretations than are directly stated in the text. Ensley argues that for a Lollard text like this one the Vulgate glosses serve a dual function: they make controversial readings more ambiguous and reader-centric, and they present the satire as grounded in the authority of the Latin Bible. The cluster ends with Lawrence Warner’s provocative argument against Langland’s direct influence on Chaucer, ‘Chaucer’s Non-Debt to Langland’ (YLS 32[2018] 353–74). Warner addresses some of the major arguments in favour of Chaucer’s Langlandian debt, demonstrating ways in which the evidence is provisional, limited, or flawed. The essay particularly stresses the ways in which a failure to attend to the specific evidence can lead to contradictory claims; arguments which suggest Chaucer’s knowledge of Piers Plowman A, but not later texts, need to be placed against those claims which rely on the B- or C-texts, rather than taken as accumulating further connections. The essay pays particular attention to the popular Latin text De duello militis et aratoris as a possible non-Langlandian source for Chaucer’s portrait of the Plowman, as well as arguing that author biography and textual dating are too speculative a basis for deriving connections between the two authors. Ultimately, Warner suggests that he is not denying the possibility of Chaucer having read Langland, only that the evidence is not there, or not held to as high a standard as any other claim regarding Chaucer’s influences. Helen Cooper’s ‘Afterword’ (YLS 32[2018] 375–88) responds to the cluster with some suggestions of ways that connections and disparities between the two authors have been a productive area for scholarly advances. Amongst other areas, Cooper examines their very different attitudes to outward devotion and affective piety, to pilgrimage, and to their shared textual precedent Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. She also questions the broad division of Langland and Chaucer as abstract allegorist and naturalist respectively: Langland’s allegory reflects everyday linguistic usage, while Chaucer’s pilgrims are frequently types rather than realized individuals. It is Langland’s cityscape, and not the Tabard Inn, that offers the most realistic picture of fourteenth-century London. Another article to consider Langland alongside Chaucer was Jamie Taylor’s ‘Lies, Puns, Tallies: Marital and Material Deceit in Langland and Chaucer’ (Speculum 93[2018] 111–21). Part of a special issue on lying in the Middle Ages, Taylor’s article examines how Piers Plowman and the Shipman’s Tale utilize puns to question the relationship between intention, sign, and res. The article focuses on the polysemous meanings of ‘taille’, which variously implies the tallying of a debt, a tale, or a ‘tail’, used as slang for female genitalia. Through these various meanings Taylor draws out the complex interaction of mercantile, scribal, and sexual metaphors, all of which operate through the language of exchange. The article pays close attention B.II–IV to interrogate the relationship of intentionality, lying, and exchange produced by Mede’s polysemous language. 8. Gower There were no specific monographs on Gower published this year, though there appeared a considerable number of journal articles and essays in collected volumes. In ‘John Gower, Squire of Kent, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Visio Anglie’ (ChauR 53[2018] 258–82), Michael Bennett looks to reappraise ideas about Gower’s works and his politics in light of reinterpreted historical evidence. Bennett demonstrates that Gower’s grant of the manor of Aldington by Thurham in 1373 is not a sale, but rather an enfeoffment to uses. Gower continued to occupy the property in 1381, and would have been far closer than has previously been assumed to the events of the Peasants’ Revolt depicted in Book I of the Vox Clamantis (the Visio Anglie). Bennett goes on to examine the grantees named in the 1373 grant as evidence for Gower’s social circle, and to suggest a biographical explanation for his views of King Richard II. Other articles took a more theory-led approach to Gower and his literary and biographical witnesses. Certain among the Confessio Amantis’s exempla and manuscript witnesses were the subject of three articles in a special issue of postmedieval (9:iii[2018]) entitled ‘Queer Manuscripts’. In ‘On the Edge: Chaucer and Gower’s Queer Glosses’ (Postmed 9:iii[2018] 269–88), editors Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt initiate the programme of ‘queer philology’ proposed in their editorial. They examine treatments of the legend of Constance in the Confessio and the Man of Law’s Tale, with special reference to the relationship between text and paratext in the Ellesmere, Fairfax, and Bodley manuscripts. Magnani and Watt are interested in the ways in which Gower, Chaucer, and their readers experiment with ideas of authority and interpretation, arguing that each is ‘acutely aware of the risks, and sometimes the pleasures, of misprision or queer interpretation’ (pp. 260–1). A different aspect of textual authority is at issue in ‘Gower Out of Time and Place’ (Postmed 9:iii[2018] 303–17), in which Malte Urban addresses the absence of an authoritative modern edition of the Confessio. Drawing attention to the ‘queer temporalities’ (p. 304 and passim) that are constructed by the poem’s frame narrative and the dialogue between Genius and Amans, and the flattening of these textually synchronous though temporally disparate levels in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 35, Urban recommends a ‘queer approach to editing’ (p. 305) that harnesses digital resources in order to situate Gower’s poem within its heterogeneous temporal frames. Another example of ‘queer philology’ with reference to a manuscript containing works by Gower is Lucy Allen-Goss’s ‘Queerly Productive: Women and Collaboration in Cambridge, University Library, Ms Ff. 1.6’ (Postmed 9:iii[2018] 334–48). Allen-Goss treats the copy of the Tale of Tereus in the Findern Manuscript as a site of queer female textual practice. She judges the manuscript’s textual variants, errors, and omissions as facilitating a reinscription of Philomela’s mutilation with a new queer female erotic significance. One further article published this year in an earlier issue of postmedieval also brings aspects of contemporary trans and queer theory to bear on the poetry of Gower. In ‘Linguistic Entrapment: Interlanguage, Biovernacularity, and Life across Tongues’ (Postmed 9:ii[2018] 196–208), Jonathan Hsy reads Gower’s and Charles d’Orléans’s French and English poetry alongside theoretical writings by contemporary trans activist Alexandre Baril and queer cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz. Common to each of these writers, suggests Hsy, are certain tropes of ‘wrong-bodiness’ (p. 198), strategies for ‘disidentification’ (p. 197 and passim) with any one dominant linguistic or gender identity. Three further articles and essays also focus on specific Gower manuscripts. In ‘The Mythological Sciences of John Gower, Medieval Classicists, and Morgan MS M. 126’ (SAC 40[2018] 257–88), Amanda Gerber reappraises the ‘encyclopedism’ of the Confessio. Rather than presenting a source-based study of Gower’s appropriation of material from knowledge-based texts, Gerber looks to reconstruct the scientific explications of classical literature to which Gower would have had access in order to demonstrate the interconnection of mythological narratives and encyclopedic knowledge about the natural world in his poem. ‘Gower’s scientific readings formed an identifiable component of his classical exegesis’ (p. 259), argues Gerber, who illustrates her point with reference to the natural-science descriptions in Book VII of the Confessio and the academically directed ordinatio in New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M. 126. In ‘Another Woman Reader of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307’ (JEBS 21[2018] 159–70), Sarah Wilma Watson examines the inscriptional practice of a powerful female reader of the Confessio: Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, and owner of the first-recension Confessio manuscript, Pembroke 307. Jacquetta inscribed Pembroke 307 three times—evidence, contends Watson, ‘of a late-medieval woman reader engaging directly with Gower’s text’ (p. 167). London, British Library, MS Add. 59495 (the Trentham Manuscript) is the subject of Arthur Bahr’s ‘Birdsong, Love and the House of Lancaster: Gower Reforms Chaucer’ (in Prendergast and Rosenfield, eds., Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, pp. 165–81). Bahr investigates Gower’s rewriting and contextualization of his earlier works, as well as of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Book of the Duchess, in London, British Library, MS Add. 59495 (the Trentham Manuscript). Bahr develops Sebastian Sobecki’s conclusions in ‘“Ecce patet tensus”: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand’ (Speculum 90[2015] 925–59). For Bahr, Gower’s direction of the compilation of Trentham and the shifting political climate reflected in the Chaucerian allusions in the Cinkante Balades and the Traitié betray the open-endedness of meaning in the manuscript. The intertextuality and range of languages in Trentham remind us, argues Bahr, that ‘texts are inherently diachronic’ (p. 177); the arrangement of the manuscript demonstrates ‘Gower’s recognition that authorial desire and textual meaning will inevitably diverge’ (p. 176). Sonja Drimmer’s study, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476, includes two chapters on illuminated Confessio manuscripts. In ‘Gower in Humilitatio’ (pp. 84–113), Drimmer examines Gower’s pictorial identity. In particular, Drimmer is interested in the fourteen Confessio manuscripts which depict the beginning of Amans’s confession, often with his arms crossed over his chest in a gesture of humility. Drimmer argues that, ‘[in] making this gesture of subordination the Lover’s—and by proxy, Gower’s denotative attribute, illuminators sanctioned the author’s dismissal as a controlling agent over his own work’ (p. 16). In ‘History’s Hall of Mirrors: Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ (pp. 189–224), Drimmer investigates the political reappropriation of the Confessio in the manuscript commissioned for Edward IV after 1471: Morgan M. 126. Again focusing on the manuscript’s miniatures, Drimmer judges the Morgan Confessio to revise Gower’s poem as a tool for royal self-promotion, rather than admonitory council. Justyna Rogos-Hebda adopts a palaeographic approach to a Confessio manuscript in ‘Text and Image: Revisiting Traube’s Halbgraphische Objekte in a Paleographic-Pragmatic Approach to Scribal Abbreviation’ (KN 65[2018] 45–59). Rogos-Hebda calls for an expanded study of scribal abbreviations that takes into account the visual and not only the linguistic interpretation of what Ludwig Traube described as ‘half-graphic’ (p. 46) symbols in medieval manuscripts. Aiming to fill what she considers to be a lacuna in Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes’s 1978 essay, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’ (in Parkes and Watson, eds., Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays presented to N.R. Ker, pp. 163–82), Rogos-Heda investigates the textual, interactional, and metalinguistic functions of the scribal abbreviations in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2. Other articles and essays focused rather on motifs and rhetorical devices present in Gower’s poetry. In ‘Translatio imperii and Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ (Med Trans 14[2018] 379–93), Diane Speed examines the idea of translatio imperii as a structural theme in the Confessio, and not only in the Vox and the Chronica Tripertita. For Speed, Gower’s treatment of the matter of Troy in the Confessio is substantially indebted to the ‘counter-Virgilian’ tradition that ‘focuses … on the human failings exhibited at various points in the story’ (p. 381). Taking the identification of London as ‘newe Troye’ in the first-recension prologue to mean that ‘for “Troy” one might read “London” in the rest of the poem’ (p. 383), Speed gives an overview of the twenty admonitory Trojan tales in the Confessio, arguing that the process of division and self-destruction evoked by Gower’s allegorical narrative has a parallel in the historical world of the prologue and conclusion. An allegorical motif is also the subject of D. Vance Smith’s ‘The National Allegory of the Household: Domus and Lingua in John Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame’ (in Woolgar, ed., The Elite Household in England, 1100–1550: Proceedings of the 2016 Harlaxton Symposium, pp. 110–28). Vance Smith discusses the ‘innately metaphorical’ (p. 111) nature of the household in the works of Gower and Chaucer, in which the household stands as the mean between the self and the world, but is also ‘the site at which both poets think through the role of metaphorical language [in the realm] more generally … by observing the regulation of language within the household’ (p. 111). Vance Smith focuses on Gower’s representation of the household in the Vox, in which the rustici are at once a threat to and threatened by the ordered domus or household of the realm. Each sin of the lingua or tongue depicted in the Vox—bestial bellowing, double speech, and murmuring—‘[is] imagined in terms of its effect on the traditional configuration of the household’ (p. 124). Yet these noises, argues Vance Smith, ‘are also part of the structure of Gower’s poem’ (p. 128); his Vox ‘both records the turmoil around him and forges a way to articulate it, and therefore to find some kind of resolution in it’ (p. 128). The recovery of memory and time in the Confessio is at the centre of R. F. Yeager’s essay, ‘Amans the Memorious’ (in Gastle and Kelemen, eds., pp. 91–103). Taking as his point of departure the problem of time pervading Jorges Luis Borges’ short story, ‘Funes el memorioso’, Yeager posits a preoccupation in Gower with historical time, and the place of the Confessio within it: Gower is ‘a poet for whom mundane time has intense urgency’, one who understands its fluidity as ‘a progression of opportunities for moral intervention, personal and political’ (pp. 99–100). Yeager has also contributed an essay entitled ‘The Riddle of “Apollonius”: “A Bok for King Richardes Sake”’ to the Festschrift published this year in honour of Helen Cooper (Archibald et al., eds., pp. 103–14). Yeager interrogates Gower’s somewhat surprising decision to conclude the Confessio not only with a romance—of which there are few examples in the poem—but with a narrative that features incest: Apollonius of Tyre. According to Yeager, Gower reworks his sources, chiefly the Historia Apolloni regis Tyri, in order to emphasize those aspects of Apollonius’s character that may have appeared to King Richard II, and which would have recommended the tale as an exemplum to the monarch. In the posthumously published ‘“Pronomination” in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton’ (MÆ 87[2018] 142–52), John Burrow discusses Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton’s use of the rhetorical device pronominatio, ‘a device which designates, with a kind of alien cognomen, something which cannot be called by its own name’ (p. 142). Burrow notes the paucity of pronomination in the Confessio, but points out the various cognomens taken from the siege of Troy which appear in Gower’s description of the events of the Peasants’ Revolt in Book I of the Vox. Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature, edited by Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein, includes two essays on Gower, a writer who, the editors suggest, ‘may be the most systematic observer of [late medieval] commercial practices and quite possibly the earliest English writer to thoroughly explore commercial economics’ (p. 2). In ‘The Need for Economy: Poetic Identity and Trade in Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ (pp. 127–42), Brian Gastle examines King Richard II’s commission of Gower’s poet-narrator to write a book for England’s sake in the prologue to the first recension of the Confessio, and the presentation of the poor pilgrims in the Tale of the Trump of Death in Book I. Gastle demonstrates Gower’s construction of a fiscal identity within a medieval social order of need and provision. For Gower, argues Gastle, ‘commercial or mercantile issues are more than simply subject matter … they are necessary to his project of defining poetic identity and labor’ (p. 139) within a traditional estates system. Gower’s interest in economics beyond the writing of estates satire is also in evidence in Craig E. Bertolet’s ‘“Money Earned; Money Won”: The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower’s “Tale of the King and the Steward’s Wife”’ (pp. 143–56). Bertolet reads the steward of the Tale of the King and the Steward’s Wife in Book V of the Confessio as the representative of a cash-based economy. The prostitution and subsequent remarriage of the steward’s wife to the king demonstrates the resistance of the economic systems of feudal obligation and cash-based transaction to conflation by the steward. ‘The steward’, concludes Bertolet, ‘discovers that the pursuit of money as its own goal—not as a medium of exchange—ends both commercial and feudal relationships’ (p. 154). Jeffery G. Stoyanoff offers a more retrospective reading of the relationship between the Confessio and a money economy in ‘Covetousness in Book 5 of Confessio Amantis: A Medieval Precursor to Neoliberalism’ (Accessus 4[2018] 1–36). Stoyanoff takes Genius’s discussion of covetousness in Book V of the Confessio as a prefiguration of the socially destructive processes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century neoliberalism. Stoyanoff adopts an Actor-Network Theory approach from sociology in order to demonstrate how, in the Confessio, ‘Gower presents his readers with the dire consequences of misunderstanding the structure of and relationships in society when Covetousness governs actions and the market overtakes the moral’ (p. 1). Work on Gower has also appeared within broader single-author studies of medieval and/or early modern literary culture, as well in relation to other authors. The importance of Gower’s political poetry for Lydgate’s poetic voice is the subject of the final two sections of R.D. Perry’s ‘Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century’ (Speculum 93[2018] 669–98). Lydgate omits Gower from what Perry calls the ‘virtual coteries’ that he constructs for his poetry—rhetorical performances of allusion and naming which constitute ‘a record of distributed agency that details what a poet, a patron, or a source does to make a poem’ (p. 671). To name Gower, Perry suggests, ‘would be excessive, placing special stress on a relationship’ (p. 673), whereas Lydgate’s indebtedness to Gower’s political poetry is likely to have been self-evident for his first aristocratic readers. Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man ‘performs the kind of critique associated with the poetry of Gower’; yet it does so, Perry argues, ‘by foregrounding the importance of Chaucer’s work’ (p. 674), an English predecessor who offers a direct familial connection to Lydgate’s patron, Thomas Montagu, husband of Alice Chaucer. Perry concludes with the important observation that Lydgate’s inclusion of Chaucer, rather than Gower, in his virtual coteries ‘helps create a literary tradition that is thoroughly and explicitly Chaucerian no matter what other authors might have influenced it along the way’ (p. 698). Gower is also discussed as a foil to Chaucer’s literary reputation in Maurizio Ascari’s ‘Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, Conflict, and Canonical Resilience’ (ChauR 53[2018] 402–27). Ascari considers the intersection of literary monumentalization in stone and print, arguing that ‘by fostering circulating forms of monumentalization in folio editions, print played a pivotal role in Chaucer’s monumentalization in situ’ (p. 403). In the second half of his article, Ascari investigates the relationship between Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, erected by Nicholas Brigham in 1556, and Gower’s tomb in the Southwark church of St Mary Overie. According to Ascari, Thomas Berthelette’s printing of an edition of the Confessio in 1532 and 1554, with a prefatory letter that draws attention to the physical proximity of Chaucer’s and Gower’s remains, ‘arguably set the ground for a memorial response, possibly instigating Brigham’s gesture’ (p. 403). Reference to Gower appears at a number of points in Lindsay Ann Reid’s Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval, evidence for Reid’s contention that Shakespeare’s ‘apparent Ovidianism also seems to tangibly intersect with his Chaucerianism or Gowerianism’ (p. 4). In her first chapter, ‘Chaucer’s Ghoast, Ovid’s “Pleasant Fables”, and the Spectre of Gower’ (pp. 9–38), Reid’s close reading of the little-known seventeenth-century ghost story Chaucer’s Ghoast establishes the historical and conceptual framework for her examination of Chaucer’s and Gower’s spectral presences in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry—most famously, in Gower’s case, as the narrator of Pericles. A review of the modest body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s reception of Gower appears in chapter 2, ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid and Sly’s Chaucer’ (pp. 39–74). In chapter 3, ‘Theseus and Ariadne (and Her Sister)’ (pp. 75–118), Book V of the Confessio is included in the tradition of English texts that lay emphasis on Theseus’s perfidy, an attitude that is apparent in the sympathetic allusion to Ariadne in The Two Gentlemen of Verona IV.iv. In chapter 4, ‘Philomela and the Dread of Dawn’ (pp. 119–62), the Tale of Tereus, which directly follows the Tale of Theseus and Ariadne in Book V of the Confessio, is suggested with Chaucer’s ‘Legenda Philomene’ in The Legend of Good Women as a possible intertext for The Rape of Lucrece. And in chapter V, ‘The Cross-Dressed Narcissus’ (pp. 163–98), Book I of the Confessio is posited as the source of a ‘distinctively “Gowerian”’ English literary tradition that conceives of a ‘heteronormative, cognitively erroneous Narcissus’ (p. 172), and which informs the references to Narcissus in the interactions between Olivia and Viola in Twelfth Night I.v. In Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature, Rory G. Critten cites Gower’s depiction of his authorial work as a counter-example to the ‘self-publishing pose’ elaborated by Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay, and Charles d’Orléans. According to Critten, ‘fourteenth-century authors such as Chaucer and Gower appear to have been keen to distinguish their work as creative writers from the manual inscription performed by their scribes’ (p. 6). In his introduction, ‘Towards a History of the Self-Publishing Pose’ (pp. 1–35), amongst Critten’s fourteenth-century examples are the three redactions of Henrici quarti primu regni fuit annus in the Trentham Manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iv, and Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, in which the blind Gower favours prayer above physical writing as the worthier means of expression. Critten acknowledges Gower’s sensitivity to the manuscript culture in which he produced his texts; however, he premises his investigation of alternative, fifteenth-century depictions of authorial work on the notion that ‘[n]one of the Ricardian authors elaborated a deliberate link between their persons and their books that might compare in intensity with the links developed by Hoccleve, Kempe, Audeley, and Charles’ (p. 26). Finally, Gower appears alongside Langland, Chaucer, Archbishop Richard FitzRalph, Oxford dissidents, Bible translators such as Nicholas Hereford, and, most notably, John Wyclif, within the ‘textual environment of anticlericalism’ (p. 20) that forms the backdrop to Ethan Campbell’s The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition (discussed in more detail above in Section 6). Campbell positions Gower as an essentially orthodox and anti-Lollard writer, though he acknowledges his criticism of the abuses of individuals in terms of the Seven Deadly Sins in a short discussion of the Confessio (pp. 69–71). Campbell again makes reference to the Confessio in his third chapter, ‘The Anticlerical Poetics of Cleanness’ (pp. 91–148), briefly remarking upon the concern in both poems with priestly hypocrisy. 9. Older Scots Rhiannon Purdie and Emily Wingfield’s Six Courtly and Chivalric Poems, including Lyndsay’s Squyer Meldrum appeared in 2018 (this review refers to the online edition as a hard copy was not received for review). The volume presents editions of The Balletis of the Nine Nobles, the Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland, The Talis of the Fyve Bestis, and The Answer Quhilk Schir David Lindesay Maid to the Kingis Flyting, alongside Lyndsay’s two Squyer Meldrum poems. The edition contains a general introduction as well as specific introductions to each of the texts, along with detailed textual and explanatory notes. The general introduction helpfully provides a section on reading Older Scots, including a list of common words. Nicola Royan’s edited collection The International Companion to Scottish Literature, 1400–1650 is a valuable addition to the field. Its three sections deal with ‘Language and Transmission’, ‘Culture and Identity’, and ‘Genre and Approach’, and the volume explicitly seeks to recognize Scotland’s literature and its audiences as multilingual. To this end, thematic chapters are often co-written by specialists in Older Scots, Gaelic, and Latin. In the ‘Language and Transmission’ section, the chapter by Sara Ponz-Sanz and Aonghas MacCoinnich, ‘The Languages of Scotland’ (pp. 19–37), provides an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Scotland from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century and details the rise of Scots usage and the marginalization of Gaelic, particularly as a literary language. In ‘The Transmission of Older Scots Literature’ (pp. 38–59), Sally Mapstone focuses in particular on the works of William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Robert Henryson to examine and explain the unpredictable nature of manuscript and print circulation. Mapstone highlights how print influenced later manuscript compilation, and analyses the circulation of Scots material within Europe. The ‘Culture and Identity’ section begins with Sìm Innes and Steven Reid’s chapter, ‘Expressions of Faith: Religious Writing’ (pp. 60–78). Innes and Reid trace the development of religious verse in Scottish vernaculars and analyse the rise of Scots prose as a medium born out of the Reformation. William Gillies and Kate McClune highlight some key distinctions between the vernaculars in Scotland in ‘The Purposes of Literature’ (pp. 79–99). Most significant, they argue, is the focus on family and social structures in Gaelic literature, which contrasts with Older Scots’ preoccupations with the moral obligation to read accurately. In ‘Historiography in Highlands and Lowlands’ (pp. 100–23), Ulrike Hogg and Martin MacGregor consider how Scottish communities imagined themselves and their heritage. Outlining the decline in Gaelic narratives that form the basis of Scottish historiography, Hogg and MacGregor demonstrate how Scots became the dominant language of written history through which a complex narrative of dependence on Gaelic heritage and dissociation from what was presented as threatening to lowland culture became increasingly apparent. The final (and longest) section of the volume focuses on ‘Genre and Approach’. Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín and Nicola Royan discuss ‘Lyric’ (pp. 124–56) with a detailed consideration of the audiences of the bawdy poems preserved in the Book of the Dean of Lismore and those of Scots which are often assumed to be far broader. Ó Mainnín and Royan demonstrate some key differences between Gaelic and Scots poems voiced and written by women, noting key differences in perceptions of female voices in the two vernaculars. In ‘Chivalric Literature’ (pp. 157–72), Rhiannon Purdie and Katie Stevenson outline the numerous written representations of chivalry that range from the literary to guides for imitation, from serious romance to comic rendition. Purdie and Stevenson concentrate on some of the ways in which a distinctive Scottish chivalric culture is rooted in knightly prowess and how perceptions of chivalry develop from the medieval through the early modern period. Joanna Martin and Kate L. Mathis examine the broad genre of literary remembrance in ‘Elegy and Commemorative Writing’ (pp. 173–99). Analysing traditional Gaelic practice alongside a significantly different Scots tradition, Martin and Mathis demonstrate how commemorative literature seeks to establish and reaffirm communal relationships. ‘Satire’ (pp. 200–16) is the focus of the chapter by Tricia A. McElroy and Nicole Meier, in which they trace the development of a tradition which includes cursing and magic in the Gaelic tradition and satire in Scots. Crucial to this genre, McElroy and Meier argue, is its flexibility and the ability of writers to caricature both individuals and groups. John J. McGavin and Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart argue for a broader consideration of what might be considered ‘Performance’ (pp. 217–36) to include music and dance as entertainments and the playing out of public concerns. Crucial to an understanding of performance, they suggest, is the role of the spectator. The final chapter, ‘Translation’ (pp. 237–65), sees Kaarina Hollo and Thomas Rutledge establish very different practices between Scots—where translation is commonplace through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and Gaelic, in which there is a comparable lack of material. Such differences, they contend, points to the work that needs to be done to understand both Scots and Gaelic literary practices across the period. This year also saw the publication of The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited by Alessandra Petrina and Ian Johnson. Considering writing from c.1513 to the Union of the Crowns, the essays presented investigate the ‘crucial role played by Latin culture in the self-identification, affirmation and flowering of Scottish literature’ during what has been hailed as the first Scottish Renaissance (p. ix). This volume comprises three sections addressing the classical and medieval legacy within Scots writing, a longer section concerned with Scottish identity, and a final section on the ‘Vagaries of Languages and Texts’. In the first section, Steven J. Reid’s chapter, ‘Classical Reception and Erotic Latin Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland: The Case of Thomas Maitland (ca. 1548–1572)’ (pp. 3–39), assess the impact of classical Latin poetry on the literary productions of Scottish writers such as Thomas Maitland. In particular, Reid analyses Maitland’s use of elegy for erotic purposes to argue that his works provide an important connection between earlier work by Buchanan and later poets. Kate Ash-Irisarri examines a fifteenth-century translation of the thirteenth-century Latin Ludus scaccorum and suggests that the Scots version works to instruct its readers in the role of prudence as a counterbalance to the vice of idleness. In doing so, she contends, the Buke of the Chess’s translator situates the text within a tradition of formal memory-training which would be understood by its vernacular readers (pp. 41–59). The main body of the volume comprises five chapters dealing with the influence of Latin culture on constructions of Scottish identity. Tommaso Leso examines representations of the Picts in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and highlights the ways in which the people of northern Britain experienced significant cultural changes in the seventh and eighth centuries that influenced how they, and others, saw themselves (‘Defining Scottish Identity in the Early Middle Ages: Bede and the Picts’, pp. 63–83). In ‘Universals, Particulars, and Political Discourse in John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae’ (pp. 85–103), John Leeds examines Mair’s use of Latin philosophical terms in his political discourse as a way of questioning the relationship between the universal term ‘British’ and a political and/or national identity. Elizabeth Hanna’s ‘A “Scottish Monmouth”? Hector Boece’s Arthurian Revisions (pp. 105–26) reassesses Boece’s Scotorum Historia as a Scottish version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and argues that, in adapting the Arthurian narrative established by Monmouth, Boece sought to emphasize the ‘interrelatedness’ of the Scottish and English kingdoms. In doing so, she suggests, Boece’s account looks to a shared British future. John Cramsie makes a case for the centrality of topographical and ethnic descriptions as a way of understanding the complex narrative of Scotland’s peoples in ‘Topography, Ethnography, and the Catholic Scots in the Religious Culture Wars: From Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia to John Lesley’s Historie of Scotland’ (pp. 127–51). Cramsie examines how, in the sixteenth century, these narratives became an important part of a religious identity that relied on images of unity. As a bookend to Leso’s chapter at the beginning of the section, Alessandra Petrina’s ‘A View from Afar: Petruccio Ubaldini’s Descrittione del Regno di Scotia’ (pp. 153–71) traces Ubaldini’s writing in England and accounts for his production of a study of Scotland as a way of acquiring a position within the English court. The