The genre of the grave and the origins of the middle english lyric

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 127-161

  Lerer, Seth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650009131     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-58-2-127     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. The text appears in British Library MS Royal 8.D.xiii, fol. 25r. It was first edited by Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), xii
2. The manuscript was reexamined and reedited by Theo Stemmler, who also reproduced a photograph of the manuscript folio (" Textologische Probleme mittelenglischen Dichtungen," Munnheimer Berichte uus Fwschung und Lehre 8 [ 19741: 245-8).
3. Peter Dronke reviewed Stemmler's edition and offered new readings and emendations of his own, together with a modern translation (The Medieval Lyric, 2d ed. [London: Hutchinson, 1978, 144, 280). My edition is based (with slight modifications) on that of Dronke. The translation is mine (as are all further unattributed translations).
4. J. A. W. Bennett, G. V. Smithers, and Norman Davis, eds., Early Middle English Verse and Prose, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), xxi-lxi;
5. J. A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3-65; for technical details see Fernand MOSSÉ, A Handbook of Middle English, trans.
6. James A. Walker (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ig52), 1-130.
7. Burrow and Turville-Petre, 57-62
8. Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 57-118.
9. Specialized studies of the metrical shifts at work in the period include N. F. Blake, " Rhythmical Alliteration," Modern Philology 67 ( 1969): 118-24
10. S. K. Brehe, " Reassembling The First Worcester Fragment," Speculum 65 ( 1990): 521-36;
11. Daniel Donoghue, " La3amon's Ambivalence," Speculum 65 ( 1990) : 537-63.
12. For discussions of generic affiliations along the lines of Romance verse forms see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1-15.
13. Woolf, 67-85
14. Raymond Oliver, Poems without Names: The English Lyric, 1200-1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 74-85.
15. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)
16. Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970)
17. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972)
18. Lois Bragg, The Lyric Speakers of Old English Poetry (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1991)
19. Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
20. For attempts to frame shorter Old English verse generically see Martin Green, ed., The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research (London: Associated University Presses, 1983)
21. Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992).
22. See Kemp Malone, ed., Widsith (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagge, 1962)
23. Joseph Harris, " Deor and Its Refrain: Preliminaries to an Interpretation," Traditio 43 (1987): 23-53.
24. See G. L. Brook, ed., The Harlq Lyrics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956) Oliver (n. 4 above), whose critical inheritance actually lies in the judgmental formalism of Yvor Winters; and Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1974), an anthology with a distinctively Robertsonian exegetical bias (for a review of competing opinions along New Critical/exegetical lines see 309-50). For the ideological and institutional tensions between New Criticism and exegesis in American medieval studies generally
25. see Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Study of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3-39.
26. See, e.g., Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
27. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
28. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
29. Behind them all, to varying degrees, stands Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991)
30. William Stubbs, ed., Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi De Gestis Regum Anglorum, 2 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1887-89), 1:278 390.
31. Henry Richards Luard, ed., Matthaei Purisiensis: Chronica Majura, 7 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1872-87)
32. Quoted and translated in Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 41, 22.
33. Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
34. Donoghue (n. 3 above); M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979);
35. James Campbell, " Some Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past," Peritia 3 ( 1984): 131-50.
36. Some gestures have been made in this direction by Pearsall, 85-118
37. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 181-221.
38. My earliest responses to this material were conveyed in a personal communication to Robert Harrison, who incorporated them verbatim into his Forests: Shadows of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 257. I have subsequently developed my interpretations in greater detail in a different argument (" Old English and Its Afterlife," in The New Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming] ) .
39. Clark, The Peterborough Chronicle, 2070-2 254, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), ixxvi. All quotations from the Chronicle and its poetry are from this edition.
40. Though Old English writers used the word castel, they borrowed it directly from the Latin castellum, meaning a town, village, or fortified encampment. See Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1898)
41. S.V. "castel." However, it appears from the lexica that castel, when used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, refers specifically to the French importation of dressed-stone castle building
42. See, e.g., the telling entry from 1052: " Pa Frencyscan be on pan castelle wzron" [the French who were in the castle] (cited in T. Northcote Toller, An Angldaxon Dictionary Supplement [Oxford: Clarendon, 1921.
43. S.V. " castel," where the usage of the word here and elsewhere in the chronicle is identified as having been borrowed from Norman French). See, too, Hans Kurath et al., A Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1932-), S.V. " castel."
44. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 197 1 ), 625.
45. For more on castle building, as the imposition of Norman power and as the locus of political infighting, in the first century after the Conquest see Charles Coulson, " The Castles of the Anarchy," in The Anarchy of King Stephen S Reign, ed. Edmund King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 67-92
46. Along with the Peterborough Chronicle's account of events in the year 1137 (Clark, 55-7)
47. For a review of attitudes toward Norman building projects in the immediate post-Conquest period see C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A Npto Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982 231-4.
48. For the impact of the Domesday Book on post-Conquest life see Clanchy, 18-21.
49. For the history and function of rhyme in European Latin and vernacular poetry during this period see Janet Martin, " Classicism and Style in Latin Literature," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfih Century, ed. Robert L. Benson andGiles Constable (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 537-68
50. Eugene R. Cunnar, " Typological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor," Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 394-417
51. For the uses of rhyme in Old English poetry, as an ornament and as an organizing principle in one poem, see James W. Earl, " Hisperic Style in the Old English 'Rhyming Poem," ' PMLA 102 (1987): 187-96
52. For further details see E. G. Stanley, " Rhymes in English Medieval Verse: From Old English to Middle English," in Medieual English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy et al. (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1988), 19-54.
