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

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 for authorship have emerged.² Although they make repeated reference to the monarchy, to parliament, to controversies surrounding the church, and to foreign political affairs, they are also so shot through with the traditional and sentential maxims of penitential moralism that any topical particulars are quickly absorbed by the songs' equally strong impulse to generality. They can be reasonably dated to the first two decades of the fifteenth century, and they also seem to demand sensitivity to the limits of their presumed expressive environment—that is, to an understanding of what could be said, and what not, and by whom. At the same time, they lay a strong claim to a style of "common" voice central to the politically motivated poetry of the period.³ As Vincent Gillespie has recently noted, the collection "offers the challenge of social and political immediacy in a particularly acute form" and in a uniquely extensive example of formal lyric practice.⁴ Confected of equal parts religion and politics, the Digby Poems are thus an interpretive challenge, demanding a specific historical context even as they work against their own reduction to mere commentary on early Henrician rule.

Given all this—and despite their high literary quality—it is perhaps not surprising that the songs have had a much more consistent presence in the work of historians than literary scholars. Frequently they have been mined for pithy statements of political sentiment, even as they have gone wanting for any comprehensive analysis for over a century.⁵ The recent new edition by Helen Barr goes a long way toward rectifying this imbalance by replacing Kail's incomplete editorial apparatus and occasionally inaccurate text. Barr's edition also offers a salutary corrective to a strictly political approach by providing a comprehensive account of the songs' scriptural, liturgical, and devotional contexts, as well as an initial map of the "lexical clusters" informing them.⁶ For from beginning to end, the lyrics are animated by a large but discrete set of themes. Terms, phrases, and even entire lines are repeated; concepts and motifs are deployed and modified in a manner apparently both conscious and in some ways unconscious, as the lexis of sociopolitical deliberation works itself out in the songcraft of one anonymous writer.

The lyrics would thus seem poised to benefit from the lively cultural turn in recent political histories of the fifteenth century, much of it under the aegis of the so-called "New Constitutionalism," as well as from the salutary rapprochement between historical study and literary analysis.⁷ Recent scholarship has stressed the development of "languages" or vocabularies of cultural, political, and institutional engagement. So we have learned of "languages of power," "languages of statecraft," "languages of antagonism," the ideologies of parliament, petition, the noble household, and more, all in an effort to better understand the nuances of discourse cross-influencing historical and literary writing in late medieval England.⁸ It is with this broad understanding of a sociopolitical vocabulary that I would like to approach the lyrics as a collection speaking specifically to the constitutional situation of their moment. It would be unreasonable to attempt...