The Digby Poems: A New Edition of the Lyrics (review)

The twenty-four short Middle English stanzaic poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 offer moral exhortation and counsel. They rehearse time-honored maxims (know yourself and dread God, know yourself and prepare for death, flee from folly, administer justice impartially, pay back what you owe, beware of wicked counsel); familiar sententiae (no man can serve two masters, the world is like a false lover); and timeless truths ("Þat borweþ moche he geteþ hate / Spende waste passyng his rent. / For suche, a kyngdom haþ ben shent . . . ," poem 14, lines 75-78). The addressees include beneficed clerics, preachers, royal subjects, justices, and "man"—basically anyone of wealth, governance, or influence. The art of the poems lies in their adaptation of familiar material to members of various social groups; in their expression of this material in challenging stanza forms (they have various rhyme schemes and lengths of line; some have refrains); and in their use of various forms, figures, and structures. These include a list of fifty-two ways to be a fool, a debate between a laborer and a courtier, extended figures of the kingdom as the crown and the body, and an address from Christ on the cross. Neither the poems, nor the attempts of their first editor, Josef Kail, to link them with political events (Twenty-six Political and other Poems . . . from the Oxford MSS. Digby 102 and Douce 322, EETS o.s., 124[1904]), have inspired much critical interest. Helen Barr's new edition invites its readers to reconsider these neglected texts afresh.

If critics have not engaged with Kail's identifications of supposed topical allusions in the poems, perhaps it is because most of his suggestions are so obviously flimsy that it has seemed hardly worth the effort. It may also be because Kail's primary purpose in looking for topical allusions was to date the poems. He was not interested in providing political readings of them. Barr's extensive introduction patiently sets out the arguments against Kail's procedures. Where Kail finds similarities in expression, theme, and sentiment between particular poems and dated texts (for example, parliamentary rolls), Barr points out that the language is highly conventional and is often recycled even in the poems. Where Kail sees a mention of Flanders as a reference to the murder of John of Burgundy in 1416, Barr sees a rhetorical device: "an example of a kingdom gone wrong" (p. 13). Poem 23, thought by Kail to refer to the coronation of Henry V, is shown by Barr to be a paraphrase of "Lauda Sion," a hymn composed by Thomas Aquinas for Corpus Christi (p. 16).

However, what seems at first to be an exhaustive but straightforward demolition job on the topical reference thesis turns out to be no such thing. At the same time that Barr demonstrates resoundingly that the Digby poems are a confection of recycled commonplaces, she historicizes them. Barr in fact goes further even than Kail in attempting a close dating, arguing that the address to a king and the call to arms in poem 13 are evidence that the series must date during the reign of Henry V, but before Agincourt, so 1413-1414 (p. 18). She then proceeds to historicize the poems' language and strategies in relation to this dating. An emphasis on the language of the liturgy is associated with Henry V's interest in public worship (p. 60). The poems' virtual silence concerning Lollardy is explained as a strategy of not giving a place to heresy (p. 21), while the poems are, however, haunted by the "spectre" (p. 24) of Wycliffite views in their emphasis on the role of the parish priest in confession. Anticlerical sentiment is evidence of the attempt to "wrest territory back from the Lollards" (p. 36). Finally, Barr turns to the question of provenance. Arguing that there are close parallels between the subjects and topics of the poems and those of sermons of Benedictine affiliations in Oxford...