final section of the collection presents three focused case studies. Ian Johnson reads Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice in the light of spiritual and critical influences on reading. He suggests that, in creating an exemplary fable of the human soul, Henryson draws both on the Latin commentary tradition and the Scottish vernacular to guide his readers in ‘metacomprehension’ that required an understanding of both the text’s content and an awareness of the self as reader (‘Reading Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice: Sentence and Sensibility’, pp. 175–97). Nick Havely presents an account of a Scottish owner of a copy of Dante’s Commedia. Assessing the surviving records for Thomas Seget, Havely establishes him as a particularly well-connected traveller and the only English-speaking reader to be firmly identified as owning a manuscript of Dante’s work (‘Seget’s Comedy: A Scots Scholar, Galileo, and a Dante Manuscript’, pp. 199–221). Jeremy Smith’s linguistic analysis of ‘baroque prose’ in ‘The Inventions of Thomas Urquhart’ (pp. 223–48) highlights the fashion for ‘verbal ornament’ in the seventeenth century. Smith notes that Urquhart’s style shows a learned imitation of polysyllabic Latin- and Greek-derived vocabulary in his humorous writing that was intended to be understood by like-minded readers as clever euphemisms or elaborate circumlocutions. Nicola Royan’s ‘Afterword’ (pp. 249–61) focuses on the contemporary critical debates that form the background to many of the literary and linguistic studies presented in the volume. In particular, she considers Scots’ writers engagement with humanism, both in Latin and in the vernacular. In ‘William Dunbar and the Querelle des Femmes: A Response to the Roman de la Rose’ (ÉtudesÉp 34[2018] np), Lucy Hinnie examines the language of Dunbar’s ‘Golden Targe’ and ‘Sen that I am Presoneir’ to argue that the poems should be read in tandem as subversions of the querelle debate. In particular, Hinnie highlights the ways in which Dunbar appeals to the senses in the poetic construction of gender. A little late for the Older Scots period but pertinent to literary studies is Alasdair A. MacDonald’s George Lauder (1603–1670): Life and Writings. In this volume, MacDonald presents an appraisal of Lauder’s life alongside a complete edition of his poetry. The first two chapters of the first section of MacDonald’s volume concentrate on establishing the cultural context in which Lauder was writing as well as a detailed account of Lauder’s life. In chapter 3, MacDonald evaluates the literary and linguistic contexts of Lauder’s poetry, tracing the development of Lauder’s art. Chapter 4 provides a detailed account of Lauder’s library based on a list of his books auctioned after his death, allowing MacDonald to consider both the sources Lauder drew on as a writer and the poet’s interests as a reader. The second section of MacDonald’s volume contains the first complete edition of Lauder’s surviving works as well as a selection of poems addressed to Lauder and some of the poet’s correspondence. MacDonald includes detailed apparatus and critical commentary. Given the scarcity of scholarship on Lauder, MacDonald’s edition draws welcome attention to this Scottish poet, who spent most of his life in the Netherlands. 10. Drama One aspect shared by a number of monographs this year is the consideration of drama through its wider cultural contexts. Eleanor Johnson’s Staging Contemplation: Participative Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama performs the still surprisingly rare work of bringing late medieval vernacular drama into conversation with devotional literature, with the prime concern of this monograph being how both forms engage audiences in contemplative activities. Redefining contemplative literature as not exclusively within the remit of religious orders, Johnson widens the scope of contemplative practices and brings more popular forms of literature into the discussion. Her book explores the ‘kinds of cognitive work that can be achieved through the experience of formal, sensory elements in a literary text’ (p. 8). Chapter 1 (pp. 23–48) presents The Cloud of Unknowing in relation to the sonic power of the vernacular text, which draws on what Johnson terms ‘atomic prayer chains’ (p. 46) as an intrinsic part of its devotional effort. The valorization of Middle English over Latin is integral to the argument, in which the text’s sensory power comes through words being simultaneously accessible and mysterious. Chapter 2 (pp. 49–74) explores how the formal features in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love stimulate contemplative activity, foregrounding the inclusivity of Julian’s text. Chapter 3 (pp. 75–108) complicates the consideration of contemplation as being antithetical to the social world, arguing, via a reading of Piers Plowman, that in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the practice became more common outside orders. Here, Johnson makes a definitive link between drama and literature in her contention that key episodes of Piers Plowman are shaped by the Quem queritis liturgical tradition. Chapter 4 (pp. 139–68) moves into the fifteenth century, and more emphatically to drama as the dominant form of imaginative contemplation. Drama’s participatory dimension is of particular interest to this study. The Marian N-Town plays are considered in relation to their poetic and dramatic effects on participative contemplation, with the Virgin’s role as mediatrix recognized as an entrance point that enables this kind of cognitive activity. The end of this chapter positions the humour of which Joseph is a target as a vehicle for a different perspective on how an audience might have been engaged in the work of divine contemplation. Chapters 5 and 6 continue with the role of laughter and comedy in Wisdom and Mankind. Returning to the importance of the vernacular, Johnson advocates that Wisdom theorizes its own processes of contemplation through the concept of likeness in language and likeness to God. The power of laughter to induce contemplative states is relayed with the dramatic intent of Mankind. Here, Johnson draws upon arguments that envisage the engagement with sin through humour as part of the corrective experience a group undergoes in drama. Through the combination of texts and perspectives, Johnson contributes new ways of considering drama in its historic literary context. In line with Eleanor Johnson’s thematic study, Sarah Brazil’s monograph The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature: Cognition, Kinesis, and the Sacred utilizes a similarly wide-ranging approach in connecting drama to its wider cultural nexus. Though the material dimensions of clothing are important to Brazil’s study, this is not an investigation of costume history. Brazil’s questions are tilted towards conceptual investigations of embodiment, and how clothing is used by drama, literature, and iconography to construct bodies within major biblical episodes. Chapter 1 (pp. 19–52) covers the Fall of Adam and Eve, with Brazil exploring the surprising variety of ways in which clothing relates to the perfect and fallen body across the sprawling theological engagements with the narrative. The three extant English plays (from York, Chester, and N-Town) encapsulate the variety of ways of understanding this formative moment in biblical history. Losing a garment, being forcefully dressed by God, and/or remaining naked all articulate the loss of the Edenic state in these plays. In tracing such a dense theological tradition via garments, a new way of viewing the network of influences on the English plays is opened up. Chapter 2 (pp. 53–88) examines another infamous garment: the folded face cloth (the sudarium) Jesus Christ leaves in his tomb subsequent to his resurrection. Brazil examines how the cloth requires a reader to infer the resurrected body in the Gospel of John, and how it signals resurrection in medieval iconography and liturgical performance. Though the sudarium appears in most vernacular plays, its instrumental role as announcer of the resurrection is displaced by the physical presence of a Christ-player’s body. Chapter 3 (pp. 89–118) argues that clothing is used in a different fashion in the resurrection of Lazarus. The paradox of rising while bound in grave-clothes underpins this chapter. While Lazarus’s constrained motion formed the basis for allegorical interpretations that position him as a grievous sinner (with his release from the garments aligned with his absolution), the plays of this episode rarely stage this interpretation. Brazil argues that this dissonance is in part owing to the practical concerns of performance, which cannot use paradoxical movement to the same effect that a literary text or image does. The fourth and final chapter (pp. 119–46) takes on two shoe metaphors, the first related to the doctrine of the incarnation, the second to the affectus, the emotional faculty of the soul. This focus on the figurative power of shoes relates to how certain bodies can and should be understood. This study marks a new departure in how material artefacts relate to bodies in literary and dramatic texts. The dialogue with embodied cognition studies gives a fresh perspective on the active engagement of medieval writers and playwrights (and modern readers) with the imaginatively porous border between body and clothing. Emma Maggie Solberg’s Virgin Whore makes a substantial contribution to Marian studies through foregrounding Mary’s role in the N-Town pageants. Using the plays as evidence for how the life of the Virgin was imagined by lay communities, Solberg draws on the theological, apocryphal, artistic, and literary sources which underpinned the pageants to reveal their characterization of Mary as a trickster figure. The first chapter (pp. 20–47) focuses on the pageants dealing with Joseph’s doubt. It provides a history of Joseph’s role in the holy family and the development of farcical tropes in his representation. Solberg also raises important questions about how this ridicule might be linked to Jewish typing in early drama. The second chapter (pp. 48–74) examines the various chastity tests in the Trial of Mary and Joseph and the Nativity, arguing that the N-Town Mary turns these potentially violent events into a form of play. Mary’s propensity to bend the rules for comic effect is developed further in the third chapter (pp. 75–100), which challenges her conventional reading as the inverse of Eve by suggesting she commits many of the same acts as Eve, and yet generates divine mercy rather than punishment. Mary’s miraculous family tree forms the centre of chapter 4 (pp. 101–25), which places a helpful focus on the role of St Anne as mother and wife before widening out from the N-Town plays to suggest that Mary might be read against other ‘bad wives’ in medieval drama, including Eve, Norea, and the Towneley Gyll. The fifth chapter (pp. 126–47) examines the N-Town The Woman Taken in Adultery through the consideration that Mary embodies a new Christian law in which sexual promiscuity receives mercy. This reading emerges through the context of the medieval stereotyping of Judaism and the narratives of supersession running through the plays. The book concludes with an examination of how the figure of Mary so often became a target of post-Reformation resistance to biblical drama and iconography. Yet Solberg also demonstrates that Marian theatrical traditions were reworked for the early modern stage through her reading of the untrustworthy virgin, Joan of Arc, in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI. This important book brings together a number of arguments currently flourishing in medieval Marian, early theatre, humour, and Jewish–Christian studies to claim a much more playful N-Town Mary than has previously been assumed. Where Solberg touches on the Christian typing of Judaism in early drama, Chanita Goodblatt’s Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy looks at how Jewish and Christian biblical exegetical traditions are interrelated in sixteenth-century English biblical drama. Examining how biblical text generates dramatic text and how dramatic text interrogates scriptural problems, Goodblatt reads biblical drama as part of early Reformation efforts to interpret the Bible. Arguing that key commentators such as Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin moved away from medieval allegory to focus on literal interpretations of Scripture, Goodblatt identifies ‘a Jewish–Christian cooperative effort’ (p. 9) in early modern biblical scholarship. The book is structured around three plays dramatizing events from the Hebrew Bible, whose stories of monarchy and family are read in relation to Tudor kings and queens. Following on from the introduction, which also comprises chapter 1, the first section is based on The Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester [1529–30, printed 1561]. Chapter 2 examines Hester’s performance of language and manipulation of speech acts in relation to Katherine of Aragon’s role in Henry VIII’s court. Goodblatt finds that Jewish prayers in the play actually represent Christian (Catholic) ritual and prayer. However, in comparing the play with the Comoedia von der Königen Esther and Hoffärtigen Haman, Goodblatt finds that the latter offers a slightly more accurate performance of Jewish prayer. The third chapter examines the carnivalesque and the wise woman in the book of Esther as depicted in Godly Queene Hester and the Comoedia. This covers the fall of Haman, the use of allegorical characters, and the wise woman’s malleability in being characterized as either Katherine of Aragon or Elizabeth I. Goodblatt draws comparisons with the allegorical work of Respublica: a morality play performed during the reign of Mary Tudor. The second section takes as its focus A Newe Mery and Wittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating Upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau [1552–3, printed 1568]. Chapter 4 focuses on female authority through the figure of Rebecca as recipient and interpreter of divine knowledge. This is contextualized within contemporary biblical exegesis on Rebecca’s status alongside the medieval Ordo de Ysaac et Rebecca, the Towneley Jacob play, and Respublica. Chapter 5 turns its attention to familial law and obedience, aligning the competition between Jacob and Esau with the turbulent inheritance within the Tudor dynasty. Again, Rebecca’s agency remains important. Her divine (fore)knowledge allows her to rework traditions of patriarchal inheritance in Jacob’s favour. A discussion of costume and disguise follows—in particular the use of ‘Jewish’ caps used in medieval artwork to differentiate Jews from Christians and Jacob’s donning his brother’s garb. Goodblatt claims these scenes position Esau as an English Catholic made obsolete by the new Protestant rule. The final section examines The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe [1594, printed 1599]. Nathan’s parable of the poor man’s ewe is called on to introduce the play’s intersection of justice, judgement, and the monarchical abuse of power. The effect of placing this parable in the mouth of the angel Gabriel in the Origo Mundi of the Cornish Ordinalia is also discussed, before moving on to the Senecan portrayal of this scene in George Peele’s play. The chapter closes with a discussion of divine and blood vengeance, linking the Tokoite parable to the conflict between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Chapter 7 addresses David’s use of poetry to celebrate and to mourn. It conducts a study of the sensual use of the pastoral epithalamium in the Song of Songs, La Seconde Semaine, as well as in Peele’s play. Elegy is addressed in relation to The Araygnement of Paris, where shepherds mourn the death of a colleague, but is also framed in relation to contemporary Elizabethan politics. The book ends with a discussion of contemporary productions of these plays, using insights from the artists involved. Goodblatt also provides an appendix containing an English translation of the Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman. Making a contribution to the study of power relations, gender, and violence, Estella Ciobanu’s Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama offers one of the more theoretically inflected studies of the year. Its seven chapters are concerned with physical and discursive violence, especially violence inflicted on figures critics have been reticent to view as victims in the York, Chester, N-Town, and Towneley plays. Ciobanu’s critical lens is shaped by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy, ‘the intersectional system of multiple oppression: gender, class, race, and colonialism’ (p. 9), reinforced by more established theories such as the abject and the subaltern. Ciobanu’s book advocates looking with the devil, that is, to