John Scattergood. Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature

John Scattergood. Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature. Dublin: Four Courts, 2006. 320 pp. $65 cloth. John Scattergood's Manuscripts and Ghosts brings together a selection of eleven previously published essays (2-10, 12, 15), most of which have been updated in light of new research, and five new chapters (1, 11, 13, 14, 16), all written in his characteristic, accessible but informative style. Overall this is a thoroughly researched collection, covering topics ranging widely from Anglo-Saxon riddles to the early modern literary texts and manuscripts. opening chapter, The Copying of Medieval and Early Renaissance Manuscripts, is a substantial and detailed review of the processes by which a variety of well-known manuscripts were produced and disseminated, including a survey of the activities of famous scribes and collectors like John Shirley, William Ebesham and Thomas Hoccleve, among others. This chapter provides a very useful introduction to the collection, which will benefit those who teach and study the history of late medieval book production. In Eating the Book: Riddle 47 and Memory, Scattergood uses the subject of the poem, the image of a worm eating a book, to examine the important function of memory as a source for power, from classical models to Anglo-Saxon times. As its title suggests, Political Context, Date and Composition of Sayings of the Four Philosophers contains a reevaluation of the poem in the light of political allusions to Edward II and Piers Gaveston, while An Unpublished Middle English Poem from London, Public Record Office Manuscript SC 6/956/5 contains a brief discussion and edition of ffro this worlde be-bynyng..., a previously unknown short (70 line) poem on the topographical and historical description of Rome. In chapter five Scattergood returns to Chaucer's Wordes unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn, suggesting that a more profitable investigation of this poem might be not the identity of the scribe, but Chaucer's choice of genre and style; Chaucer seems to have preferred complaint poetry as a model for his poem, thus placing himself in a long tradition, from Strabo and Cicero to Jerome, Petrarch and Dante. Two Medieval Book-Lists consists of a brief investigation of surviving evidence about two fourteenth-century libraries, of Sir Simon Burley and William de Walcote; their books included, alongside at least one Bible, the Brut chronicle, the prophecies of Merlin, and some unidentified Arthurian romances. The Authorship of Boke of Cupide was Scattergood's first published journal article, prior to the popularity John Clanvowe's work was to enjoy. following chapter discusses the origin of folio 90 in Trinity College Library MS 212, which represents a previously unrecorded fragment of the prose Lancelot; the chapter contains both an examination of the origin of the manuscript to which this folio was added and an edition of the text. In Dublin, Trinity College Library MS 75: A Lollard Bible and Some Protestant Owners, Scattergood writes, with Guido Latre, about the fascinating history of a miscellany well-known as a witness to the Lollard movement. Although the detailed examination of John Purvey, one of Wyclif's followers, his connections with book production and his ownership of books cannot provide any clear evidence about his connection with TCD MS 75, the authors of the chapter suggest that the composite nature of the manuscript and its contents indicate a strong association with Protestant readers in the sixteenth century, Sir Henry Gates and his friends. In chapter ten Scattergood returns to issues of ownership and circulation of medieval manuscripts in a fascinating analysis of the connection(s) between the Massy family of Cheshire and the writing of Middle English alliterative poetry (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the alliterative St Erkenwald in BL MS Harley 2250). …