This book is a collection of fourteen essays. Twelve of the pieces have appeared before, and the subject matter broadly concerns four research areas, reflected in the volume's four sections: the relationship between Latin, French, and English in late medieval scholarly studies; issues in manuscript integrity, construction, and production; manuscript custody and history and what these can reveal about medieval audiences and scholarship; and Patience, an allegorical figure, in William Langland's Piers Plowman. The first essay is a useful description of how late medieval men and, to a much lesser extent, women were educated. The second examines the multilingual habits of textual exegesis employed by three fourteenth-century English preachers in their sermons. The third piece notes how Lambeth Palace Library MS 260 suggests an interplay between Latin, English, and French, as opposed to a “growth of an English vernacular literary consciousness,” in its collection of poems (54). In the fourth essay, Hanna criticizes the early editions of the Middle English lyric “Wyth was hys nakede brest and red of blod hys syde,” which is a translation from Latin, for ignoring the previous history of this poem and its context in John of Grimestone's Commonplace Book (1372). This same lyric features in English as part of the argument of a Latin sermon, and Hanna explains this role in the fifth essay, along with the exegetical techniques of the preacher.

The second part of the book begins with essay six, in which Hanna observes the previous neglect of the Middle English material in Lambeth Palace Library MS 487 and uses a detailed description of the content of this manuscript, as compared to that of other miscellanies, to argue that the dissemination of many Middle English texts is neither as centralized nor as readily traceable as critics previously had thought. The seventh piece considers the various manuscripts that once belonged to John Dygon of Sheen, particularly Magdalen College MS lat. 93. Hanna sorts through the complicated processes that went into the production of this manuscript. In the eighth essay, Hanna reconfigures the form of the fifteenth-century Middle English miscellany that emerged from Kathleen Scott's realization that at least seven discrete volumes, mainly in the Rawlinson collection, originally belonged to the same collection of Middle English texts. He concludes that stationers as early as the late fifteenth century might well have produced small collections of popular material out of existing stock as opposed to making up each book to specific orders from clients. In the ninth piece, Hanna describes a previously unexamined manuscript, Bodleian Library Lat. misc. C. 66, and identifies it as an example of a “household book,” with largely practical household concerns, though a few verses appear in it.

Part three begins with the tenth piece, which opens with the observation of how dominant Yorkshire was in the production Middle English texts during the fourteenth century. Hanna marshals as many as ten scribes to support his point. In the eleventh essay, he puts Ripon forward as the likely location for an artistic community of Yorkshire scribes who are responsible for the transcription of several important Middle English texts. The twelfth piece uses an examination of the contents of MS Digby 98 and contemporary historical records to argue that Dr. Peter Partridge, a fifteenth-century scribe and indexer associated in later life with Lincoln Cathedral, was a member of a “textual community” that organized extracts from scripture for “instruction in and the dissemination of specifically heretical texts” (237). In the thirteenth essay, Hanna describes the exegetical and translation activities of a group of friars associated with Oxford University in the early fourteenth century and labeled “classicizing friars” by Beryl Smalley. Hanna finds that one of these friars, John of Wales, is not as pedantic as Smalley had thought.

Part four marks a major shift in the volume's subject matter, and the five essays therein comprise a unified essay, where Hanna engages in a literary analysis of the figure of Patience in William Langland's Piers Plowman. After an untitled introduction, then a prequel and a prologue—all of which try to prepare the ground for Hanna's reading of important aspects of this very complex work—Hanna examines Patience's several appearances in the poem, initially focusing on this figure's minstrel garb. In the second enumerated section on Patience, Hanna describes how the Dreamer, Conscience, and other characters interact with Patience; and then, in the third piece on Piers Plowman, he defines the kind of poverty that Patience advocates. Hanna's conclusion is that the dialogue between Patience and the Dreamer is an intermediate point along the road to spiritual improvement, and thus Patience's effect on the Dreamer is limited. The fourth piece on Piers Plowman deals with the C version's revisions, including material concerning Patience's dealings with the idea of penitence. Although the C version simplifies certain narratives and concepts from the previous two versions, it retains the poem's focus on and need for “an attentiveness to precision in language” (351).

I use my descriptors of the pieces in this volume judiciously because I believe the volume reads as a collection of essays rather than as a more unified structure. Repetition of material, initially mystifying references to honorees, and rather jarring references to popular culture should have received editorial attention. The relatively large amount of prefatory material, oddly, does not help to justify the volume's structure as it should, nor does the content cohere in the way that ideally it should. That said, the work that Hanna has done on late medieval English manuscripts will be of genuine benefit to scholars. I was less taken by his analysis of Piers Plowman, which does not offer a convincing picture of this work as a whole—admittedly a tall order. This section also presumes a huge amount of knowledge of the poem on the part of the reader.