Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose were already present when the library was temporarily transferred to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the last few years the library has become home to the older part of Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror, for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles (including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises. Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items, ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.

This collection of essays by Douglas Jefferson from various periods of his distinguished career and by fellow academics writing in response to his work represents a novel dialogic form of literary criticism. In his essays ranging from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" to the "Canon", Jefferson is always stimulating and engaging, while offering nuanced and informed readings of his chosen texts. Replying to Jefferson's work, contemporary critics have variously extended his ideas, disclosing new ways of reading texts in the light of current debate and more theoretical developments, or have adopted a more discursive strategy in using ideas derived from Jefferson's essays to provoke further explorations. Douglas Jefferson (1912-2001) spent virtually his entire academic life at the University of Leeds, starting as an undergraduate in the School of English in 1930, and interrupted only by his studies at the University of Oxford (Merton College), where he gained a B.Litt in 1937, and his educational services in Egypt during the Second World War. His was a career remarkable for distinguished service to his profession, comprising not only an extensive range of publications on writers from John Dryden to Iris Murdoch but in the care with which he nurtured and encouraged generations of students and colleagues both at home and abroad in the study of English literature.