Middle English Verse Research Articles

Systematicity, a missing term in historical metrics

This essay identifies two persistent problems in the historical study of meter—nonconformant metrical patterns and metrical change—and offers a new term as a conceptual tool for understanding their interdependence. The term ‘systematic’ denotes metrical patterns that conform to synchronically operant metrical principles. The corresponding term ‘asystematic’ denotes the minority of actually occurring metrical patterns that fall outside the metrical system as such for historical reasons. All systematic patterns are necessarily metrical, but not all metrical patterns are systematic. It is argued that the systematicity/metricality distinction in historical metrics is analogous to the regularity/grammaticality distinction in historical linguistics and similarly fundamental to historical analysis. By introducing a new technical term, this essay seeks to shift the metrist’s object of study from the metrical system qua system to meter as a complex historical experience. The value of the concept of systematicity is illustrated through three case studies in asystematic metrical patterns from early English poetic traditions: verses with three metrical positions in Beowulf, lines with masculine ending in Middle English alliterative verse, and the infamous ‘broken-backed lines’ in the pentameter of John Lydgate. In each case, it is argued that the contrast between systematic and asystematic metrical patterns illuminates the diverse historical and perceptual negotiations that inevitably lie behind metered texts.

A Middle English Poem on a Binding Fragment: an Early Valentine?

On the parchment binding fragment which is now Cambridge, Trinity College, R.2.70 are twenty-five lines of Middle English verse, copied in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and accompanied by an image of a pierced heart. Preceded by a couplet which may or may not form a part of what follows, the lines take the form of three rhyme royal stanzas with concluding four-line envoy. They constitute a lover’s petition, addressed to ‘Susane’, asking for merciful treatment and offering compliments of a mostly conventional kind. The tone of the poem is difficult to assess, since at times it humorously mocks features of the late medieval courtly love lyric. Certain features identify it as a love epistle, however, signed off in covert terms by the sender in the envoy, and intended for delivery at some point towards the end of winter; and it is similar in a number of respects to surviving examples of poems associated with Valentine’s day. The original function of the parchment on which the poem was written is unclear, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the decorated poem was copied on to a single small piece of parchment as a missive for delivery. It may thus constitute a very early example of a Valentine’s day message.

Null subjects in Middle English

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from thePenn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Proseand the newParsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

Reassessing Latin influence on he/she this in Middle English

ABSTRACTThis paper offers the first comprehensive survey of the combination of a third person singular pronoun and the demonstrative pronoun this, which is assumed to be peculiar to Middle English. Through a close analysis of the data extracted from the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, particular attention is paid to how far this usage is attributable to direct Latin influence, as has been previously suggested. A detailed study of the Wycliffite Bible examines how often Latin demonstrative pronouns which refer to persons in the Vulgate (e.g. hic, iste) are translated as he/she this. It will be demonstrated that, other than such translation effects, the pronominal combination is also subject to several conditioning factors such as the Northern dialect, metrical requirements and the set of contexts where a special emphasis is very likely to be intended on the person in question.

‘He That No Good Can’: An Unrecorded Copy of a Middle English Proverb

OXFORD, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 99 is a late fourteenth-century manuscript copied in one hand on paper. It contains a copy of the synodal statutes of William Raleigh, followed by an idiosyncratic copy of the Middle English poem The Prick of Conscience . 1 The scribe identifies himself in his colophon as ‘Frater Iohannes stanys canonic us Thetfordie’. 2 As the available descriptions indicate, this is a fascinating book, and its copying, provenance, and use merit more detailed treatment elsewhere. 3 For the present purpose, however, the key text in the book is a copy of Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse 1162.8 in a fifteenth-century hand—not the hand of the scribe—in the bottom margin of one page. 4 To my knowledge this instance has not previously been recorded. 5 It reads: The hand is essentially modelled on anglicana in its ductus and most of its letter-forms, though it has the single-compartment secretary a , as was common in fifteenth-century anglicana, and alternates between an anglicana w for ‘wylle’ and an open secretary w for ‘warvne’. (I have no explanation for the use of the form ‘warvne’ for ‘warne’, unless it is a mistake.) The sample size is very small but I would tentatively date this writing to the second half of the fifteenth century. It shares some suggestive common features with some of the writing in the collection of songs and carols which is now Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e.1, although it is not identical to any of the hands in that manuscript. 7 For example, the hand that writes 11 r –48 r shares the approach-stroke on word-initial m , the rightwards lean of the looped ascender of h and the leftwards curve of the stem of t . The hand that copies the proverb in MS Digby 99 also displays a hint of the rightwards flick at the bottom of the descender of y which is more pronounced in MS Eng. poet. e.1. The first hand’s activity in MS Eng. poet. e.1 probably dates from the end of the fifteenth century, and it has been suggested that its dialect is locatable to South-West Norfolk; dialect is not cast-iron evidence for a manuscript’s place of production and reading, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary this localization might put this manuscript in the same part of Norfolk as Thetford, where MS Digby 99 was copied. 8 The text is a proverbial couplet, although here it is copied as a xaxa stanza. A four-part brace has been added on the right in text-ink; since the brace braces every line it must denote verse in general, or the idea of rhyme, rather than the actual rhyme-scheme. The scribe may have chosen this arrangement simply because the pages of MS Digby 99 are not very wide.

