William Dunbar’s Liturgical Poetics

Long hailed as one of the most technically gifted poets of the later Middle Ages, William Dunbar held a special interest in the lyric effects that could be generated through the appropriation of liturgical texts. This essay analyzes poems that are usually separated in categorizing Dunbar’s corpus—parodies, laments, and meditations—to show that Dunbar exploits the rhetorically capacious first person of liturgy in order to theorize the fashioning of his own poetic voice. He does so, moreover, by building on a tradition of liturgical adaptation that he inherited from the fifteenth century, including poets such as John Audelay and William Litchfield. Dunbar’s experiments with liturgical language and form reveal a heretofore unacknowledged poetic agenda: to expand the audience and performance possibilities of liturgically inflected, linguistically hybrid religious lyrics. He pursues this agenda in two complementary ways: by theorizing the linguistic toggling required in a bilingual devotional culture, as we see in his Marian anthem “Ane Ballat of Our Lady”, and by recomposing the calendrical rhythms of liturgy in a distinctly lyric mode.