Why Medieval Lyric?

Why Medieval Lyric?

Ardis Butterfield

ELH, Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 319-343 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/elh.2015.0017

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319ELH 82 (2015) 319–343 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

WHy Medieval lyric?

By ardis BUTTerfield

i. lyrics on THe Page

look at this page from the back of a fifteenth-century legal roll:

figure 1. The armburgh roll, Manchester, chetham’s library, Mun. e.6.10 (4), published by permission

320 Why Medieval Lyric?

it is a roll of letters, mostly in english, about the property disputes from the 1420s–1450s of the armburghs, an aspirant gentry family. Here at the end of one group of letters comes a separate section in different handwriting. it comes as a complete surprise. Probably written by one of the legal clerks who was commissioned to copy out the entire roll, it consists in expressions of love from a man to a woman, full of the usual compliments, expressions of ardent desire, and pleas for reciprocal feeling. Who knows whether he wrote this on his own account, or on behalf of someone else? as one can see, the visual impression is of paragraph after paragraph of elegant but tightly written prose. yet on closer inspection it turns out to be somewhere between prose and verse, lyric and letter. The layout on the page is uncommunicative about any of these ambivalences. its formal opacity pushes the reader far away from any sense of “lyric.”1

as one zooms in, however, the page crackles into formal life, not clearly, but puzzlingly. for one thing, in places it is written in more than one language: french and latin as well as english. This is how it begins:

a celuy que pluys ayme de moundeof all that i haue foundecarissimasalutez ad verray amourWith grace joie and honourdulcissima.2

This is not, of course, the layout on the roll, but that of the roll’s only editor. But it makes sense since it indicates a rhyme and metrical scheme: a8´a7b4 c8c7b4.3 The first paragraph contains five of these stanzas, but then finishes (without visual warning) with a little quatrain rhyming abab that has a rather rough sense of “meter”:

He that is youre mani ensure yow to his lastesendyth to yow as he cana rude letre y written in haste (156).4

on an even closer look, it is the first of three embedded mixed language poems, distinct from the surrounding writing only by virtue of the fact that two of them occur separately in other manuscripts.5 later in the section, we find much more formal vagueness. if one were to try to turn the prose lineation into verse, then there are many sequences of lines that have no single possible pattern. There are rhymes, of a

321Ardis Butterfield

kind, but they do not create consistent line lengths or much sense of meter; other “poetic” features such as assonance, concatenation, apostrophe, and refrain-like repetitions of whole lines occur sporadi-cally, but without a visible structural logic. These passages might also be extrapolable into stanzas or other units that one could set out as discrete poems, but on what grounds? Perhaps this is merely loose love writing, flowing with rough spontaneity, and expressed with frequent, exuberant, but only marginally considered repetition.

let me present one more example. Here is a page from a medieval sermon manuscript:

figure 2. British library Harley Ms 7322, f.157r, published by permission.


again, to paraphrase, is there a lyric on this page?6 if you have started looking from the top, you will have seen that the writing is well shaped but hard to read straightforwardly because it is full of flourishes. it is also hard to read (for a modern or medieval reader) unless one is reasonably competent in heavily abbreviated medieval latin. Three lines from the bottom, starting roughly in the middle, are some words in English: “Worldis blisse strif hat wrout • for it [New line] is wit serwe to ende brout • .” If one were leafing through this book it would be hard to spot the english words unless one knew they were there, or were reading every word. There is no visual fanfare; nothing marks them out. if one carries on reading, after a brief latin interlude the english continues overleaf, with two more couplets each alternating with more Latin: “worldes catel [verso] passet sone • þat wacset and wansit rit as te mone • trist nout to þ[i]s wonder world þat hastit bot a wile • for it is not bot wiles of wo a hasardour þat wil þe gile.” after this, the latin sermon commentary resumes.

so, once more, is this a lyric? it is certainly hard to read it as a lyric. any effort to describe or read these lines as lyric bears intriguingly close comparison with virginia Jackson’s brilliantly persuasive construction of the mental habits of emily dickinson’s early readers and editors.7 gazing at dickinson’s often scrappy, private jottings, Jackson works over the primary questions that they raise: “[W]hat was it that Emily dickinson wrote?” (20) dickinson’s editors turned her into america’s foremost lyric poet, but on what grounds? if we go back to dickinson’s manuscripts, what we find are passages in a letter to her brother, scraps of writing on the back of an envelope, on a memo pad from an insur-ance company and on the printed wrapper for a pack of paper. These jottings do not present themselves as finished works: many of them are full of provisional, alternative ideas, or written at strange angles with vigorous crossing out. These are the raw materials that her editors turned into “collected works,” each item carefully set out on a printed page, numbered and neatly punctuated. But how (and why) was that transformation created? What makes any of these poems? and, with lines embedded in a letter, why select them out and shape them into a lyric? is that what they are? “How do we recognise a lyric poem when we see one?” (25).

Jackson’s answer is that “lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation” (8).8 a powerful drive emerges, in dickinson’s time, to make lyric take form. Jackson identifies that drive with the “development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism.” (8). in short, to summarize a


complex argument too swiftly, the modern lyric came into being when readers decided they wanted to read poems as lyrics.

Jackson’s book, perhaps unexpectedly given its focus, has multiple reasons to be brought to bear on a discussion of medieval lyric. one is her emphasis on the handwritten nature of dickinson’s work. Before print, “lyric” was by definition handmade, and many of the conditions of production created by dickinson for her writing have much in common with those for preprint verse. The status of the armburgh roll passage, or of Worldes blis, interwoven as it is with a latin prose sermon commentary, is not so dissimilar from the conundrum of whether sections of dickinson’s letters are really poems. an editor of dickinson has questions to reflect upon that are centrally at issue for an editor of medieval “lyric.” Thus to turn sections of the armburgh roll into “lyrics” is likewise to choose to see certain sequences of lines as something separate and separable; to give them a visual form where they did not have one; to tidy them up; to make the repetitions count as formal devices.9

The comparison between dickinson and medieval lyric goes further still. in working so intimately with handwriting, dickinson shows striking affinity with medieval manuscript practice.10 There is so much of a similarity that her work seems a posterior shadowing of the complexities of a thoroughly handwritten culture. What makes dickinson stand out in relief against the literary culture of her day is exactly what made verse in the medieval period unexceptional in its own time. all medieval writing—poetry and prose, fantasy and history, sermons and songs—survives in ways that are stubbornly handmade, often in contexts that we do not understand fully, in often unique witnesses that present awkwardly, or mysteriously, or simply, variant versions of each other. That sense of the whimsical, unexpected jotting, or of a poem that is not presented as complete in itself is an experience that one encounters repeatedly in medieval manuscripts. The crux of the comparison is the following claim by Jackson:

