Ipomadon. Edited by Rhiannon Purdie. Early English Text Society, original series, 316. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xc + 366; 1 b/w photograph, 1 figure. $76.

The anonymous tail-rhyme romance Ipomadon is one of no fewer than three independent translations into Middle English of an extraordinary twelfth-century romance in Anglo-Norman, Hue de Rotelande's Ipomedon. Rhiannon Purdie's edition of this romance is most welcome: apart from an unpublished dissertation and some selections in a fine recent anthology, this important romance has languished in Eugen Kölbing's valuable but increasingly unavailable edition (1889). Purdie contributes signally to our understanding of the artistry of Ipomadon, which, despite its stanzaic kinship with "Sir Thopas," rises above the charge of "drasty rymyng" that still dogs the tail-rhyme stanza. This edition is sure to stimulate further research into this unjustly neglected poem, and not least into the mauling it has undergone in its sole surviving manuscript witness, Chetham's Library A.6.31 (formerly 8009): as a quick example of the damage, take sojourned spelled as sogarende due to errors in copying (l. 2296).

David J. Parkinson
University of Saskatchewan