This collection of essays addresses pressing questions about the nature of medieval lyric raised in the wake of Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric (2015) and Ardis Butterfield's article "Why Medieval Lyric?" The editors feel the tension between, on the one hand, these recent interventions that theorize about defining qualities of lyric, and on the other hand the enduring influence of landmark studies in the longer history of lyric criticism. Tracing the shift in the field's priorities and underlying assumptions over the past century, the volume advertises itself not as a definitive account of the poems or methods represented, but "as a snapshot of the present time" (11). This volume is equally invested in acknowledging the value of prior contributions to the field and revising them to make way for new perspectives.
The essays are organized loosely according to four of the prevalent interests in today's lyric studies: 1) Affect--the treatment of which is here substantially indebted to Sarah McNamer's work in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (2010); 2) Visuality--which investigates medieval lyrics' "ability to conjure a mental picture" (7); 3) Mouvance, Transformation--which attends to the possibilities of variant versions in light of Paul Zumthor's theory of textual mobility; 4) Words, Music, Speech--which explores the relationship between lyric and voice, words and music, and the sonic qualities of Middle English poetry.
To put these four interpretive lenses in context, the editors' introduction provides an overview of the editorial history of Middle English lyrics from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, accompanied by a discussion of the scholarly preoccupations that informed, and were subsequently shaped by, those editions. In its framing, as well as the methods adopted by individual contributions, the volume is poised between two eras in lyric studies. It is certainly noticeable that even as the essays advance new perspectives on selected poems, they return repeatedly to Rosemary Woolf's influential book, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (1968), and editions by Douglas Gray, John Hirsh, and Thomas G. Duncan. John Hirsh's Afterword completes this throughline by offering a detailed history of the history of three key figures in the study of Middle English lyrics: Rosemary Woolf, Douglas Gray, and Peter Dronke.
The format of the contributions reflects the second of the volume's main priorities, namely, examining the principles and practices that guide editions of Middle English lyric. Each chapter opens with an edition of the poem or poems under consideration, sometimes selected from previous editions but some newly edited for this publication. This convention allows readers to better appreciate the close readings pursued in the essays and is especially useful for lesser-known poems. This pairing of edition and interpretation is the volume's most innovative feature, providing a foil for the twentieth-century model of anthologies that tended to be "monolingual, extracting lyrics from their frequently multilingual manuscript contexts, subordinating or suppressing variant versions, and organising them into categories" (8). While the essays remain focused exclusively on lyrics written or translated in Middle English, the authors are scrupulously attentive to the multiple linguistic, manuscript, and artistic contexts of poems and the possibilities implied by variation between versions of the same work.
The first essay, by the volume's dedicatee, Thomas G. Duncan, diverges from the format of the remaining contributions and establishes textual editing as one of the shared concerns of the volume. Duncan admonishes editors to remedy textual and scribal infelicities, since, as he argues, "the ultimate goal in the editing of literary texts must be the restoration of artistic integrity" (27). Combining present knowledge of Middle English pronunciation with what he terms a "metrical hypothesis," an argument that Middle English poetic practice typically prioritizes consistent syllable count and rhyme, Duncan offers a number of case studies where a reading that better supports the expected rhyme, syllable count, or poetic sense could, or even should, be supplied (18). This essay continues his argument from his chapter in the 2005 collection he edited, A Companion to the Middle English Lyric.
Since this book as a whole distances itself from the suggestion that a comprehensive typology of "the medieval lyric" is even achievable, much less desirable, the resulting structure is fairly loose. In place of a rigid taxonomy based on characteristics of the featured poems, the editors helpfully provide a note that directs readers to other essays in the volume that treat similar concerns. These notes frequently link essays across sections, offering the reader multiple paths through the material. I describe five of these topical clusters and give the briefest of summaries of the nineteen contributions.
