The Abridged English Metrical Brut: Edited from London, British Library MS Royal 12.C.XII. Edited by Una O'Farrell-Tate. Middle English Texts, 32. Heidelberg: Universit’tsverlag C. Winter, 2002. Pp. 142; 1 illustration. EUR 39; SFr 68.

This scrupulous single-manuscript edition is a welcome contribution to the corpus of published texts of medieval English vernacular historiography. The unfamiliar title, The Abridged English Metrical Brut, may lead readers to suppose at first that this is a previously unknown or unedited text, but it is not. The work has been called by many names, as Una O'Farrell-Tate discusses in detail (p. 14) and is best known as the Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, so titled by Ewald Zettl in his 1935 critical edition. O'Farrell-Tate proposes this new title as a better one (pp. 14œ–17). I must admit it is not clear to me why "abridged, " with its implications of a known process of development (which there is not for this work), should be a superior term to "short, " or why "Brut" should be thought a markedly less vexed label than "chronicle." My main concern about the title, however, is that it may generate confusion as to just what the work in question is. It would be a pity for scholars to fail to make full use of it as a result, for this edition is exactly the sort of project that is needed as the scholarly community takes more serious and substantive interest in noting and interpreting, rather than ignoring and effacing, the significant differences among manuscripts of the "same" text.

Julia Marvin
University of Notre Dame