The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XV: Manuscripts in Midland Libraries. Ed. Valerie Edden. / The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XVI: Manuscripts in the Laudian Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson. / The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XVII: Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Ed. Kari Anne Rand Schmidt.

• Veronica O'Mara

Of the three volumes reviewed here, the first is the most surprising: one expects a wide range of material in the Laudian collection, is not shocked by some limitations in the Gonville and Caius library, but does not perhaps anticipate such overall variety in the eighty-one manuscripts from the twelve Midland libraries catalogued by Valerie Edden. These collections, which are carefully and cogently described in the introduction, range from St Mary’s College, Oscott (Birmingham), which contains a single pastedown from Dives and Pauper in a sixteenth-century recusant book, to the largest collection of all in Worcester Cathedral Library, which contains everything from texts by Richard Rolle to a cure for a hangover.

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