Jerome McGann's “near future” remains futuristic ten years later, highlighting the ongoing technological liminality of books today. That experience of transition makes Myra Seaman's Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England timely. Seaman's focal point in the book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61, conspicuously straddles both manuscript and print, first in its archival form, given that watermark evidence pinpoints a production date between 1479 and 1610, when printed books were supplanting handwritten ones; and, in this century, print and digital in George Shuffelton's Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (2008), an edition of the codex simultaneously published in paperback and online versions. Seaman is cognizant of this confluence, claiming, “[a] central aim of this book is to discern this single manuscript's multiplicity, to document and appreciate the whole ecology of the book-in-time” (38).

In this first book-length study of the artifact often called the Rate Manuscript after the scribe's name, signed nineteen times throughout, Seaman considers modern and medieval reception of the texts the manuscript preserves. The codex's five romances enjoy pride of place, but Seaman intentionally omits three of its longer texts, The Northern Passion, The Stations of Jerusalem, and The Legend of the Resurrection (165n3, 201n1). Seaman's appreciation for the manuscript is based on archival study, experience teaching it, and years of research—apparent in the appendix, which provides a helpful resource for anyone working with the manuscript (260): this single-page table details material observations about the book—its quires, watermarks, foliation, and organization—and lists its contents with information about the texts’ relationships to other manuscript versions, indicating whether they are unique, significant variants, or extant in multiple copies.

With her five main chapters roughly following manuscript order, Seaman imposes some thematic unity on each section. In chapter 1, she thus concentrates on the first eight texts, with fullest treatment given to the romance Sir Isumbras, and explores the role that nonhuman household participants play in human moral transformations (84). In the second chapter she studies selected texts from the third through sixth quires, in particular three exemplary narratives and two romances, The Erle of Tolous and Lybeaus Desconus. Seaman asserts that these five works encourage readers to embrace universal forgiveness (97). In chapter 3, she returns to quire 4 to discuss The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools in conversation with works from quires 6–8 and 10. Seaman ponders how household members excluded from power—tools, apprentices, horns, cherries, charters, women—nonetheless “emerge as instruments of moral correction” (165). Chapter 4 is the only one that does not address a romance; Seaman focuses on four religious lyrics and an exemplum and usefully identifies unresolved contradictions about the manuscript's moral agenda regarding the efficacy of mercy over repentance and contemptus mundi motifs (198, 199). In the fifth chapter she considers The Life of Saint Margaret, Sir Orfeo, and King Edward and the Hermit. Seaman regards these three narratives as models of “successful human reincorporation” in relationships with nonhuman others (206).

Some of Seaman's arguments in Objects of Affection should be read with caution. For example, she summarizes Maura Nolan's deeply interrogative essay, “Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation: Reading Manuscripts in the Digital Age” (Chaucer Review 47, no. 4 [2013]: 465–76) as a polemic against digitization, creating a straw man argument in the introduction (34–37). In chapter 1 she characterizes as scholarly consensus the suggestion of just one scholar—Lynne S. Blanchfield, whose work on the manuscript is foundational—that the opening texts seem oriented to children (61, 86n23). Seaman identifies The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools as a debate poem but never cites scholars Neil Cartlidge or Francis Lee Utley, who delineate that designation; instead, Seaman derives a definition based on sometimes inaccurate readings of The Owl and the Nightingale: she refers to the female birds with male pronouns (137) and implies that a judge resolves the dispute (139). In chapters 4 and 5, she offers some discussion of how texts from different parts of the codex fit together. Given Rory G. Critten's insight that the texts in Ashmole 61 treat similar subjects but reflect conflict rather than concord, it would be helpful to see such connections developed throughout (“Bourgeois Ethics Again: The Conduct Texts and the Romances in Oxford Bodleian, Library MS Ashmole 61,” Chaucer Review 50, nos. 1–2 [2015]: 108–33).

While technophiles may lament the slow pace of the digital revolution, MS Ashmole 61 reveals that technological transitions are neither unidirectional nor immediate. Rate handwrote his book when printed materials were becoming dominant, and he included texts over two centuries old alongside more contemporary ones. Seaman's insistence that this compilation offers “affective literacy training” for a late medieval English household (2) is intriguing because it is an artifact from a culture also experiencing massive changes in information technology and access. One hopes that Objects of Affection will inspire future studies of this fascinating codex.