Reviewed by:

• Manuscript Culture and Medieval Devotional Traditions: Essays in Honour of Michael G. Sargent ed. by Jennifer N. Brown and Nicole R. Rice
• Anna Welch

This Festschrift volume, in honour of Professor Michael G. Sargent, is the inaugural publication in a new series from the Boydell & Brewer imprint York Medieval Press, ‘York Medieval and Early Print Studies’, which expands on the focus of the ‘Manuscript Culture in the British Isles’ series to include, most fruitfully, printed books. It is fitting that this is the first volume of the new series, given the important influence of Sargent on generations of scholars in the field of medieval English literary and cultural studies, areas of inquiry that naturally transcend the artificial boundaries of handwritten and printed book production. Best known for his work on vernacular English devotional literature, particularly that by Nicholas Love and Walter Hilton, Sargent has made a major contribution as a critical textual editor, bringing access and prominence to manuscript sources through modern printed editions. His areas of interest are well represented in the fourteen contributions to [End Page 240] this volume, which cover diverse topics but are characterised by a unifying thread of gratitude to a generous colleague, teacher, and mentor, as well as by a focus on English devotional cultures, particularly those of the Carthusians and Brigittines. It will be of interest to specialists of medieval English literature and book history (naturally), but two essays in particular address questions of methodology and metaphysics with significance across the humanities.

The editors, Jennifer N. Brown and Nicole R. Rice, have wisely broken the essays into four thematic sections. The first section, ‘Manuscript Transmission and Textual Adaptation’, features essays that coalesce around issues of editorial and scribal practices, and the relationships between the two. Essays by Laura Saetveit Miles and E. Gordon Whatley interrogate dialogues between texts alongside that between texts and other media, including architecture and sculpture, while pieces by A. R. Bennett and Stephen Kelly explore the methodologies and metaphysics of textual criticism. The latter two essays stand out in the volume for their innovative and stimulating contributions that have relevance beyond the scope of medieval studies. Bennett’s ‘What Do the Numbers Mean? The Case for Corpus Studies’ is a challenging read for those of us not accustomed to statistics and graphs, but it offers an important demonstration of the possibilities of aggregate data in the study of textual production and reception. Their point, illustrated graphically, that Chaucer was not ‘the most prevalent author nor his work or the manuscripts in which it survives representative of the vast majority of the Middle English corpus’ (p. 58) will give many readers pause to think about how modern academia approaches manuscript culture.

Similarly, Kelly’s discussion of the metaphysical and ontological issues inherent in studying manuscript transmission is fizzing with exciting ideas and difficult questions. One of Michael Sargent’s important contributions to textual editorship is his advocation of the rhizome: he posits that the traditional mode of constructing the stemma of a text gives a misleading sense of linearity, and that a more accurate metaphor is the rhizome, a concept borrowed from botany that indicates an interconnected root system in which influence flows horizontally as well as vertically. This can be best achieved, Sargent argues, in digital media, not printed textual editions. This is an appealing idea, one that seems to meet the needs of the postmodern, poststructuralist sense of culture as well as our technological shift into the digital, as Kelly notes. However, he questions whether in fact ‘the metaphysics of the textual and digital realms are fundamentally at odds with one another’ (p. 98), and what this might mean for a digital rhizomic model of textual editorship. These are questions fundamental to research and study broadly, not only of the medieval English literary world, and it is this quality that makes the essay important reading for all in the...

审阅者：

• 手稿文化和中世纪的虔诚传统：纪念迈克尔·G·萨金特的论文编辑。作者：詹妮弗·N·布朗和妮可·R·赖斯
• 安娜韦尔奇

这本纪念文集是向迈克尔·G·萨金特教授致敬的，是 Boydell & Brewer 出版社约克中世纪出版社新系列《约克中世纪和早期印刷研究》的首部出版物，该系列扩展了“手稿文化”的焦点在不列颠群岛的系列中，包括最富有成效的印刷书籍。鉴于萨金特对中世纪英国文学和文化研究领域的几代学者的重要影响，这些研究领域自然超越了手写和印刷书籍制作的人为界限，因此这是新系列的第一卷是合适的。萨金特以其在白话英语灵修文学方面的著作而闻名，尤其是尼古拉斯·洛夫和沃尔特·希尔顿的著作，他作为批判性文本编辑做出了重大贡献，通过现代印刷版本来获取和突出手稿来源。他感兴趣的领域在 14 篇贡献中得到了很好的体现[完第240页]这本书涵盖了不同的主题，但其特点是对慷慨的同事、老师和导师的感激之情统一起来，并重点关注英国的宗教文化，特别是迦太基派和布里吉特派的文化。中世纪英国文学和书籍史的专家（自然）会对此感兴趣，但有两篇文章特别讨论了对整个人文学科具有重要意义的方法论和形而上学问题。

编辑詹妮弗·N·布朗 (Jennifer N. Brown) 和妮可·R·赖斯 (Nicole R. Rice) 明智地将这些文章分为四个主题部分。第一部分“手稿传播和文本改编”，以围绕编辑和抄写实践问题以及两者之间的关系的文章为特色。Laura Saetveit Miles 和 E. Gordon Whatley 的散文探讨了文本之间的对话以及文本与其他媒体（包括建筑和雕塑）之间的对话，而 AR Bennett 和 Stephen Kelly 的作品则探讨了文本批评的方法论和形而上学。后两篇文章因其创新性和刺激性的贡献而在本书中脱颖而出，其相关性超出了中世纪研究的范围。贝内特的《数字意味着什么？》对于我们这些不习惯统计和图表的人来说，《语料库研究案例》是一本具有挑战性的读物，但它提供了聚合数据在文本生成和接收研究中的可能性的重要演示。他们的观点以图形方式说明，即乔叟不是“最流行的作家，也不是他的作品或现存手稿代表了绝大多数中古英语语料库”（第 58 页），这会让许多读者停下来思考如何现代学术界正在研究手稿文化。

同样，凯利对研究手稿传播所固有的形而上学和本体论问题的讨论充满了令人兴奋的想法和困难的问题。迈克尔·萨金特对文本编辑的重要贡献之一是他对根茎的提倡：他认为构建文本词干的传统模式给出了一种误导性的线性感，而更准确的隐喻是根茎，这是一个借用于植物学表明根系相互关联，影响力水平和垂直流动。萨金特认为，通过数字媒体而不是印刷文本版本可以最好地实现这一点。正如凯利指出的那样，这是一个吸引人的想法，它似乎满足了后现代、后结构主义文化意识以及我们向数字技术转变的需求。然而，他质疑事实上“文本和数字领域的形而上学从根本上是相互矛盾的”（第98页），以及这对于文本编辑的数字根茎模型意味着什么。这些都是广泛研究和研究的基本问题，不仅是中世纪英国文学界的问题，正是这种品质使这篇文章成为所有读者的重要读物……