Imago Mortis

Imago Mortis Bridget Whearty Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Ashby Kinch. Leiden: Brill, 2013. <http://www.brill.com/imago-mortis> One of the joys of being a medievalist today is the exploding growth of digital access. It seems that every month a new library or museum announces an ambitious digitization program. In the face of this glut of availability, there is a pressing need for smart studies engaging deeply with medieval images. Ashby Kinch’s Imago Mortis: Mediating Image of Death in Late Medieval Book Culture is one such study. Imago Mortis is an ambitious book, exploring cross-pollinations between didactic and literary works, manuscript illumination, wall paintings, cadaver tombs, late medieval religious traditions on the commemoration of the dead, and local and international political maneuvering in England and English-occupied Paris during the 1420s and 30s. Through these nodes, Kinch traces how visual and verbal artists draw on, adapt, and transform each other’s traditions in ways that are sometimes complementary, sometimes competitive, and nearly always in the service of making death more palatable to their powerful patrons. It would have been significantly easier to study one or two of these topics more deeply and in isolation, but it is in teasing out this vast network that Imago Mortis does its most valuable work. As Kinch puts it, “attending closely to the creative re-interpretation of both conventional and novel images of death in the medieval period opens up important dialogues: between literary and visual forms; between artists and the patrons for whom they produced their work; between the political and religious institutions that competed for the psychological and social energies of the late medieval individual; and between ourselves and the past” (276). In Chapter One, “Affirmative Visions of Dying in Illustrations of Henry Suso’s ‘De Scientia,’” Kinch shows how three manuscripts pair Suso’s vision of the lonely bad death with illustrations showing a good end surrounded by community. For the visual artists illuminating these manuscripts, Moriens, the dying one, is supported in death by the same institutions that supported him in life: a good friend (in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen Cod. gall. 28), a loving family (in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV. III), and an attending cleric (in London, British Library, Additional MS 37049). Rather than dismissing these craftsmen as bad readers of the texts they illustrate, Kinch reads disagreements between Suso’s text and accompanying illustrations as visual [End Page 301] artists’ thoughtful critiques and deliberate transformation of the textual tradition they accompany. Chapter Two, “Verbo-Visual Mirrors of Mortality in Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Lerne for to Die’” turns to the only extant Middle English verse translation of Suso’s “De Scientia.” Although it begins by analyzing a deathbed illustration in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 53, this chapter is not really concerned with connecting Hoccleve’s poem with a specific death culture, visual arts tradition. Instead, it traces how Hoccleve’s verse aestheticizes Suso’s Latin prose, arguing that this highly wrought poetic form serves as a tool for self-promotion, highlighting the English writer and his virtuosity. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Hoccleve differentiates himself from Chaucer through his preoccupation with death and loneliness, Kinch argues that Hoccleve depicts Chaucer as the poet who transcends death, but that he portrays himself as a poet who faces death, thus creating a space for himself outside of Chaucer’s shadow as well as outside the reach of meddling friends and worldly ambition. The intimate links between worldly ambition and patronage are a central topic of Chapter Three, “Commemorating Power in the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead,” which analyzes luxury images of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Here Kinch reveals how aristocrats co-opt an art form that began as clerical critique of aristocratic power. Through patronage of exquisite books and monuments, aristocrats turned this satire of their class’s failings to their advantage. The leveling power of death turns out to be something of a lie when patronage is taken into account. All men must die, but the wealthy can purchase rich memorials that ensure the survival of their names and memories, urging those...

