People are always trying to analyze an author based on his books. But have you ever tried to analyze an editor based on his books?

Robert Thornton was a Yorkshire gentleman in the early fifteenth century. He was not particularly high in the social order, but he was respectable, and he was literate, and he wanted his family to be both as well. And so he compiled and copied two books for his family, now known as the "Lincoln Thornton Manuscript" and the "London Thornton Manuscript." Into these he copied religious works, courtly romances, medical texts, and a few odds and ends. Given how carefully he assembled the texts and rearranged the books (far more carefully than he actually copied the texts, it appears), it seems clear that he had a plan in mind.

But what was that plan? And what was he trying to teach? What sources did he have access to? How did he arrange them, and to what extent did he excerpt, expand, rewrite, or just conform the dialect to his own? The romance portion of his collection is one of the most important collections of Middle English romances in existence, so it's important to know just how Thornton interacted with his sources.

This essay collection is the latest attempt to get inside Thornton's head. As is often the case in such a collection, it's a mixed bag. Susanna Fein's detailed examination of the contents of his books and George R. Keiser's assembly of the few facts we know about Thornton (further illustrated in Field and Smith's final section on "Robert Thornton Country") are excellent. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre's article on the Alliterative Morte Arthure are a typical Hanna production: Extremely erudite, radical, dull, and (to me) ultimately unconvincing. Mary Michele Poellinger's item on religious violence probably tells us more about the Middle Ages than about Thornton himself. Ditto Julie Nelson Couch's essay about Apocryphal Romance, although it does show that Thornton didn't object to things that had no scriptural and little ecclesiastical justification. Julie Ormanski's classification of medical texts is perhaps important for understanding medical texts; I'm not sure it tells us much about Thornton. As for Joel Fredell's article about book production in York -- I'll admit that it completely failed to stick in my head. There is good stuff there for paleographers, I think, but not much for the general reader.

Ultimately, Robert Thornton still keeps most of his secrets -- and almost certainly always will, because there are probably no other records to be discovered and few new bits of data to be wrung from his two books. But if you want to know all there is to know about him, there is certainly much in this book that you should know. ( )