The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XVIII: Manuscripts of Pembroke College, Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam Museum. By Kari Anne Rand. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xxvii + 129. $80.

The project to compile an index of Middle English prose along the lines of the widely respected and widely used Index of Middle English Verse is now in its thirtieth year. Many international, collaborative research projects have been far longer in the making and during those periods of preparation have seemed almost to disappear from public view. What has kept the "Index of Middle English Prose" visible in medieval scholarship are the volumes of handlists that are designed to identify the prose texts found in manuscript collections principally in British libraries, but elsewhere as well. In one way these are interim reports fundamental to the project, but in other ways the series of handlists has taken on a life and value of its own; these volumes offer insights into libraries, individual manuscripts, and manuscript collections that in some cases have seldom if ever been investigated as a whole. It is in the nature of the plan to publish handlists for each manuscript collection that some will yield a smaller number of texts than others, and of the two with which this volume is concerned, Pembroke College, it emerges, has few medieval manuscripts containing Middle English. Kari Anne Rand's introduction explains that the college's library, begun in the fourteenth century, was intended to serve the teaching syllabus of the university's schools, and at Pembroke College there was a special emphasis on theology and therefore Latin texts. Thus vernacular texts were of little use or interest. The great sixteenth-century benefactor of Pembroke College was William Smart, who gifted to the library approximately 100 manuscripts that had been owned by the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and this collection also contained little vernacular material. The occurrences of Middle English that are recorded here from these predominantly Latin manuscripts take the form mainly of single lines, glosses, and marginalia. Although the Pembroke collection contributes few texts to the index as such, the negative evidence is an insight into how vernacular texts were regarded by major religious institutions in the Middle Ages. Only three later acquisitions of unknown origin contain significant instances of Middle English: Chaucer's Boece, the Wycliffite sermon cycle, which is complete, and a collection of texts from the "Sacerdos Parochialis." Also, there are five letters in the archives of the college that relate to the Pastons; these are listed here with the Pembroke material.

William Marx
University of Wales, Lampeter