Anke Timmermann. Verse and Transmutation: A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry (Critical Editions and Studies). (History of Science and Medicine Library, 42; Medieval and Early Modern Science, 21.) xiv + 374 pp., bibl., index. Leiden: Brill, 2013. $171 (cloth).

Anke Timmermann. <i>Verse and Transmutation: A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry (Critical Editions and Studies)</i>. (History of Science and Medicine Library, 42; Medieval and Early Modern Science, 21.) xiv + 374 pp., bibl., index. Leiden: Brill, 2013. $171 (cloth).

Additions to the Index of Middle English Verse: Unpublished Verse 'Longinus' and 'Job' Charms in British Library, MS Sloane 2187

Additions to the Index of Middle English Verse: Unpublished Verse 'Longinus' and 'Job' Charms in British Library, MS Sloane 2187

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

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.

The Middle English Circa instans: A Pharmacopoeia from Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 307

This article discusses and presents an edition of a Middle English pharmacopoeia based on the Latin Circa instans, which is found in Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 307 (U.7.1), fols. 167r–172v. The Circa instans survives in many copies and languages, but the Middle English version has been virtually unexplored and no text of it has been edited previously. The current study contributes to our knowledge of the diffusion and transmission of the Circa instans in England and to the history of medicine in the Middle Ages.

Initial Position in the Middle English Verse Line

This paper establishes that spelling forms collected from initial position in the Middle English verse line have unique characteristics, and it discusses why this is so. The paper first addresses scribal copying practices, before describing the utility of letter-based n-gram models in objectively comparing scribal copies in terms of their spelling. Testing of models trained on a corpus totalling ten manuscripts demonstrates that initial position regularly prompted scribes to suppress their tendency to introduce their own spelling forms in favour of replicating those encountered in their exemplars. The discussion attributes this behaviour to the operation of two mechanisms. One mechanism is psycholinguistic in origin, while the other is rooted in manuscripts' production and so implies a codicological dimension to spelling variation.

The Language of William Dunbar: Middle Scots or Early Modern Scots?

This paper provides linguistic arguments for a new periodisation of the Scots language where adequate space for the Renaissance, or the early modern period, would be created. In his search for the definition of the ‘middle’ period in Germanic languages, Roger Lass (2000) selected a range of linguistic features whose absence or presence would testify to a specific degree of archaism in the language of a given author, with special attention paid to Middle English poetry. This paper uses the same methodology to establish whether the language of William Dunbar warrants the label ‘middle’, which is traditionally applied to his writing, or perhaps a less anachronistic designation would be appropriate. A series of linguistic tests (phonological and morphological) proves that the language used in Dunbar’s poetry at the beginning of the sixteenth century does not qualify as a ‘middle’ stage in the history of a Germanic language. It is argued that, if one wants to achieve coherence with other Germanic periodisations on linguistic grounds, one should treat William Dunbar’s language as early modern Scots.

Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages by Michelle Karnes (review)

Reviewed by: Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages by Michelle Karnes Michael G. Sargent Michelle Karnes. Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 280. $50.00 cloth. Michelle Karnes has written a thought-provoking argument for the elevation of the role of the imagination in our perception of late medieval contemplative and devotional thought. Specifically, she argues that a synthesis of elements of Scholastic and Augustinian psychology achieved by Bonaventure led to the promotion of the power of imagination from its lower role (as it is usually conceived) in the memory and projection of sense impressions into the cognitive faculty, so that it came to have a function in the higher cognition of those ideas that are eternally in the mind of God: that it is through the functioning of the power of imagination that we know the highest truths that the human mind is capable of knowing. This synthesis worked out in Bonaventuran psychology, [End Page 320] Karnes goes on to point out, characterizes Bonaventure’s authentic works of devout, imaginative meditation, and further influences the circle of works attributed to him in the later Middle Ages, like the Stimulus amoris and the Meditationes vitae Christi. But it was dismissed by later medieval English writers like Walter Hilton (if it was indeed he who wrote the Prickynge of Love) and Nicholas Love, in whose vernacular versions of these pseudo-Bonaventuran works imagination was reduced once more to the lower rank that it had held in the monastic tradition as a helpful but problematically illusory aspect of sensuality. Karnes’s study is divided into six chapters: the first provides an overview of classical and early medieval thought on the imagination, beginning with Plato and the Neoplatonists; focusing on Aristotle; and continuing through the medieval Aristotelian/Scholastic tradition, including Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas. The second chapter treats first of Augustinian thought on imagination (particularly in De Trinitate) before proceeding to deal with Bonaventure’s philosophical writings. The third shows how the Bonaventuran philosophical position on imagination expressed itself in the devotional writings that were assuredly written by him; the fourth follows this emanation of influence into the most prominent Latin devotional writing in the “Bonaventuran” tradition, the Stimulus amoris and the Meditationes vitae Christi, as well as Suso’s Horologium sapientiae and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi. The sixth chapter follows directly on from this, demonstrating what happened to the Bonaventuran strand of imaginative contemplation in the two prominent Middle English versions of the Stimulus and the Meditationes, the Prickynge of Love and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The fifth chapter interrupts the flow of this argument, in an excursus on “Imaginatif” in Piers Plowman that demonstrates the usefulness of this study to those other than specialists in contemplative and devotional literature. The crux of Karnes’s argument lies in her observation that Bonaventure synthesized the late medieval Aristotelian conceptualization of the operation of the agent intellect in illuminating the intelligible species abstracted from common sense perception as phantasmata by a higher-level form of imagination, with Augustine’s trinitarian psychology, according to which reason illuminates the intelligible species that reside eternally in memory. For Augustine, as Karnes demonstrates with admirable lucidity, the soul is a created trinity made in the image and likeness [End Page 321] of the uncreated Trinity: memory in the individual human soul is the image of the Father, in whom eternal truth resides; reason is the image of the Son, the Word in whom/which eternal truth expresses itself; and will is the image of the Holy Spirit, the love that flows from this truth to this truth. For Bonaventure, as Karnes argues, the Son, the Word of the Augustinian Trinity—through which we know the ideas (“verba” or “species”) that reside properly in the Mind, the Father (to the limited extent that we do know them)—functions in the individual human soul in the same way as the Aristotelian/Scholastic agent intellect in illuminating the intelligible species. I am not certain that I am convinced by this, but I will admit that my undergraduate study of medieval...

A Discovery of the only Middle English Version of the Legenda Aurea Prologue in The Assembly of Gods

A Discovery of the only Middle English Version of the Legenda Aurea Prologue in The Assembly of Gods

Practicing literary theory in the Middle Ages: ethics and the mixed form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve

Johnson's book is rewarding work of literary criticism. It sets out to trace the philosophical and aesthetic function of the (prosimetrum, i.e., the oscillation between lyrical verse and didactic prose) in the Consolation of Boethius and its legacy in late-medieval vernacular literary traditions. Through lucid close readings, it also reveals how literary texts enact ethical transformations through their literary form. The chapter on Gower carefully attends to the dynamic relationship between form and content throughout the CA. In her chapter 4, Johnson investigates two facets of the work's mixed nature: its integration of verse and prose, and its use of two mutually informing languages (Latin and Middle English). The chapter treats Usk's Testament of Love alongside Gower's CA. Johnson observes how both authors adopt a mask--a genre-based persona through which a sociopolitical critique with can be launched (166). Johnson reads Gower's sudden shift into rhyme royal stanzas in the verse epistle at the end of the CA as formal allusion to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Gower, like his contemporary, uses stanzas [in the epistle] to bumper syntactic units at the level of the sentence, and the formal aspects of this passage set it apart from Gower's use of enjambment elsewhere (192). Through formal juxtapositions and shifts in narrative voice, Gower enacts a comical revision and reinterrogation of Boethian modes of consolation (198). The most revealing aspect of Johnson's analysis its attention to the interplay between glosses and Middle English verse in the CA. She deftly reveals how prosimetrum enacts both formal and linguistic mode of code-switching. Gower's prose glosses showcase the complexity and alterity of Middle English verses and present the Middle English as its own sort of Latin with philosophical heft that demands critical unpacking (191). Through its mixed form, the CA effectively breaks down rigid binary between and the vernacular. Since Johnson's chapter on Gower only discusses the CA, the integrative function of prose and verse in his major and French works remains unexplored. Nonetheless, the book offers fruitful readings of the CA that not only encourage new approaches to literary Boethianism but also restore the importance of form and aesthetics to an understanding of Gowerian ethics. [Jonathan Hsy. Copyright JGN 33.1].