1. Lyrics on the Page
Five of the essays in the volume draw out the significance of poems' placement within manuscript codices, either as responses to surrounding texts or as part of a textual sequence. Michael P. Kuczynski puts several of Duncan's recommendations into practice with a new edition of Al oþer loue is lych þe mone. He argues that the central concern of the poem is the conflict between the narrator's desire to love God faithfully and his inability to do so, a "psychology of affective dissonance," and shows how this dynamic picks up on themes from the Latin religious prose text neighboring the poem in its sole witness. Like Kuczynski's essay, Natalie Jones's interpretation of Ihesus woundes so wide asks what we lose when we extract lyrics from their manuscript context. Considering the poem in its original context where it is embedded in a treatise on Christ's passion, Jones illuminates the "structural function" of this apparently simple meditation on the Five Wounds, arguing that it provides a compressed response to the first section of the treatise and introduces discussions of the sacrament of the Eucharist to follow in the second.
Susanna Fein describes the disadvantages of publishing poems in "anthologies that alter and consequently blur their historical contexts" by pointing to an under-studied thirteenth-century lyric sequence (221). Noting that its companion text, The Owl and the Nightingale, has typically been published and studied in isolation, Fein draws attention to the sequence of religious lyrics that accompanies it in two manuscripts. Like Jones, Fein argues that critics have dismissed the deceptively simple themes of the two lyrics she edits, An Orison to Our Lord and A Little Sooth Sermon, as lacking in aesthetic sophistication (224), missing the opportunity to examine the principles behind this rare medieval anthology.
Annie Sutherland attends to another thirteenth-century literary anthology, the Wooing Group, recorded in London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A XIV. On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi is one of the least-studied texts in the group, as well as the only item in verse. As Sutherland shows, the poem employs multiple technical terms that advertise the text as a poem, a prayer, a song, and a lyric, showing by its "formal self-awareness" a sharp difference between this text and others in the group (76). Finally, in one of the few treatments of macaronic lyrics found in the volume, Mary Flannery reads Tutivillus, þe deuyl of hell in the context of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, noting the potential significance of its position immediately following the C Version ofPiers Plowman. In medieval exempla, the demon Tutivillus often collected or recorded idle speech in church, so Flannery demonstrates how the interplay between the Latin and Middle English lines works to critique the errant speech of both lay and clerical speakers.
2. Lateral Connections, Verse Clusters
Medieval lyrics that exist in multiple versions present additional challenges to interpretation, and several of the essays in the collection address these concerns. Hetta Elizabeth Howes notes that William Herebert's fidelity to his Latin sources in Quis est iste qui uenit de Edom? and other Middle English poems have caused scholars to overlook the significance of his modifications to his sources. With sensitivity to the effects of small changes in wording on the emotional resonance of a line, Howes puts the poem in conversation with other texts in Herebert's notebook to show how Herebert's interventions are designed to evoke shame in readers and ultimately convert that shame into the "more productive state of contrition" (98).
Similarly, Christiania Whitehead addresses differences between six Middle English versions of Stabat iuxta Christi crucem, including Stond wel, moder, under rode, from the perspective of music. In comparison with other translations, Whitehead argues that the dialogue form of Stond wel, moder is intentionally more dramatic. Given the musical notation accompanying two copies in manuscript, Whitehead hypothesizes thatStond wel, moder may have been intended for use as a liturgical sequence. Adopting a similar method to Whitehead's treatment of Stond wel, moder, Anne Baden-Daintree shows how multiple versions of Undo thi dore employ minute changes in wording and imagery drawn from the Song of Songs to facilitate different affective responses. Despite this masterfully orchestrated comparison between versions, showing how "poetic ideas can be part of a dynamic process" of textual invention, Baden-Daintree voices frustration about all the unknowns surrounding even the best-documented medieval lyrics and how "this unknowability frustrates efforts to push scholarship further" (157).
3. Meditation
Several essays explore the meditative function of medieval lyric through the lenses of music, wall paintings, and sound. Mary Wellesley considers the ways in which Lydgate's lyric Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Marychallenges the default association of lyrics with song or music. Relatively unstudied, this lyric incorporates elements of the visual and aural in its meditation, but it ultimately, Wellesley asserts, emphasizes its writtenness to facilitate "bookish devotion," rather than song, such that Lydgate intends to provide a "textual rosary" (130). A. S. Lazikani offers a reading of On leome is in þis world ilist that compares the meditation or "affective sight" of the passion made possible within the lyric to that facilitated by church wall paintings. In meditating on the images in the poem, Lazikani asserts, the reader, like the observer of church wall paintings, "embraces a narrative context whilst also interacting with isolable images" (37). Finally, Daniel McCann readsSwete Ihesu, now wil I synge with attention to the poem's interest in the "taste" of the Holy Name, savored through a "carefully structured" layering of affective responses achieved through details of sound and imagery (54).
