As academic disciplines evolve and grow, they typically diversify in the process. Since the social structure of academia appears to evolve at a slower rate than its subject matter, academic communities and disciplines hardly ever map onto each other. This fact of life becomes particularly obvious when a scholar receives a Festschrift from his academic peers: the social coherence of the contributors is hardly ever matched by the thematic coherence of the contributions. This is also true of the Essays on Medieveal English dedicated to Professor Matsuji Tajima on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, and edited by Yoko Iyeiri and Margaret Conolly. A brief curriculum of the festschriftee is followed by a personal address by E. F. K. Koerner and fourteen papers on a variety of topics which in the nineteenth century would have belonged to the discipline of English historical philology but would now be attributed to areas such as comparative linguistics, historical phonology, historical metrics, lexicography, medieval history, literary criticism, philology in the narrow sense, or simply medieval studies. The volume will therefore make stimulating reading for scholars who enjoy looking beyond their own areas of specialization and who want to be reminded of the different angles from which their subject may be approached.

The volume is divided into a linguistic and a literary section. The first two papers of the former address phonological issues: Hans Frede Nielsen brings the evidence of (reconstructed) phonemic systems to bear on the question of whether Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German should be classified into an Anglo-Frisian versus a German sub-branch of West Germanic, or rather into a North Sea Germanic one (including Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon) versus a Southern West Germanic one (with High German as a single member). Nielsen discusses vowel and consonant systems, adduces opinions from relevant literature concerning their likely values at different stages of the four languages, adds his own interpretations of some of the substantive evidence, backs it up with arguments based on functional and structuralist considerations, and attempts to infer which language sets were likely to have shared which phonological apomorphies. The paper is informative, carefully argued, and indicative of how challenging the issues still are.

Jeremy Smith focuses on Old English breakings of palatal vowels before consonant (cluster)s such as /x(C)/, /rC/ or /lC/. He suggests that (at least some of) these breakings may have resulted from dialect contact between West Saxon and Anglian, arguing that the changes did not result in a divergence of the two dialectal branches but rather emerged when differences that had developed earlier came in contact with each other. Like Nielsen's paper, Smith's contribution highlights how many questions historical English phonology still harbors, and reflects, at the same time, one of the reasons why it does indeed pay to read Festschrifts: Being asked to write one may occasionally motivate scholars to go public with an idea they would be too cautious to present in less personal settings. Sometimes, today's Festschrift contributions may become tomorrow's handbook lore.

The third contribution, by Eric G. Stanley, discusses what noun phrase types OE deofol ‘devil’ could occur in, and why, if it took a determiner, it was so often the neuter pæt, rather than the masculine se. While the topic is certainly very specific, Stanley's treatment of it is comprehensive. He describes (albeit only by way of example) the distribution of the possible construction types in many genres and in various stages of the Old English period, and demonstrates his broad and deep knowledge of the textual evidence. However, the main problem on which Stanley focuses is why neuter gender got attached to deofol, and it does not receive much of an answer. In the end, I found myself wondering whether the issue really represents very much of a problem, given that Old English had grammatical rather than neutral gender.

In the fourth essay, Yoshiyuki Nakao deals with the modality of Middle English trewely and particularly with the way Chaucer seems to have played with its ambiguity in Troilus and Criseyde. Nakao's discussion is insightful, and highlights how one of the main questions in the poem—namely how “true” Criseyde's intentions of remaining “true” to Troilus really were—is reflected in a cunning use of trewely, which can often be interpreted both as a typical adverb (modifying verbs of speech, for example) and as an epistemic, indicating the narrator's attitude to the truth value of a proposition. In addition to its central part, which focuses on Chaucer's Troilus, the paper provides a statistical 282 Reviews survey of uses of trewely not only in Chaucer's other works, but also in the works of other Middle English writers.

Sadahiro Kumamoto compares the rhyme words in the Old French Roman de la Rose with those in its English translation. He does so systematically, dealing with one word class after the other. The conclusions he draws from his descriptive survey are not really spectacular, however, which may be due to limitations of space.

Thomas Cable's paper (the sixth) deals mainly with the metrics of fifteenth-century poets such as Lydgate and Hawes. He demonstrates that established views about the metrical defects of their verse are most likely unjustified and derive from false phonological reconstructions, or misconceptions about what may have counted as a well formed line at the time. Since the paper demonstrates how easily historical texts can be misinterpreted and misjudged, its relevance clearly goes beyond the specific cases it discusses.

Next, Yoko Iyeiri adduces extensive corpus evidence to test the hypothesis that the rise of nonassertive uses of any is causally related to the decline of multiple negation. As far as his data go, a case for a direct causal relationship is difficult to make. This is the seventh paper and concludes the linguistic section.

Like the linguistic contributions, the papers in the literary part of the collection are diverse in kind. Jun Teresawa makes the case that wiste ‘feast(ing)’ in line 128 of Beowulf could refer to Grendel's feasting on the Danes rather than to the Danes' banquet. His view contradicts established opinion and is backed up by collocational evidence.

Next, Laurence Eldredge discusses whether Benventus Grassus, a thirteenth-century ophthalmologist, is likely to have studied at Montpellier. An intertextual analysis of Grassus's treatise De probatissima arte oculorum suggests that he did not. While the paper reads well, one wonders if interested readers will expect to find it in a volume on Medieval English.

The third “literary” essay is by Robert E. Lewis. In it, he explains the rationale behind some editorial decisions taken in the production of the Middle English Dictionary, such as the decision to give more easily determinable manuscript dates priority over doubtful composition dates.

Joseph Wittig deals with lines 958–1087 of book four of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. They represent a speech by Troilus which is taken over from Boece's Consolatio. Wittig develops a well argued, novel interpretation, according to which the passage makes an important contribution to the central meaning of the poem and can thus be understood as artistically well integrated rather than as a tedious digression, as some earlier research had it.

One of the most substantial contributions is Margaret Connolly's, who offers a critical edition of a Late Middle English devotional text on charity that has so far not been edited as a text in its own right (although it is derivative of a text that has been). Her article can be read as an introduction to the edition. Together they make a valuable whole.

Edward Donald Kennedy describes the image of King Arthur as it emerges from Caxton's edition of Malory's Morte Darthur. He attempts to reconstruct Caxton's intentions and the ways in which the text may have been received and evaluated by contemporary readers. The paper provides a good view of Arthurian literature, the degree to which it might have been known to Malory, Caxto, and their readership, and the way in which knowledge of earlier textual traditions may have influenced the reception and interpretation of later texts. Like Cable's paper on fifteenth-century meter, it reminds us of some of the aspects that need to be taken into account when one interprets and evaluates historical literature.

The final essay, by Hideki Watanabe, traces the history of the phrase while the world standeth from Old English to Early Modern English times. It provides many textual examples and complements the picture by looking at selected competitors of the phrase, such as whil that the world may dure or world without end.

The book will certainly have made a nice present for Professor Matsuji Tajima. The editors have done a good job, and the volume is well produced. If one knows how to deal with the genre Festschrift, and takes an interest in medieval English language and literature, reading one or the other essay will certainly be worthwhile.