Introduction

In 2010, I found myself seated next to Susanna Fein during a panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. We were both there to listen to a pair of papers about the manuscripts of Robert Thornton. I was a very green, very junior member of the profession, just finishing my second year in an academic job, and Susanna Fein was, well, Susanna Fein. And while we waited for the session to start, she remarked, to no one in particular, that we need a collection of essays about Thornton. After returning home from the conference, I worked up the courage to email her, asking if she wanted to co-edit such a volume. She graciously said yes. Over the next eighteen months, we worked together on gathering essays, commenting on them, and getting them into publishable shape. She consistently proved a model co-editor, and she has become a model mentor, colleague, and friend over the years since.

Fein’s comment at that session, seemingly so offhand, nicely encapsulates two traits that I have come to value in her scholarly career: the desire to unpick complicated manuscripts, coupled with a genuine belief that research works best when undertaken by multiple scholars putting their heads together. I trust I speak for the contributors to this volume—and no doubt many of you reading this, as well—when remarking that these are timeless qualities that our field needs now more than ever. And so it is that Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Derek Pearsall, and I wished to mark this moment of Susanna Fein’s retirement by this volume.

The collection of essays we have gathered here, celebrating the scholarship of Susanna Fein, offers us all a chance to reflect upon her rich body of work, which is always marked by a deep commitment to unraveling the complexities of medieval manuscripts and to editing and translating as central scholarly enterprises. What is most remarkable about Fein’s many influential essays and editorial projects is that she consistently keeps both literary meaning and manuscript forms in view. Fein is indeed that rare scholar who has mastered the nuances of codicology and paleography, and yet who, at the same time, is adept at thinking about how texts make meaning within manuscripts. She seems driven always to ask how we might use manuscript evidence to recover the voices of medieval poets in their original reading environments. Margaret Connolly has recently remarked that “Interrogating texts in their manuscript contexts has been the mantra of Middle English studies for the last forty years.”1 Without a doubt, Susanna Fein has been one of the most important scholars in making this so.

Drawing from this dual focus on manuscripts and literary meaning, Fein’s work has indelibly affected how we understand some of the most important manuscripts in Middle English studies. She has, for example, offered bracing interventions into studies of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts, Digby 86, the Auchinleck Manuscript, John Audelay’s manuscript, and the Thornton Manuscripts. And, along with Carter Revard (whose most important work she herself shepherded into print), Fein is the unquestioned expert on Harley 2253, one of the most important manuscripts in all of Middle English. But she has also challenged how we think about the lyric, love poetry, alliterative verse, devotional poetry, penitential poetry, the Psalms, Pearl, Audelay, Chaucer, and romance.

Revisiting Susanna’s scholarship (and even encountering some pieces for the first time) alongside the contributions to the present volume has afforded me the chance to reflect upon precisely what is so searching and influential about her methods. I wish to suggest here that the commitments exemplified by Susanna’s scholarship fall under three broad headings: first, careful attention to both literary meaning and material form. Second, a belief that small details matter to larger narratives of cultural history. And third, a belief that editing is an act of service to the field which, when done with care and dedication, can advance our knowledge of medieval England as much as books and articles can. Individually, each of these commitments are sorely needed in our field, and the career of any scholar who attended to a single one of them would be of note. But when all three are synthesized in one robust body of scholarship—as we find in the work of Susanna Fein—then such a scholar is worthy of celebration indeed.

The Synthesis of Literary Meaning and Material Form

A commitment to both literary meaning and studying the details of manuscripts marks nearly everything Susanna has published. Perhaps the most trenchant manifestation of this is her critique of the editing of Middle English lyrics, published in Poetica in 2008.2 In this piece, Fein persuasively shows how modern editions render lyrics’ meaning opaque by anthologizing them and giving them modern titles, offering a balanced, nuanced articulation of what we—as readers—lose when we move from the manuscript to the anthology of lyrics. But this is no revanchist rejection of editing, nor is it a quixotic call for a return to reading from manuscripts, as such arguments inevitably become in blunter scholarly hands. Rather, Fein’s essay serves as a reminder to readers always to be conscious of the transformations editing effects, alongside a call for better, more self-conscious practices of titling: “In assigning titles to medieval works, we editors of Middle English ought not lose sight of the changes that our translations will have wrought.”3

The respect for the medieval page modeled in Fein’s Poetica essay is certainly not a one-off within her oeuvre. In her analysis of Four Leaves of the Truelove, for example, she recovers how this poem was originally designed to be laid out over precisely four manuscript leaves, creating a brilliant pun on the truelove flower’s four leaves and the four leaves of a bifolium.4 As originally designed, this poem’s depiction of the Harrowing of Hell would have occurred right at the midpoint—crossing from the bottom of leaf 2 to the top of leaf 3. But perhaps most remarkably, Fein is able to demonstrate this poetic intention in spite of the fact that none of the surviving manuscripts, nor Wynkyn de Worde’s print edition, follow this design. That is, Fein perceives a design to the poem that several late medieval scribes and a printer failed to note. But, as in all her scholarship, in this essay Fein is careful to articulate for her readers why attention to the shape of words on the page matters. This is no mere piece of trivia, nor some slick advertisement of a nifty observation. Instead, Fein reveals something fundamental about medieval readers and their relationship to the forms of their books—a form of engagement that is almost completely opaque to us today: “Even though poetic shaping strikes moderns as ingenious and somewhat artificial, […] [t]he endeavor asserts that ultimate meanings derive from God and exist outside the poet’s own efforts, that is, in forms that may materialize from words meaningfully and artfully sequenced.”5

Fein has not limited her searches to these comparatively obscure corners of Middle English poetry, for she finds similar things happening in Audelay and Pearl, as well. As she shows with Audelay, the poet’s self-conception is deeply imbricated with the very form of his autobiographical poetry on the manuscript page. In examining Audelay’s Epilogue, for example, Fein’s sleuthing abilities are on full display, as she observes that this poem

possesses thirty-nine thirteen-line stanzas, which are said to be indebted to the Trinity (469–76) and made by “the Holé Gost wercheng” (497). The numerology is therefore openly trinitarian: thirteen times three stanzas of thirteen lines each. By my calculation, Epilogue proceeds in semantic groups of three stanzas each (that is, thirty-nine-line units), with four basic arguments worked out in nine stanzas each (that is, three groups of three). Symmetry causes one group to operate as the centerpiece, so that, with thirteen three-stanza groups, the full argument arranges itself into four parts and a center: 9|9|3|9|9 (number of stanzas) or 1–9|10–18|19–21|22– 30|31–39 (sequential stanza numbers).6

And one would think that, although it is hospitable to new and evolving ways of reading, Pearl has little about its form still left to be discovered. But I must admit to sitting up in surprise when encountering Fein’s remark that the poem’s very central lines play on the semantic richness of the word ryche/rice:

This punning on ryche, Fein shows, right at the center of the poem, illustrates the poet’s larger project of exploring and exposing the limitations of human language and thought when set against the divine economy. For this word can mean riches/treasury—as in, God’s pockets are deep enough to allow each laborer to be paid the same rate,...