reviews 247 Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde, eds, Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna. Texts and Transitions 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Pp. xxiv + 262. Tere are few scholars of Piers Plowman whose work one simply has to read in order to be a proper student of the poem. Before reading this Festschrif, most scholars would already have placed Ralph Hanna in that company. Tis collection of essays afrms the wisdom of such presuppositions. Perusing the list of Hanna’s publications, appended to the collection (pp. 241–50), underscores the wide range of felds in medieval studies that his scholarship has infuenced. Most germane to this journal’s readership: by my count, he is the author of 23 separate articles or book chapters centrally about Piers Plowman, as well as a handy introduction to the poem, 1993’s William Langland, in the Authors of the Middle Ages series. (His volume in the Penn Commentary series is so recent that it doesn’t even make the list of his publications, and that volume may well wind up as his most enduring legacy in the world of Langland studies!) On top of that, he co-edited two editions for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Of course, the remit of YLS extends to alliterative poetry in general, and thus Hanna’s scholarly shadow extends even further over this journal’s interests: he is the author of an additional eleven essays on alliterative poems or alliterative meter, and is the editor, or co-editor, of four alliterative texts. Ralph Hanna is, then, a scholar who occupies a large place in the intellectual life of this journal, and upon his retirement it is fting that some of the leading lights in the feld have submited such fne essays in his honour. Te collection begins with Vincent Gillespie’s touching Foreword, ofering a biography of Hanna — both his life story and his intellectual history. It contains a few gems that give some insight into Hanna’s personality and methods of intellectual pursuit. Gillespie memorably remarks that ‘You always want to be on your best game when discussing things with Ralph, who has one of the most sensitive bullshit-detectors in the business, which is, it has to be said, occasionally atached to one of the loudest critical bullhorns in the business’ (p. xii). And, ‘He has certainly edited more lines of Middle English verse than any person living, the veritable Carl Horstmann de nos jours’ (p. xii). And, ‘In an age of increasing specialisation, Ralph Hanna’s scholarly output is unusually wide ranging and diverse. He has made discipline-changing interventions and provided bracingly direct analyses of materials in the felds of Middle English Romance, Chaucer, Langland, and increasingly in recent years, mediaeval religious writing’ (p. xiii). Tis Foreword provides a chaty overview of the infuence of Hanna’s work — an infuence extended both through published scholarship and years as one of the doyens of medieval studies at Oxford. Space does not permit an extended engagement with each of the essays that follows. Sufce it to say, the editors have done a nice job of curating this collection, ensuring that each contribution falls under the broad umbrella of one of Hanna’s The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 33 (2019), 247–249 FHG 10.1484/J.YLS.5.119170