take a counter-perspective on commonly held truths and knowledge. Chapter 1 (pp. 43–76) takes on the plays of the Slaughter of the Innocents, which Ciobanu considers paradigmatic for the types of violence, whether physical or discursive, present in the plays. Gender-based violence is a prime concern, with the author investigating the silence imposed on the mothers of the innocents and their forced entry into men’s discursive practices. Chapter 2 (pp. 77–124) switches focus to the source of this violence, Herod. Read alongside Herod are other figures related to tyranny, including God, Noah, and Abraham, thus calling patriarchal values into serious question. Chapter 3 (pp. 125–88) looks at judicial torture in relation to music-making, particularly in the passion plays. Here, Ciobanu investigates how victims are created through the repeated performances of Jesus’s torture and death. In naming Jews as the torturers or executioners, the critic contends that redemption is not so easy a concept when power dynamics are working against socially marginalized groups. Chapter 5 (pp. 189–234) looks at the types of discursive practices that work to alienate female speakers from the discovery of Christ’s resurrection, while chapter 6 (pp. 235–264) considers how argumentative logics work against Noah’s wife, who is positioned in relation to other unruly women such as Eve. The exclusion of women from patriarchal knowledge also emerges as a concern. Chapter 7 (pp. 265–297) focuses on plays concerned with final things, with the Chester Harrowing of Hell and Last Judgment forming the focal points. Ciobanu considers how sin is gendered in these plays, and how gender categories lead to violence, such as the callous exclusion of the penitential alewife from redemption in the Harrowing play. In not taking power dynamics or concepts of truth at face value, Ciobanu puts her finger on dimensions of violence that are all too often normalized in critical discourse. In that regard, there is much to be gained from this study. Gabriella Mazzon’s Pathos in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art: A Communicative Strategy examines the intersection of the linguistic and the visual in its study of pathos as a means of spiritual and dramatic communication. Building on a long tradition of scholarly connections between medieval drama and art, Mazzon’s book adds a linguistic focus to the discussion by examining how rhetoric aids the visual in evoking emotion in its audiences. Arguing that the generation of pathos aimed to appeal ‘to the heart rather than to reason’ (p. 2), Mazzon nevertheless stresses the importance of drama and art drawing on the spiritual memories of their audiences, whose active spectatorship demanded they perform the sufferings of Mary and Jesus. Chapter 1 (pp. 11–79) provides a solid grounding in the current theories linking iconography and textual studies, and offers an overview of their intersection in the late Middle Ages, where artwork began to place a greater emphasis on human features, suffering, and fragility. These strategies, Mazzon claims, were key to devotional artworks functioning as objects of memory. Mazzon then turns her focus to her main theme of pathos in visual art and drama. Two sections argue that pain and suffering were communicated through presence and memory. Together, these enabled the viewer to reflect on and meditatively re-experience pathos and suffering long after encountering dramatic or iconographical material. The second chapter (pp. 80–131) develops in response to recent theories of medieval emotion and its practical role in devotional practices. This is contextualized within a discussion of the linguistic history of popular religious writing and the presence of plays that mix Latin and the vernacular throughout Europe. This mixture, Mazzon argues, allowed for the diverse proliferation of emotion-generating words, particularly in English drama. The section ends by calling attention to how these practices were geared towards engaging audiences in forms as diverse as sermons, plays, church artwork, and liturgy. The third chapter (pp. 132–239) considers a series of episodes in which the evocation of pathos is key to the medium’s communication. The English Sacrifice of Isaac plays, Mazzon finds, use interjection and affective language to emphasize Isaac’s fear and horror and Abraham’s reluctant obedience and grief. A trans-European study of plays of the slaughter likewise examines the intersection of grief, violence, and the mother’s desire to protect and comfort her children. Parental affection is also studied in relation to the staging of Mary’s relationship with her parents and her affection and anxiety for Jesus. The next section engages with some of the themes also covered by Ciobanu. Included here are the N-Town presentation of Christ’s torture as a ‘game’; depictions of Cain’s violence, and the work of performative violent speech acts such as slander across a range of plays and literary texts. The worldly powers carrying out these tortures are examined through a linguistic analysis of the tyrant figure, while Mazzon also interrogates the anti-Semitic tropes engaged in medieval dramatizations of Christ’s persecutors. The final part of this chapter provides an analysis of the grief of Mary at the crucifixion and her lamentation and accusation. Having established the many ways in which performances and artwork sought to produce, use, and manipulate pathos, the final section of the book turns its attention to the audience. Offering an analysis of language, mode, and tone to engage an audience—particularly through dialogue and address—Mazzon claims that these devices achieve a similar effect to paintings in which the viewer is fashioned as witness, or where a painted figure’s gaze is directed outward. This section, which speaks directly to the most recent thinking in medieval audience studies, provides a compelling ending to this meticulously researched exploration of pathos in medieval European drama. This year saw two further publications of Routledge’s Variorum Collected series. On this occasion, some of the most significant publications of Peter Meredith, The Practicalities of Early English Performance: Manuscripts, Records, and Staging, and Meg Twycross, The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance, are brought together by editors John Marshall (Meredith) and Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King (Twycross). Meredith’s rich critical legacy is evident in the wide array of specialisms included in his volume. Having attended to the importance of the manuscripts, scribes, and hands that recorded the bulk of early drama, Meredith’s work makes a series of important contributions to the field. Amongst the most impactful are his discussion of the sixteenth-century York clerk John Clerke, an investigation of the complex document known as the Ordo Paginarium, and dealing with the problematic features of MS Cotton Vespasian D viii, the manuscript which preserves the N-Town plays. His careful analysis of metrics, liturgical and biblical influences on the plays and pageants, and what the performance of plays can do to further knowledge will be greatly appreciated by drama scholars. Meg Twycross’s volume offers further insight into how performing the plays has led to significant advances in critical thinking about early drama, work in which Twycross continues to participate. This collection gathers together publications on practical details of performance such as a study of the stations that the wagons would have stopped at on Corpus Christi day in York, and another consideration of the complexity of the Ordo Paginarium from the perspective of digital photography. Twycross’s work on York is celebrated in a section of its own, but the scope of her scholarship extends beyond England to European practices such as the Leuven ommegang. Other practice-based aspects of dramatic performance include costume, transvestism, and acoustics. Both collections bring together important advances in the study of early English drama that were previously in disparate and hard-to-reach places. The Variorum series has done exceptional work in preserving the accessibility of field-changing publications for a new generation of researchers. Like several publications this year, the collection edited by Mark Cruse, Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, demonstrates the effectiveness of drawing on performance methodologies and history to analyse performance elements in non-dramatic sources. The essays in this collection engage with religious imagery, acts of confession, secular and devotional poetry, music, spiritual texts, and hagiography. The volume commands a vast geographical and temporal scope, covering materials from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries and from eight countries, and it defines performance spaces as physical or textual spaces that ‘allow for the production of identities, beliefs, or relationships’ (p. ix). Chapters by Marisa Galvez (pp. 1–16), Candace Hull Taylor (pp. 17–34), and Jenna Soleo-Shanks (pp. 35–54) identify the performance possibilities of spiritual literature. Galvez considers the role of the spectator in Crusade songs and confession, arguing that the performative rituals of confession could inspire witnesses to another person’s penance to their own repentance. Hull Taylor establishes an illuminating dialogue between the allegorical figure of Prudence in the thirteenth-century Sawles Warde and Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee. Drawing on medieval theatre tropes in examining the ways in which the two texts ‘stage’ Prudence, her power, and its relation to her gender, this chapter will prove an illuminating resource for those considering allegorical figures in theatre. Soleo-Shanks’s chapter demonstrates the importance of procession and performance in saint-making and urban identity-making. It argues that a performance of Catherine of Alexandria allowed the city to celebrate and commemorate their own holy woman, Catherine Benincasa, fifteen years before her canonization as Catherine of Siena. An essay by Albrecht Classen (pp. 111–34) contributes an analysis of the gendered roles and anxieties being performed in German Shrovetide plays. Classen looks beyond the plays’ carnivalesque ‘battle of the sexes’ conceits to identify specific concerns about the financial, sexual, and societal expectations imposed on men and women. Ivy Howell Waters’s chapter (pp. 177–88), meanwhile, examines two Spanish musical interludes which demonstrate the ability of music and dance to emotionally and spiritually engage audiences in a play’s didactic themes. One of Howell Waters’s most salient points is her argument that popular music had the capacity to address the highly mixed audiences of Spain’s Golden Age. Three chapters examine what Claire Sponsler called the ‘visual archive of early performance’ (p. 94) and the intersection of text, performance, and art. Lofton Durham focuses on an illustrated copy of Jacques Milet’s 1452 play, Istoire de la Destruction de Troie la Grant (pp. 55–92) to examine how illustration complements the dramatic effect of the text’s dialogue and stage directions. Claire Sponsler’s contribution (pp. 93–109) explores the methodological questions raised by using visual images to study drama through a study of the fifteenth-century Beauchamp Pageant. Sponsler outlines the text’s capacity to activate the memories of those who saw the performance, arguing that this capacity enabled the Pageant to continue its role in communicating Beauchamp’s identity beyond its original audience. Meanwhile, a chapter by Catherine Schultz McFarland (pp. 137–54) turns welcome attention to the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In analysing the drama depicted in two prints containing the farces The Dirty Bride and The Masquerade of Valentine and Orson, she demonstrates how the images of plays might have acted as a form of protest against political attempts to suppress theatre in Spain. The political nature of theatre is also a concern for William Bradford Smith’s examination of Jesuit drama’s role in shaping the ambitions of Catholic League founder Maximilian I of Bavaria (pp. 155–78). In analysing a series of plays celebrating the life of Emperor Henry II, which sought to legitimize and inflate the authority of the Bavarian duke, Bradford Smith demonstrates how Jesuit dramatists made use of the latest dramatic techniques from Italy. The collection concludes with J. Eugene Clay’s discussion of the polemical plays of Dimitrii, Metropolitan of Rostov, as a means of countering a revolt against reform in the Russian Orthodox Church (pp. 189–207). This enquiry into the use of theatre as polemic and educational tool underlines the dialogue between Russian and other European theatre traditions. The chapter also highlights the relationship between the spectacle of religious ritual and the spectacle of theatre. Two new editions of early plays have been added to the excellent, publicly accessible TEAMS Middle English Texts series. Their coherent layout and accessible format make them highly useful for research, classroom, and performance use. Theresa Coletti’s edition of The Digby Mary Magdalene Play opens with an introduction that outlines the context of the play, the unique Digby manuscript, and the editing process. Here, Coletti locates the play and the role of Mary Magdalene within their culturally rich East Anglian setting. The introduction gives a useful overview of the saint’s history and the influence of The Golden Legend, as well as covering the international links generated by the saint’s travels within the play and its relationship to continental visual and preaching cultures. Coletti also reads the play in dialogue with recent developments in early theatre criticism, and offers a re-evaluation of what constitutes drama in the context of the performative nature of medieval life. This is followed by a discussion of the play’s manuscript and its history, the rich language and form of the text. A closing section ponders Mary Magdalene’s capacity to draw the reader’s attention to its spectacular, performative dimensions. Coletti discusses the stage directions, machinery, and use of multiple scaffolds, while offering a thoughtful reflection on the how gender roles may have been performed. As with all publications in the TEAMS series, Coletti’s edition includes detailed footnotes, extensive glossing for challenging words, idioms, or phrases, and meticulously researched contexts for the plays and their biblical or apocryphal sources. A bibliography tracks the latest scholarship on the Digby play. The introduction to Garrett P.J. Epp’s TEAMS edition of The Towneley Plays charts the complex history of this manuscript compilation, and considers how the plays’ nineteenth-century ownership has influenced early editions and interpretations. Epp examines the use of local place names in individual plays as evidence of their diverse origins, re-evaluating the legacy of the manuscript’s early attribution to Wakefield. He further posits that the myth of the ‘Wakefield Master’ is a product of literary criticism. The manuscript’s many missing pages and episodes, erasures, and irregularities in the ordering of the plays are addressed, and Epp argues that the manuscript may have been compiled for private devotional reading. Epp justifies his ordering of the plays (at odds with what the manuscript records) by arguing that this edition is geared towards classroom and performance use. He also aims to continue the work of the manuscript’s compilers in trying to collate disparate pageants into a coherent whole. Epp’s edition of the Towneley plays includes parallel glosses, detailed notes on specific lines, and a short introduction to each play that offers a comprehensive overview of its religious and contemporary contexts. Christina Fitzgerald’s modernized edition The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants is the third effort this year to make early drama more accessible for teachers and students alike. Fitzgerald has included twenty-seven of a possible forty-seven pageants, and those acquainted with the Beadle and King edition of the York plays will be interested to know that eight pageants previously omitted are now available through Fitzgerald’s selection: (2) The Creation; (12) The Annunciation and Visitation; (15) The Shepherds; (24) The Woman Taken in Adultery and the Raising of Lazarus; (39) Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene; (44) The Death of Mary; (45) The Assumption. A decidedly Marian focus emerges from Fitzgerald’s choice of episodes. The editorial practice of the Broadview edition keeps accessibility at the forefront of its mission, with the model of early modern drama firmly in mind. Alongside modernized spelling, right-hand marginal glosses and end-page notes make for a less fractured reading experience than