At first glance, this is an unbalanced book: twenty-four pages of primary text (686 lines of poetry) generate 160 pages of secondary apparatus. But in fact it is a well balanced presentation of an interesting, although relatively unknown, selection of texts. The works under consideration in fact deserve the intense analysis they receive.
The edition presents three extant poems composed in the North and East Midlands around 1400 in a largely unrecognized genre of Middle English verse: odes to saints written in strong stress meter in fourteen-line stanzas. This edition of these linguistically difficult, "knotty," poems takes into account recent scholarship on the Middle English alliterative verse tradition, and includes full discussion of the three poems' hagiographical and historical content. These three "hymns," so-called only because of their editing tradition, are by different authors, appear in different unique manuscripts, and have no link in their manuscript histories. Yet they share the same unique niche as odes to popular saints whose hagiographies would have already been well known to their audiences. The introduction to the volume covers manuscripts, textual histories, construction, meter, alliteration, language, provenance, dates, and sources.
The 14-line stanzas of the odes are divided into octet and sestet and demonstrate much of the stylistic complexity typical of late alliterative poetry: strong-stress alliterative meter, additional rhyme-schemes, concatenation, iteration of word or phrase, and terminal metrical wheels. These poems succeed in broadening our knowledge even more of the "Alliterative Revival" or "Alliterative Survival" of Middle English alliterative verse around the late fourteenth century. They are one more witness to the fact that alliterative meter never died out in the vernacular, and that in the reign of Edward III some stylistic innovation was encouraged.
The present edition's St. Katharine is the first English publication of this work which Kennedy calls "thorny and crux-ridden." Because the many Middle English biographies of St. Katharine of Alexandria demonstrate her wide popularity, this additional alliterative witness to her tradition is significant. For each of the hymns, the extensive textual notes interrogate decisions made by past editors, potential scribal errors, and the logic of the text's meaning. An example of thorough handling of a crux caused by manuscript problems is the discussion of lines 35-6 of St. Katharine. When the king commands a fire to be built to burn Katharine, "To forme a fyre ferly, his face there before, All tho fifty fe[l]a[w]ys in fyre to fees" the editor uses former readings of other editors, a knowledge of Middle English conventions, and reasoning to restore the reading to "felawys."
St. John Evangelist was last edited in 1889. In this poem, lines 43-50 provide another kind of crux--a missing octet caused by scribal omission. In order to discover what would have followed, "Thi modir, thi mobles. All maner of tynge, That any man in his mynde aftir might mene, Of all the welthe and the wanes thou had in kepynge" the editor works from sources (such as the Legenda Aurea), uses the logic of alliterative poetry, and follows the context to argue for the missing meaning. The most recently edited of the three, St. John the Baptist, was last edited in 1921. The editing of this poem also shows a number of clever, multifaceted readings of the text using other primary texts and scholarly criticism.
The audience for these poems per se might be small, but for what they offer us in understanding the milieu of devotion to the saint's and for expanding our understanding of alliterative poetry in the late fourteenth century, they are excellent.