John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England.

EDWARDS, A.S.G.

Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). xi + 247 pp.; 8 plates. ISBN 1-85928-462-0. 47.50 [pounds sterling].

This is the first book-length study of John Shirley, whose activities as scribe, translator, and book collector have been the subject of intermittent debate since the early years of this century. It offers a biography, together with discussion of his translations, the major manuscripts he transcribed, those others with which he can be associated, and the posthumous use of his copies.

One expects such a book to offer new material or insight, but the biographical chapters do not seem to add significantly to the information assembled by A. I. Doyle in this journal nearly forty years ago (with the exception of a new letter by Shirley, published previously by Margaret Connolly elsewhere). The study of Shirley as translator is a largely ignored aspect of his activity; but Connolly has recently published a version of this study. And the study of manuscripts owned or annotated by Shirley inevitably covers much of the same ground traversed recently by the late Jeremy Griffiths (although Doyle's discovery of a Shirley inscription in Tokyo, Takamiya MS 16, The Master of Game, is included here). The same general point can be made about the three central chapters on manuscripts copied by Shirley, British Library, MS Add. 16165, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3.20 (and its related parts), and Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59. These are all manuscripts studied extensively before, particularly by Eleanor Hammond, and some have been the subject of further important recent work (for example, by Lyall and Hanna on Add. 16165, Boffey on R. 3.20). Connolly does not seem to add much to this work; indeed, in one case at least she does not seem to have actually examined a manuscript she discusses. The quotations from the Shirley-related Harvard 530 (p. 173) reflect the inaccurate transcriptions in the most recent published description, not the readings of the manuscript itself.

This book is at its weakest in what it does not say, particularly in respect to those manuscripts that seem potentially related to Shirley's activities but which are not mentioned here. To offer a single example: Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 32 includes a copy of The Libelle of English Policy, in a version composed some time between late 1437 and mid-1441. This manuscript has a rubric that sounds insistently Shirleian and is written in a hand that seems sufficiently close to Shirley's own to deceive all but the most experienced eye (see the frontispiece to The Libelle of English Policy, ed. G. F. Warner (Oxford, 1926)). It suggests that a more wide-ranging examination of manuscripts, beyond those traditionally associated with Shirley, might enlarge, and possibly modify, our sense of his activities.

The brief conclusion takes up the question of the audience for whom Shirley was producing these manuscripts. Connolly feels that his verse prefaces are in `the idiom of the old-fashioned oral household entertainer' (p. 194). I am not sure what figure she has in mind nor how he or she can be related to the written texts discussed here. She feels that Shirley's `primary audience was that of the noble household of which he himself was a member' (p. 195). Much of the twentieth-century debate about Shirley's manuscripts has focused on the question of his audience; I am not convinced it can be so briskly resolved. The scale of his activity (clearly much greater than the surviving manuscripts in his hand), the links (not all of them necessarily posthumous) between his manuscripts and forms of commercial copying, the extreme circumstantiality of many of his rubrics and attributions, his own connections with a known scribe, John Cok, and his professed attempts to circulate his manuscripts are factors which, in part and in sum, cannot be readily reduced to simple formulations. Dr Connolly has evidently digested a large amount of material in a relatively short time (she appears to have begun work on this book in 1991). She gives us a lucid statement of the present state of Shirley studies. But the larger issues remain unresolved.

A. S. G. EDWARDS Cambridge