other editorial choices have previously done. Moreover, glossing is continuous and does not rely on a cumulative reading experience, which gives teachers more freedom to move around the selected episodes with the confidence that students will have all difficult or obscure words explained. Alongside an informative introduction laying out the state of research to date on the York plays, a series of suitable appendices accompanies the selected episodes. Fitzgerald chooses pertinent medieval images that resonate with how the plays were staged, furnishing students with a visual analogue that they will find helpful to their reading experience. Key historical documents from the REED project, such as payment records and the surviving guild records of the Mercers’ Last Judgment pageant, will further open up the cultural and historical contexts of the plays. This additional material will be crucial to making the York plays accessible to a wider audience, ensuring that this edition will be a valuable classroom resource. Staying with the subject of pedagogy, three electronic articles in Once and Future Classroom (https://once-andfuture-classroom.org) by Douglas Sugano, Leah Haught, and Jamie Friedman provide helpful resources and reflections on how to bring early drama into the classroom. ‘Teaching and Performing the N-Town Plays as Bricolage’ opens with Sugano’s reflection on teaching the N-Town plays as part of a Middle English literature survey class. Using accounts from his students alongside a critical analysis of key plays, Sugano notes that the N-Town plays are particularly well adapted to appeal to our postmodern sensibilities owing to their self-consciousness and political nature. Providing an account of the N-Town manuscript’s compilation and revision history, Sugano draws helpful links between its nature as a compilation and the Canterbury Tales. He shows how performing the plays opens students up to the texts as medieval productions that were both local and acted as political propaganda. Haught’s contribution, ‘Fragments, Framing Devices, and Female Literacy: Teaching the N-Town Marian Material’, addresses the manuscript’s Marian focus as a means of exploring complex theological topics that draw on the plays and students’ backgrounds. How to broach the questions of identity, gender roles, and the relationship between individuals and institutions is also discussed through the example of the presentation of Mary at the temple, with further links to the Canterbury Tales. Haught concludes by demonstrating how the N-Town plays might be used to teach the importance of Mary in medieval female devotional practice. She draws on Chaucer’s Prioress and the Second Nun’s Marian tales, as well as the Marriage and Trial pageants as a means of navigating individual (lay) spirituality and church authority. Friedman closes the collection with ‘(Post)Modern N-Town and the Urgencies of the Now’. Her contribution enters into the long-standing debate about whether the medieval past should be treated as ‘another country’, untouchable by modern theories, or whether the approaches adopted by Carolyn Dinshaw and others—that modern questions can illuminate the medieval past and interrogate our own present—are more conducive. Friedman argues that the N-Town plays provide a useful exemplar in navigating this debate precisely because they resist the modern privileging of author, provenance, and context. Friedman goes on to consider how the N-Town figures of Pilate, Annas, and the soldiers who witnessed Christ’s resurrection might speak to students in our ‘post-truth’ era. Affinities are drawn with the postmodern distrust of ideological narratives presenting themselves as truth. Together, these three articles demonstrate the rich pedagogical flexibility of the N-Town plays, which are capable of generating productive in-class discussions of performance and gender, narrative and cultural production. The fortieth edition of Medieval English Theatre begins with a reflection from Meg Twycross on how the journal’s production methods have changed over the years (METh 40[2018] 2–6). Twycross briefly reviews how scholarship in early drama has changed alongside the journal, with annual meetings moving from specific themes to more diverse ones as the field developed. The diversity of the articles contained in this edition reflects this journey. Philip Butterworth and Michael Spence’s article, ‘William Parnell, Supplier of Staging and Ingenious Devices, and his Role in the Visit of Elizabeth Woodville to Norwich in 1469’ (METh 40[2018] 7–65), examines the rich evidence from the Chamberlains’ account books concerning staging preparations and costs for the queen’s entry. The authors include a discussion of the scenery built at or around Westwyck Gate, the use and care for the hangings and cloths at the stations (which were soaked in the heavy rain), costumes, the making of giants and other dummy figures, and the work done by carpenter William Bisshope and William Parnell, ‘who regularly supplies ingenious devices for plays and stations’ (p. 13). Above all, this study emphasizes that a royal entry demanded involvement and labour from across the city and beyond, bringing in specialist stage craftsmen. The second part of this article tracks William Parnell’s career through several East Anglian records, including from Ipswich and London, discussing whether his diverse works might come under the later term ‘property player’. The article ends with useful appendices featuring transcriptions and translations of the accounts it uses. In ‘The Huy Nativity from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century: Translation, Play-Back, and Pray-Back’ (METh 40[2018] 66–96), Olivia Robinson and Aurélie Blanc provide an analytical reflection of the Medieval Convent Drama Project’s 2017 translation and staging of the Huy Nativity. Introducing the seventeenth-century text as an adaptation synthesized from two fifteenth-century plays, the article examines how post-medieval sisters approached their convent’s performance history. It asks what these practices might tell us about drama in English religious houses, for which fewer sources survive. Robinson and Blanc discuss the challenges involved in translating the play’s language, and the problem of making a play ‘triply in the past’ (as a seventeenth-century imagining of a medieval imagining of Scripture) accessible to a modern audience. The authors’ consideration of language provides an opportunity for some insights into a collaborative relationship between the play’s early audiences and performers, as well as how language might influence a modern audience’s reception of its theological content. They also give attention to the role of Joseph as caregiver and nourisher: a role often overlooked by the heavier focus on the figure’s comic elements in English biblical drama. John Marshall’s ‘A “Gladnes” of Robin Hood’s Men: Henry VIII Entertains Queen Katherine’ (METh 40[2018] 98–121) conducts a striking discussion of the court relationships at work in Henry VIII’s 1510 disguising as Robin Hood’s men in Katherine of Aragon’s chamber. Suggesting that this was the act of a young king keen to establish himself, Marshall provides a review of the cast and audience of this private entertainment, revealing how intimately performance, relationships, and politics were entwined in Henry’s youthful court. As Butterworth’s EarT article also explores regarding theatrical disguise, Marshall notes that, given how familiar the dancers and audience were to one another, there must have been some pretence involved relative to the use of disguise. The performance is considered alongside Henry VIII’s proclivity for disguisings and jousts, with a discussion of the kinds of dance that may have been used in courtly performances. Marshall concludes with an exploration of the gendered power dynamics of place and space at work in the incursion of the kings’ men into the queen’s space. In ‘Reading Mankind in a Culture of Defamation’ (METh 40[2018] 122–54), Clare Egan positions the vices’ naming of prominent local figures in the context of ecclesiastical and secular defamation laws. The main argument contends that this episode allusively slanders the men it names while showing an awareness of defamation as a moral and criminal offence. This offers a plausible reason for why the vices designate some of the men they name as untouchable. Drawing on W.K. Smart’s identification of those named by the vices, Egan proposes that, rather than situating these men as the victims of the vices’ theft, this passage works as an example of performed libel attacking the reputations of individuals. Research into ecclesiastical and secular court libel cases supports this suggestion, and also takes into account the effect of such language on a receptive, collaborative audience. Demonstrating how sin can cross from vices to audiences, Egan links Mankind’s horse-stealing episode with reputation-stealing, which has the potential to ensnare its audience in the guilty act. Darragh Greene’s “Mysse-masche, dryff-draff”: Wittgenstein’s Language Games, Nonsense, and the Grammar of the Soul in Mankind’ (SELIM 22[2017] 77–99), missed in last year’s YWES, draws on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to explore the calculated misuse of grammar by the vices. Meg Twycross’s ‘The Sun in York (Part One): Illumination, Reflection, and Timekeeping for the Corpus Christi Play’ (METh 40[2018] 155–202) is the first of two articles to examine the use and manipulation of natural light in the York pageants. This fascinating study brings together evidence from across Europe concerning the manipulation of artificial and natural light. Twycross offers a close reading of English play texts, artwork, theology, and optical theory in order to discuss how God’s radiance might have been represented. She begins with a review of mechanisms using fire to light performances in royal entries and feste before moving on to the use of reflective materials to create the effect of dynamic radiance. Sunlight in the York Nativity, Transfiguration, and First Day of Creation pageants is considered, including the use of reflective surfaces, texture, and scattering of light; the luminous properties of white costumes; the materials used for reflection and light-direction, and the quality of reflection in different sunlight conditions. These effects are deftly placed in conversation with the plays’ scripts and theology—particularly the idea that certain reflective light conditions would make it difficult to look directly at God, Christ, or the Christ child in these pageants. The second part of this article, forthcoming in the next volume, will examine how the movement of the sun across the sky might have influenced stage effects. Again, Twycross demonstrates how the practicalities of performance are closely entwined with the plays’ theological metaphors. Volume 4 of this year’s Philological Quarterly was dedicated to Claire Sponsler, a scholar who possessed an extraordinary ability to connect drama studies to a range of other disciplines. Sponsler’s untimely death in 2016 has left a field mourning her brilliance, and this volume features colleagues and former students coming together to produce articles that celebrate the work of a friend, mentor, and inspiration. Mary Hayes’s tribute to Sponsler’s many contributions to performance studies forms the preface to this special edition, ‘Saving Rough Drafts: The Miracle Plays of Claire Sponsler’ (PQ 97[2018] 363–74). Hayes’s collation of the scholarly interventions Sponsler made in her doctoral work, described as ‘marginalia’, traces her memories of the intellectual guidance of a formidable teacher and scholar. Hayes attends to Sponsler’s capacity to carve aspects of the field of literature and drama into her own precise and idiosyncratic concerns, before giving an overview of the contributions to this special edition. Though offerings range in topics from Middle English poetry to Irish mythology, only the most pertinent to the study of early English drama are included in this review. In ‘Claire’s Key Phrases’ (PQ 97[2018] 375–87), Kathleen Ashley charts the intellectual development of Sponsler via some of her most important publications, such as the monographs Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England [1997] and The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theatre [2014]. Ashley divides her endeavour into a tripartite approach, moving between Sponsler’s profound impact on the field of drama studies, her capacity to move between disciplines, and her achievement of widening the sense of what constitutes serious research. Summing up such a vibrant and eclectic body of work via phrases she considers key to Sponsler’s intellectual perspective, Ashley suggests that ‘embodied subjects’, ‘cultural appropriation’, and ‘boundary crossing’ offer a sense of the breadth and ingenuity of the research Sponsler has left to the field. Judith Coleman’s tribute, ‘Performing Orthodox Heresy: Mary, Antinomianism, and the Transgressive Female Body in N-Town’s Trial of Mary and Joseph’ (PQ 97[2018] 409–24), takes as its focus the N-Town Trial episode, and frames the body of the Virgin Mary in relation to Sponsler’s concern with the ‘place and the problems of bodies in the world and on the stage’ (p. 410). Coleman views the epistemological shift regarding the Virgin’s status within Christianity through the lens of the heretical doctrine of antinomianism (meaning against the law—a term that designates a position of rejecting moral law and the efficacy of good works). She positions the Virgin as ‘the only nonheretical antinomian in Christianity’ (p. 410). Coleman considers how the unique embodied condition of Mary is viewed through the play, particularly in relation to physiognomic understandings of the body, as presented by the trial-by-ordeal. Hayes’s second contribution, ‘The Lazarus Effect: Translating Death in Medieval English Vernacular Drama’ (PQ 97[2018] 445–66), examines the Raising of Lazarus plays to consider literature and drama’s capacity to engage with epistemological uncertainties such as death. Hayes draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives such as cybernetics, the study of communication, and automatic control in machines and living organisms (through the scholarship of N. Katherine Hayes), and cryptomimesis, ‘the semiotic play of concealment and revelation’ (p. 447), as per Michelle Ballif. These frameworks facilitate Hayes’s consideration of how the Lazarus story works within dramatic performance. The relationship between the dead and the literary is considered via the physicality of book production, so dependent on animal skins for basic materials, and how death and literature intertwine both on page and on stage in relation to this episode and figure. Lazarus, though varying in depiction across the five extant English plays, is nevertheless a speaking agent who has seen beyond death and returned with this story. Hayes considers how drama engages with tropes of the ars moriendi and traditions of translation (linguistic and metaphysical) in late medieval culture. Inspired by Sponsler’s major work on John Lydgate as dramatist, Richard Garrett attempts to bring other neglected works of the famed fifteenth-century poet into critical discussion in ‘The Politics of Beastly Language: John Lydgate as Fabulist and Translator’ (PQ 97[2018] 481–97). A series of beast fables likely written early in his career exemplify for Garrett important aspects of Lydgate’s authorship. Questions of Lydgate’s relation to public culture, translation practices and theory, and being an auctor are pursued by relating beast fables such as Isopes Fabules (a collection of seven of Aesop’s fables), The Churl and the Bird, and The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose, to their principal sources, such as Marie de France. Garret contends that, via these early texts, different authorial concerns of Lydgate’s are evident than those in his later poetic works. The focus of Sonja Mayrhofer’s article, ‘“This sely jalous housbonde to bigyle”: Reading and Performance in Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale’ (PQ 97[2018] 515–29), is to draw out several performance traditions that Mayrhofer reads as being integral to Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. There is a particular focus on the character of Nicholas, his skilled performance as scholar and lover, and the props that aid these performances, such as his selection of books, musical instruments, and astrolabe. The other performative dimension is the connection between the Flood scheme Nicholas concocts to trick Alisoun’s husband John, and the late medieval Noah play, with Alisoun figured as the recalcitrant wife in such a scenario. Mayrhofer draws on Sponsler’s attention to the multisensory experience of medieval literature throughout this article, with the contention that reading practices