Author ORCID Identifier
Mary F. Wheaton: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-84637-6923
DOI
10.1093/ywes/maaf025
Abstract
Extract
Winter’s Middle English Texts Series (MET) published a single volume this year, containing a number of editions of related medieval texts. Hans Sauer and Alessia Bauer’s To Instruct and Entertain – Medieval Didactic Dialogues is the first parallel-text edition of the Old English Prose Solomon and Saturn (SolSatP) edited from London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv and two copies of the Middle English Master of Oxford’s Catechism (MOC), edited from London, British Library, MSS Harley 1304 and Lansdowne 762. In addition to presenting these texts side-by-side, the editors have daringly attempted to construct a potential and as-of-yet undiscovered Latin source text, which appears parallel to the English texts. To provide even more comparison with the primary texts, two editions of additional didactic dialogues are included following the parallel texts: the Old English Adrian and Ritheus (AdRit) and an Old Icelandic dialogue, in this volume called Spurningar lærisveins og andsvör meistara (SLAM). The introduction provides an overview of the medieval didactic dialogue as a genre, discussion of how these parallel editions differ from their predecessors, their manuscripts sources, tentative stemma for the English texts, other related sources and parallels, notes on dialect and dating and editorial procedures. Each edition is followed by a corresponding critical apparatus section. The volume concludes with commentaries on the dialogues, focusing on the questions that appear across the selected texts as well as those from AdRit and SLAM that do not appear in either SolSatP or MOC. The volume ends with glossaries for the Old English and Middle English texts as well as an index of names.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-3-2025
Publication Title
The Year's Work in English Studies
Volume
104
Issue
1
Publisher Statement
Copyright © 2025, © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact [email protected].
Recommended Citation
Mary F Wheaton, 2. Manuscript and Technical Studies, The Year's Work in English Studies, Volume 104, Issue 1, 2025, Pages 157–168, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywes/maaf025
