This rich volume reflects the remarkable range and depth of Derek Pearsall's influence on Middle English studies over the past half century. It originates in a 2011 conference organised to mark Pearsall's eightieth birthday; however, the true lineage of this book is more extensive. The volume contributes to a long-standing discussion about what the material contexts of medieval texts might have to say to literary critics. Conferences organised by Pearsall himself in 1981 and 1998 form notable landmarks in this conversation. The book is divided into seven sections, each featuring three or four papers and a foreword. The format is not unlike that of a conference, and, indeed, the forewords were developed from respondents' comments on individual conference sessions in 2011. The volume's structural similarity to a conference is complemented by the pleasantly conversational tone of many of the contributions. The subdivisions and forewords prove a helpful device both for keeping the myriad threads of discussion in clear focus and for articulating their relationship to each other in the course of a volume of more than five hundred pages.

The first section is devoted to what are termed ‘Pearsallian reading practices’. In his foreword to this part of the book, Christopher Cannon stresses the importance of close reading in Pearsall's scholarship and traces his conscious shift from an initial focus on New Critical methods, to a more historicised perspective in later decades. The papers in this section exemplify and respond to these interpretative practices. The question raised in Oliver Pickering's title ‘How good is the outspoken South English legendary poet?’ is very much in Pearsallian mode. A. C. Spearing's exploration of narrative freedom in Troilus and Criseyde builds on Pearsall's insights into this text, but supplements them with ideas drawn from narrative theory. The volume's second and third sections pay tribute to Pearsall's work at the University of York between 1965 and 1985. The former section focuses on courtly verse and affectivity, themes on which Pearsall worked with Elizabeth Salter. William Marx's foreword frames this part of the book, as a tribute not only to Pearsall's work, but also to that of Salter, who died prematurely in 1980. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne reads two meditations on Christ's passion, one in Anglo-Norman and one in Middle English, against the background of medieval England's multilingualism and internationalism. Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis develops the idea of the annotator as literary critic in her contribution on reader interventions in the sole surviving manuscript of the Book of Margery Kempe. The third section of the volume is inspired by Pearsall's collection, Manuscripts and readers, the proceedings of his 1981 conference on the topic. It features four essays written by scholars who also contributed to that conference. Julia Boffey, Carole M. Meale and A. I. Doyle each use a single case study to ask larger questions about compilation, reader response and the medieval book trade. A. S. G. Edwards contributes an essay on the modern trade in medieval manuscripts, charting the fortunes of Lydgate manuscripts on the twentieth-century book market.

As its title signals (and unlike many volumes of its type), New directions avoids the temptation merely to look back. Senior scholarly voices are placed alongside less well-established ones and the collection is full of suggestions and pointers for further exploration. Sections iv and v of the volume are titled ‘Newer Directions in Manuscript Studies i & ii’ and feature some stimulating work from up-and-coming scholars. Hannah Zdansky takes a fresh look at the curious manuscript in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl survive. Other essays extend Pearsall's work in less well-trodden chronological and geographical directions. Karrie Fuller probes early modern manuscript responses to Langland and contributions by Hilary E. Fox and Theresa O'Byrne analyse literary output in the English-speaking areas of fifteenth-century Ireland. The final two sections deal with two of Pearsall's consistent preoccupations: the medieval reception of Chaucerian and Langlandian texts. Elizabeth Scala explores Chaucer's practice of self-quotation in the The Nun's Priest's Tale. Through a detailed analysis of the manuscript glosses to the Wife of Bath's prologue, Sarah Baechle makes a compelling case for the glosses in early manuscripts of The Canterbury tales having been ‘received by medieval readers as an integral part of the text’ (p. 400). In the final section on Langlandian writing, Jill Mann questions the well-established theory that the C-reviser of Piers Plowman was using a ‘corrupt’ copy of the B-text. Melinda Nielsen and Katherine Kerby-Fulton consider textual instability in a manuscript culture, focusing on the act of revision and on the blurry boundary that often exists between authors and scribes.

The emphasis in New directions on the relationship between manuscripts and reading practices produces a volume that has a lot say about literary experience, but also about the shifting nature of aesthetic expectations in different times and places. In her preface to the volume as a whole, Kerby-Fulton voices the hope that the essays will not only speak to manuscript specialists, but will also enrich students' literary understanding of medieval texts (p. xix). The volume's fresh insights into canonical texts, its clear ‘mission statement’, its account of previous work in the field and, above all, its clear and lively style, should ensure a broad audience. Fittingly for a volume about books, it is an attractive publication with a generous helping of colour images. Scholars and students of medieval English writing will find much to enjoy here. New directions is an engaging collection of essays that covers a remarkable range of texts and contexts and opens up as many questions as it seeks to answer. The energy and intellectual largesse that characterises this volume is a fitting reflection of Derek Pearsall's impact on Middle English studies.