margaret connolly and raluca radulescu (eds). Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain.

Our brains find patterns. A 2008 study by Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky on ‘illusory pattern recognition’ exposed some of the ways in which a lack of control prompts people to perceive ‘a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli’ (‘Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception’, Science , 3 October 2008, 115–117). Precisely what is perceived is similarly complex—hungry people see food in ambiguous images more frequently than non-hungry people, and cultural differences affect the nature of the patterns seen. Apophenia, the tendency to perceive patterns amidst unconnected points, lies at the heart of our encounters with randomness, and the many ways in which we attempt to make meaning out of it. Any collection of essays on medieval miscellanies is bound to be, well, a bit miscellaneous. The editors deftly wield the variety of the essays here to construct interesting resonances throughout the volume. Broadly, the introduction, 15 essays, and an afterword offer a sustained and very detailed focus on a remarkable number of late fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century manuscripts. The almost 300 entries in the welcome Index of Manuscripts attest to the learning on display here. The breadth of manuscripts under consideration is noteworthy, moving beyond the usual suspects in English manuscript study (Digby 86, Harley 2253, Auchinleck, the books of Robert Thornton, John Shirley, and Richard Hill) to include Welsh, Scottish, and Tudor manuscripts. These reimagined cultural, linguistic, and chronological borders put fascinating pressure on ideas of miscellaneity that have been primarily derived from late medieval English manuscripts.