In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, and: Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)
  • Daniel Birkholz
My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay. Edited by Susanna Fein. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009. Pp. xx + 355. $25.
Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302). By John the Blind Audelay; edited by Susanna Fein. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009. Pp. x + 389. $23.

Susanna Fein has done yeomanly heroic editorial work once again. Actually, make that "again, and yet again," in two substantial Medieval Institute publications that are sure to be placed alongside one another on the shelf. My opening oxymoron—"yeomanly heroic"—suits not just Fein herself, familiar to many from her work as editor of The Chaucer Review and of the indispensible Studies in the Harley Manuscript (2000). The phrase also describes her subject in these books, the fifteenth-century lyric poet and chantry priest known as John the Blind Audelay. As Fein and her collaborators demonstrate to good effect, however, the [End Page 418] audaciously self-abnegating Audelay is more aptly described in the reverse: as chantry priest first, and lyric poet second.

In addition to being an accomplished compiler of vernacular devotions, John Audelay, though obscure, happens to be one of medieval England's few nameable and placeable lyric poets. Indeed, Blind Audelay "clearly relishes self-ascription," variations on his moniker appearing sixteen times on the thirty-five surviving leaves of his "thoughtfully ordered" (if "perhaps crudely done") book (Poems, pp. 1, 7). Dating ca. 1426-1431, Douce 302—the sole manuscript of his work—intercalates Audelay's own compositions (distinguishable by his signature thirteen-line stanza) with texts culled from elsewhere. Despite lacking up to nineteen front-lying folios, Douce 302 appears to have been produced under Audelay's supervision; its opening "likely" included, Fein guesses, "yet more ascriptions" plus a contentslist and preface "meant to emphasize the prevailing presence" of its chantry-bound compiler (pp. 4-5). Yet if, following Fein and company's lead, I belabor Blind Audelay's elevation of his métier as Haughmond Abbey chantry priest (and before that, household chaplain to the notorious Lord Richard Lestrange, d.1449) over and above his literary callings, I do so primarily to endorse one of these volumes' key themes: that Audelay's book-making impulses are best understood as products "of a contrition-wracked soul moved to make open declaration of himself as penitent chaplain" (p. 3), rather than as literary exercises composed for their own sake. For a reviewer with no prior investment, however, to embrace this point is also to begin tracing the lineaments of a quibbling minor theme, one that cannot help but be encountered by those who shall, by virtue of Fein's good scholarly offices, come to meet her spiritually doughty protagonist.

Protagonist is no idle word choice. A fascinating crux these books raise concerns the vexed relationship between a writer's extant "work" (in this case, MS Douce 302) and whatever "life" (or set of documentary markers) might usefully be affixed to it. Regarding Audelay's biography, the essentials are that he participates on his patron's behalf in an infamous, bloody fray in a London church in 1417; and that following sharp reproval, "social trauma," and public penance for all involved, he retires from household service to become, by 1424, "furst prest" of Lord Lestrange's newly endowed family chantry at Haughmond, an Augustinian house near Knockin, Shropshire (Poems, p. 6). The scandal of 1417 and the Douce Manuscript of ca. 1426 "obviously inform one another in a biographical sense," observes Michael J. Bennett, whose historicist digging ("John Audelay: Life Records and Heaven's Ladder") helps "give the participant in the affray in the London church a future, and the poet at Haughmond a past" (My Wyl, p. 38). Fein regards the chantry appointment as a reward for "years of active service" (Poems, p. 6), but Bennett sees "[no] ordinary retirement," even if Audelay "was probably already in ill health and losing his sight"—his "initial claustration" being perhaps "part of the disciplinary process" (My...

pdf

Share