The confusion between the pathos of a subject and the pathos of transmission . . . has come to define, in the last century and a half, not only an idea of what counts as dickinson’s verse but of what does and does not count as literary language—and especially of what does and does not count as lyric language. (13)

We might say just the same of medieval verse that has counted as “lyric” to modern readers. The conversion of the real, tangible envelope


into a visual image for critical consumption is read by Jackson as a figure, but also a measure, of the creation of lyric as lyrical. she is pointing to a subtle truth about criticism, that it creates its object while claiming merely to find it. The passage of time has likewise turned medieval books into images for critical consumption, yet they were and are objects of tangible, highly individual human production. so, is it possible that we could revise Jackson’s notion of lyric reading historically backwards, or does the very ubiquitousness of the manu-script culture within a medieval reading experience change the terms in which we might understand that notion?

Dickinson’s Misery has been highly influential in current thinking in the “new lyric studies.”11 My title alludes also to Jonathan culler’s intervention “Why lyric?,” which has formed part of an enduring desire of his to give ground back to lyric that narrative had long possessed on slightly different terms from Jackson’s, ones that seek to give credence to the term lyric rather than to a theory of lyric reading.12 in asking “Why medieval lyric?” i want to rethink whether, and if so, how, medieval poetry might belong in these and other current conver-sations about lyric. second, i ask, like Jonathan culler, “Why lyric?” but with the difference i argue, that the question gains crucial benefit from being asked through medieval examples. it is not just that the medieval period might add value in interesting ways to modern discus-sions. it is fundamental, i suggest, to such discussions, since issues of methodology that are primary to the discipline of literary criticism are at stake. Third, and finally, (though it is actually a leitmotif of the whole essay) i try to do what i have been asked to do, and talk about form. “is lyric form?” is my third question where the question, in this context, means “What does medieval poetry have to say about form?”

ii. WHy Medieval?

There is a general assumption in modern criticism that lyric is not a term that can properly be applied to medieval verse. as any scholar of the early Modern period would hasten to remark, the word lyric is used first in the sixteenth century (lyric as poem was used by sidney in 1586; as an adjective by Puttenham in 1589).13 The consensus is wide and vociferous, and extends particularly to the notion of the personal and privately subjective. Historically, many of its promoters have been medievalists. Throughout much twentieth-century criticism of the medieval lyric runs the mantra that “lyric” and “personal experience” could hardly be further apart. if medieval lyrics seem, on occasion, to


share in post-romantic characteristics of the “lyrical,” then for many medievalists this is by and large an illusion. The “lyrical” lyrics are the exceptions that prove the rule that medieval short verse is essentially formulaic, often practical, and above all, religious (which of course does not exclude the formulaic or practical).

ironically, the parallel modern critical history of editing medieval lyric, although founded on these assumptions, in practice exactly opposes this perspective. in modern anthologies and pedagogies the medieval lyric is still thoroughly caught up in new criticism, in the same history that Jackson outlines. The heyday of modern anthologizing and valorizing of medieval lyrics took place in the 1960s and 1970s—the height of new criticism. it is no accident that the notion of lyric comes to be applied back to the middle ages at the same critical juncture as it is being used for the work of emily dickinson. The new critical “lionizing” of lyric (as Jackson terms it, 39) touched the medieval period as well as every other. it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that medieval lyric was invented as a category of medieval writing to satisfy the predilections of “practical criticism.”14 The key was brevity: new critical approaches to the medieval lyric shaped it in their own image as short, concise, ambiguous, intense and rich in meaning. it was perhaps the modern golden age for medieval lyric where it reached a public audience that other medieval literature—with the sole excep-tion of chaucer—could only dream of. it then dropped out of critical purview as new historicism took over and is only now coming back.15

The notion of lyric as applied to medieval english literature is thus somewhat contorted. in one sense, lyric in the medieval period is simply a more extravagant example of the creation of a modern lyric imaginary, more extravagant because the object of attention is all the more unsuspecting than a dickinson scribble. The sheer torque required to turn medieval verse into lyric is a correspondingly impres-sive critical feat. yet this feat works at the expense of dismissing most of the surviving short verse. implicitly the grounds include notions of form: those that emerge as the chosen few are tightly constructed, and have a visible and artful rhyming and metrical pattern, usually stan-zaic. But the very existence of verse that conforms to these principles serves to blot out large swathes of verse that do not so conform. so “medieval lyric” currently is a category that belongs, historically, to the post-dickinsonian period of modern criticism; the large bulk of its survival in medieval manuscripts awaits modern critical engagement.

These ways of defining poetry as lyric, the ways that marginalize so much medieval short verse, are now looking suspect in many periods.


The revisionary and postrevisionary moves in relation to lyric in other periods free the medievalist as well to rethink lyric. My further claim is that the very intractability of much medieval short verse to these post-dickinsonian notions of lyric has much to teach critics of all periods about fresh ways to approach and understand poetry.

iii. WHy lyric?

Medieval poetry offers up many conundrums to the modern reader. Perhaps its most central challenges are to anglocentricity, language, literariness, and print-based notions of form. let me outline these in order. first, the reflex that lyric is not a term that belongs to the middle ages is a generalization that only holds true for verse in english. The picture is different on the continent. “lyrique” as an adjective occurs as early as 1371–75 in a translation of augustine’s City of God by raoul de Presles for charles v.16 it is used of a person as well as of a poem in 1400 in a text by Jacques legrand, an augustinian who wrote a text on rhetoric, poetry and spelling called L’Archiloge Sophie, dedicated to louis d’orléans.17

Well before this in twelfth-century occitan and thirteenth-century northern french, spilling out into northern italy and germany, the troubadours and trouvères produced a great body of verse that was self-consciously defined, highly artful, and anthologized in often beauti-fully produced chansonniers, and for which a good proportion of music survives (approximately one-tenth, or some 300 troubadour songs, and two-thirds, or over 2000 trouvère songs).18 The puzzle is the context in england. in contrast to the continent, we find enormous diversity in the material and in its manuscript contexts, haphazard copying, and a largely anonymous culture.19 lyrics in english were not collected except sporadically until the fifteenth century, and even then in a way which bears no comparison with the french tradition, and there is no explicit articulation of a poetics or aesthetic of lyric.

language is another complicating factor: up to the fifteenth century, lyrics were being composed and copied in the two vernaculars of english and french as well as in latin—which contrasts with the picture of a single vernacular focus on the continent, most notably in occitan, french and also italian.20 Music is yet another: it exists but its survival in insular manuscripts is meager. Just a handful of individual pieces with english texts (20–30) are notated from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, alongside around 15 in french and over 80 in latin.21 Music becomes more of a presence in the fifteenth- and


sixteenth-century songbooks. its large-scale written absence before then raises questions, some of them intractable but central, about how to understand the nature and extent of musical contexts for short verse in england.22 Music in medieval english manuscript culture reminds us that poetry is no narrow literary category, just as its absence is an ever-present indication of how slight the evidence is from the period in england for any concrete music-inflected notion of the literary. The manuscript culture is itself centrally complicating. examples at the start of this essay showed some ways in which medieval poetry challenges the rigidity of print-based notions of form, and how there are similarities between these and the elusive slips of writing left to posterity by emily dickinson.

in all of these respects, english poetry of the medieval period takes us into territory that nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of lyric reading do not seem to comprehend. armed with Jackson’s aperçu about the nature and character of lyric reading, it may be possible to escape from under its shadow as a critical approach and think through some different ways of responding to a mass display of handwritten verse. in the following examples, what i have elsewhere termed the “textual dynamism” of medieval short verse will drive our search for critical method (“The construction of textual form,” Butterfield 55). i include music to show that it is an absent presence in many theories of lyric and lyric reading as well as in medieval literary culture.

iv. Medieval lyric: neTWorking and reMixing

The stubbornly undistinguished mass of medieval insular verse almost defies explication and analysis. This quagmire of verse is a vast, nebulous, ill-defined area which does not work well in toto (whatever that might be) as a means of contemplating poetic principles. The notion of medieval lyric has only worked in highly specific cases, the “art poems” such as “nou goth sonne under wod.”23 The large majority is still dismissed as diffuse, crude, as not-lyrics. To put it starkly, medi-eval insular verse at once beautifully exemplifies the literary in the medieval period and refutes it, provides its classic antonym. This is just as true in relation to form. certain isolated instances of exquisite formal craft—“i sing of a maiden,” and “adam lay ybounden”—have become the jewels of modern anthologies but there are large tracts of devotional verse that do not share this characteristic.24 We might even describe that verse (and some have) as formless, as an ungenre.25


in an effort to think toward a new critical approach to such verse, what strategies might we adopt? if we try to do justice to the sheer scale of the material, then medieval insular poetry may be ripe for a descriptive turn. Precisely because of its large, sprawling material state, it wards off close reading. deep structural reading works for a tiny minority: the rest may be much better approached through a strategy of flat description, that is of description rather than interpretation (i am alluding here to Heather love’s essay “close but not deep”).26 There may be no need to force it all into an inappropriate interpretative mold. This morass of Marian cliché might respond to an empirical method of observation that holds back from readings that insist on depth.

one can discover the wide horizontal plane of medieval verse by opening almost any manuscript containing songs from the period and finding the song text reappear in different guises in other books. To take an example almost at random, the latin sequence Samson dux fortissime, copied with music into the thirteenth-century Ms Bl Harley 978 next to the celebrated bilingual “sumer is icomen in” occurs in four further manuscripts, now held in Weingarten, Palermo, karlsruhe, and lambeth Palace library. Two of these are large latin tropers (music books) containing antiphons, tropes and sequences and other items, in which Samson appears with music. The third is a text-only copy in a collection of devotional and theological material. The fourth is a more whimsical survival. among notes on logic, someone has scribbled in very small handwriting a fragment of the opening written out as prose. The appearance of this song across germany, italy, and england gives some indication of its international reach.27

Worldes blisse provides a more radical (though still typical) example of textual recycling /remixing. it displays the endemic characteristic of medieval lyrics as clusters of myriad smaller elements that then combine and recombine in new forms and contexts. This particular case is of interest because its complex, multilinear paths pass through particular stages that are usually presented in anthologies as independent art lyrics. it is only by painstaking tracking and serendipitous reading that one finds these paths and realizes how intricately texts now to be found in separate places are part of larger webs.28

it so happens that the opening phrase “Worldes bliss” crops up repeatedly in medieval manuscripts. To cut through some of the detail, there are at least three, probably quite separate traditions. Two of these survive with music, the other does not.29 We will call them (i), (ii), and (iii). The two that have music are not really very similar.


(i) has six or seven ten-line stanzas; (ii) comprises 22 lines that make up three slightly uneven stanzas. Here is the opening stanza from (i):

I [W]orldes blis ne last no throweit went and wit awey anon•þe langer þat ics it knoweþe lasse ics finde pris þar on•for al it is imeind mid care• 5with serwen and mid iuel fareand atte laste poure and bareit lat man wan it ginth agon•al þe blis þis her and *þere (MS *hare)bilocth at ende wep and mon 10

london British library, arundel Ms 248, fol.154r

and here is that of (ii):Worldes blisce haue god day. nou fram min herte wand away him for / to louen min hert his went þat þur3 his side spere rent • his herte blod / ssadde for me • 5nayled to þe harde tre • þat swete bodi was y tendprened wit nay / les þre • .

cambridge, corpus christi college, Ms 8, p.547

i print these in verse lineation. in fact, in both cases (as is usual in this period), the manuscripts copy them as prose underneath musical notation (there is also a copy of (i) without music that gives the text in prose). The rhymes are fairly plain, except in line 8 of (ii) where the couplet pattern is disrupted.30 (ii) is also tricky because with rhyming couplets it is not clear where one might divide the stanzas. it does not need to be stanzaic, in truth. (ii) survives in just one copy, a single leaf from a much larger music book that has been preserved (somehow) as a fragment inserted into a medieval historical encyclopedia. The music for (i) is for one voice; (ii) is a two-part motet—that is a voice part that sings the text and a second part, the tenor, which is taken from a section of chant.31 Motet texts, especially english ones this early (they are exceptionally rare) have no “norm” for a modern editor to reconstruct.

on top of this, a more shadowy hinterland of additional textual satellite material also seems to be part of the “Worldes blis” cluster:


1. Werdys lowe lestyth but a qwy3le (2 couplets in a latin sermon by friar nicolas Philip)2. Worldys blys haue good day No lengur habbe ich þe ne may (1 stanza, fifteenth century)3. Worldes blisse haue god day Þat I þe lete so wayls way (3 couplets, Worcester cathedral, unedited)4. Worldis blisse strif hat wrout (3 couplets, Bl Harley Ms 7322 in sermon materials, dated 1360, links with Fasciculus Morum)5. Werdis blisse maket me blind (4 couplets [John of Grimestone])6. Werdis ioy3e is menkt with wo (3 couplets, in sermon, De Gloria mundi [John of grimestone])32

There is a constant starting point for this cluster—“Worldes blisse”—but from there on the phrases mix and match, fall away, are replaced by new phrases, whole stanzas and sequences of stanzas. John grimestone, a late fourteenth-century franciscan preacher, copies out two different versions (without music) in his notebook (see items 5 and 6 above). i provide these further clustering examples of the phrase in much the same spirit of testing and proving our critical response as Jackson proffers dickinson’s jottings. are they poems? are they the same poem? Putting them together on a printed page provides a way of interpreting them as “a detail of a literary corpus” (12), which we would not be able to do from any single manuscript leaf. yet, to a greater degree than the work of nineteenth-century poets this is a literary corpus that goes beyond any one author’s control: it is a public corpus, a cluster of verbal and musical materials that is (in part) common intellectual property. The material survivals of this item are revealingly various and flexible: they sketch out a poem that has several distinct realizations, some with music, some without, in more than one textual form, and more than one musical form and genre. The picture is so complex that it is not possible without much greater time and space to work through each manuscript copy individually to track a history that would take us as close up to the “pathos of a subject” as dickinson’s manuscripts allow (13). The historical distance, the anonymity of the parchment trail, the sheer number of possible connections and contacts all conspire to make us stand back, to observe the pattern of connection between the manuscripts rather than the nuances of human connection in any single one.


My second example has been chosen to show a different kind of relationship between the verse on an individual, personal page and the verse in public circulation. Here is an extract from what is probably an oxford student’s notebook from the fifteenth century:

figure 3. cambridge, gonville and caius college Ms 383/603, p. 210, published by permission of the Master and fellows of gonville and caius college, cambridge


it is messy, blotched and (as often) not readily legible. With patience, one can begin to decipher it. The book as a whole bears many signs of student behavior: it is a well-thumbed, grubby, and haphazard trilingual collection of scraps of education, some dutiful, some more exuberant, some, let us say, not strictly relevant to the pursuit of learning. There are latin grammatical notes, verses and exercises (Tractatus gram-maticales versificati), such as a note from De Natura Rerum33 on the names of animals, and latin treatises on passages of scripture used in the liturgy. There are legal notes, including the 1290 statute “Quia emptores terrarum” (de modo faciendi chartas obligatorias);34 model letters (epistolarum formae), and accounts in french along with instruc-tions for keeping accounts.35 among the more exuberant items are a verse riddle in english, and 11 often erotic carols and other songs and song fragments.36

This particular page is in four languages, if one includes music, and hidden in its graphiology are no fewer than four songs. it is divided visually into four horizontal sections, two of which are framed by a line of staves. The second main section is divided by the visual highlight of a short strip of red staves, marked with black notes. at the top is the last part of a prose letter in french. Then roughly a third of the way down comes a single hand-drawn four-line stave in the same ink as the text (the fourth line is exceedingly faint). it is blank apart from just two notes: a black, square g and d. straight underneath comes: “bryd on brere y telle yt to non our y ne dar•Were it vndo at is y do I wolde be war• y louede.” Reading on, it becomes clear that “Were it vndo” is the refrain or burden of a stanzaic song that is copied below the staves. Here is a direct transcription of the full song:

Bryd on brere y telle yt to none oþur y ne dar•Were it vndo þat is ydo I wold be war Y louede a child of þis cuntre and so y wende he had do me now my self þe soþe y see þat he is far Were it vndo þat is ydo &c he seyde to me he wolde be trewe and chaunge me for none oþur newe now y sykke and am pale of hewe for he is far Were it vndo &c he seide his sawus he wolde fulfille þerfore y lat him haue al his wille now y sykke and mourne stille for he is fare Were it vndo &c

“Bryd on brere y telle yt to none oþur y ne dar” is not a spare line, but the verbal cue for the tune of the song. This is shown also three lines down, where “Byrd on þe brere &c” is written in at the end of the first stanza, underlined in dotted red ink and with the actual refrain text squeezed in above: “Were it vndo þat is ydo &c.”


immediately after this comes the next carol, whose burden begins “Þei y synge and murthus make.” squeezed in between the text lines is a short red three-line stave (again hand drawn) with a single short line of melody in black square notation. it gives the tune for the burden (though the text is not underlaid as such).37 The music is in two halves, with a “bar” line drawn before the last eight notes. To the left of the stave is le bon •l• don. In the stave itself there is p•v (for primus versus) at the left hand side and again just before the “bar” line. after it is a blank stave, ruled across the whole width of the page. Unfortunately this melody for the french song that follows with a latin variable refrain, Aue virgo regina, was never filled in.38 finally, right at the bottom is a fourth carol, with the burden “now this yol.” The writing tapers and breaks off at the bottom and far-right worn edges of the page.

The page as a whole is full of visual and aural complexity, and in particular about how the visual and the aural connect. Perhaps appropriately for a student book, despite its apparently rough, chaotic appearance it gestures towards a sophisticated semiotics of commu-nication. let me discuss a nonverbal example: the first set of blank staves. a blank stave is at first sight an empty sign, and by definition, perhaps, uncommunicative. yet it holds more than one might think. it is a hint, first of all, that there is some extra auricular resonance to these words. There is more than an abstract hint in this case since, as we have observed, two musical notes are written in at the start. it is not clear why there are only two: perhaps he didn’t have time to fill the rest in, or only needed that short cue to remind him of the tune, or began with one tune in mind then broke off when he realized for whatever reason that it wasn’t the tune he wanted to write down. it might even be a mistake for the next tune a little lower down the page which also starts with a large upward interval. The blankness, in short, is not empty: reading it tells us that a melody is there, and even its approximate length: we can’t hear it now, but the scribe could, and his stave gives a kind of substance to its absence.

The situation is tantalizing for at least two reasons. Here we have just two notes for a song which clearly began with “Bryd on brere y telle yt to none oþur y ne dar.” oddly enough it turns out that the words are very close to a much earlier piece, now in king’s college, cambridge, that was jotted upside down on the back of a roll containing a copy of a papal bull, originally dated 1199, from the cluniac priory of st James, exeter. This song was added a century later. in this back of the envelope jotting there is space for a fourth stave but it


was never written in: it would have been a two-voice song. as John stevens remarked, “either his memory or his copy or his invention must have failed him.”39

i have chosen this example because it comes close (in virginia Jackson’s terms) to showing a lyric “confusion between the pathos of a subject and the pathos of transmission” (13). The evocative “Byrd on brere” leaves footprints on this cambridge page in two places, and in a totally unrelated manuscript from exeter. centuries before dickinson’s handwriting was described as fossil bird-tracks (Jackson, 16), this song bird was preserved with random but telling iteration by an unknown cleric, idly filling in time on a spare piece of papal parch-ment, and by a Magdalen chorister (most probably) doing the same as a distraction from his lessons. yet the recording of this medieval bird takes us deeper into the nature of sound and writing than do dickinson’s jottings. as a mini verbal icon, “Byrd on brere” functions as a shorthand for a whole carol text, for a melody, and for a much earlier, different song. The range of functions of this small icon shows that there is not a single relationship between a verbal idea, its aural/oral realization and its written transcription. instead it shows us a lateral, horizontal diffusion with depth and extent. Perhaps what i am saying is that synchrony is never mere synchrony, but diachrony too. any one moment is layered with history, caught in history. so medieval insular songs are a testimony to the subtleties of catching sound and meaning on the page precisely in their looseness, and their profligate iterations. Their lack of a dulling sense of written norm, the particular nature of their openness as forms of writing pushes us to reconsider what form is, how its unthought, assumed features come into being, and propel certain written realizations.40

Worldes blisse and Byrd on brere are the merest tip of the iceberg in the ocean of medieval writing. But both exemplify crucial features of that vast repertory. reading each involves tracing a long (and perhaps always incomplete) textual journey. The journey reveals how the kinds of patterning we now associate with verse—rhyme, a discernible meter, various kinds of repetition—fluctuate along the way, sometimes with a more discrete shape and at others with any kind of shape obscured by continuous lineation, a seemingly careless copying of syllables and sometimes awkward juxtapositions with other languages and other verses. What we have here is something like a poetic core that is realized in different genres, different books, different places and different memories. The trail these clusters leave is disconnected and often obscure to us from a distance of 600 years. But enough survives


to show that each had a shareable existence; each forms a patterned group of words and, on occasion, lines of melody that had some quality of transferability.

is this different from any other example of what we have come to call lyric verse? is not this the way all kinds of song “move”? Possibly. But i’d like to think it through a little further. for one, in this case music is only patchily relevant, at least from the evidence. for another, these manuscripts are not showing us some anonymous, accidental instance of transmission. if it seems like that then it is only the wear and tear of centuries that makes it seem so. The handwritten personal character of a medieval manuscript means that a specific person or persons remembered, wrote down and put together each written version we have of the realization of any one group of words. in some sense, then, this is a super-controlled process: we could, in theory, identify the very person, watch him (almost certainly male) at work with his pen and ink either directly or by instructing a scribe. But then again, precisely because of their very personal character, the written versions of these clusters also attest to something much less fixed. Unlike a song in a printed anthology, or even as a single set-piece leaflet, the core changes shape, sometimes radically. The words are spelled a little differently each time; some of them are replaced by others; they are translated; they trigger associative links with other verses in other languages; sometimes, yes, they are sung; they come to mind in a sermon; they enrich a lullaby or frame a reader’s perspective on the history of kings. and the fact that each time these changes take shape on the page paradoxically indicates that there is no single shape for them. The verses, in short, exist in a state of continual potential to be changed. stability is almost accidental, rather than the norm.

flat reading has its limitations as an approach. or at least it would be good to try to moderate any notion of flatness with one of depth, if that didn’t negate the attempt. one problem with its converse—deep reading—is that it begs the question of the relation of the small to the large, of the local to the general. so however brilliant the aperçus of a deep reading of one line or even one word may be, it may do little to illuminate the larger practice of that poet, let alone of that poet’s generation of writers and their sense of language. But the corresponding problem with flat reading is that it rides above the small, human gesture, touch, breath. caught up in our broad perspective, we fail to pick out what makes that landscape visually significant.

so my further suggestion is that the specific character of medieval textual journeys like the ones i have just traced shows us a way of


reading laterally that involves reading deeply. To observe the protean and mobile core of a verse cluster traverse the landscape of a medieval intellectual’s memory is to do more than follow the tracks of a network. The layering of meaning, the unstoppable lateral connections, turn each verse unit into a dazzling and expanding maze of links, and sets it off on a long performance of collective memory. This huge horizontal field of lateral connections is not a merely superficial record of pathways. each realized poetic instant registers its own moment of realization as a charged sounding of layered depths of reading.

This is perhaps one way forward. The particular messiness of the empirical database for medieval insular verse makes “traditional” close reading suspect. no one poetic item, however crafted, stands alone to form an object of scientific enquiry. each dissolves into an ever-expanding associational set of links. But this does not negate a close reading. on the contrary it inspires us to travel those pathways, to uncover the intellectual energy that drives the patterns of associa-tion, the linguistic transfers, the theological layering. in the process we discover the many forms of social interaction that generate these links: through pedagogy, personal devotion, public performance, private jottings, to name a few. This is a form of reading that is profoundly lateral: it is driven by words, but clarified by practice.

v. WHy lyric?

so what does medieval verse have to say about form? i have argued elsewhere that two features of medieval vernacular language are key: its fuzzy plurilingualism and its rough purchase on the “norm.”41 My coda example attempts to show how in both these aspects, medieval verse points to something else about form.

What if, instead of saying that “lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation” (Jackson, 8) we said that poetry is the creation of manuscript and authorial mediation of sound into sense for public consumption? What i mean by this is that poetry emerges from an author’s complex realization through writing of a moment of personal but public communication. The moment may be intimate, but the impulse to put it into written form involves negotiating between that intimacy and the public nature of writing. This is not only what poetry means. The purely oral context (if there is such a thing that we can ever recover) clearly also has poetic potential. But what connects “Bryd on brere” and “Who cares / about a / Blue Bird’s tune” is a care about translating a sound and a sense into a visual icon that intervenes (in


its small way) in history. What print does to poetry is to expand the notion of public: but i am not convinced that it does so decisively. long before print, authors and readers were crafting a notion of the pathos of a subject and giving over control of its semantic and aural character to the processes of writing.

The point may be clarified by way of Jonathan culler’s 1975 discus-sion of how readers of poetry “naturalize” line endings or the gap between stanzas.42 He is talking of readers’ assumption that “typo-graphic space reproduces a space in the world or at least a gap in the mental processes,” and remarks that “such procedures form part of the institution of poetry” (184). yet, once more, medieval poetry shows this to be incidental, rather than crucial to a recognition of what poetry is. The convention of prose lineation for poetry common throughout the earlier middle ages shows that poetry does not have to be identified with a visual perception of the line end. Patterns of meter or rhyme can be heard as well as seen; a line ending is negoti-ated into written form by medieval poets rather than simply declared or revealed, and it is this process that is poetically engaging, rather than the visual form per se.43

My final piece of writing below is a twelfth-century prose latin narra-tive describing the miraculous origin of four medieval english songs.44 it comes from a biography of the medieval hermit godric, who, after a career in the maritime banking industry, retired to a remote village in northumberland and settled down in a nearby forest to practice penance and piety. The biography contains four songs composed by godric, which (as it happens) are the first songs in english to survive with music.45

alia die dum solus resedisset, contigit ut subito altius elata voce quodam modulamine musico cujusdam cantici melodiam concineret. Post vocum dulciora modulamina, subnexuit et verba, quae auditori simplici satis fuere perceptibilia, nam sermone anglico usus est, at tamen cantilenæ dulcedine cum ipsis sermonibus diutissime perfunctus est. dixit enim haec verba anglica, quae saepe ab ipso sunt iterando replicata, “Welcume, simund; welcume, simund;” quod latino sermone sic exprimitur: “Bene venias, symon; bene venias, symon.” verba his plura in canendo non protulit; sed dulcis cantilenae diversitate vocum sonoras arterias immutando saepius alteravit; nam quoties eadem verba repetiit, semper novi ac disparis cantus melodias quibusque syllabis verborum apposuit. Mirandum sane et omni stupore dignum, semimortui linguam modulamina musica alta jubilationis voce posse conficere; ac illiteratum idiotam simplicem notas non simplices, sed innodaciter intricatas, nullo docente, cognoscere. Quia vero tantae


virtutis habere testem volui, advocans unum ex ministris, ei diligentius aurem adhibere commonui. citra limina ecclesiae utrique consedimus, ac diutius jocunditati tali cantici harmonia, verba ipsa memoriae tenacius commendavimus.

another day, as he sat by himself, it happened that he suddenly lifted his voice and with a certain musical modulation sang the tune of some song. After the sweet modulation (music? melodies?) [modulamina] of these sounds [vocum], he also attached [subnexuit] words, which to a simple listener were quite understandable, since he used the english language; and nonetheless, with these words, he performed for a very long time the sweetness of this cantilena. for he said these english words, which he iterated and repeated many times, “Welcume, simund; welcume, simund;” which in latin is, “Bene venias symon, bene venias, symon.” He did not utter any further words beyond these in his song; but he constantly altered his voice production [?] sonoras arterias, “resounding windpipes”] in the sweet cantilena with a diversity of sounds [vocum]; for however often he repeated these same words, he always put melodies of a new and different song to each of the syllables of the words. it is wonderful and surprising that the tongue of one half dead was able to produce musical modulamina in a voice of high jubilation; and that an unlettered, simple rustic should have known, without being taught, musical phrases [notas] that were not simple but intricately knotted (or woven together without seam?) [innodaciter intricatas]. But because I wanted a witness to such prowess, i called one of the servants and instructed him to listen carefully. so we sat just inside the church, to either side, and for a long time tenaciously committed to memory the harmony and the words of this astonishing song.

it is not a straightforward passage to interpret. although godric’s singing of a song is so diligently observed, the song itself is not cited here. The four songs are slightly oddly recorded in the copies of the biography, and only in one case (without music) at the proper narra-tive cue. so it’s a performance in absentia, as it were. The biographer writes with a certain condescension, or perhaps wonder. These are sounds produced by an “unlettered, simple layman” (illiteratum idiotam simplicem): reginald, a Benedictine monk from durham, notes the sophistication of the music with evident astonishment. it belongs to a cluster of remarkable tensions in the passage: between the crudeness of the language (english—the only language an unlettered layman would know how to sing in, which reginald helpfully translates for his lettered reader)—and the complexity of the music, between the naive iterations of the english (“Welcume, simund; welcume, simund”) cutting through


the latin narration, and the layman’s complex and masterful perfor-mance that keeps setting the syllables to the melodies of new, diverse songs (“semper novi ac disparis cantus melodias quibusque syllabis verborum apposuit”). The monk’s keen sense of disparity between his level of education and the singer’s does not, however, extend to a snobbery about writing down the music. He and his servant sit humbly in the church and commit what they hear to memory.

This may seem an unlikely place to end an essay on form. But to me it is eloquent about the contribution the middle ages make to our contemporary discussions of this deceptively tricky and controversial concept. first, the song exists only in a silent and empty shape. Words round out the event, and help us imagine, even hear, the sound but only through appealing to off-stage knowledge and memory. The picture of the two witnesses hearing and memorizing the song acts as a living mnemonic for the representation of the song. The form of the song is a mystery: clearly reginald has never heard anything quite like it. yet its presence is meticulously palpable and, by means of a written verbal language, strangely oral.

The way the song hangs peculiarly between the literate and the illiterate also seems indicative. in watching the birth of this song, we are also witnesses to a conceptual process in which a monk tries to describe how musical sounds, a verbal phrase, a set of intricate patterns of new and repeated material come together in an unexpected and jubilant realization. There may, after all, be a hint of the sublime here, but it is uttered through an only roughly articulate vernacular, allowing a bounded but open-ended creative moment. form is caught here precisely on and off the page, in and out of language, in and out of history. Maybe this is what we are trying now to say.

Yale University

noTes

i would like to acknowledge with gratitude the comments by Ben glaser, christopher Page, cathy sanok, and Paul strohm on a draft of this essay, and the high-energy conversation provided by the newly founded yale Poetics reading group, organized by Justin sider and Tessie Prakas, along with Ben glaser. i also found the occasion of the english institute meeting on “form” at which a version of this essay was delivered of especial cross-period and cross-disciplinary stimulus.

1 christine carpenter, ed., The Armburgh Papers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998). although it was standard practice to present verse in continuous lineation in thirteenth-century french and english manuscripts, by the fifteenth century the practice was rare.

2 carpenter, 155


3 The ms punctuation is as follows: a virgule after “carissima,” and a punctum after “dulcissima.” one oddity in the meter is that to create a regular pattern of 8,7,4 syllables “mounde” would have to be pronounced without a final e in the french, and with a final e in the english, opposite to the norms in each language.

4 in the ms: a punctum after “laste” and “can”; new line after “haste.” 5 The three poems are (1) “a celuy,” which also occurs (together with a 9-stanza

Responcio) in cambridge, cUl Ms gg.iv.27 part 1a ff.10b-11a; london, Bl Harleian Ms 3362 f.90v; J. Boffey and a.s.g. edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (london: British library, 2005), 16, hereafter NIMEV; Digital Index of Middle English Verse (www.DIMEV.net), 19, hereafter DIMEV; r.T. davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics (london, 1963), 159–61. (2) “en iesu roy soueraign,” which is also copied in oxford, Bodleian library, Ms douce 95, f.6r; NIMEV 724; rossell Hope robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XV Centuries, 2nd ed. (oxford: clarendon, 1955), 160–62, hereafter Sec Lyrics. (3) a ele que ayme sur tout rien, NIMEV 33.

6 stanley fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980).

7 virginia Walker Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).

8 i am grateful to Michael Warner for first alerting me to Jackson’s book after a talk i gave at yale in January 2012 on the medieval lyric.

9 a case in point occurs in a love letter between Margery Brews to her future husband, John Paston iii, where some parts of the letter are in rhyme. for an edition, see alexandra Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing in Middle English (london: longman, 1992), pp.251–53.

10 of course many many post-print poets handwrite their poetry: what makes dickinson distinctive, Jackson suggests, is the kind of response she has received from her readers and editors.

11 Jackson, virginia and yopie Prins, “lyrical studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999), 521–30.

12 see, in particular, Jonathan culler, “Why lyric?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 201–06; and “lyric, History, and genre,” New Literary History 40.4 (2009): 879–99.

13 see OED: Philip sidney, An apologie for poetrie, 1st ed. (1595), sigl. I4v. [STC 22534]. george Puttenham, The arte of English poesie, 1st ed. (london: r. field, 1589), I.xi.20. [STC 20519].

14 it may be worth noting that i made these remarks in various invited lectures before reading Jackson. The point here is that from the perspective of medieval studies her (excellent) argument is neither surprising nor contentious.

15 The existing norton critical edition of Middle English Lyrics was published in 1974. a new norton critical edition of Medieval English Lyrics is currently in prepa-ration, edited by ardis Butterfield. Perhaps the most notable exponent of new critical interpretations of medieval lyrics was Peter dronke: Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (oxford: clarendon, 1965) and The Medieval Lyric (london: Hutchinson Univ. library, 1968).

16 “le secont dit d’orace est en .i. autre livret qui s’appelle ‘in odis’, c’est assavoir en la cinquante et .v.e ode; et appelle monseigneur saint augustin ce livret le livre des dittiers liriques pour ce que ‘oda’ c’est chant ou dittier, et pour ce que il est de divers mettres et qui souvent se varient il l’appelle lirique. et ainsi est il ethimologié par ysidore en son .viii.e livre des ethimologies ‘a lira’, c’est a dire de la harpe qui fait divers sons; et pour celle variacion l’appelle il ‘carmen liricum’, car selont Papie il a


en ce livre .xxix. paire [sic] de mettres” (Raoul de Presles, Cité de Dieu, 1371–75, ms. Paris, B.n., fr. 22912, v.13, glose, f 249c). cited in Dictionnaire du moyen français. http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/, hereafter DMF.

17 “aucuns poetes estoient nomméz liriques, pour tant que leurs dis se chantoient a un instrument nommé lire (Jacques legrand, L’Archiloge Sophie, Livre de bonnes meurs, ed. evencio Beltran (Paris: H. champion, 1986), 25–261, 151. cited in DMF.

18 for the standard account, see elizabeth aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington: indiana Univ. Press, 1996), xvi. she gives 315 “discrete musical settings” for 246 poems among 42 composers. John dickinson Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), gives 322 “different melodic readings” for 253 poems (pages 20 and 41, note 32).

19 carleton Brown catalogued the great bulk of medieval english lyrics and edited a proportion of them in the 1920s–1940s, with the help of his younger British colleague rossell Hope robbins. They published 630 items in four editions: 91 items in carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (oxford: clarendon, 1932), hereafter Brown ELXIII; 135 items in Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (oxford: clarendon, 1924), hereafter Brown RLXIV; 192 items in Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century (oxford: clarendon, 1939), hereafter Brown RLXV, and 212 items in robbins, Sec Lyrics. according to robbins, approximately 2000 short Middle english poems are preserved in 450 manuscripts; 35 of these contain 75% of all “lyrics” (Sec Lyrics, xvii). The NIMEV lists roughly 4200 items of Middle english verse, ranging from proverbial couplets to long works of several thousand lines, while the DIMEV has reached 7108. i am grateful to emma gorst and ann e killian for their help and advice over these figures.

20 for routes into and further references on this large topic, see ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2009); ardis Butterfield “The construction of textual form: cross-lingual citation in some medieval lyrics,” in Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. yolanda Plumley, giuliano di Bacco, and stefano Jossa (exeter: Univ. of exeter Press, 2011), 41–57.

21 Helen deeming, ed. Songs in British Sources, c.1150–1300, Musica Britannica, xcv (london: stainer & Bell, 2013).

22 ardis Butterfield and Helen deeming, “editing insular song across the disciplines: Worldes Blis,” in Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed vincent gillespie and anne Hudson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 151–66.

23 Brown, ELXIII, no.1.24 “i sing of a maiden”: NIMEV 1367, DIMEV 2281; “adam lay ybounden”: NIMEV

117, DIMEV 215.25 alfred Hiatt, “genre Without system,” in Middle English, ed. Paul strohm, oxford

Twenty-first century approaches to literature (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 277–294.

26 Heather love, “close but not deep: literary ethics and the descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 371–91, 375. although franco Moretti is often credited as initiating the recent trend toward “distant reading” (“conjectures on World literature,” new Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68), my own interests have been stimulated by the work in social studies of clifford geertz, Bruno latour, and erving goffman, and indeed by earlier structuralist criticism, generated by saussure. a full bibliography would be impractical: i mention here only geertz, “Blurred genres: The refiguration


of social Thought,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (new york: Basic Books, 1983), 19–35; latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2005) and goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

27 “sumer is icomen in”: NIMEV 3223, DIMEV 5053. london, British library Harley Ms 978, fol. 11v. see B. schofield, “The Provenance and date of ‘sumer is icumen in,’” Music Review 9 (1948): 81–86; and e.J. dobson and f.l. Harrison, Medieval English Songs (new york: cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 143.

28 Butterfield and deeming. “editing insular song.” for further discussion of these webs, see Butterfield, “The construction of Textual form.”

29 oxford, Bodleian library, Ms rawlinson g.18 (sc 147510), perhaps 1265, with music; london, British library, arundel Ms 248 (late thirteenth century, with music); and oxford, Bodleian library, Ms digby 86 (sc 1687), assembled circa 1272 to 1282 in Worcestershire.

30 dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, emend this line as follows: “with nayles þree ypreend” but this does not have any particular warrant unless one assumes (as they do) that the lines ought to be “right” (195). There is not space here to conduct a full discussion of this point, except to say that even dobson and Harrison’s version produces a sequence of irregularly patterned stanzas. i am grateful to christopher Page for his comments on this text.

31 This single late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century survival occurs as the front flyleaf of cambridge corpus christi college Ms 8, an early fourteenth-century copy of vincent de Beauvais’s speculum historiale. “Worldes blisce,” a 2-part, descant-style piece on Benedicamus in 3 stanzas is next to another english two-part song, a french motet and some 3-part clausulae. see http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions/manuscript_description_long_display.do?ms_no=8 and dobson and Harrison, Medieval English Songs, no.17. note that diMev 6789 incorrectly gives the page of the flyleaf as 457 instead of 547.

32 (1) NIMEV 4225.5, DIMEV 6794. oxford, Bodleian library, Ms lat. Theol. d.1 (sc 29746), fol. 174. see alan J. fletcher, “selected verses from Bodleian library Ms lat. Th. d.1,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90 (1989): 163–66. (2) NIMEV 4220, DIMEV 6788. cambridge Uk, Pembroke college, Ms 248, fol. iii. (3) NIMEV 4220, DIMEV 6788. Three couplets in Worcester, Worcester cathedral library, Ms Q.46, fol. 238; see siegfried Wenzel, “Unrecorded Middle english verses,” Anglia 92 (1974): 55–78 at 78. other source (4 lines): Bodleian library, Ms rawlinson c.301 (sc 12158), fol. 93v. (4) NIMEV 4224, DIMEV 6792. london, British library, Ms Harley 7322, fol. 157. see f.J. furnivall, Political, Religious and Love Poems, from Lambeth MS. 306 and other sources. EETS o.s. 15 (1866); repr. 1962; rev. ed. 1903: 234; rev. ed. 263. (5) NIMEV 4222, DIMEV 6790. edinburgh, national library of scotland, Ms advocates’ 18.7.21, fol. 15. see edward Wilson, A Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of Grimestone’s Preaching Book. Medium Ævum Monographs (oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 4. (6) NIMEV 4225, DIMEV 6793. edinburgh, national library of scotland, Ms advocates’ 18.7.21, fol. 60v. see Wilson, Descriptive Index: 18.

33 Wrongly ascribed to sidonius. The confusion may have arisen because sidonius mentions lucretius (the actual author of De natura rerum) in his Carmina, ix.265, ed. and trans. by W.B. anderson, Sidonius: Poems and Letters, 2 vol. loeb classical library (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), 190.

34 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1/18/1 (accessed 8 June 2014).


35 J.J. smith, ed., A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, (cambridge: deighton and Macmillan, 1849), 192. see also the descriptions in M. r. James, and in r. l. greene, eds., The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (1935; oxford: clarendon, 1977), 324–25.

36 The carols are in greene, Carols nos. 114b (pages 68–69), 187a (68), 418(41), 441(210), 452(41), 453(41), 455(210), 470(68), appendix ii (210). note that the entry in DIMEV 2222 has an incorrect page number (308) for greene.

37 This has been edited by John stevens, Mediaeval Carols, (london: stainer & Bell, 1952), 111.

38 greene, Carols, xxxv–xxxvi. greene doesn’t note that there is a repetition of the burden after “familia.”

39 cambridge Uk, king’s college Mun. sJP/50, verso, NIMEV 521, DIMEV 852. for a description of the manuscript, see John stevens, no. 19, in Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900–1700, ed. iain fenlon, (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 66–68, 66. dobson and Harrison believed that the caius carol burden “must be related in some way” to the papal bull verso jotting (Medieval English Songs,185). But this is pure speculation.

40 dobson and Harrison take considerable liberties with the text in order to match up the melody to the words. for their edition and extensive commentary and justifica-tion for their decision, see Medieval English Songs, 183–88; 269; 305–06. There is not space to discuss their procedures in detail here, but i hope to in a separate publication.

41 ardis Butterfield, “fuzziness and Perceptions of language in the Middle ages Part one: explosive fuzziness: The duel,” in “Fuzzy Studies, Part 2,” special issue, Common Knowledge18.2 (2012): 255–66; “Part Two: collective fuzziness: Three Treaties and a funeral,”, in “Fuzzy Studies, Part 4,” special issue, Common Knowledge 19.1 (2013): 51–64; “Part Three: Translating fuzziness: countertexts” in “Fuzzy Studies. A Symposium on the Consequence of Blur, Part 6,” ed. Jeffrey M. Perl, special issue, Common Knowledge 19.3 (2013): 446–73.

42 Jonathan d. culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (ithaca: cornell Univ. Press, 1975), 184.

43 The sonnet spoken in dialogue by shakespeare’s romeo and Juliet in act i, scene v of the play is a celebrated case in point.

44 reginald of durham, De Vita et Miraculis S, Godrici, Heremitae de Finchale, ed. J. stevenson, surtees society (london: nichols, 1847), 306.

45 Helen deeming, “The songs of st godric: a neglected context,” Music and Letters, 86.2 (2005): 169–85.

Why Medieval Lyric?

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