“The Tongue”:

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the assembly of stanzas in the Findern manuscript known as “The Tongue” presents a coherent, voiced, lyric poem made up of selections from Lydgate's Fall of Princes, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and a concluding stanza unique to this manuscript. I illustrate how the Findern scribe recast this source material into a poem that resonates with the broad concerns of the manuscript as a whole: the place of proper speech in social behavior, the relationships of male and female eloquence, and the allegorizations of courtly gaming adapted to a gentry world. More pointedly, the poem's final stanza, with its reference to marking the chase in the game of tennis, associates its idioms with the personal allegories of Charles d'Orléans, and I suggest that the overall tone and texture of this poem owes much to Charles's literary sensibility as it was understood in late-fifteenth-century England.