Introduction The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives

Summary

THIS volume owes much of its genesis to an event sponsored under the aegis of the London Old and Middle English Research Seminars (LOMERS), held at Senate House, University College London, in July 2008. Focused on the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, MS Advocates 19. 2. 1), the presentations were, as I recall, meticulous in delivering new ways to perceive the book's array of tangible clues, often daring in how they used these clues to assess contents and reconstruct new scenarios of the book's making and purpose, and – more often than not – contentious in knocking down old theories in order to replace them with explanations of finer nuance and better historical grounding. The organizers of the conference, Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, had pulled together a group of keenly interested scholars to take on, whole, this tantalizing volume that embodies in its very existence a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the earlyfourteenth century, c. 1330–40.

Displaying reproduced folios alongside the cogent aids provided by Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham, the 1977 facsimile of Auchinleck had already become an indispensible resource – and the magnet that drew many a scholar of medieval English literature into manuscript studies. As Pearsall noted in the introduction to the facsimile, Auchinleck holds crucial significance ‘in its early date, in the range, variety and intrinsic interest of its contents, and in the evidence it provides for English poetry, of book-production and readership in the period before Chaucer’. In the present volume, Pearsall returns, some forty years later, to affirm that statement and speculate further that, in its own time, Auchinleck was a rare book and ‘perhaps quite famous’ (p. 23). Other notable voices chime in. For A. S. G. Edwards, the massive Auchinleck is a landmark of ‘unprecedented comprehensiveness’ (p. 34), and, for Ralph Hanna, the book holds ‘deserved cultural centrality’ in our understanding of fourteenth-century English poetry and book production (p. 213).

Each of these three experts of medieval English manuscripts spoke at the LOMERS Auchinleck conference, and each has refined, updated, and formalized his observations for this volume.