Betwixt engelaunde and englene londe: Dialogic Poetics in Early English Religious Lyric by Barbara Kowalik (review)

It would be unwise, in a field as lively as medieval studies, to maintain that a particular scholar has ever said the last word on a subject. The penultimate word on the Middle English religious lyric, however, was almost certainly Rosemary Woolf’s in 1968, in her groundbreaking English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Woolf’s achievement was twofold: to approach discussion of a very large corpus of poetry, erratic in its successes, by way of the medieval practice of meditation; and to trace medieval Latin traditions concerning meditation, which form the deep background to some of the best Middle English poems, through their own complex literary development in Latin treatises and their translations. Woolf rescued the short Middle English religious poem from stereotyping as an anonymous, cliché-ridden, and textually unstable poetic form. Instead, she established its integrity as a polymorphic local manifestation of an important international genre and spiritual discipline: an engagement, across three centuries, with ancient devotional habits that, beyond the end of the Middle Ages, would inspire the writings of canonical figures such as Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw.

Barbara Kowalik’s somewhat oddly entitled Betwixt engelaunde and englene londe: Dialogic Poetics in Early English Religious Lyric is not going to supersede Woolf’s monograph. It does serve, however, as a useful addendum to it. Whereas Woolf concentrated on the lyrics as models for reflective interiority, Kowalik concerns herself with their communicative nature—their role in an ultimately transcendent discourse that connects medieval English authors and readers with the supernatural inhabitants of “angel-land.”

Kowalik’s book is expansive, moving across its three chapters from specific to more general concerns, from points about stylistics and manuscript context to theoretical speculation. In her first (and to my view most successful) chapter, Kowalik discusses the religious dialogue poem itself as a literary form. Here she makes some illuminating comments not only on particular, explicitly dialogic lyrics (for example, “What ys he, þys lordling,” a lyric in which a speaker interrogates Christ-the-knight) but also on the role-playing involved in this kind of writing, which requires poets to adopt the personae of sacred figures such as Jesus and Mary. At several points, the author draws a useful analogy between certain Middle English religious lyrics and the contemporaneous Biblical drama. In support of her parallel, she notes that the cycle plays themselves sometimes contain lyric verse (p. 45) and that various poems in manuscript are given Latin headings that “are comparable to stage directions in drama” (p. 82), indicating, for instance, when Christ or the soul is supposed to be speaking. This information is important, although never pursued by Kowalik to its possible sources in the liturgy and in medieval Psalm commentaries, whose authors observe that within a single poem, the Psalmist will speak variously—as Christ himself, as the collective members of his Mystical Body, the church, and as an individual penitent. Variability of voice in the Middle English religious lyric has been almost entirely overlooked by critics, and Kowalik must be given credit for initiating discussion of this important feature of the poetry.

In Chapter One, Kowalik also widens the category of dialogue poetry to include dramatic monologues—for example, lyrics spoken by Christ from the cross to a silent observer—and, intriguingly, the interplay between the voices of some lyrics adjacent to each other in their original manuscript copies. These pairings she calls “lyrical diptychs” (p. 46), citing and analyzing a good example from New College, Oxford MS 88—Christ pleading from the cross and Mankind’s answer—which Carleton Brown chose to anthologize as separate poems. No medieval genre has suffered more than lyric verse by its abstraction from manuscript context. Anthologies may be useful in the classroom, but for scholars they obscure more than they reveal about the vitality of the lyric tradition during the...