In this important book Hanna sets out to recover, or reinstate, the body of works written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, or English by Londoners (whether as “authors’” or as scribes) or for Londoners before Chaucer came to dominate the literary scene in the 1380s. This latter date also marks a change in written London English (M. L. Samuel's “Type II”) and the appearance of a new sort (his “Type III” or Chaucerian English). Moreover, just after 1375, a new variety of book hand, “Secretary,” emerged as the dominant English script (226). But Hanna is particularly concerned to escape the long shadow cast by the genius of Chaucer and to consider this London literature of the Edwardian period in its own right. Some of his ideas and conclusions (particularly in relation to Pepys Manuscript 2498) were set out in his earlier article “English Biblical Texts before Lollardy and Their Fate” (Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard, Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England [Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003], 141–53).

Hanna has cast his net widely and interprets both London and literature very generously (and indeed his time span extends back to the early thirteenth century). So London literature includes ten texts written in Type II London English, among them the polyglot handbook of John Skip, rector of St. Martin Vintry in the early fourteenth century; most of the Auchinleck manuscript; various vernacular texts such as The Mirror, the Ancren Riwle, the prose Psalter, and the Apocalypse; and romances such as King Alisaunder and Titus and Vespasian. To these Hanna has added Latin legal texts such as the early thirteenth-century London custumal now BL Additional Manuscript 14252 and all the custumals compiled by the city chamberlain Andrew Horn in the early fourteenth century. Such collections were put together, he argues, in the same way as romance collections like Auchinleck and share with them a common mode of production and, in some cases, also a common illuminator (80). Copying legal documents was one way of creating the historical record, and romance history could also be deployed to demonstrate legal right (93). And since we know that there were romances in the royal library of Edward III, and since the court and the city were interconnected through shared tournaments and aristocratic town houses, then texts like Beves of Hamtoun and Guy of Warwick can be considered not only as sophisticated (as opposed to popular) literature but also as London literature. The argument here may, perhaps, be a little strained, and the case for including a discussion of the Chandos Herald's La Vie du Prince Noir as a London text, apparently on the grounds that a copy found its way into the hands of the London scribe John Shirley in the fifteenth century, seems a trifle contrived. But the result is to bring together and interrelate a wide variety of interesting texts. Ralph Hanna is a very skilled codicologist, and the strength of his approach to these texts is to consider each of them within its manuscript context: what other texts appear in the same manuscript? He considers carefully also the size and appearance of his texts and hence their function and audience.

A particularly strong case is made for considering the vernacular religious and instructional texts to be found in Pepys 2498 as London literature. For these texts such as the Apocalypse, the Mirror, and the Recluse, Hanna postulates an audience of lay Londoners such as those who joined the numerous religious fraternities and who might use these texts either for their private devotions or within the public space of their parish churches. The translators, Hanna suggests, have deliberately “laicised” these texts and have removed them from their original clerical (Latin) or aristocratic (Anglo-Norman) contexts to bring them within the reading orbit of pious lay Londoners. It is into this textual community that Hanna places Piers Plowman. He justly points out that Piers Plowman was written a generation earlier than Chaucer and should be seen as “a London work and the culmination of Edwardian literature in the City” (243) rather than as an “old-fashioned” alliterative contemporary work.

Sometimes it might seem that the concepts of literature and London have been stretched to include any texts and manuscripts that Hanna wanted to discuss. And he certainly discusses a lot of manuscripts: there are nearly two hundred cited, and some twenty of these receive extensive discussion (e.g., Oxford, Ch.Ch. Manuscript 92). Hanna's eagle eye has hovered over a number of manuscripts to very good effect. The whole, in this case, is, perhaps, less great than its parts. The need to justify the inclusion of a range of texts and to situate them in London, or for a London audience, is not always helpful, yet the discussion of individual texts is always interesting and sometimes brilliant (e.g., the discussion of the London custumals). Sometimes, however, this becomes a very difficult book to read and understand: difficult because the style is persistently allusive rather than direct. This may be a particular problem for the reader who is a historian rather than a literary scholar and may feel like a spectator at a game whose rules he does not understand, let alone the performance history of the players. And Hanna's writing style does not help: he swings from near slang (e.g., “weaselly” [20], “fuzzy-edgedness” [97], or “ribbony” [153]) to the esoteric (“the gospel pericopes provided by the Mirror were supplemented by a unique diatesseron” [306]). It is a pity that Hanna makes the reading, and hence the understanding, of his book so difficult because what he has to say is extremely interesting.

With characteristic insight, Hanna draws attention to Manchester John Rylands Library Manuscript Eng. 77, a Wycliffite New Testament. Ker noted on the flyleaf the inscription “This booke … was overseyn And redd by doctor Thomas Ebbrall and Doctor Yve or that my moder bought it.” Hanna points out that Ebbrall and Yve were successively masters of Whittington College in London (1444–70) and that both were doughty opponents of heresy, yet both owned Wycliffite texts. Hanna muses also about the mother and her son (why assume a son: could the inscription not equally well have been written by a daughter?) who has so carefully omitted their names from the inscription. Hanna conjures up the mother as a literate, wealthy, and pious woman. Perhaps we might search for this unnamed family a little further? Ebbrall and Yve were not only masters of Whittington College; they were also rectors of the parish of St. Michael Paternoster Royal. Among their parishioners was Sir John Yonge, a grocer, alderman in 1460 and mayor in 1466–67. When he died in 1481 he chose to be buried in his parish church of St. Michael. In 1466/7 John had married, as his second wife, Jane Boughton, whose mother, Joan Boughton, was burned for obstinate heresy in 1494. Perhaps it was Jane Boughton Yonge who sought a nihil obstat for her English New Testament and one of the Yonge children who later wrote this careful inscription.

In this provocative book Hanna herds a number of very different texts into his London pen. He usefully breaks apart the categories into which texts have been divided—legal, romance, historical, religious—and he argues for shared concerns (often nostalgic ones) and priorities, for a seriousness of purpose even in texts apparently written to amuse (e.g., Beves of Hamtoun and Guy of Warwick), and for a continuity of pious lay vernacular reading across the great divide, or cultural revolution, of the late fourteenth century. Not all readers will agree with everything in this book, but anyone interested in London, or Londoners, in the Edwardian period will gain a great deal from reading it.