Middle English Lyrics, Homo Vide, and A Christian Mannes Bileeve

Abstract

THIS note delivers new texts and contexts of two Middle English lyrics, ‘Leerne þou vnkynde man to be kynde’, a single quatrain that plays on various meanings of ‘kynde’, and ‘Vnkind man take heed of me’, seven rhyming couplets that translate the popular Latin carol of Christ appealing from the Cross, O homo vide quid pro te patior, (O, man, behold what I suffer for you), hereafter Homo vide. The first lyric, ‘Leerne þou vnkynde man to be kynde’, appears as item 1846 in Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins’ Index of Middle English Verse, and in Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards’ New Index of Middle English Verse. It is also item 3042 in the open-access Digital Index of Middle English Verse. The second lyric, ‘Vnkinde man take heed of me’, appears as item 3827 in IMEV and 6111 in DIMEV. Brown edited both from different manuscripts in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, the first as lyric 190 and the second as lyric 104. For simplicity, I will refer to each by their IMEV item numbers, 1846 and 3827. Despite the awareness of these works, scholars have neither noted the lyrics’ distribution nor discussed their immediate contexts within A Christian Mannes Bileeve (CMB), a lengthy prose commentary on the twelve articles of the faith comprising the Apostles’ Creed. This note thus makes complete the lists of the lyrics’ witnesses; highlights an independent English redaction of Homo vide, the Latin source of the longer poem; and suggests a female readership for CMB, a probability that has to date been missed or minimalized.