This book aims to teach undergraduate students how to read Middle English lyrics histrionically as “opportunities to impersonate” various emotions (2). Quinn explains that medieval lyrics have been misevaluated by readers accustomed to metrical regularity and the typesetting conventions of early print culture, who expect lyrics to be creative, original, and complex. By contrast, Quinn contends, short stanzaic poems in Middle English are more like pop songs and should be approached as emotional scripts for dramatic performance. Quinn’s goal is to help students understand “the intended emotional effects” of representative lyrics by inviting them to try “to feel how medieval readers (or performers) might have felt” (9, 22). Instead of evaluating artistic excellence according to the standards of a later era, students should approach lyric reading as play.
To facilitate student engagement with the primary texts, Quinn provides an interlinear translation for every poem, placing his modern rendering in bold above the Middle English, which is neither punctuated nor capitalized. Quinn made this decision so that his editorial interventions would not color students’ performative reading of the text, though he does present the poems in verse lineation regardless of how the text is presented on the manuscript page.
Quinn models how to perform histrionic lyric reading in chapters organized around emotions. The second chapter, “Bringing the Middle English Lyric into Modern Play,” invokes scholarship on the history of emotions and affective reading practices to justify his interpretation of poems as emotives or performatives. Although emotions have changed over time, Quinn argues that, through enacting the lyric like a script, readers can still appreciate the “emotional role-playing” and rhetorical impact of this poetry (37). Subsequent chapters juxtapose contrasting emotions. Chapter Three, “Playing Glad,” treats expressions of joy, revelry, seduction, and adoration. By contrast, Chapter Four, “Playing Sad or Mad,” opposes gaudium to tristitia to argue that the performance of sadness, frustration, political protest, puzzlement, or dread has a therapeutic effect. Chapter Five, “Compassioun for the Passion (and Its Perversion)” looks at “impersonations of directly sharing another’s pain,” (126) including meditations on the crucifixion, lullabies, complaints, dialogues between the Virgin and Christ, and Christ’s words from the cross. Chapters Six and Seven consider poems that voice a discord (contek) or emotional tension between love and longing, then love and loathing. These lyrics stage gendered debates or voice laments by rejected lovers.
Organizing the study by emotion affords the opportunity to place devotional poems alongside courtly pieces, thereby avoiding the division that modern anthologies tend to impose between sacred and secular, a distinction that is often not evident in the manuscript sources. Quinn’s organizing logic also differs from that of modern anthologies by discussing poems in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscript sources alongside lyrics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources. So, for example, the Chaucerian ballade Madame for your newfangleness appears on a page facing the Harley MS 2253 lyric, Lenten is come with love to town, as examples of contemptuous complaint and misogynist invective (212-13). Written some 150 years apart, these poems were produced and read within different regional cultures: Chaucer was writing for a literary coterie in metropolitan London, whereas Harley MS 2253 was copied for a manorial household in the West Midlands. How the time and place of each poem’s production and original reception might have shaped its early performance does not figure in Quinn’s commentary. That lack of attention to material context is not necessarily a fault. A high percentage of Middle English lyrics are anonymous, and many are unique texts recorded in manuscripts that offer no clues as to their provenance.
Nevertheless, the omission surprises because the book’s Introduction, in Chapter One, emphasizes the importance of situating medieval poems within their multilingual, heterogeneous manuscript context and attending to their musical backgrounds and textual variation. After this initial overview, however, references to the presence of Latin, French, and music appear minimally in Quinn's literary analysis. Students curious about the manuscript sources will need to consult the prefatory “Middle English Lyrics Discussed or Referenced.” This list of poems by incipit provides item numbers for cross-referencing in the print New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) and online Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), where the textual witnesses for each item can be found. The only chapter to consider how the material manuscript or printed page influences poetic composition and reading practices is the final Chapter Eight, “The Early Modern Machining of Verse.” Quinn contends that Middle English verse has been disregarded because the metrical experiments of poets like Thomas Hoccleve have been misunderstood. Quinn refers to Hoccleve’s holographs to argue that the poet’s decasyllabic line resulted from the privileging of textuality over aurality. To support his contention that early print culture spurred the standardization and stricter regulation of English prosody, Quinn compares Chaucer's translation of Petrarch to Petrarchan lyrics by Wyatt and Surrey, noting the small-scale differences between the texts in manuscript witnesses versus Tottel’s Miscellany. Three appendices follow this chapter: Appendix A sets Petrarch’s Rima 132 alongside Chaucer’s Cantus Troili; Appendix B gives the text and modern translation of Petrarch’s Rima 140; and Appendix C provides “A Comparison of Petrarch’s and Wyatt’s Corresponding Rhyme Schemes” (291-92).
Quinn acknowledges two drawbacks to reading practices aimed at reconstructing historical performance. The first lies in the alterity of medieval emotion and the related challenge of discerning whether to read a lyric as a “sincere performance” of “emotional earnestness” or a satirical parody (82, 107). Within this same context, a more troubling issue is the risk inherent in encouraging students to impersonate the lyric “I” of poems that refer to violence against women or hatred of Jews. Misogyny and antisemitism are “contemptible emotions,” Quinn writes, and poems that express them are to be “remembered as historical testimony, no longer performed as emotive impersonations” (173). The second drawback is the limit imposed upon the corpus when lyric is defined by emotionality. This definition would seem to exclude short poems that provide craft instruction, convey moral teaching, pose intellectual puzzles, or serve a talismanic function, such as versified recipes, proverbs, riddles, and charms. Quinn deals with a few examples, in Chapter Four, of lyrics that evoke negative feelings by suggesting that these poems do evoke an emotional response: that of distressed puzzlement or wonder.
Perhaps limits must be imposed upon the sheer mass of short verse from medieval Britain if one intends to introduce Middle English Lyrics to undergraduates. This book will prove accessible to students: it presents poems that give some sense of the strangeness of the Middle Ages without fundamentally challenging their notions of what lyric is or how lyrics should be read. Tellingly, the scholar most often cited is Stephen Manning, who was publishing on Middle English lyrics in the 1960s. With that in mind, I would quibble with the Foreword's presentation of this study as “groundbreaking.” Rather, Quinn may be said to build upon the work of Sarah McNamer, Christiana Whitehead, and Jessica Brantley (whose 2007 monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, is not cited here). Collectively, their scholarship has developed theories of affective and performative reading to analyze poems in their manuscript context and cultural milieu. Regardless, Quinn contributes a wealth of exemplary readings that show students how to do poetic analysis while writing in a conversational style that testifies to years of classroom experience.