Shannon McSheffrey and Ad Putter, The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London, with an Edition of their Bilingual Guild Ordinances. Medieval and Renaissance Clothing and Textiles. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2023, 153 pp, 15 b & w ill.

The core of this book is Guildhall Library MS 15838, a never-before-edited work that contains what is most probably the earliest bilingual English-Dutch document in existence. The manuscript contains three texts: the bilingual Ordinances of the Hatmakers (written ca. 1501 though likely recording older usage), followed by an English-only agreement of 1511 between the Hatmakers and Haberdashers, in which the former were amalgamated into the latter, and finally an English oath of the wardens of the Haberdashers of the early to mid-sixteenth century. An edition of these texts comprises the last quarter of the book, accompanied by a selective glossary of the more unfamiliar terms used. The choice of the glossary terms ranges from clarification of middle English phrasing to translation of Dutch dialect terms (where appropriate). Based on a linguistic analysis of the Dutch used, the authors hypothesize that the first scribe who wrote the Ordinances was from the northwest Netherlands on the border with Germany, while the second was from the southwest, possibly Flanders, though both were clearly also fluent in English. The edited text portion does not specifically indicate changes in script, although chapter four fills these potential lacunae admirably, assisted by figures 8–11.