Manfred Görlach

William Langland: Piers Plowman. A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Vol. II: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography and Indexical Glossary, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt

When the first volume of this major undertaking was published in 1995 (= Schmidt 1995a), it was clear from the complexity of the problems and the editor’s meticulous care for detail that readers would have to wait for some time for the promised second volume, which was to comprise all the commentary necessary for a full understanding of Schmidt’s decisions, and in fact to provide a justification of the total enterprise in the light of existing editions of Piers Plowman (= PP), one of the most important texts of Middle English literature. Faute de mieux from 1995 readers could use whatever evidence was provided in the smaller critical edition of the B version by Schmidt (1995b; see my joint review in Görlach 1997). Even a first

Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, gen. editor Bernard Rosenthal

Records documenting early social history became more plentiful after 1500, but losses are dramatic compared with other text types, such as printed works by eminent poets. The records (mainly dating to 1692, = RSWH) collected and interpreted in the impressive volume under review are a fortunate exception to the rule and – as the extensive list of references (965–970) shows – they are among the most thoroughly discussed English texts surviving from early North America. They represent 977 surviving documents of the proceedings and preliminary hearings of the notorious Salem witch-hunt (SWH) trials, their length ranging from three lines to three pages, viz. accounts, arrest warrants, bills, complaints, court records, death warrants, depositions, examinations, indictments, orders of payment, petitions, receipts, recognizances, summonses, warrants (and mittimuses) and a few other text types, such as oaths, witness lists etc. This embarras de richesse has long been a challenge for local social historians trying to identify accusers, 156 accused (of whom 19 were hanged, 1 was pressed to death and 5 died in prison), witnesses and copyists, and to establish the dates and sequence of the documents and underlying social networks. Since new documents (in smaller numbers) continue to resurface from archives and private collections, editing the corpus has proved to be a continuing challenge. With some reservations on such scores the volume under review can now be seen as the definitive final word in the complex editorial history of the SWH collection. Rosenthal’s “General Introduction” (15–43) provides a meticulous but very readable survey of the local background of the case, summarizing a wealth of earlier studies and detailing the functions of the major relevant actors in the proceedings. A very careful discussion of the possible reasons for the outburst (fraud or psychological mechanisms at work) uses a wealth of contemporary publications by Mather, Calif and Hale as well as dozens of modern interpretations. Rosenthal’s conclusions are supported by the reconstruction of dates, an interpretation of the motivation of the accused and the accusers, and identification of more than 250 hands appearing in the documents. Trask provides very insightful (and necessary) explanations of the “legal procedures used during the Salem Witch Trials” (44–63). In particular, readers learn in what way documents were written in various stages, showing corrections, additions and deletions by several hands – which justifies the painstaking editorial practice evident in the present volume. Trask also gives a full account of how the extant documents survived and of the successive stages of the transcription project, the

The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick

Cusack, Bridget, ed. 1998. Everyday English, 1500–1700: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Donaldson, William. 1989. The Language of the People: Scots Prose from the Victorian Revival. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP. Görlach, Manfred. 2002. “The Problem of Authentic Language”. Manfred Görlach. Still More Englishes. VEAW G28. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 17–47. Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. 2009. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Schneider, Edgar W. 1989. American Earlier Black English. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P. Schneider, Edgar W. 2002. “Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents”. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J.K. Chambers et al. Oxford: Blackwell. 67–96. Wakelin, Martyn F., ed. 1986. The Southwest of England. VEAW T5. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Winer, Lise, ed. 1993. Trinidad and Tobago. VEAW T6. Amsterdam: Benjamins.