Catalogue and scholarly consideration of these vital manuscripts.

Catalogue and scholarly consideration of these vital manuscripts. Following her vital cataloguing of the surviving 200+ manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniein Volume III, Julia Crick has been able in Volume IV to present the information which the manuscripts contain both about thetextual development of Geoffrey's History and about its circulation and audience. Crick begins by exploring the evidence for grouping the manuscripts. External evidence such as associated texts found frequently with the Historiais compared with the internal evidence of textual disruption, the notorious dedications, rubrication and trial passages collated from each manuscript. This information forms the basis for an account of the chronologyand geography of the circulation of the work as a whole, which in turn sheds light on the audience of the Historia, their taste in reading, and their status.JULIA CRICKis a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Arthurian Boydell & Brewer have become the Arthurian publishers par excellence, not simply for their excellent secondary material on the once and future king, but for their commitment to the publication of a largely Cambridge-based inquiry into the primeval sources of the Arthurian story. ENGLISH STUDIES [J.D. Burnley] Following the cataloguing of the 200 surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey's HistoriaJulia Crick sets out to assesswhat these reveal about the textual development of the work and about its circulation and audience. Her meticulous and scholarly approach prises out information which will prove invaluable to all students of the 12th century.