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  • Minding Shirley’s French
  • Stephanie Downes

At the beginning of the twentieth century the philologist Paul Meyer published the first description of the French texts in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20. Meyer’s primary interest in the manuscript was in the continental balades copied by Shirley in the third group of French poems, but in between brief mention of the lyrics Shirley attributes to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and those Meyer attributes to continental French poets, including Eustache Deschamps and Alain Chartier, Meyer noticed Shirley’s inclusion of a proverbial debate, the “Desputacion entre Salamon ly saage et Marcoulf le foole” (“Disputation between Salamon the Wise and Marcolf the Fool” [82]).1 He either missed, or chose to omit from his description of the manuscript’s French contents, two other short French texts, the “dit de Saynt Beede” (9) and the “Prouerbes de les xvij sages” (86). Following Meyer, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the lyric contents of the manuscript have tended to be the focus of most discussions of Shirley’s French. Read alongside his French lyrics, however, Shirley’s non-lyric French inclusions come into dialogue with them in dynamic and revealing ways. In R.3.20, non-lyric French texts tend toward the proverbial, the instructional, or both, and they buttress the manuscript’s continental lyric inclusions, strengthening in turn the ways in which [End Page 287] they aim to teach and/or to encourage individual reflection. “Minding Shirley’s French” is primarily about observation, both of the appearance of French in the manuscript itself, and of the patterns of scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have directed how we read and understand Shirley’s French in the present. It is about paying attention to what has been missed when it comes to Shirley’s copying of French, reflecting error, inaccuracy, and inconsistency, and ruminating on the ordinary as well as the extraordinary in his scribal practice. What is at stake in minding Shirley’s French in R.3.20 is a fuller understanding of what French meant to Shirley and what reading Shirley’s French means to us today in a scholarship increasingly aware of the active significance of non-anglophone texts in late medieval “English” literary culture.

There is no doubt that R.3.20 provides crucial information about French lyric circulation in fifteenth-century England. Twenty-first-century scholars have inherited Meyer’s earlier disciplinary preoccupation with the lyric form, continually reading the same agenda (whether or not directly influenced by Meyer), back into their discussions of Shirley’s book and the “Frenchness” of late medieval English lyric and literary culture more broadly.2 That a combination of continental and insular lyrics make up the vast majority of manuscript’s “French” (to use that term as a wide-ranging linguistic category, which covers a variety of dialectic variants and continental and insular forms), however, has made any remaining French texts in the manuscript shine less brightly by comparison. Such texts are literally “other” (as in “other French works”), a distraction from what has been taken to be Shirley’s main French interest—the lyric form, especially the balade. But this is precisely why Shirley’s “other” French texts should intrigue. Study of Shirley’s non-lyric French inclusions, such as the comic, philosophical debate between Solomon and Marcoulf, can contribute meaningfully to this still important work. At the same time, being mindful of the difference of non-lyric works widens our perspective on Shirley’s copying of [End Page 288] French, where “mindful” suggests that rather than offering judgments on Shirley’s French practice, we allow non-English texts in his manuscript to be moments for reflection on what writing in French might have meant to an educated, well-traveled scribe like Shirley, whose copying of French extended to business affairs and correspondence, as well as education and entertainment.3 This includes not only consideration of how he acquired French texts and why (or where) he chose to copy them into his book, but also what their presence means to us now, and how attention to them reveals, historically, the prejudices of our...

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