Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics: The Implications of Mobility, c. 1300–1351

Wiþ longyng y am lad,	afflicted
on molde y waxe mad,	earth
a maide marreþ me;
y grede, y grone, vnglad,	lament
for selden y am sad	seldom; sober, unmoved
þat semly forte se.	fair one
Leuedi, þou rewe me!	beloved; have pity on
To rouþe þou hauest me rad.	sorrow; brought
Be bote of þat y bad;	remedy
my lyf is long on þe.	depends on

The Lover’s Complaint (G. L. Brook, The Harley Lyrics, #5.1–10)¹

This essay is about poetry, community, and medieval literary history. To be more precise, it is about the poetry of community, and how communities (past and present) shape and locate themselves through the medium of poetry. Such group articulation involves more than just the composition of text. At least as important are the circulation, grounding, and evaluation of poetry, which is to say, its incorporation by authorized social bodies. It is by no means incidental that the poems this essay treats are on their way to being forgotten. Thus, these pages also concern how, under the pressure of historicist methodological tastes (New and old), one kind of literary anonymity, the anonymity of unestablished authorship, can breed another: the anonymity of provincial inconsequence. Below I will examine how the cultural meanings and artistic valuation of some reportedly slight medieval poems have been affected by trends in postmedieval literary study. All texts are subject to the vagaries of reception, but the poems I study here have found themselves unusually susceptible to changes in historiographical fashion.

To assert that literary history helps constitute the object of its own study is a nod toward recent critical trends. Where this essay departs from previous work is in the connections it traces between movements in critical taste (instituted diachronically, across generations of scholarly readers) and movement in the material geographical sense (articulated horizontally, across expanses of topographical space). Key manifestations of the latter include the travel of human bodies as well as the circulation of textual artifacts, modes, and effects, while comprising the former are more nebulous and historically contingent forms of literary spatialization. As recent work in theoretical geography has demonstrated, all human cultures engage perennially in the construction, organization, and representation of space. Geography, in other words, is one of the basic categories through which social power is negotiated. Operating dialectically with any society’s material geographies is a plethora of imaginative geographies, prominent among which are those encoded or produced in literary discourse.² Based in the first half of the fourteenth century, but extended over time, this essay offers a case study in the intersection of geography and literature. Patterns of medieval mobility—human, textual, and imaginative—will be shown, in their interlocked dynamics, to offer new perspectives on the geographical assumptions (what is “cosmopolitan”? what is “provincial”?) that have helped drive modern assessments of premodern poetic achievement. This assertion contains a certain amount of protestation, one lover’s special pleading on behalf of a beloved corpus of texts. But the argument has broader purchase insofar as this case demonstrates how judgments of literary merit can become caught up within an evolutionary model of cultural history, one that privileges metropolitan notions of development.

Above I chose the term “forgotten” to describe one possible fate awaiting the poems I examine here. The fond hope or “longyng” (Brook #5.1) of this essay is that such a future might be averted. To embark on any project of literary-historical recovery is both to commit an act of conspicuous love (“my loue is on þe liht” [my love has alighted on you], 22) and to seek redress for past wrongs of devaluation. As the poet of my epigraph pleads, “Be bote of þat y bad” [Grant the remedy that I require].³ This essay itself amounts to a lover’s complaint, the particular species of whose desire is to impose its own, remapped version of the literary past. Previous essays in these pages have established the seminal role that pleasure plays in medievalist scholarship, our collective desire for the emotional matter of the...