Review from the scholarly journal, Studies in the Age of Chaucer
MARTIN M. STEVENS and DANIEL WOODWARD, eds. The Ellesmere This lavishly produced volume is, in format, elegance of layout, and in range and depth of contents, a worthy companion to the New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile (Tokyo and San Marino: Huntington Library and Yushudo Publishing, 1995) it is designed to accompany. Like the facsimile itself, it is an exemplar of the publisher's art. It is appropriate therefore that it should begin with a detailed account, by Daniel Woodward, of the making of the facsimile. This introduction should be required reading for anyone who still believes that the making of a facsimile, of any kind, is a purely objective and "scientific" activity, removed from any editorial judgment. No doubt the makers of the 1911 Manchester Press facsimile thought they were achieving an exactly faithful facsimile: in the hindsight of eighty years, their decisions tell us more about their own editorial values (as Ralph Hanna's excellent introduction to the 1989 Brewer reprint shows) than they do about the manuscript itself. Similarly, one can expect that a scholar of the next century might examine the facsimile, and this volume, for insight into the editorial values of the last decade of this century. On p. 8, Woodward declares that a principal aim of the facsimile was to achieve "some of the overall effect of the manuscript" (his emphasis). As the later pages make clear, the emphasis is on physical effect: on the presentation in the facsimile of the manuscript as physical artifact. Thus, the facsimile is printed on sheets of paper in the same quiring as the original, with some copies having pages trimmed to the edges of each sheet. So, too, Woodward asserts that the facsimile is much better presented in printed hard copy than on a computer screen. The Ellesmere manuscript is a codex, and best understood as a physical artifact. This emphasis on the manuscript as object is in harmony with the movement in medieval textual studies in the last decades toward the study of manuscripts as objects of cultural history in their own right: as the product of the workshops that prepare the parchment and bind the finished folios; of the teams of scribes, illustrators, and supervisors who write and ornament the pages; and as the possession of those who commission, sell, keep, and reuse the finished manuscript. (Outside medieval studies, Jerome McGann's work on "bibliographic codes" has reminded textual critics of the importance of the physical instantiation of the text.) Fundamental advances have been made in this work by many of the contributors to this volume, and the essays by Parkes on the planning and construction of Ellesmere, by Doyle on its scribe, by Scott on its illumination, and by David on its owners, are both timely summaries of years of work and contributions of new knowledge. One regrets here that the editors were not able to include the full version of Antony Cains's report on the bindings of the Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ralph Hanna's and Tony Edwards's discussion of the manuscript's Rotheley and De Vere connections, contained in the special number of the Huntington Library Quarterly (58:1 [1996]) edited by Seth Lerer. Both of these supplement material in this present volume in interesting directions: the parallel offered by Hanna and Edwards between the reactions of the De Veres to their loss of power, memorialized in the Rotheley poem contained in Ellesmere, and of Chaucer to his loss of political power, is pregnant with possibility. It is consistent with the emphasis of this volume on Ellesmere as artifact that these essays are among the most satisfying in the volume. The essays of Doyle and Parkes are rich in exact detail, concerning the identity and characteristics of the Ellesmere scribe and the making of the manuscript. Scott's painstaking analysis of the illuminators notably shifts the likely date of the manuscript earlier, and brings it rather closer to Chaucer's death, "in a period beginning in or just after 1400 and ending no later than 1405" (p. 106). One should not make too much of this as a means of reinforcing the authority of Ellesmere. An early date is no guarantee of a good text, as is shown by the example of the notoriously unreliable Harleian 7334 and Corpus 198, both contemporary with or earlier than Ellesmere. All these essays benefit from the generous space and opportunity for ample pictorial illustration given by the editors to present familiar arguments in rare detail. Some of the essays that do not center so closely on the manuscript itself as object, by comparison, appear less focused. Gaylord's essay on pictorial images of poets in contemporary manuscripts has interesting material about Gower portraits, and gives useful context for students of the Ellesmere Chaucer portrait. Bowden's essay leaves Ellesmere behind altogether to illustrate handsomely visual presentations of Chaucer in printed editions up to 1809. However, Emmerson concentrates on the miniatures in Ellesmere itself and argues, convincingly, for the complexity of text-image relationships in Ellesmere, as further evidence of the creative care behind the making of the manuscript. Pearsall usefully summarizes the context of Ellesmere within contemporary literary manuscripts, and reminds us that there is no evidence (much as we might wish it) to link Thomas Chaucer with Ellesmere. However, Kendrick's essay on the context of The Canterbury Tales in contemporary translations seems to have very little connection with Ellesmere or the other essays in this volume, and might have appeared better elsewhere. Study of the manuscript as book has its strengths, as many of the essays in this volume show. But it has weaknesses too, and to this reader the three essays on aspects of the text, by Blake, Hanna, and Cooper, are less satisfying, and for the most part only restate positions elsewhere elaborated. It should be emphasized, however, that Blake does not say in this essay (as Cooper asserts he does, p. 259 n. 10) "that any portion of text that does not appear in Hengwrt cannot be authentic." Indeed, to this reviewer's knowledge, Blake has never asserted this. What he says is rather more challenging: if one accepts that Hengwrt has the best text (and this has been common ground among most scholars for the last fifty years; it is not seriously disputed by Hanna in his article) then one must start from the presumption that what is not in Hengwrt needs justification if it is to be accepted as by Chaucer. To put it another way: the fact that Ellesmere is the most splendid and carefully produced of early Canterbury Tales manuscripts does not mean automatically that it has the best tale-order or the best text. One has to argue these things. Indeed, that the Ellesmere order can be argued is well shown by Cooper, whose article presents the case for the Ellesmere fragment 4 and 5 ordering lucidly and convincingly: one does not have to accept that Hengwrt is "right" in every detail. Hanna's article is a curious performance. It attempts to assess Ellesmere by a survey of the possible manuscript sources available to its production team, and that team's use of it. The method is certainly well-conceived, but in this short space Hanna is able to base the analysis on just five manuscripts, making no use of the possibly crucial "independent" manuscripts such as Christ Church, Bodley 686, Additional 35286 manuscripts and Caxton's second edition. From his analysis, Hanna agrees that word-by-word Hengwrt gives the best text—in the first half of The Wife of Bath s Prologue, markedly so—but arrives at a rather odd conclusion: that "any editing [sc. in Ellesmere] that occurred is likely to have rendered the text more Chaucerian, not less." One may wonder just what this means. More "Chaucerian" than what? Than Hengwrt? This can hardly be so, given Hanna's admission that Hengwrt has a better word-by-word text than Ellesmere. Hanna's statement is taken up by Martin Stevens in his foreword, and is there transformed into an ever stranger assertion (p. 22): this amounts to a "redefinition of authorship," as Chaucer is constructed for us by the Ellesmere editorial team, and then further reconstructed by the many modern editions built on Ellesmere. Stevens comments that "this is the Chaucer that the twentieth century knows." Certainly: and it is possible that the twentieth century knows the wrong Chaucer, and that it is time it had a Chaucer based on sounder textual foundations. Finally, one must note the presence of an excellent essay on the language of Ellesmere by Jeremy Smith, which in its understated way reveals rather nakedly the relative imperfections of the Ellesmere text compared to Hengwrt. One regrets the absence of an essay on the glosses in Ellesmere: a surprising omission, given their prominence in the manuscript and the recent work that has been done on them. One fears too that the concentration on Ellesmere alone may lead the reader to undervalue the importance of the other eighty-plus surviving manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, some of them at least as splendid, or as textually important, as Ellesmere. But there is much here to absorb the reader. PETER ROBINSON
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