Parergon

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...