Ralph Hanna: Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers.

This book presents a series of lectures given by Ralph Hanna “to candidates for the Oxford Masters degree in Medieval English literature, for examination in ‘paleography and textual criticism’” (p. xi). Thus, Introducing English Medieval Book History is not for the beginning palaeography student, certainly, as it assumes a base level of knowledge of at least a semester of study; should you need to brush up, the Introduction helpfully gives the best bibliography for English palaeography and codicology. But all other students of medieval manuscripts – that is, all of us, in that no matter our experience, we always have more to learn – will find the book deeply informative and satisfying. Each of the seven chapters spins a story with a web of small details that somehow come together for a quite convincing larger lesson. Some suspense (esp. chapter 2) evokes the excitement these lectures must have generated in person, though this reader is grateful for the chance to absorb the often dizzying amount of information at her own pace (and with footnotes). The first chapter starts where many good English book history courses begin: with Beowulf. Hanna’s impetus in this chapter is to engage, rigorously and respectfully, with Kevin Kiernan’s book Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript and all its strengths and problems. By the end we have learned the history of manuscript-oriented Beowulf criticism, and earned an introduction to the miscellany book genre, centered on Cassiodorus.