Review of 'The Language of Middle English Literature', by David Burnley and Matsuji Tajima. Woodridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, New York: D. S. Brewer, 1994, viii + 280. Hardback. ISBN 0 85991 405 4. (£39.50; US $71.00 cloth)

This volume is the second issued, but the fourth sequentially, in a series of some two dozen texts, the general purpose of which is 'to produce an annotated bibliography for every area of mediaeval English literary studies for which such a tool is not already in existence or preparation' (p. vii). All are intended, by reason of various chronological arrangements, to give readers a sense of the development of scholarship, and to focus on a relatively small period and literary kind. In the present instance, in the main annotated sequence, clustered largely by alphabetical items from each decade, the focus is on scholarship concerned with 'the function of language for literary effect' (p. 1). Thus there are some 447 items concerned with Early Middle English (to 1330), and 759 about Later Middle English (1330 to 1500).