The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. Edited by Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. xxi + 236; 12 halftone, 10 color illustrations. $50.

In the last two decades, manuscript study conferences have produced several excellent essay collections, which in turn have facilitated a new vitality in the exchange of ideas among scholars who share common methodological problems but work in a wide range of fields. This volume, which grew out of papers delivered at a University of British Columbia workshop in 1999, focuses squarely on the problem of editing. The usual disclaimers about the difficulty of reviewing a collection of essays with such various content apply in a particularly acute manner here. In the introduction, aptly titled "Varieties of Editing: History, theory, and technology," Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge ground their attempt to define the volume's coherence in a generational shift of scholars, trained after 1985, for whom "New Philology … represented neither a liberating departure from, nor a threatening challenge to, their established methods and assumptions, but rather a formative influence" (p. xii). The subtitle alludes to a consistent focus throughout the volume on the way in which the new editing movement foregrounds questions of reading and interpretation. The hermeneutic turn in editing has made modern editors determined to render "textual processes—the processes by which texts are created, read and passed on—visible" (p. xiii). During this same period (post-1985), changes in technology have allowed editors to realize the "visibility" of textual processes more concretely, so it is no surprise that many of the essays in this collection endeavor to bring these two strands—the theoretical and the technological—together. The essays range from almost purely theoretical pieces (Robins) to minutely local, small-scale recovery projects (Schipper). In between these two poles, some contributors are actively at work on new editions or revisions of old editions (Klinck, Reimer).

Ashby Kinch
University of Montana