Turpines Story: A Middle English Translation of the "Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle." Edited by Stephen H. A. Shepherd. Early English Text Society o.s. 322. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. lxiii + 105; 3 illustrations. $99.

Stephen H. A. Shepherd's Turpines Story is an edition of a previously unedited English prose translation of part of the Historia Karoli Magni or Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. According to Shepherd's linguistic analysis, this brief chronicle (12 folios) was probably written in the south-west Midlands. It forms part of Huntington Library HM 28561, a fifteenth-century manuscript that consists primarily of Trevisa's translation of Higden's Polychronicon. Although the tabula at the beginning of Turpines Story lists 35 chapters, the text breaks off in the middle of a sentence in chapter 25, shortly after its account of the battle of Rouncivale. Shepherd notes, however, that some leaves were lost from a quire of the manuscript, and these may have provided enough space for the part of the text that is missing (p. xv n. 10).

Edward Donald Kennedy
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill