Reviewed by: Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems ed. by Julia Boffey and Christiana Whitehead, and: Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England by Ingrid Nelson Roderick J. Lyall Boffey, Julia, and Christiana Whitehead, eds, Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2018; hardcover; pp. xvii, 310; 8 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844976. Nelson, Ingrid, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; cloth; pp. 214; 2 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00; ISBN 9780812248791. That medieval lyric, especially the great body of anonymous lyric, has been accorded less critical attention than it deserves is almost an axiom of literary studies. Despite the existence of outstanding collections by Carleton Brown, Rossell Hope Robbins, and others, and the invaluable resource of the Index of Middle English Verse, the sheer volume and variety of shorter verse forms in medieval English, along with the canonical primacy of big names—or indeed, any name at all—have long contributed to the critical neglect of all but a very few of the shorter poems that survive in manuscript miscellanies, commonplace books, and often in contexts that are otherwise anything but literary. These two volumes therefore come as welcome additions to the critical corpus. Although there is a certain degree of overlap, to the extent that both deal with the fourteenth-century Franciscan William Herebert and with ‘Antigone’s song’ from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (of which more in a moment), the two books could scarcely be more different in approach. Boffey and Whitehead provide nineteen essays, all but two of which focus tightly upon specific texts, grouped under the themes of Affect, Visuality, Mouvance, and Transformation, and Words, Music, and Speech. The reader is greatly helped by the practice of citing at the outset the poem to be discussed, and by notes cross-referencing other essays in the volume that touch on related questions. The earliest poems discussed date from the thirteenth century; the latest is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘In eternum’. Ingrid Nelson, by contrast, approaches her texts from a very specific theoretical perspective, stating that her study (in an echo of the New Historicist Louis Montrose) ‘defines the medieval lyric genre as much by what it does (its cultural work) as by what it is (its formal features)’ (p. 6). She, too, begins in the early Middle English period and ends with Wyatt; her book had, in fact, appeared in time for Boffey and Whitehead to engage with it briefly in their introduction. Two broad questions are posed by both approaches. One is the perennially thorny issue of generic definition: ‘lyric’, with its associations with music and with the evocation of deeply experienced emotion, fits well with many shorter [End Page 224] poems written in the Middle Ages, but not so well with others that are essentially didactic, political, or comic. While opting, faut de mieux, to employ the term, both Boffey and Whitehead on the one hand and Nelson on the other acknowledge the problem: for Nelson, indeed, it is the focus upon cultural practice that may offer a way out of the difficulty, although for this reader at least it would take a much more wide-ranging body of material to establish the case. The other important dimension, clearly represented in both volumes but inviting much more exploration, arises from what has been called the ‘codicological turn’ in scholarship, a greater awareness both of the importance of manuscript context in understanding how texts were read (or used) and of the significance of scribal intervention in shaping and reshaping the texts themselves. The theme is firmly established in Tom Duncan’s opening chapter of the collaborative volume, his meticulous analysis of the minutiae of textual transmission raising crucial questions for any potential editor, but hinting too at interpretative issues that recur in many of the subsequent readings, such as that by A. S. Lazikant of a poem in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.14.39, or Michael P. Kuczynski’s study of one in Eton College MS 36, or Natalie Jones...
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