Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers.

Edwards, A.S.G.

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 300 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3642-4. $55.00/38.50 [pounds sterling].

This book examines three manuscripts produced in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in different monastic environments: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23 (the Chanson de Roland), British Library, MS Harley 978 (a variegated collection of texts), and BL, MS Royal 10.E.4 (the Smithfield Decretals). What Andrew Taylor appears to be attempting is to recover such evidence as there is of these manuscripts' earliest readers and their forms of engagement with their texts. This is not a foolish approach and Taylor has qualities that make one wish it were more successful than it is. He writes well and has clearly devoted much effort to providing contexts for thinking usefully about these manuscripts, effort that has involved him ranging widely and familiarizing himself with fields often rather distant from those with which a professor of English might be expected to have acquaintance. Above all, there is throughout a quality of alert curiosity that makes him sensitive to the detail and anxious to contextualize it fruitfully.

But for all these admirable elements I do not find this ultimately a successful or even very convincing book. In part my difficulties lie in the lack of any obvious rationale that could fruitfully link these manuscripts. As it is, this book never gets beyond its particularities to any convincing larger conclusions. The manuscripts become pegs on which are hung various observations which turn into a form of loosely associative commentary on aspects of the world of medieval England, interspersed with reconstructions, sometimes highly speculative, of the lives of the early owners. The manuscripts themselves get rather lost in all this: there are not even any systematic codicological descriptions of them, so it is not always easy to relate particular comments to the physical object that is being discussed.

In effect the book seems to be a history of Taylor's self-education, of his efforts to prepare himself appropriately to understand these manuscripts, both textually and contextually. What he is less successful at doing is showing why his education should matter to us. He seems conscious of this. His final chapter, 'The manuscript as fetish', makes a few overly ambitious gestures towards modern literary and epistemological theory before concluding that 'no single individual can hope to read the manuscript fully' (10. 205). It is good that Taylor has grasped this, but he is not the first to do so. And most of us do not always need to understand the manuscript 'fully' since we approach it to examine various specific aspects: its text(s), decoration, material structure, scribes, and provenance (among others), the accurate characterization of which we may relate to other manuscripts to contribute to a 'fuller' understanding of the history of the book in both particular and general terms. Taylor's arguments will not change the way we think about manuscripts very much. Nor should they.

A.S.G. EDWARDS

London