4. Authorial Word Play
Instead of centering her discussion on the edition of a single poem, as do the majority of the chapters, Jane Griffiths surveys John Audelay's oeuvre more broadly to demonstrate how his word play, especially alliteration, rhyme, and puns, underscores his theological positions. Denis Renevey investigates the role of Ballade 84 in constructing Charles d'Orleans's authorial persona, especially as contrasted with his French ballade sequence. In addition to signaling a formal shift, Renevey shows how Ballade 84, which has no French equivalent, signals divergence between the French and English sequences. Shifting from authors' construction of authorial identity to the liberties taken by later readers, Katherine Zieman attends to three lyrics in London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, compiled by Carthusian monks from phrases in Rolle's English texts and lyrics. Zieman's deft reading of these lyrics compiled by later readers to fit Rolle's authorial persona engages extensively with the images that accompany them in manuscript and with recent work in medieval literary theory.
5. Qualities of Lyric
The questions about whether lyric can be said to have essential, transhistorical qualities, raised by Culler's book and subsequent discussion, are taken up in four of the essays. In an astute analysis of the field and the poem at hand, Julia Boffey uses Lydgate's Thoroughfare of Woe to demonstrate "compression" as a central function and aesthetic of medieval lyric. Boffey distills her argument into a formulation that will no doubt become invaluable to anyone seeking to address the distinguishing features of the category of shortish poems we conventionally call lyrics: this characteristic compression is achieved "by the implying of a larger context in which the lyric voice functions as one small interjection...[C]ompressing, into an ostensibly simple arrangement of a few words, allusion to a substantial body of doctrine or argument" (193).
Anne Marie D'Arcy addresses a smaller subset of lyric poems when she counters the negative critical attitude toward aureate diction. She compares its function to that of ornate gilded artworks. Taking the words and imagery employed in The infinite power essenciall as her primary examples, D'Arcy shows how an aureate register is employed expertly to suit the material with decorum. Elizabeth Robertson departs from the norm in the balance of the volume when she turns to Troilus and Criseyde to evaluate the function of individual lyrics within the framework of the poem's overall "lyric disposition." Robertson attends to three moments that highlight the "social antagonisms" Criseyde considers in her response to Troilus's suit, namely, "the anxieties and tensions between, on the one hand, communication, union through love and the making of community, and, on the other hand, the subjection of women to male sexual desires against their will as well as the destructiveness and dissolution of community caused by war" (185).
Of all the essays in the volume, Joel Grossman's reading of Thomas Wyatt's In eternum addresses issues of canon, periodization, and the notable dearth of medieval examples in Culler's book most directly. Grossman takes the opportunity to show intersections between medieval and Renaissance lyric while decentering the notion of subjectivity that has so dominated theories of lyric.
On the whole, the book's parts are well executed, although they are not all consistent in feel; Part 3 engages more with secular lyric and secondary criticism, and it feels as though it was edited separately, since the headers and author names swap positions only in this section. Readers in search of a reference to a specific author or text will find the index helpful, as the index contains each lyric referenced in the essays. The index does not, however, contain references to any secondary scholarship or critical terms.
This volume will be most useful for scholars pursuing readings of the poems featured, those with a stake in the debates surrounding the editorial practices of Middle English verse, and perhaps graduate students looking for a concise overview of the critical trends in a conversation they wish to enter. The readings will be conceptually useful for anyone engaged in reconciling the 20th century critical history with new turns in lyric study, but those specifically interested in political or secular lyrics will find less material directly relevant. In sum, this is an accomplished volume that presents contributions from some of the most prominent figures in today's lyric studies.