were more reliant on performative dimensions, both internally and externally, than contemporary readers often take into consideration. Amongst the articles published this year, stagecraft, performance space, and the historical practices of early drama constitute a dominant focus. Carla Baricz’s insightful ‘Performing Fulgens and Lucres: Henry Medwall and the Tudor Great Hall Play’ (MRDE [2018] 178–203) is concerned with amplifying the importance of the playing space—in this case the Tudor great hall—and of positioning the play in this context rather than in relation to issues such as publication history and paratextual materials. This article reflects on the ways Tudor drama was conceived with a specific occasion, venue, and audience in mind. The idiosyncratic circumstances of such drama demonstrate the necessity of taking the practicalities of performance conditions into account. The article also points to the severe limitations of previous research into a play such as Fulgens and Lucrece. Making the argument for how the play works in relation to the serving of dinner in a stately house gives Baricz grounds to contest such print-based analyses, and opens up a fresh and exciting perspective on the play’s structure and performance. One of the major contentions of the article is that Thomas More could have been one of the principal players (referred to as A and B in the play text). This claim is situated in relation to an imaginative engagement with the possibilities of performance, grounded in a convincing investigation of the historical and performative dimensions of contemporary practices. Kyle A. Thomas’s ‘The Medieval Space: Early Medieval Documents as Stages’ (ThS 59[2018] 4–22) uses Peter Brook’s question, ‘When and how does a space become a theatre?’, to examine how early medieval Latin manuscript books can function as theatrical spaces. In doing so, Thomas identifies ‘the purposeful theatricality of documentary practices’ (p. 5) in the twelfth-century Bavarian Ludus de Antichristo, which presents itself as a play, and in De investigatione Antichristi, which raises concerns that theatrical performances in sacred spaces might debase that space. Thomas argues that these records of theatrical activity are also records of how space is contested and co-opted by theatrical performance. Gordon Kipling offers a comprehensive overview of medieval practices of staging in ‘Medieval Scenography: Places, Scaffolds and Iconography’ for The Routledge Companion to Scenography, edited by Arnold Aronson (pp. 251–71). Noting that ideas about medieval scenography have been skewed by the scene plan for The Castle of Perseverance [1425] and The Martyrdom of St Apollonia [1452–60], Kipling investigates the diverse uses of space and scenery in a range of early drama forms. Noting that early plays tended to appropriate iconography as a visual source for their theatrical staging, he conducts a persuasive reading of the similarities between images of the Mappa Mundi, which places Jerusalem at the centre of the world, and the Castle stage plan, which puts the castle at the central point. The chapter draws on the work of Meg Twycross to examine the function of scaffolds and the characters stationed there. Noting that it is often the case that only unconventional scenery tends to be mentioned in detail in theatrical sources, Kipling nevertheless finds a range of intriguing examples of scaffolds in the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Cornish Passio Domini, and The Conversion of St Paul. He offers a good overview of current research into the pageant wagon and its effect on plays’ internal symbolism, before turning attention to the comparatively less examined use of pageant cars and moving scenery in mummings and disguisings. The chapter concludes by arguing that the royal entry tended to employ several of these staging conventions to situate the monarch as chief spectator and dramatic protagonist. While the chapter only briefly examines indoor household drama, or the more space-dependent academic and liturgical plays, it works with the other chapters in this book to provide a useful introduction to the diverse use of staging conventions in early performance. Philip Butterworth provides a welcome study of transformation and audience understanding in ‘Putting On and Removing the Mask: Layers of Performance Pretence’ (EarT 21[2018] 33–58). Focusing on moments when a mask is put on or removed in view of the spectators, Butterworth examines the relationships between performers, spectators, and their knowledge of identity. He positions examples of masked performance in sixteenth-century courtly mumming alongside less formal house visits, drawing on evidence from more recent accounts of masked mumming traditions. Noting that the ‘agreed pretence’ between the player and spectator differs according to whether or not they recognize the player behind the masked personage, he examines staged moments of transition from John Bale, Robert Wilson, and the Cornish The Life of St Meriasek. Further examples examine instances where the mask is not removed and is complemented by a vocal disguising. This study shines a light on the importance of spectator curiosity in specific instances of masked performance, pushing the kinds of questions we ask of early drama. In ‘“By consent of the whole chapter”: Lincoln Cathedral’s Rewards for Touring Players and School Comedies, 1561–1593’ (EarT 21[2018] 11–31), Jason Burg examines a shift from cathedral-funded performance to the rewarding of travelling players and school comedies. Burg’s investigation aims to extend the timeline of previous studies to 1593 to better examine the transition of the cathedral’s role from producer to audience. He investigates the earlier records of Lincoln’s prolific play-making, before examining those covering the Edwardian reforms and Marian revival. Burg notes that the rewards given to schools and travelling players reflected their patrons’ social standing and the religion of the dean. With this conclusion, he argues for an increasingly political and religiously inflected form of sponsorship. In ‘Dramatic Networks: Marginalized Economics and Labour in the Norwich Grocers’ Play’ (EarT 21[2018] 9–28), Jeffery G. Stoyanoff employs actor-network theory to examine the social and political links between the Norwich Grocers’ Play and its surrounding area. Reading the play as ‘an important actor’ (p. 9) within its city’s economic collective, he contends that the financial and social networks engaged through the performance were part of the same culture that produced Kett’s 1549 rebellion. This argument adds to established readings of early drama’s capacity to fossilize pertinent moments of confessional change by suggesting that shifts in attitudes to social class can also be tracked through performance texts. Stoyanoff also provides an exciting new reading of the leather aprons given to Adam and Eve through this lens. In ‘What Is Everyman?’ (RenD 46[2018] 1–23), Katherine C. Little tackles genre and periodization by demonstrating that, although often cited as a medieval morality play, Everyman is neither medieval nor does it exhibit the temptation-fall-regeneration structure central to earlier incarnations. In doing so, she reads the play as a product of English humanism alongside George Gascoigne’s 1575 The Glass of Government and other contemporary humanist plays. Noting that Everyman is the only play of the so-called moralities to self-describe as ‘a morall playe’, rather than a ‘game’, Little argues that the play text follows the humanist method of providing its audience with a lesson to take away, while making the figure of Death a kind of humanist teacher. While this article renews efforts to dismantle simplistic ‘medieval/early modern’ periodization, its use of The Glass demonstrates the possibilities that emerge when we question established considerations of genre and period. 11. Secular Verse There was not a lot published in the category of secular verse in 2017 and 2018: a handful of articles and two books, the latter of which, Thorlac Turville-Petre’s Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, contains only some sections of relevant discussion. There were two articles that focused on the English poetry of Charles D’Orléans. The late John Burrow’s ‘The Exchange of Hearts in the English Poems of Charles D’Orléans’ (ChR 52[2017] 476–83) discusses the trope of the exchange of hearts in D’Orléans’s English Book of Love, focusing on the importance that this exchange be consensual. He shows how this is successful in the first ballad, but not so in the second. In ‘Charles D’Orléans’s Heart and Its Books’ (MÆ 87[2018] 343–67), Lucas Wood explores the different ways in which the poet’s two manuscripts, London BL MS Harley 682 and Paris BnF MS fr. 25458, dispose his work as retrospective attempts at poetic self-fashioning. He argues in particular that the Harley MS presents the poet’s work as coherent (pseudo-)autobiography, detailing the fortunes of the poet-persona in love, but which nonetheless forbids the reader to equate poem, book, and life history. On an altogether different subject, in ‘Political Poems in MS Harley 2253 and the English National Crisis of 1339–41’ (ChR 53[2018] 60–81), Carter Revard discusses seven political poems of protest in MS Harley 2253, including the English Song of Lewes (c.1260s) and Song of the Husbandman (c.1330s) in the context of social conditions, political crises, and royal statutes. Turning to the two books, Ingrid Nelson’s Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre and Practice in Later Medieval England argues that the lyric genre in late medieval England is defined as much by cultural practices as by poetic forms. Nelson emphasizes how late-medieval English lyrics via tactics of improvisation hybridize, recombine, and blend traditionally separate forms. She bases her theory of tactical composition on the close reading and analysis of a range of lyrics, including many from Harley MS 2253 and BL Additional 46919, which is Friar William Herebert’s Commonplace Book (as well as lyrics embedded in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women). In chapter 1 (pp. 31–58), relevant to this section on secular poetry, she focuses on the Harley MS, arguing that the voice of the Middle English lyric ‘I’ is inherently tactical, negotiating and articulating the relationships between writing, subjective interiority, and the external world. The remaining chapters concern Friar Herebert’s religious lyrics and Chaucer’s lyrics. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Turville-Petre explores the conceptual relationship between description and narrative, the contribution of description to the narratives of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century alliterative poems, and the poets’ greater than usually acknowledged familiarity with and use of the Latin classics. He bases his study on the close reading and analysis of key passages from a selection of poems, which includes, relevant to this section, Mum and the Sothsegger, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Richard the Redeless, and Wynnere and Wastoure. Concerning Mum and the Sothsegger, in a sustained ten-page analysis, Turville-Petre focuses on the set-piece description of the locus amoenus of a remote, lovely valley surrounded by hills in the dream-vision portion of the poem, declaring it an unmatched description of the English countryside. He also discusses the description of the wise old bee-keeper who appears towards the end of the dream, as well as the topos of the commonwealth of bees, including the poet’s possible knowledge of Virgil’s Georgics. In the final chapter (pp. 167–92), Turville-Petre discusses the alliterative poets’ imitation of set-piece descriptions in the French romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Wace’s Roman de Brut and the Latin classics, but also argues for the importance of their observations from life. The other poems mentioned above are discussed here and there as relevant. 12. Religious Verse This year saw the publication of several important monographs, essay collections, and articles fully or partly focused on Middle English religious verse. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead, eds., Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, covers a substantial amount of religious verse. The collection seeks ‘to remind readers of the extraordinary richness of the body of Middle English poems conventionally, if not always problematically, held to be lyrics’ (p. 1). Each of the essays in this volume takes as its focus one particular lyric, with a glossed text of the lyric offered at the opening of each essay. In the probing introduction by Boffey and Whitehead, the editors image the volume as a ‘snapshot of the present time’, celebrating the inevitable critical shifts that will take place in future years (p. 11). It is divided into interconnected sections on ‘Affect’, ‘Visuality’, ‘Mouvance, Transformation’, and ‘Words, Music, Speech’. Thomas G. Duncan’s essay assesses the complexities of the editing process of Middle English lyrics, focusing on the fundamental need for careful metrical analysis (pp. 12–27). In the ‘Affect’ section, A.S. Lazikani juxtaposes On leome is in this world ilist with church wall paintings (pp. 31–44); Daniel McCann (pp. 44–56) explores affective ‘sweetness’ in Swete Ihesu, now wil I synge, demonstrating that ruminative reading allows ‘its complex blend of poetic flavours and tastes’ to be ‘unlocked’ (p. 47); and Michael P. Kuczynski (pp. 57–69) examines the manuscript context of All Other Love is Like the Moon, proving that such context is ‘crucial to an accurate understanding of both its text and its affectivity or emotional dimension’ (p. 58). In Part II, ‘Visuality’, Annie Sutherland studies the neglected On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi, suggesting that its ‘unlikeness’ to its ‘codicological neighbours’ (the traditionally defined Wooing Group texts and Ancrene Wisse) ‘might provide us with some productive ways of thinking about, and with, the poem’ (p. 76). Hetta Elizabeth Howes inspects blood and shame in Quis est iste qui venit de Edom?, establishing that the lyric ‘can be read as an emotive, script-like text, specifically designed to provoke an array of responses—awe, dread, fear, pity, but most especially shame’ (p. 89). Natalie Jones scrutinizes Ihesus woundes so wide, showing that ‘[a]lthough the poem is in keeping with the popular devotion to Christ’s wounds in the fifteenth century, its imagery can be traced back to a much earlier period and has its origins in the scriptural and iconographic tradition of the fons vitae and the sacramental significance of baptismal water and Eucharistic blood’ (p. 108). Anne Marie D’Arcy studies aureate diction in The infinite power essenciall, conveying the ways in which ‘it is the rhetorical counterpart of the burnished gilding and jewelled pigments lavished on these supernatural events [mysteries of the Virgin and Christ’s victory over death] by contemporary artists’ (p. 111). Mary Wellesley turns to Lydgate’s Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary, a ‘poem that delights in its own textuality’: it ‘celebrates the act of reading text on a page’ (p. 136). In Part III, ‘Mouvance, Transformation’, Anne Baden-Daintree investigates Undo thi dore, among a range of other texts, in her focus on lyric rewritings of the Song of Songs. As Baden-Daintree asserts, ‘The dramatic scenario of the biblical source plays a large part in ensuring a sense of intimacy in its lyric rewriting, and the use of direct speech enhances this’ (p. 156). Katherine Zieman examines the lyrics in the opening of London, British Library, Additional MS 37049. Zieman reveals that the Carthusian compilers ‘draw upon Rolle’s spiritual experience of canor, or angelic song, as both inspiration for and authorization of their own iterations of his vernacular lyrics in ways that allow us to understand both the form and the purpose of their compilation practices’ (p. 161). Part IV, ‘Words, Music, Speech’, has a study by Susanna Fein on two poems found in ‘an extraordinary thirteenth-century literary sequence of moral and didactic poems’: An Orison to Our Lord and A Little Sooth Sermon, neither of which has ‘ever been included in a modern anthology of Middle English lyrics’ (p. 217). Christiania Whitehead interrogates the relations between musical and poetic form in Stond wel, moder, under rode, underscoring ‘the first-person dialogic format of the lyric’ which ‘emerges from the poet’s very close attention to the musical form of the liturgical sequence that he is translating and adapting’ (p. 239). Mary C. Flannery looks at Tutivillus, þe deuyl of hell, putting a spotlight on ‘the dynamic between the Middle English and Latin lines of the poem, and the poem’s potential to act as a warning against the misuse of liturgical Latin’ (p. 