Daniel Birkholz's study Harley Manuscript Geographies focuses on a single volume from the huge collection of 7,661 manuscripts amassed in the eighteenth century by Robert and Edward Harley: British Library, Harley MS 2253. Harley 2253 has long been famous among specialists in Middle English for its courtly love lyrics. It is also exceptional among earlier vernacular manuscripts in that the date and place of work of its main scribe have been established: the area of Ludlow, Herefordshire, in the first half of the fourteenth century. This provenance provides a starting point for Birkholz's application of the “burgeoning realm” of what he terms “literary geography” (43) to the manuscript.

A lengthy introduction engages points of disagreement with current scholarship. The breadth and variety of contents in the manuscript, argues Birkholz, could not have been achieved by a scribe at work in a six-mile radius of Ludlow. Birkholz argues for a patron—probably female (10)—and a compiler with the mobility and connections to source exemplars. Chapter 1 proposes the highly mobile Hereford bishops Richard Swinfield and Adam Orleton and the cathedral clergy as candidates, and he imagines how the language of love, topography, and mobility in the Harley lyrics might have resonated with the interests of this community. Rather than being provincial, the lyrics are hybrids of regionalism and internationalism.

While one may admire the energy and commitment of this revisionary reading of the lyrics, doubts niggle. To be sure, material relating to the cathedral occurs on a flyleaf in the manuscript, but evidence that members of this community were interested in lyric poetry in English seems lacking. For Birkholz, illustrations to the Bestiaire d’ amours in Harley 273 (another manuscript associated with the Harley scribe) depict “a mature priest, tonsured and amply robed” (11) who mediates between a book's patroness, scribe, and others as the Hereford clergy may have done. This reading is not central to the main argument, but it, too, raises eyebrows. The present reviewer does not see a tonsure; with extravagant curly hair, and gestures that suggest intimacy with the lady, the figure looks like a lover, while the figure below appears to be a teacher (he wears a skull cap and reads to two tonsured pupils).

Chapter 2 considers the manuscript as witness to the cultural presence of the Jews in Herefordshire some five decades after their expulsion. Birkholz surveys the manuscript's contents noting both references to Jews and the absence of reference, focusing on some of the less noticed texts in the manuscript, including Anglo-Norman biblical paraphrase and Holy Land descriptions. This painstaking survey would have benefited from some comparative work so that one could judge just how distinctive (or not) the manuscript's engagement with the Jews is. While chapter 1 offers the manuscript as a hybrid borne of regionalism and mobility, here the manuscript helps us to see how the expulsion affected the cultural periphery (96). Production of the manuscript is imagined differently here too: the “priestly go-between” (11) disappears, and the Harley scribe is restored to compilatory agency.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Anglo-Norman pastourelle Gilote et Johane. Birkholz takes issue with Carter Revard's view that Gilote is a precursor of Chaucer's Wife of Bath and that the Harley manuscript is a multivocal forerunner of the Canterbury Tales (although in the epilogue he yields to the pressure to bring the manuscript into Chaucer's orbit, describing Saint Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford—a “conspicuous absence” in the manuscript (275)—as “England's other St Thomas”). In chapter 3, although spaces and places play a role, literary geography gives way to counterfactual historical methods, while the critical voice becomes somewhat multivocal, even ludic itself, though not always in an untroubling way. One hopes that phrases such as “exegetical bad girls” (189) can be read as ironic ventriloquism. But what of “[o]ur heroines’ mockery of older men who ‘can neither screw nor do their will’ [244] has doubtless had a deflationary effect on the poem's stock among the gentlemen antiquarians and senior professoriate who have formed its post-medieval readership” (188)? It is hard to avoid the impression that a “senior professoriate” is assumed to be male here.

The final chapter returns to geography and the Harley lyrics, this time with a focus on death: “love and death's linked geographies in Harley 2253 help map a structural relation between the historical trauma of the Great Pestilence and the literary phenomenon of early English lyric” (203). Given that the work of the manuscript's main scribe apparently finished just as the plague struck—was he a victim?—the attempt to link the codex with the plague seems both perverse and oddly prophetic. Our own intimate knowledge of the lived experience of global pandemic, acquired just after Harley Manuscript Geographies went to press (presumably, as the volume was published in June 2020), lends an innocent, ironic poignancy to such comments as this on Saint Anselm's De interrogandi moribundis, “[w]hether mid-fourteenth-century or latter-day witnesses, we all carry plague's pall, bear with us the nihilistic trauma of pestilence” (215). Harley 2253 represents a “pre-pestilence moment” (227), and so, now, does this chapter.

There are some welcome moves in this book, including the review of the Jewish presence and absence, the enthusiasm for the Harley lyrics, and the reflections on plague that are both timely and untimely. Generous quotation from the texts and helpful translations will valuably support student readers. There are also some points to take issue with in the individual chapters and with overall coherence, as I have indicated. Birkholz assures us that “its chapters do work together,” only to repeat rather than substantiate the claim; they “affiliat[e] with one another textually and topographically to produce a whole that is more than the sum of its parts” (43). The “takeaway” from Harley Manuscript Geographies is that there is no “clear and coherent conclusion” (43). If this was his aim, Birkholz has succeeded. Much scope remains for developing a method for interpreting a manuscript miscellany in relation to its geography.