On Valentine’s Day, of course, a fifteenth-century Valentine’s ballade. By coincidence, I found this one in the manuscript which preserves the proverbial text translated for Margaret of Anjou which I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. It was printed once in Skeat’s multi-volume Works of Chaucer, but not much looked at since, I think. I like the tone of voice in this lyric: the histrionic lover, completely and utterly devoted, but also full of a sense of his own absurdity and the unfairness of love.
Category Archives: late Middle English
Fit for a Queen
This post is really just the story of how one thing leads to another in research. It’s also to tell you about what I’ve been working on in the last three weeks, a sudden and unexpected digression from my poetics book. It’s also to highlight the role of noblewomen in the commissioning of English verse in the middle of the fifteenth century.
Over New Year’s, I went to the British Library to look at a fifteenth-century manuscript with a little-known prologue to a little-known text. The text, the Liber Proverbiorum, is a verse translation of an early fourteenth-century collection of proverbs and wise sayings by the friar and preacher Nicole Bozon. The text as a whole had been edited in two American PhD dissertations, but these were hard to get hold of, so I went to look at it myself. Continue reading Fit for a Queen
Save us, O Lord, from Dithering!
In this guest post, Sheri Smith, postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University, explains the surprising references to Chaucer’s Griselda and Custance in a late fifteenth-century poem.
Reading Jenni’s post on the fifteenth-century poem ‘Alas quid eligam ignoro’, I was struck by the poet’s invocation of Susannah, Griselda and Custance in a prayer asking for guidance. This seemed an unusual combination of biblical and literary figures which just so happened to bring together two strands of my own research into thirteenth- and fourteenth-century petitionary prayers and Chaucer’s use of prayer in his poetry.
In the poem, the narrator and his friend find themselves at a loss after dismissing the various career options open to them. The poet calls to mind the example of Susannah, who, when forced to choose between consenting to sin and being put to death, was rescued from death by God. With Susannah’s difficult choice to inspire him, the poet then beseeches God for guidance in his own decision-making, invoking his intervention in the lives of St Paul, Griselda and Custance.
The Provocative Fifteenth Century Conference
UPDATE: You can listen to the conference talks HERE.
Continue reading The Provocative Fifteenth Century Conference
What I shall choose,
I know not
I have been chasing up various references to poetic terminology in a little anthology from 1953 called Cambridge Middle English Lyrics, edited by Henry A Person. One of the poems is not very well known, because (as far as I can tell) it has only been printed once in this rather obscure little book. But it deserves to be a little better known, because it is a very entertaining account of the difficulty of choosing a career in the fifteenth century, and of the sort of mind who is better at seeing difficulties than seeing possibilities.
What a printer said to a manuscript…
I’m still exploring the envoy (or lenvoy in Middle English), a section of dedication, epilogue, parting words or direct address added to a text. As well as envoys written by poets to their own poems, and by readers to someone else’s poem, I’ve also been reading envoys added by printers to late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printed books. There are many more short poems added to early printed books than I had realised, and they are a great source of terms for my poetics glossary. One of the best writers of an envoy was the printer Robert Copland.
The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English
Tomorrow I’m off to London to attend the Biennial London Chaucer Conference. I’m speaking on Saturday morning in a session on ‘Literary Technologies’. The title of my short paper is ‘The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English’. It discusses verse-technology and verse-terminology in fourteenth and fifteenth century English poetry, looking especially at balades and lenvoys. I look at the ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer’ at the end of the Clerk‘s Tale, at Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and at The Kingis Quair.
Continue reading The Techne of Verse-Making: Poetry’s Termes in Middle English
Go weep with Proserpina…
I’ve been exploring the lenvoye this week, both as a form and as a technical term. In medieval French poetry, an envoi is the final stanza of a ballade in which the poem is sent on its way to its audience or addressee. It’s borrowed into late medieval English poetry by Chaucer, and the lenvoye quickly becomes several different things at once. It can be part of a poem in which an author speaks directly to his audience (in contrast to the narrative subjectivity so well described by A C Spearing). It can be a final section of a poem, more elaborate in form than that which precedes it. It can be a place for the author to speak to or about the work as a whole, offering a commentary or conclusion.
Good and Bad Stanzas
Some medieval English playwrights use different types of stanza for different types of characters. In the fifteenth-century morality play Mankind, the personification Mercy begins the play speaking in stanzas which are often called octaves, rhyming ababbcbc (also sometimes called eight-line ballade stanzas, or Monk’s Tale stanzas following their use by Chaucer). This stanza form is often used for moral or educational writing in later Middle English poetry. This is a good fit for Mercy’s character, as he begins the play in priestly guise, reminding the audience to persevere in good works and to avoid sin.
Making happy stanzas
My last post looked at characters sharing lines and stanzas in Middle English cycle plays. These shared lines and stanzas were sometimes ominous or implicative, showing how characters are drawn into evil or collaborate in cruelty. But joining together in the construction of a stanza can also signal joy and celebration in these plays. This post shows you some of these spectacular collaborative stanzas in Middle English drama.