St Fremund, Fact and Fiction

The Anglo-Saxon Saint Fremund has often been regarded as purely imaginary. However, a comparison of the various Latin and the one Middle English vitae discloses that the passio and translatio almost certainly go back to an Anglo-Saxon tradition, and that a cult which probably originated in Anglo-Saxon times persisted well into the 16th century. That the tradition was essentially local is borne out by detailed geographical references, especially in the Middle English version. The Life of St Fremund that has come down to us is presumably a mixture of Anglo-Saxon usage and post-1066 Norman requirements. The Middle English vita has been preserved in one manuscript only, British Library Stowe 949, produced close to the centre of St Fremund’s cult. As it has never been edited before an edition is provided in the Appendix.

Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

The Bound Earth in Patience and Other Middle English Poetry

The Bound Earth in Patience and Other Middle English Poetry

The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377–1422 by David K. Coley (review)

The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377–1422 by David K. Coley (review)

"THE STORIE OF ASNETH": A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY COMMISSION AND THE MYSTERY OF ITS EPILOGUE

The Storie of Asneth is a fifteenth-century poem, written in heavily alliterating rhyme royal stanzas, which retells the apocryphal story of how Joseph, son of Jacob, came to marry the Egyptian Asneth and have children with her: events that are briefly mentioned in Genesis 41, verses 45 and 50. The story was little known in England, and the fifteenth century might seem a surprising time for an English version of a biblical apocryphon to be written. However, in the prologue to the poem the narrator explains that he translated it from Latin at the request of a lady:As I on hilly halkes logged me late,Biside ny of a Ladi sone was I war;La Bele me desired in Englysh to translateThe Latyn of that lady, Asneth Putifar. (lines 1-4)1After some demurral, as he protests his poor abilities, he agrees to take on the translation, following his Lady's advice:'That servant ys not to blame, but fully excused,That meketh hym to his maystresse, and doth as he can.' (lines 23 f.)And the prologue ends with him addressing the Lady:And yf ye fynde fautes, grave hem with yowr glose,I pray yow thus, my maystresse, of yowre good grace, (lines 3if.)That final direct address suggests that the prologue is a fictionalized version of a real relationship between the poet and the Lady whom he serves.2 This article will explore why the Storie might have been commissioned in the fifteenth century, and consider its place in contemporary religious and literary cultures. I will argue that, although Russell A. Peck's inclusion of the Storie in a collection of Middle English biblical poetry is not inappropriate, the Storie has more features in common with contemporary saints' lives, while meeting a largely unmet demand for a religious story that would resonate better with secular, married women than tales of virgin martyrs. And, although at this distance it is probably impossible to identify its original patron, I will argue that its prologue, its semi-detached epilogue, and certain details of the poem proper show that its original meaning was closely bound up with that patron's identity. By proposing one candidate for the role I will explore how the poem might have reflected her values, aspirations, and religious tastes. Along the way, I hope to correct some misconceptions in the existing scholarship about the poem's precise source and its presentation in MS Ellesmere 26. A. 13.IThe story of Joseph andAseneth first appeared some time between the first century bc and the second century AD.3 Christoph Burchard has shown that - despite the claims of its nineteenth-century editor Batiffol - the text is most likely to have been composed in Greek by a Jewish author for a Jewish audience, probably in Egypt. It circulated widely and was translated into other languages, and its popularity in the twelfth century may have prompted the making of two Latin translations before 1200.4 Burchard proposes that one version, which he designates Li, may have been composed at Christ Church, Canterbury, and shows that the manuscripts containing this text were all copied in England between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.5 The story was probably best known in late medieval England through Vincent of Beauvais's abbreviated version in his Speculum historiale (c.i 26o).6 But it was relatively obscure: the only reference to Aseneth in Middle English outside The Storie of Asneth is in Lydgate's poem 'To Mary, the Queen of Heaven', where he mentions Assenek of Egypt, of beute pereles' (line jj).7 The Storie does not use Vincent's version as a source, as R. A. Dwyer has demonstrated, but a few verbal details reveal that it derives from a Latin text - probably a full length Li text.8 (Peck suggests that Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 424 could have been the specific source, but there is little evidence to support this, and there must also be doubt over the only alternative he discusses, CCCC MS 288. …