“Oute of mesure”: “Alone walkyng” and Syncategoremata

The fifteenth-century lyric poem “Alone walkyng” proffers a case study in close reading, but it also suggests the need to concentrate on the “funny words” of medieval logic in poems, that is, logical connectives (quantity-words such as “all,” “some,” “alone”; prepositions; conjunctions; and key other terms). These terms, known as syncategoremata in scholastic sophisms, enable the progression of thought, but in “Alone walkyng” they also trouble the development of ideas to a greater than usual extent. Along with the poem’s minimalism and manuscript format, presented here, the evolution of ideas in the poem is repeatedly troubled so that the poem becomes an almost explicit study of the dependency of thought on these connectives. As a near paradigmatic example of the late medieval lyric, the poem comes to be about the limits of thought to move from one topos to another.