Book reviews, Selim 25

Abstract

He takes on one of the knottiest of medieval texts and sorts out its kinks. What he calls the J. B. Treatise is a miscellany of tracts (including jests and proverbs and lists of collective nouns) upon varied subjects (such as hunting, heraldry, wine, hounds, the carving of meat). Older authorities called it The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms or The Book of St Albans (where it was first printed in 1486); they further ascribed it to Dame Juliana Berners or Barnes (b. 1388?), Prioress of Sopwell, Hertfordshire. She is the Pope Joan of English Literature. Modern scholars believe that she never existed. (That does not prevent outdated feminists from writing on her even now as a 'pioneer female author'.) The difficulty of his task was worsened by a second printed version (of 1496), with a treatise on angling added to it, and twenty-two early manuscripts. For the last may be mentioned a witness appearing since the editor published his first edition in 2003. The labour of dealing with variants (as also questions of scribal hands, sources, vocabulary, etymology) was one requiring a scholarly resolution and application of almost heroic proportions. Dr Scott-Macnab has spent years looking at manuscripts and reference books to produce his edited text and notes upon falconry or heraldry or cooking. His reward is rich. By presenting information on subjects dear to fifteenth-century gentlemen, he offers glimpses of a world that is lost, especially for modern academics, almost none of whom knows anything about (for example) hunting. Much learned nonsense is the result. Here are two examples. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the expression 'bere the belle' (pp. iii, 198), applied to a debate of high-ranking ladies on the subject of love, is constantly misunderstood by editors. They refer it to sheep, asserting that the lady who speaks best of love resembles a bellwether, a (usually castrated) ram leading the flock and with a bell on its neck. Dr Scott-Macnab makes the correct interpretation clear. It is to a falcon, fastened to a small bell (often elaborate) in case it escaped its owner. Hence his quotation from Fr John Gerard (describing 'Gawain' Poet, ed. Myra Stokes & Ad Putter (London, 2004: xv). Reading A Sporting Lexicon of the Fifteenth Century cures one of this delusion. It is from the world of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of magnates and gentry who delighted in hunting, its stench and sweatiness notwithstanding. These are two reasons why Dr Scott-Macnab's edition is required reading for medievalists. Here are two more. It has miscellaneous lists which linger in the mind and inform us on popular learning, as (for example) with collective nouns: exaltations of larks, unkindnesses of ravens, prides of lions, skulks of foxes, eloquences of lawyers, blasts of hunters. Second, its catalogue of wines includes forms from Continental Europe, many still unidentified. Spaniards will be interested to read (pp. 158-159) of Robedore from Ribadeo (Lugo) or Bilbowe from Bilbao (Vizcaya) or Lepe from Lepe (Huelva...