R. VINCENT, Colne Valley: A History of a Pennine Landscape

Abstract

or how they might have differed from each other (if at all). The manuscript remained in the hands of the York guild through until the late eighteenth century by which time the guild was largely defunct. The subsequent history of the manuscript until it came into the hands of the British Library in 1881 is well-traced. Medical historians would wish there to be more detail on the medieval images; there are only a few pages on each of them despite their vividness and wide usage in publications. It really did not make sense to compare the image of the four temperaments with a very odd series of images from the much earlier Liber Cosmographiae of John de Foxton, despite it being also a York product. There are contemporary continental examples that might have been more useful to examine. The editor often complains that there are mistakes throughout the manuscript, for example in the labels to images, but it might have been more productive to see them as meaningful variations. The royal portraits seem to get more historical and artistic analysis than the medieval medical images. Both medical historians and York specialists would like to know more about the early-modern careers of the practitioners who left their names in these folios. At times the reluctance to provide more examples of guild business in York is frustrating. There is an intriguing graph in an appendix showing the fluctuating numbers of apprentices in the guild over three centuries, but it is not really analysed. The manuscript would seem to be a gold mine for future prosopographical studies of York medics, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The provision of the names as an alphabetized list of people, including all their mentions together, does make the book very useful for further research, although the decision to take them out of their context in the manuscript does break normal conventions of editing a manuscript. Despite a few oddities, which might suggest some underlying competing goals, this is a fascinating volume that is after all an edition, not a monograph, meaning that space was limited. It comes out as one of the first publications in an attractive new series in medical history, a joint venture by Boydell and York Medieval Press. These volumes are beautifully printed and bound, with very good quality reproductions of images. This book would be a handsome addition to any shelf, especially for anyone interested in the guild history of York.