241). Laura Varnam’s powerful monograph on space (The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture), which includes many reflections on religious verse, is discussed in more detail above in Section 1. Relevant to this section is the fact that it opens with a vignette from the fifteenth-century continuation of the Canterbury Tales, The Canterbury Interlude and the Merchant’s Tale of Beryn, and closes with a reflection on the carol ‘By a Chapel as I Came’. Varnam’s study ‘demands an interdisciplinary approach’ (p. 4). The religious verse studied includes St Erkenwald, How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter, Manning’s Handlyng Synne, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. Varnam also explores a range of lyrics in which Christ speaks from the cross, arguing that ‘the “here” of these lyrics and the location of “þis cros” could be linked to the church’ (p. 167). Daniel McCann’s monograph Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England is an important contribution to the history of emotions and to the medical humanities. He responds to intensifying interest in the Vernon manuscript, taking this codex—with its rich collection of religious verse and prose—as his focus. The monograph is structured ‘thematically, focusing on a specific medicinal emotion and analysing the texts most associated with it’, a strategy that seeks ‘to adhere to the manuscript’s overall broad function of “sowle-hele”’ (p. 25). McCann progresses through the medicine of fear, penance, compassion, and longing; to this is added a chapter on ‘moderation’ (pp. 25–6). The religious verse examined by McCann includes the Prick of Conscience, Richard Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, and various lyrics. Katie L. Walter’s Middle English Mouths: Late Medieval Medical, Religious, and Literary Traditions also considers religious verse at various points in her wide-ranging critical study. Within this frame, Walter includes consideration of Piers Plowman and the poetry of John Lydgate. Eleanor Johnson’s monograph, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, argues for a more wide-ranging definition of contemplative literature. Johnson contends that ‘the flourishing and evolution of late Middle English contemplative literature contributed significantly to the possibilities and practices of “contemplation” conceived far more broadly than we imagine when we think of “a contemplative” in radical withdrawal from the world’ (p. 3). Johnson covers an array of genres, including religious verse. The book includes examination of Piers Plowman, the verse of the dramatic texts of the N-Town cycle, Wisdom and Mankind. Johnson finds contemplative texts encourage an orientation towards the social world, and contends that these texts enable a ‘two-tiered participation, first in literature and then and thereby in God’ (p. 4) The essay collection edited by Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu in honour of William Marx, Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts, includes consideration of a range of verse and prose texts. Piers Plowman makes an appearance (in an essay by A.S.G. Edwards), as well as the less well known The Nine Points Best Pleasing to God. Oliver Pickering (pp. 191–210) studies this latter poem to see its ‘interaction between verse and prose’ (p. 191). Pickering explores the transformation of verse into prose in adaptations of the Speculum vitae and the South English Legendary. As for the Nine Points Best Pleasing to God (also known as the Nine Virtues), it is extant in twelve prose texts and four versions in verse (p. 195). In his essay on Piers Plowman (pp. 21–33), Edwards critiques aspects of the methodology of the Athlone edition of the text. Hagiographical poetry was also foregrounded this year in Christiania Whitehead’s essay ‘Regional, and with Attitude: the Middle English Metrical Life of St Cuthbert’ (Med Trans 14[2018] 115–32). Whitehead ‘provides an introduction to a particularly acute example of neglect: the fifteenth-century, Middle English metrical Life of St Cuthbert, which has attracted little or no scholarly attention since its critical edition by Rev. J.T. Fowler, for the Surtees Society in 1891’ (p. 115). 13. Romance: Metrical, Alliterative, Prose (a) General Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald, eds., Thinking Medieval Romance covers a wide range of topics on the modes of thinking that informed medieval romance texts, and several of its chapters focus on Middle English romance. Nicola McDonald’s ‘The Wonder of Middle English Romance’ (pp. 13–35) explores romance attitudes towards marvels and wonders with a particular focus on Octavian; in ‘Unthinking Thought: Romance’s Wisdom’ (pp. 36–51), James Simpson examines the concepts of thought and non-thought in medieval romance with a particular focus on Sir Degaré; Laura Ashe, in ‘Killing the King: Romance and the Politicization of History’ (pp. 55–67), argues that romance texts are innately both political and politicizing; Lee Manion’s ‘Thinking Through the English Crusading Romance: Sir Gowther and the Baltic’ (pp. 68–90) examines the capacity for romance to comment upon Crusader culture, with particular attention to Sir Gowther; Emma Bérat, in ‘Romance and Revelation’ (pp. 134–52), argues that the secular nature of romance texts allowed their readers to relate better to the religious allegories suggested therein, with particular attention to Octavian; and Michelle R. Warren’s ‘Good History, Bad Romance, and the Making of Literature’ (pp. 203–20) examines the shifting nature of romance reception with particular attention to changing attitudes towards Henry Lovelich’s romance writing. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders, eds., Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance is a Festschrift that honours Helen Cooper and her huge contribution to medieval romance scholarship. A number of chapters are relevant to this section: Neil Cartlidge’s ‘Medieval Romance Mischief’ (pp. 27–48) and Marcel Elias’s ‘Rewriting Chivalric Encounters: Cultural Anxieties and Social Critique in the Fourteenth Century’ (pp. 49–66) are discussed above in Section 1. Christopher Cannon, in ‘Malory’s Comedy’ (pp. 67–82), looks at the dualistic nature of tragedy and comedy in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cannon recalls Helen Cooper’s observation that the difference between ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ is the end point of the text, ‘the decision to “stop the wheel” at a particular point’ (p. 69). Rather than reading the comic moments in the Morte as failure (an ‘unevenness’ in tone), Cannon argues that Malory was conscious of the relationship between comedy and tragedy, mastering not only the controlled ending at the close of the Morte but also the juxtaposition and sometimes overlapping of comic and tragic elements throughout the text. Cannon concludes that ‘Malory’s comedy may be most simply defined as knowledge of a tragedy that does not have to be experienced’, representing a tension between empathy and separation on the part of the laughing reader(s). Elizabeth Archibald, in ‘Malory and the Post-Vulgate Cycle’ (pp. 115–32), explores the possibility that Malory was familiar with and applied his knowledge of the whole of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, rather than just the Suite du Merlin. Archibald provides a careful analysis of the stylistic, tonal, and narrative similarities between the Morte and the Cycle. Contributions by Barry A. Windeatt, Marco Nievergelt, Corinne Saunders, Ad Putter, Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, and Corinne Saunders and are all discussed above in Section 1. In Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson, eds., The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints, several essays address topics on Middle English romance. Rhiannon Purdie’s ‘King Orphius and Sir Orfeo, Scotland and England, Memory and Manuscript’ (pp. 15–32) explores the idea of memorial transmission in stories of Orpheus; Derek Pearsall discusses metrical self-awareness in romance texts in ‘The Metre of the Tale of Gamelyn’ (pp. 33–49); Ad Putter’s ‘The Singing of Middle English Romance: Stanza Forms and Contrafacta’ uses Bevis of Hampton, King Horn, and Sir Tristrem to explore the presence of song in medieval romance (pp. 69–90); Thorlac Turville-Petre’s ‘Is Cheulere Assigne an Alliterative Poem?’ (pp. 116–27) argues that Cheulere Assigne should be classified as alliterative on the basis of the text displaying an imperfect but still applicable knowledge of the form; Donka Minkova’s ‘Language Tests for the Identification of Middle English Genre’ (pp. 127–48) uses The King of Tars and Sir Orfeo in order to posit a linguistic approach to identifying and categorizing romance texts; Nicholas Myklebus’s ‘The Problem of John Metham’s Prosody’ (pp. 149–69) draws attention to the metre of Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes and argues that it might have been more accomplished and self-aware than has been assumed; Jordi Sanchez-Marti’s ‘The Printed Transmission of Medieval Romance from William Caxton to Wynkyn de Worde, 1473–1535’ (pp. 170–90) focuses on the effects of Caxton’s and de Worde’s different approaches to publishing romance texts; and Michelle De Groot’s ‘Compiling Sacred and Secular: Sir Orfeo and the Otherworlds of Medieval Miscellanies’ (pp. 191–208) examines the influence of manuscript classifications on the interpretation of medieval romance texts. Although Susanna Fein, ed., The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives focuses primarily on book history, the collection also contains several essays that focus on the literary content of the Auchinleck MS. In ‘A Failure to Communicate: Multilingualism in the Prologue to Of Arthour and of Merlin’ (pp. 52–66), Patrick Butler focuses on the prologue to Of Arthour and of Merlin and its commentary upon the status on French and English language use in manuscripts such as the Auchinleck MS. Venetia Bridges, in ‘Absent Presence: Auchinleck and Kyng Alisaunder’ (pp. 88–107), explores the difficulties of contextualizing Kyng Alisaunder within the Auchinleck MS. Marisa Libbon, in ‘The Invention of King Richard’ (pp. 127–38), argues against reading Richard Coer de Lion on the basis of common assumptions about the text and without considering its context within the Auchinleck MS. Venetia Bridges’ monograph, Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France, explores medieval European literary depictions of Alexander the Great. This study is not exclusive to Middle English romance, but chapter 5, ‘English and International?’ (pp. 194–236), focuses on Middle English romances such as Kyng Alisaunder and Of Arthour and of Merlin. Miriam Edlich-Muth, ed., Medieval Romances across European Borders focuses on the adaptation and transmission of European romance texts, and its concluding section highlights Middle English examples. Its chapters include Roger Nicholson, ‘Translating Treason: Shameful Death in French and English Romances of Arthur’s Last Days’ (pp. 155–76); Suxue Zhang, ‘Between Father and Son: Interpreting Motherhood in L’Estoire de Merlin and Its Middle English Adaptations’ (pp. 177–204); and Natalie Goodison, ‘The Serpent with a Woman’s Face: Transformation in Libeaus Desconus and the Vernacular Fair Unknown Tradition’ (pp. 205–28). Mary C. Flannery, ed., Emotion and Medieval Textual Media explores the presentation of emotion within a broad range of medieval contexts, and the volume contains two chapters that would be of interest to scholars of Middle English romance attitudes towards emotion: Amy Brown, ‘Lancelot in the Friend Zone: Strategies for Offering and Limiting Affection in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’ (pp. 75–97); and Marcel Elias, ‘Adapting Romance: Emotional Interpolations, Cognitive Evaluation, and Interreligious Empathy’ (pp. 99–124). (b) Metrical Romance The Stanzaic Morte Arthur is the primary focus of the third issue of Arthuriana 28. In ‘Re-evaluating the Stanzaic Morte Arthur: Content and Contexts’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 3–14), Fiona Tolhurst and K.S. Whetter explore the content and contexts of the romance. In ‘Black Waters, Dragons, and Fiends: Arthur’s Dream in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 15–32), David F. Johnson examines the nuances through which the poet of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur adapts their source material, particularly La Mort le roi Artu and Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to portray Arthur as beholden to divine judgement. In ‘Making Joy / Seeing Sorrow: Emotional and Affective Resources in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 33–50), Andrew Lynch explores the effects of spontaneity and fast narrative pacing within the text and the formal applications of these in order to emphasize the conflicting presence of chaos and structure within the romance. In ‘Malory, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Chaucer’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 51–65), Edward Donald Kennedy explores the idea of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur having been a source that Malory treated with particular respect. In ‘Some Uses of Direct Speech in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 66–85), Elizabeth Archibald also explores the influence of the text on Malory, and particularly the use of direct speech and dialogue to channel the emotions of its characters and, when interrupted, their frustrations. Lastly, in ‘Standing Up for the Stanzaic-Poet: Artistry, Characterization, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (Arth 28:iii[2018] 86–113), Fiona Tolhurst and K.S. Whetter defend the aspects of the poem that have been derided elsewhere, and use these to explain why Malory was so heavily influenced by the text. There is a brief note on The King of Tars in Marisa Libbon, ‘Douce 228, Richard Coeur de Lion, and The King of Tars’ (N&Q 65[2018] 8–11). In ‘Don’t Mention the War! Geography, Saracens and King Horn’s “Diplomatic” Poet’ (LLC 65[2018] 23–36), Kenneth Eckert argues that the peoples and place names of King Horn are left deliberately vague and that romance readers should see this as a strategic decision rather than as information that has been lost to posterity. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp’s ‘Perception and Possible Worlds in Sir Orfeo’ explores the concept of time in relation to the adaptive nature and ambiguous faerie Otherworld of Sir Orfeo (in Knapp and Knapp, eds., Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility, pp. 51–72). Lastly, in ‘“These Are Not the Elves You’re Looking For”: Sir Orfeo, The Hobbit, and the Reimagining of the Elves’ (TStud 15[2018] 33–58), Thomas Hillman uses Sir Orfeo as evidence for the argument that the common basis of fairy-stories is the faerie Otherworld and the enchanting features readers associate with it, rather than the presence of fairies, elves, or other supernatural beings. Tara Williams also uses Sir Orfeo as an example in Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century, which explores romance examples of the marvellous in detail and argues the case for its didactic nature. In ‘“Who-so wylle of nurtur lere”: Domestic Foundations for Social Success in the Middle English Emaré’ (ChauR 53[2018] 82–101), Amy N. Vines explores the intertextuality between the romance Emaré and comparable texts in London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ii that focus on the nature of courtesy and chivalric behaviour, and in doing so suggests that good manners contribute more to chivalric success in the text than other traditional chivalric values. In ‘Absent Fathers and Searching Sons in Sir Degaré’ (SN 90[2018] 32–43), Kenneth Eckert argues for the significance of Degaré’s missing father and his sexual transgressions within his eponymous romance, and the resulting role of Degaré as an intermediary figure for reconciling his family. In ‘Reading Family in the Rate Manuscript’s Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras’ (ChauR 53[2018] 350–73), Wendy A. Matlock compares the texts of Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras through their presence in the same manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61), and groups these and their three neighbouring texts through their thematic similarities in relation to family, patriarchy, and community. In ‘Josian and the Heroism of Patience in Bevis of Hampton’ (ES 99[2018] 609–23), Robin Waugh argues that Josian in Bevis of Hampton is depicted as a parallel adventurer to Bevis, whose acts test her patience in particular, and that this is further evidence of the tendency in medieval romance to laud different concepts of strength in male and female characters; though they argue that Josian is ultimately a proto-feminist