Troubling the New Constitutionalism: Politics, Penitence, and the Dilemma of Dread in the Digby Poems

Abstract

Since their first scholarly editing in 1904, the “Digby Poems,” a collection of twenty-four English songs found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102, have had a desultory presence in our understanding of the literary and cultural landscape of the fifteenth century.1 They were probably written toward the end of the reign of Henry IV and during the rule of Henry V, possibly by a Benedictine monk near, or with knowledge of, the political center of early Lancastrian England. They range in length from seventy-two lines to over four hundred lines each for a total of over 3700 lines of English verse. They are replete with apparently oblique topical references to the institutional and political environs of their day. Nonetheless they are largely illocatable, at times it seems studiously so. Although the songs were almost certainly written by one person, they reveal no clear dialectal or regional identifiers, and no strong candidates