Theological Sophistication and the Middle English Religious Lyric: A Polemic

For Seint Paul seith that al that writen is, To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis.

—geoffrey chaucer,nun’s priest’s t’s tale¹

Impressive as it is, the 1999 Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature edited by David Wallace “failed to offer an account of the [Middle English] lyrics.” ² That is not my own observation, although I could hardly dispute it. I quote from the introduction to Thomas G. Duncan’s invaluable collection of essays by various expert hands, A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (2005), which in the face of the Cambridge History’s lapse must serve students of Middle English—alongside Rosemary Greentree’s exhaustive annotated bibliography, The Middle English Lyric and Short Poem (2001)—as an important adjunct to Wallace’s effort. ³ It would be inaccurate to say that the lyrics, and in particular the Middle English religious lyrics, are nowhere mentioned in the Cambridge History. The largest surviving corpus of Middle English verse, however, appears in a scant twenty-five of the Cambridge History’s 1,043 pages, noted almost idly across sustained and earnest chapters on “Latinitas,” “Writing in Ireland,” “Vox populi and the Literature of 1381,” and, aptly enough, given my gripe about the History’s neglect of the lyrics, “The Experience of Exclusion : Literature and Politics in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII” (my emphasis). ⁴

Not all of the Cambridge History’s chapters are linguistic, social, or political in their approaches, either. Certain traditional Middle English genres—for example, alliterative poetry, contemplative writing, and the romances—receive full-length analytical attention. The lyrics, however, do not. Yet lyrics permeated Middle English culture. As Julia Boffey notes in her superb contribution to Duncan’s Companion, “lyric material . . . seems to have played a part in almost all forms of cultural production throughout the medieval period,” turning up not only in manuscripts (lyric’s usual context) but in paintings and stained glass windows, and even on jewelry and housewares—plates and cups. ⁵ One could perhaps pour out a drink on a Saturday, after a tough week of labor, and note, scrolled around the mug, “Þis world fareþ as a Fantasye!” The religious lyric thus had multiple refined and quotidian cultural contexts in medieval England. Anthologies, however, are the customary mode of access to lyrics by students and also scholars, and they tend to obscure these contexts. ⁶ If we take the Cambridge History as a measure of scholarly interest itself, lyrics barely seem to rate for the major critics of Middle English today. The genre’s only real advocate in the Cambridge History is John Fleming, who discusses for a couple of suggestive pages “The friars and the lyric,” because of the important (but, it must be said, overemphasized) influence of Franciscan spirituality and particular Franciscans on this kind of Middle English poetry. ⁷ Thomas Hahn provides for the Cambridge History, in his fine chapter on “Early Middle English,” a couple of persuasive pages about one of the more famous Middle English lyrics associated by name with a particular Franciscan, the theologian Thomas of Hales (fl. ca. 1250)—the enigmatic Luve Ron —a poem also mentioned briefly by Fleming. ⁸ But since Hahn’s view is that Luve Ron is a special case, his reading (compelling as it is) suggests little about the comprehensive, theological nature of lyric poetry on religious themes in Middle English.

Nor, oddly, has the religious lyric figured much in the expansive literature on Middle English vernacular theology. ⁹ Across the long chronology represented by this poetry (ca. 1000–1500), many of its persistent themes are the same as those explored, at greater prosaic length, by such figures as Richard Rolle (d. 1349) and Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416): the human soul’s distance from and desire for union with God; the related idea of man’s failure, through sin, to embody a spiritual ideal he nevertheless is capable both of imagining and exploring (that is, the dilemma of human culpability); the doctrine of the atonement, especially as this relates to Christ...