A new and comprehensive anthology of medieval lyrics and carols, in new
editions, with introduction and commentary.
Lyrics and carols are two of the most important types of medieval
literature. This anthology provides a generous and wide-ranging
selection, beginning with the first lyrics in English to celebrate love
as romantic devotion to a woman, and including all pre-Chaucerian love
lyrics (other than a few brief snatches). Poems by Chaucer and his
successors present the courtly game of love in its sophisticated later
medieval form, while devotional lyrics portray the tenderness of the
later medieval response to Christ as lover and beloved and to the Virgin
Mary with the infant Jesus, Mary as sorrowing mother and as Queen of
Heaven. Fully represented also are lyrics on characteristically medieval
moral and penitential themes, alongside miscellaneous lyrics such as
drinking and dancing songs, ballads, satires, poems of wit, humour and
sexual innuendo, accounts of lecherous priests, minstrels mocking their
audiences, and women vividly listing their lovers' inadequacies.
The texts are edited anew, accompanied with a textual apparatus
detailing manuscript readings where emendations have been made to
restore sense, metre and rhyme. The language of pre-Chaucerian poems has
been normalised to accord with the dialect of late fourteenth-century
London ("Chaucerian English"), and unfamiliar spellings in later lyrics
have been regularized. Readability is further aided by line-by-line
glosses. An extensive introduction offers an appraisal of the forms,
themes and contexts of the lyrics and a full discussion of their
language and metre, while a comprehensive commentary gives further
essential information.
Thomas G. Duncan is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of English
at St Andrews University.