53. The title of the poem was bequeathed by Bartlett Jere Whiting, " The Rime of King William," in Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Thomas A. Kirby and Henry B. Woolf (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 89-96.
54. Calvin B. Kendall, " Let Us Now Praise a Famous City: Wordplay in the OE Durham and the Cult of St. Cuthbert," JEGP 87 (1988): 507-21
55. Kendall, The Metrical Grummar of " Beoruulf" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199 I ) , 217.
56. For a reading of the poem as a sustained act of literary antiquarianism see my Literacy and Power in AngleSaxon Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) , 199-204.
57. See Brehe (n. 3 above), from which all quotations are taken.
58. Brehe translates losiap as " damned," rather than " dead" (531). The verb Zosian means to be lost, to fail, to die, to escape, to destroy. Brehe imposes a moral reading on the term (to be spiritually lost, i.e., damned), but to me that is an overinterpretation. The point is not that the old teachers have been damned but simply that they have disappeared.
59. Gransden, " Realistic Observation in Twelfth-Century England," Speculum 47
60. Kendall reviews evidence that the Vita is datable to Saint Cuthbert's translation in 1104 (" Let Us Now Praise" ).
61. William Stubbs, ed., Memorials of Suint Dunstan (London: Rolls Series, 1874). 83-4; translated by Gransden, 37.
62. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds. and trans., Alfrd the Great (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 125
63. For the Old English see the text from Bodleian Library MS Hatton 20 published in Dorothy U'hitelock, ed., Sweet 4 An,glo-Saxon Rmder, 15th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, ig67), 5.
64. D. A. Bullough, " The Educational Tradition in England from Alfred to Aelfric: Teaching IJtriusque Linguae," Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull 'alto medioevo 19 (1972): 453-94
65. The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 199 1 ).
66. Arnold Schrorer, " The Grave," Anglia 5 (1883): 289-90.
67. Douglas Moffatt, ed., " The Soul's Address to the Body " : The Worcester Fragments (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues, 1987), 68, fragment C, 11. 29-32.
68. All further quotations from this text are from this edition, cited by fragment letter and line number. Relations between these sections of The Soul 's Address and The Gave are discussed in Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: Brewer, lg77), 9-1 1.
69. J. W. Rankin, " The Hymns of St. Godric," PMZA 38 (1923): 699-711
70. from which I quote. My translation is based on the interpretations of Julius Zupitza, " Cantus Beati Godrici," Englische Studien 11 (1888): 401-32.
71. See, e.g., Laeamon's Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, Early English Text Society, 250 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 1. 24122
72. Harley Lyrics, no. 26, 11. 1-2, in Brook (n. 9 above), 64.
73. The Fox and the WolJ 1. 140, in Bennett, Smithers, and Davis (n. 2 above), 7 1
74. For good examples of anaphora in Middle English romance see A. J. Bliss, ed., Sir Orfeo, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 11. 165-74, 387-404.
75. Dronke concurs (Medieual Lyic, 280). If this reconstruction is correct, the poem offers the earliest attestable use of the verb thrive in English.
76. For more on the friars' miscellanies and the early English lyric see Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the EurZy EngZish Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
77. For an eloquent review of the issues see Thomas C. Moser Jr., " 'And I mon waxe wod': The Middle English 'Foweles in the Frith,'" PMLA 102
78. Brown, 14. This is also a text with music, preserved on a single-sheet flyleaf, in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson G. 22 (see Brown, 169).
79. M. R. James, The Western MSS in the Library of Trinity College Cambridge, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900) , 1 :437-47; Brown, xx-xxii.
80. Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 146-7, 273.
81. Dronke discusses the poem briefly and prints the music that accompanies it (Medieval Z,yric, 145-6, 245).
82. Harley Lyrics, no. 19, 11. 17-20, in Brook, 55.
83. For trilingual literary culture inEngland and its impact on the making of lyric anthologies see Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 181 221.
84. Eric Gerald Stanley, ed., The Owl and the Nightingak, 2d ed. (Manchester: Man-Chester University Press, 1972).
85. All quotations and references to the poem are from this edition. The studies most relevant to my discussion are Kathryn D. Hume, " The Owl and the Nightingale" and Its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977)
86. J. J. Murphy, " Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Owl and the Nightingale," in Medieval Eloquenre, ed. J. J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 198-230
87. Thomas L. Reed Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 219-60
88. Some of the interpretations I advance here are developed from my dissertation, " Classical Skepticism and English Poetry in the Twelfth Century" (University of Chicago, 1981).
89. See N. R. Ker, " The Owl and the Nightingale" : Facsimile of the Jesus and Cotton Manuscripts, Early English Text Society, 251 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
90. See Thomas A. Shippey, " Listening to the Nightingale," Comparative Literature 22 (1970): 46-60.
91. See Stanley's note to 1. 14 (105) and his glossary entry for the word. See, too, ME1D, S.V. " breche," sense 6, for the information concerning the place-names quoted below.
92. K. R. Potter, ed. and trans., Gesta Stephani (London: Thomas Nelson, ig55), 45-7.
93. See Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 108-11
94. Geraldine Barnes, " Cunning and Ingenuity in the Middle English Horis and Blaunchejeur," Medium Kvum 53 (1984): 10-25.
95. An Old English Miscellany, Early English Text Society, o.s., 49 (London: Trench, 1872), 156-9.
96. See Stanley's glossary ( 188-9).