Context, Form, and Text in Lack of Steadfastness

Abstract

Abstract The surviving witnesses to Lack of Steadfastness, conventionally included among Chaucer's lyrics, raise a number of textual and contextual problems mostly overlooked in discussion of Chaucer's short poems. This article explores the evidence for authorship and attribution, the instability of the forms in which the poem survives, and its tendency to disintegration into shorter units or to amalgamation in longer runs of undifferentiated poems.