The newest volume of The Manuscript World subseries of Brill's Library of the Written Word is nothing short of remarkable. Anne Thayer closely follows Dr. Thomas Swalwell (d. 1539), a Benedictine monk of Durham priory, through the extensive marginal annotations he left across his personal library. In doing so, she offers a rare window into late medieval clerical mentality and reading practices.

The recent flourishing of material philology has offered fresh perspectives and new discoveries, bringing to light numerous previously overlooked figures, and Swalwell is a prime example. Educated in Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in theology in 1503, he later held several offices at Durham, including chancellor and almoner. Yet he left behind no authored works and appears to have wielded little institutional influence. It is his annotations spread over more than fifty volumes that make him exceptional.

Following an introductory survey of Swalwell's life, books, and marginalia, Thayer arranges her volume into two parts: Monastic Life and Religious Landscape. The first traces Swalwell as monk (27-68), scholar (69-114), administrator (115-154), preacher (155-193), educator (194-230), and man of prayer (231-255). The second revisits the same material and focuses on Swalwell's response, through his annotations, to three selected themes that go beyond monastic life: clerical leadership (259-286), religious others (287-315), and Reformation (316-352).

Thayer's approach is ambitious and meticulous. Rather than merely cataloguing notes, she reads the books alongside Swalwell - "looking over his shoulder" (1) and reconstructing the larger textual networks and intellectual contexts in which he operated. The result is not only a portrait of a reader but an excellent guide to a late medieval personal library.

Yet some methodological choices remain unclear. The basis for selecting the analyzed volumes is not fully explained. Obviously, Thayer could not reach those books that are kept in private collections today but why she focused on printed books and neglected Swalwell's notes in manuscripts is not clear. Even her list of books with Swalwell's annotations (xix-xl) is only partial (e.g. while some incunabula known to have belonged to Swalwell but not used by Thayer are listed separately, manuscripts into which he added tables of contents, foliation and running titles are excluded even from the list). Somewhat disquieting may also seem Thayer's disclosure of her uncertainty regarding the identity of Swalwell's hand which may have resulted in including notes of others and, on the other hand, excluding some of Swalwell's notes. Thayer also admits to being unable to decipher some of the notes (10-11). Nevertheless, these are in fact candid statements openly describing difficulties we all encounter when dealing with late medieval annotations, and I appreciated their honesty. Swalwell's notes are numerous, and Thayer's work is enormous as it is.

The content of the annotations may surprise modern expectations. Swalwell emerges first and foremost as a devout, orderly, and fundamentally conservative reader. Most of his notes serve organizational or mnemonic purposes: they structure, index, and cross-reference the text. Few challenge the main text (14-15) and even fewer may be interpreted as expressing personal judgment. The fact that no specific features of their author is revealed through the notes may well be due to Swalwell's humility. Nevertheless, it is striking that even concerning the theme of Reformation, which must have been very relevant then (Swalwell died just a few months before the dissolution of the Durham priory), there is, as Thayer notes, "so much business as usual" (361) and Swalwell's "strategy in the face of change seems to have been to continue acquiring new books, reading, studying [...]" (363). In my opinion, Swalwell's notes at this unsettled time actually show a remarkable passivity and inertia.

While Thayer frequently infers attitudes and even practices from the annotations, I would caution against extrapolating too far: rather than "life as it was lived in England before the Reformation" (353), I believe we are witnessing "books as they were read" then. Swalwell's additions are truly many and show in-depth interaction with a great number and variety of texts but to me, they seem much more relevant for studying late medieval reading with pen in hand. His case shows primarily the ways in which late medieval reader navigated, compared, appropriated the texts and kept returning to them. I would have welcomed a typology and hierarchy of the annotations, and a general overview of their density across volumes. Although very brief, these texts would have deserved a linguistic analysis: which words and phrases recur? What is the proportion of his rare English notes in comparison to the Latin ones? Thayer prints the marginalia in English translation with Latin in footnotes, but the Latin contains a number of errors (e.g., accept for accepit 293, n. 23, crudelissia for crudelissima 294, n. 26, predestinatius for predestinatus 322, n. 19). Some may be Swalwell's own slips, but if so, they would merit comment rather than silent reproduction. A diachronic analysis of his changing hand would also have been more enlightening than a brief comment on its sudden deterioration (16).

The conclusion, in which Thayer first compares Swalwell with selected other medieval annotators, and then summarizes his legacy, shows that this direction of material philology and history of mentalities is definitely both worthwhile and far from exhausted. With more case studies researched in a comparable level of detail, it will be possible to see patterns in annotating strategies, distinguish between commonplace and idiosyncratic practices, and thus better assess an individual annotator's place in book, intellectual and social history. At this point, Thayer's Swalwell is somewhat solitary but also a truly impressive result of extraordinarily painstaking scholarship.

Lucie Doležalová