New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference. (Shorter Notices).

King, Andrew

ed. Derek Pearsall (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), xvi + 214 pp. ISBN 1-90353-01-8. $90.00. Contents: Derek Pearsall, `Introduction'; A. I. Doyle, `Recent directions in medieval manuscript study'; C. David Benson, `Another fine manuscript mess: authors, editors and readers of Piers Plowman'; N. F. Blake, `A new approach to the witnesses and text of the Canterbury Tales'; Julia Boffey, `Prospecting in the archives: Middle English verse in record repositories'; Martha W. Driver, `Medieval manuscripts and electronic media: observations on future possibilities'; A. S. G. Edwards, `Representing the Middle English manuscript'; J. P. Gumbert, `Skins, sheets and quires'; Ralph Hanna, `Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript'; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, `Professional readers of Langland at home and abroad: new directions in the political and bureaucratic codicology of Piers Plowman'; Linne R. Mooney, `Professional scribes? Identifying English scribes who had a hand in more than one manuscript'; Eckehard Simon, `Manuscript production in medieval theatre: the German carnival plays'; Alison Stones, `The "Lancelot-Graal" project'; John J. Thompson, `After Chaucer: resituating Middle English poetry in the late medieval and early modern period'. This important collection of essays demonstrates the literary implications of manuscript study, aiming in general to define the patterns of scholarship in the last generation and to predict future directions. The essays are reproduced in their original texts, as written for oral delivery, and some of them pall in the reading because of their colloquial style.