character. (c) Alliterative Romance In ‘“Under a holte so hore”: Noble Waste in The Awntyrs off Arthure’ (Arth 28:iv[2018] 3–24), Chelsea S. Henson applies ecocriticism and discard studies to The Awntyrs off Arthure to examine the concepts of waste, both material and figurative, that appear in the text, and that contribute to the unsustainable nature of Arthur’s court. Thorlac Turville-Petre’s Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry focuses on descriptive passages in alliterative romance texts, and includes chapters on the alliterative Morte Darthur (pp. 57–78), The Wars of Alexander (pp. 79–96), and St Erkenwald (pp. 97–114); in addition to further thematic chapters. (d) Prose Romance and Malory Aubrey Morris, in ‘“Here is my Glove”: Introductory Oath-Taking and Trial by Combat in Le Morte Darthur’ (Arth 28:i[2018] 20–37), argues that the oaths that precede combat trials in Malory’s Morte Darthur are just as crucial, if not more so, as the trials themselves, and that Arthur’s inability to uphold the importance of these oaths factors into the downfall of his kingdom. In ‘Seeing Is Believing and Achieving: Viewing the Eucharist in Malory’s “Sankgreal”’ (Arth 28:ii[2018] 3–27), Sarah B. Rude examines some of the historical practices associated with Malory’s Grail narrative, including the Eucharist and optical theory, and argues that applying these contexts can help readers to re-evaluate the intended aims and results of the Grail quest. Helen Cooper, in ‘Punctuating Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (JEBS 21[2018] 171–84), delves into the issues of incorporating punctuation when editing and reading the Morte Darthur. In ‘Perceval’s Sister as Spiritual Authority and Eucharistic Symbol in Malory’s Morte Darthur’ (JEGP 117[2018] 360–89), J. Benskin explores the range of female characters in the text and focuses particularly on Perceval’s unnamed sister as a spiritual character who challenges the misogynies of the text. Finally, Larissa Tracy, ed., Medieval and Early Modern Murder: Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts, includes Dwayne C. Coleman’s ‘Murder, Manslaughter and Reputation: Killing in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’ (pp. 206–26), which explores the theme of violence in the text and its historical contexts. Also see Section 1 above for several essays on Malory in Archibald, Leitch, and Saunders, eds., Romance Rewritten. (e) Reception Arthuriana published several works on Middle English romance reception in 2018. In ‘Interpretive Reading and Medieval Hunting Treatises in The Once & Future King’ (Arth 28:i[2018] 3–19), Katherine E.C. Willis explores the ways in which T.H. White engaged with and interpreted his source material for The Once and Future King, and particularly medieval hunting treatises, in a way that emulates medieval reading and writing practices. Elly McCausland, in ‘“A Kind of Vessel to Carry on the Idea”: Frustrated Taxonomies of Adaptation in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King’ (Arth 28:ii[2018] 79–99), also explores The Once and Future King, using the complexities of the text’s relationship to Malory’s Morte Darthur to examine its nuanced approach to adaptation. A. Arwen Taylor, ‘Mockney Arfur: Class and Reviewer Reception of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword’ (Arth 28:iv[2018] 46–67), examines class-conscious assumptions within reviews of Guy Ritchie’s Arthurian film adaptation King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Finally, Alison Gulley, ed., Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts, contains several essays that might be of interest to instructors of medieval romance; and William H. Smith, ‘Rape, Identity, and Redemption: Teaching “Sir Gowther” in the Community College Classroom’ (pp. 199–207) will be of particular interest to scholars and instructors of Sir Gowther. 14. Early Middle English This year has seen a range of publications in the often neglected field of Early Middle English language and literature. The thought-provoking research by various scholars has been wide in its scope. Subjects have included, among others: human–animal subjectivities, anchoritic communities, sociopolitical and geopolitical agendas, and archaeological subtexts. The New Medieval Literatures volume of this year contained fascinating new studies on Early Middle English. Megan Cavell has examined the resonance of human–spider encounters in various Old and Early Middle English texts, including the Early Middle English Physiologus and The Owl and the Nightingale: ‘Arachnophobia and Early English Literature’ (NML 18[2018] 1–43). In this study, Cavell has ‘identified a clear development from the preceding and highly influential classical and biblical traditions when it comes to early vernacular English writings’ (p. 42); in particular, spiders were no longer viewed as ‘artistic, futile, fragile or sinful’ but rather as ‘actively evil, disgusting, and fear-inducing’ (p. 43). In this same volume, Jenny C. Bledsoe assesses sympathetic engagement with demonic figures in the Katherine Group, with particular focus on Seinte Iuliene and Seinte Margarete in ‘Sympathy for the Demon: Affective Instruction in the Katherine Group’ (NML 18[2018] 105–30). The demon of Seinte Iuliene is an ‘affect alien’ (with Bledsoe employing Sarah Ahmed’s term), and the author thus forces the readers ‘to move through sympathy for the demon to the normative position of disgust for evil’ (p. 105). Ancrene Wisse has continued to attract scholarly interest this year. On Early Middle English anchoritic literature, in particular, Joshua Easterling’s article, ‘Knocking in the Usual Manner: Inquiries, Interrogations, and the Desire for Advice in Anchoritic Culture’ (JMRC 44[2018] 148–69), is of interest. While the focus is primarily on ‘the culture of inquiry as it shaped the lives, communities, and ultimately the reputations of anchorites in the later Middle Ages’, it does include discussion of the Early Middle English Ancrene Wisse. Iva Jevtic’s chapter, ‘Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse’ (in Alison Langdon, ed., Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, pp. 13–30), focuses on ‘the linkages between the ideal of female anchoritic life and the specific use of gendered animal imagery in Ancrene Wisse’. In this text, ‘discrete boundaries between humans and animals blur; ontologies dissolve’ (p. 14). For Jevtic, the anchoress is part of a community ‘even wider than thought—and certainly less human’ (p. 14). With regard to other devotional texts, Carl Phelpstead draws on contemporary African environmental thinking and Heidegger to embark on a ‘cosmocritical reading’ of Aelfwine’s Prayerbook in ‘Beyond Ecocriticism’ (RES 69[2018] 613–31). Early Middle English romance has enjoyed critical attention this year, particularly in the essays in Thinking Medieval Romance, edited by Katherine C. Little and Nichola McDonald. Laura Ashe’s chapter, ‘Killing the King: Romance and the Politicization of History’ (pp. 55–67), assesses ‘romance as a mode of thought’, ‘an available discourse, a framework of narrative structures and expectations’. In this piece, Ashe explores the sociopolitical ramifications of the Havelok tradition, as well as the Short English Metrical Chronicle, found in Auchinleck and other manuscripts. Furthermore, Kenneth Eckert’s ‘Don’t Mention the War! Geography, Saracens and King Horn’s “Diplomatic” Poet’ (JLLC 65[2018] 23–36) studies King Horn, Havelok, and other early English romances to shed new light on ‘the stubborn elusiveness of KH’s toponymy and antagonists’ (p. 33). Early Middle English religious lyrics have also been covered in the collection edited by Boffey and Whitehead, Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (particularly in the contributions by Fein and Lazikani); these are discussed above in Section 12. Helen Appleton’s study on grave-as-home imagery in early English verse, ‘The Architecture of the Grave in Early Middle English Verse’ (LSE 49[2018] 73–88), takes as its starting-point the lyric ‘Wen þe turuf is þi tuur’, but then extends to a wider range of Middle English lyrics, including the Worcester Soul’s Address to the Body fragments. More broadly, Edward I’s reign has also been the focus of research in 2018. Andrew Dunning’s ‘Les Roys de Engeltere: An Illustrated Genealogy for King Edward I’ (MÆ 87[2018] 72–80) examines the royal pedigree in British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. xiii/1. Debra Higgs Strickland’s ‘Edward I, Exodus, and England on the Hereford World Map’ (Speculum 93[2018] 420–69) considers the relevance of the map to the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England. Finally, and again though not specifically on Middle English, Jeffrey M. Wayno’s essay on ‘Rethinking the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’ will also be of interest to those working on Early Middle English texts (Speculum 93[2018] 611–36). Books Reviewed Archibald Elizabeth , Leitch Megan G. , Saunders Corinne , eds. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 295 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 5096. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Aronson Arnold , ed. The Routledge Companion to Scenography . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 602 . £190 ISBN 9 7811 3891 7804. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bertolet Craig E. , Epstein Robert , eds. Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. x + 185 . £79 ISBN 9 7833 1971 8996. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Boffey Julia , Whitehead Christiania , eds. Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. 328 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 4976. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Brazil Sarah. The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature: Cognition, Kinesis, and the Sacred. Early Drama, Art, and Music 36 . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. x + 174 . £79 ISBN 9 7815 8044 3579. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bridges Venetia , Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. 319 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 5027. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Burrow John , Turville-Petre Thorlac , eds. Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype (Bx) . UNCP . [ 2018 ] pp. 388 . pb $20 ISBN 9 7819 4133 1149, hb $50 ISBN 9 7819 4133 1132. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Campbell Ethan. The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 238 . $99 ISBN 9 7815 8044 3074. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Ciobanu Estella. Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama. The New Middle Ages . Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xviii + 337 . £54.90 ISBN 9 7833 1990 9189. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Clark Linda. ed. The Fifteenth Century XVI: Examining Identity. Boydell . [ 2018 ] pp. 208 . £60 ISBN 9 7817 8327 3614. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Coletti Theresa , ed. The Digby Mary Magdalene Play. Middle English Texts . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. viii + 188 . $79 ISBN 9 7815 8044 3012. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Connolly Margaret , Radulescu Raluca , eds. Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx. Texts and Transitions 12 . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. xix + 355 . €95 ISBN 9 7825 0356 8478. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Critten Rory G. Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 226 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 5058. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Cruse Mark , ed. Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 207 . €75 ISBN 9 7825 0357 9870. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Drimmer Sonja. The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 . UPennP . [ 2018 ] pp. 352 . $59.95 ISBN 9 7808 1225 0497. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Düzgün Hülya Taflı , ed. Texts and Territories: Historicised Fiction and Fictionalised History in Medieval England and Beyond . CambridgeSP . [ 2018 ] pp. 186 . £58.99 ISBN 9 7815 2751 1064. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Edlich-Muth Miriam , ed. Medieval Romances Across European Borders . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. vii + 228 . €75 ISBN 9 7825 0357 7166. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Epp Garrett P.J. , ed. The Towneley Plays. Teams Middle English Texts . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. 595 . $39.95 ISBN 9 7815 8044 2831. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Fein Susanna , ed., The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives . York Medieval . [ 2018 ] pp. 266 . £25 ISBN 9 7819 0315 3789. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fitzgerald Christina M. , ed. The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants. Broadview Anthology of British Literature . Broadview . [ 2018 ] pp. 408 . €20 ISBN 9 7815 5481 4299. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Flannery Mary C . ed., Emotion and Medieval Textual Media . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. 280 . €80 ISBN 9 7825 0357 7814. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gameson Richard. The Medieval Manuscripts of Trinity College, Oxford: A Descriptive Catalogue. Special Series: Manuscript Catalogues 3 . OBS . [ 2018 ] pp. 530 . £100 ISBN 9 7809 0142 0633. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gastle Brian , Kelemen Erick , eds. Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honour of James M. Dean . UDelP . [ 2018 ] pp. 268 . £80 ISBN 9 7816 1149 6765. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Goodblatt Chanita. Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 256 . £120 ISBN 9 7814 7247 9785. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Griffin Carrie , Purcell Emer , eds. Text, Transmission, and Transformation in the European Middle Ages, 1000–1500. Cursor Mundi 34 . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. xxii + 245 . €75 ISBN 9 7825 0356 7402. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gulley Alison , ed., Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts . Arc Humanities Press . [ 2018 ] pp. 226 . £90 ISBN 9 7816 4189 0328. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Hanegbi N. Cohen , Nagy P. , eds. Pleasure in the Middle Ages . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. xxiii + 386 . €100 ISBN 9 7825 0357 5209. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Harris Carissa. Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain . CornellUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 285 . $42.95 ISBN 9 7815 0173 0405. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Heng Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiv + 493 . $49.99 ISBN 9 7811 0842 2789. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Johnson Eleanor. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama . UChicP . [ 2018 ] pp. 256 . $30 ISBN 9 7802 2657 2178. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Karath Tamás. Richard Rolle: The Fifteenth-Century Translation. Medieval Church Studies 40 . Brepols . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 370 . £85 ISBN 9 7825 0357 7692. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Knapp James F. , Peggy A. Knapp , Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility . UTorP . [ 2018 ] pp. 251 . $77 ISBN 9 7814 8750 1914. 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[ 2018 ] pp. 326 . €121 ISBN 9 7890 0435 5583. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC McCann Daniel. Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England . UWalesP . [ 2018 ] pp. 272 . $96 ISBN 9 7817 8683 3327. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Meredith Peter. The Practicalities of Early English Performance: Manuscripts, Records, and Staging. Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies . Routledge . [ 2017 ] pp. xiii + 353 . £84 ISBN 9 7814 7248 6288. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Nelson Ingrid. Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre and Practice in Later Medieval England . UPennP . [ 2017 ] pp. 224 . £56 ($65) ISBN 9 7808 1224 8791. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Parkinson David J. , ed. Gavin Douglas: The Palyce of Honour. 2nd edn. Middle English Texts . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. x + 228 . $89 ISBN 9 7815 8044 3739. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - III Middle English
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maaa003
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/iii-middle-english-4l55ANjLuB
SP - 219
EP - 291
VL - 99
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -