A Companion to the Middle English Lyric.
Phillips, Helen
A Companion to the Middle English Lyric. Ed. by Thomas G. Duncan.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2005. xxv + 328 pp. 50 [pounds sterling]. isbn:
978-184384-065-7.
It is a pleasure to review a collection with such consistently good
contributions. This volume is dedicated to Douglas Gray and will prove
as important a milestone in criticism of the Middle English lyric as the
authoritative studies by Rosemary Woolf and Douglas Gray, published in
1968 and 1972 respectively. These are critical essays, but everywhere
the significance of manuscript contexts in their interpretation is given
its due. Equally appropriately, the relationships between English,
French, and Latin lyrics (some other linguistic traditions) are weighed
with fresh and up-to-date expertise.
We begin with Julia Boffey's account of 'Middle English
Lyrics and Manuscripts', an outstanding compendium of research and
analysis--virtually a short reference book in its own right on this
subject. Thomas Duncan comes next with a fine essay on metre that
helpfully explores the links to issues of editing, and the problems of
relationships between Latin and English metre. John Scattergood's
scholarly and original essay on the difficult and disparate subject of
the love lyric before Chaucer, giving numerous fresh insights into what
are, in his words, often 'astonishing and strange texts' (p.
51), draws on wide critical and historical perspectives to open up
plausible interpretations of many particularly elusive compositions.
Vincent Gillespie's 'Moral and Penitential Lyrics' takes
a clever approach, in view of the fact that many readers today will lack
the Christian background to make full sense of the assumptions
underlying the medieval texts: he arranges his material so that the
essay also conducts a master-class. Its deft arrangement of things
begins with fear of death and gently takes its reader through a sequence
of the ensuing theological doctrines. Gillespie brings out well the
emotional subtleties of much of this writing, while explicating the
intricate connections between vernacular religious lyrics and the Latin
and learned worlds of theology and liturgy that fed them. The same is
true of Christiania Whitehead's essay on Middle English religious
lyrics, which also explores the narrative and visual affinities of many,
and their varied material contexts: not just lyrics scribbled in the
margins of other manuscripts, but such profoundly unmodern
accompaniments to the 'literary' text as reckonings of how
many years off Purgatory will be won by frequent recitals of particular
lyrics.
If one could specify any one topic that might have been included in
the menu for the book and is not, it is that of performance contexts and
audiences. But, despite the absence of a single essay wholly dedicated
to this, it is handled in a state-of-the-art fashion in several of the
contributions. This is particularly so in Douglas Gray's masterly
account of 'Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry
VIII', which makes a powerful rehabilitation of late medieval
courtly lyrics through a myriad of contexts and affinities, especially
manuscripts and illustrations, and many different types of upperclass
social 'game': court rituals and 'entertainments. Each
page reaches out to a concisely indicated wealth of links and
speculations, and it includes a sparkling short new analysis of
Chaucer's lyric output.
Performance appears also in Karl Reichl's essay on the Middle
English carol, which examines both the texts and their musical contexts,
ecclesiastical and secular, with an expertise likely to satisfy the
music historian as well as literary critics, and with information about
some parallel Spanish and French developments. Contexts feature too in
Alan Fletcher's 'The Lyric in the Sermon', which pushes
forward our understanding of both sermons and their lyrics, and also, as
he says, of our 'appreciation of the weight of cultural work that
these lyrics were allowed to support' (p. 189). With its
characteristic combination of wit and learning, both equally
illuminating, his chapter manages to make strongly convincing its
proposition that 'in the sermon the lyric found its natural
habitat' (p. 209) and that we ignore this at our peril. Thorlac
Turville-Petre's lively essay on political lyrics gives a useful
guide to some political backgrounds, with a particularly helpful
consideration of the MS Harley 2253 lyrics, but concentrates its focus
on 'hate literature'--lyrics of abuse, indignation, and
xenophobia--and makes a robust defence of the inescapable presence of
much medieval vituperation and insult, against modern,
politically-correct critical attempts to make these features of the
period 'disappear by the magic of irony' (p. 185). Bernard
O'Donoghue, on popular lyrics, looks back to the questioning of the
courtly-popular distinction by Rosemary Woolf and others, and discusses
both the 'precariousness of survival' and the insecure place
of these lyrics in the modern critical mainstream. He points to
interesting possible links between some of them and Chaucer's
writing. Sarah Stanbury's finely nuanced and wide-ranging essay on
'Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics' argues
that the religious lyric, through its use of both voices and the gaze,
'repeatedly unsettles expectations we might have between
male/female relationships' (p. 229). A. A. Macdonald's
'Lyrics in Middle Scots' makes some especially interesting
observations about what manuscripts reveal of English-Scots connections
and influences, in both directions.
Each of these contributions manages to overcome the difficulty of
providing an overview and an account of where their subject is now,
while offering in addition an important new critical essay.
Helen Phillips
Cardiff University
