A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Middle English Lyric Janet Hadley Williams Duncan, Thomas G., ed., A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; cloth; pp. xxvi, 302; R.R.P. US$85.00, £50.00, ISBN 18438406750. Some Companion volumes are designed to be read from cover to cover, although most are prepared in expectation of selective interest. A Companion to the Middle English Lyric is one of the few attending to both needs. There are Latin translations and glosses throughout, the absence in quotations of thorn, eth, wynn and yogh, some handy definitions (although a few more could have been added, for 'synizes' and 'apocope', for instance), with some core pieces of information, such as the nature of major manuscripts mentioned, repeated strategically. Yet through the sum of the book's various examinations – of the themes, categories, and, with the carol, genre – the Middle English lyric is [End Page 196] properly and subtly described, with the references to foundational scholarship and the new readings splendidly enabling a multiplicity of scholarly approaches and levels. In his Introduction, Thomas G. Duncan sets out in detail the importance of the Middle English lyric to English literary history. He links it to several formal and thematic innovations: the change to stanzaic verse form, the appearance of secular love lyrics, the beginnings of a different concept of love in the religious lyric, and to a new vocabulary of affective piety. He also points out the lyric's continuities with earlier writing, in the use of the alliterative line, and the retention of major themes. Duncan acknowledges the problems encountered by readers of the lyric. He looks first at those of context: the lyric's linguistic diversity, less-than-ideal physical context (often surviving in corrupt versions only), the rarity of authorial copy, and the fact that this 'anonymity' is compounded by the lyric's brevity and by the loss of the original corpus, without which a lyric, surviving in isolation, fits none of the recognized categories. He then considers problems of modality, noting the potentially misleading nineteenth-century idea of the lyric as 'the expression of the poet's own feelings' (p. xxiii), and recognising the essentially public nature of the early lyric, where use of conventions is much in evidence. He considers, too, the important relationship of song to the lyric. During the course of the volume, all of these matters come into play; Duncan has provided a thought-provoking basis for understanding that later commentary. Julia Boffey enlarges this in her 'Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts', pointing out the diversity of the forms of record in which the lyrics are found, and the cultural implications for the Middle English lyric produced in the trilingual (French, Latin, English) society of that time. She surveys the settings for the copying of these poems, devoting discrete sections to single-author collections, and others to those in which lyrics are components in anthologies, household miscellanies, religious instruction manuals, sermon-collections, songbooks, and commonplace books. Boffey meticulously records particular sources, and gives frequent but unobtrusive references to modern scholarship. Duncan's 'Middle English Lyrics: Metre and Editorial Practice', which makes more sense because it follows Boffey's contextualising essay, offers editors practical and flexible advice based on the author's considerable editing experience. For those who are students of lyrics, however, there are also insights – on how a lyric should be read and of what to question: scribal eye-skip, for example, is suggested as a possible explanation, on occasion, of a supposed faulty metre. Attention is also given to matters less familiar, such as the fact that some [End Page 197] lyrics were jotted down in an abbreviated form, and may require the reader to reconstruct them. Such discussions inform the reading of the remaining chapters, John Scattergood's 'The Love Lyric before Chaucer', Vincent Gillespie's 'Moral and Penitential Lyrics', Christiana Whitehead's 'Middle English Religious Lyrics', supplemented by Sarah Stanbury's 'Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics', Douglas Gray's 'Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII', Karl Reichl's 'The Middle English Carol', Thorlac Turville-Petre's 'Political Lyrics', Alan Fletcher's 'The Lyric in...