Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England 9781501516511, 9781501524806, 9781501516481

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Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England Essays on Manuscripts and Meaning in Honor of Susanna Fein Edited by Michael Johnston, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, and Derek Pearsall

ISBN 978-1-5015-2480-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1648-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1651-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938213 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: The cover image comes from London, British Library MS Harley 2253, fol. 61v, showing the opening of “Cyl qe vodra oyr mes chauns (He who would hear my songs),” edited by Susanna Fein in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2, art.26. as Enseignement sur les amis (The Lesson for True Lovers), a poem on the rules of true courtly love (“fyn amour verroie,” line 108). Visible above it are Middle English verses and rhyme brackets of the prior poem, “Lord [th]at lenest us lyf,” edited by Fein as “On the Follies of Fashion” (art.25a), a satire on outlandish contemporary hairstyles for women. © The British Library Board, 0 Harley 2253, fol. 61v. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the many willing workers who have made this collection possible: at De Gruyter, we have benefited repeatedly from the vigilance of Verena Deutsch, Suruthi Manogaran, and our careful copy-editor, Jonathan Hoare. At Medieval Institute Publications, Tyler Cloherty, Theresa Whitaker, and our contributor Marjorie Harrington, who has multi-tasked both for the press and as an author in this volume. Among institutions, we would also like to thank Purdue University, University of Notre Dame and University of Victoria for financial or logistical support, and, in producing a volume rich in manuscript studies, we are grateful as always to the many librarians and curators whose permissions are listed here. In particular, we acknowledge the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University for a Publication Subvention Grant. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes to our contributors themselves for their enthusiastic and timely labours, including David Raybin for gathering Susanna’s Bibliography (and keeping it a secret till the time was ripe), and Amanda Bohne, our dedicated indexer, fellow Middle English scholar and admirer of our dedicatee. Most importantly, the opportunity to honour Susanna Fein’s own lifelong service and brilliant scholarship kept everyone on the team eager and cheerful throughout. We have Susanna herself to thank for bringing us together so fruitfully.

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Contents Acknowledgements

V

Tabula Gratulatoria

IX

Michael Johnston Introduction 1

Part I: Manuscripts and Meaning Martha W. Driver Visualizing Susanna: Another Look at “The Pistel of Swete Susan” and Later Imagery in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries

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Phillipa Hardman Finding a Context for Gamelyn: Between Romance and Canterbury Tale 47 Carissa M. Harris Wayward Maidens and Cuckold-Makers: Multilingual Female Lyric Voices in BL MS Egerton 3537 65 Michael Johnston A Lydgate Anthology: The Codicological Vicissitudes of Rawlinson C.48 87

Part II: Honoring the Small Details Julia Boffey Making Sense of Anelida’s Complaint: The Fifteenth-Century Reception of Anelida and Arcite and its Stanza Forms 113 Richard Firth Green Pearl’s Rhymes 133

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Wendy Scase Pedagogy and the Proverbs of Hending

151

Part III: Fein’s Editions at Work Marjorie Harrington The Role of the Interpreter in the Estoyres de la Bible (British Library, MS Harley 2253) 179 Jennifer Jahner Prediction, Prognosis, and the Efficacious Book

197

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Writing Inclusively for Educated Women: Clerical Proletarian-Patroness Relationships and the Shaping of Audelay’s Poetry of Beatific Vision and Spiritual Intimacy 223 Susanna Fein’s Publications List of Contributors General Index Manuscripts Index

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269 275

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Tabula Gratulatoria Jenny Adams Johan Bergström-Allen Louise M. Bishop Mishtooni Bose Peter Brown Jennifer Bryan Glenn Burger Ardis Butterfield Thomas Cable Siobhain Bly Calkin Cristina Maria Cervone Nicole Clifton David K. Coley Carolyn Collette Margaret Connolly Julie Nelson Couch Susan Crane Rory Critten Orietta Da Rold Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi Kara Doyle Robert R. Edwards Suzanne M. Edwards Alice Grace Fulmer Jamie Fumo John M. Fyler Andrew Galloway Matthew Giancarlo Thomas Hahn Shona Harrison John C. Hirsh Ann M. Hutchison Hope Johnston Henry Ansgar Kelly Laura Kendrick Andrew W. Klein Steven F. Kruger Marisa Libbon Thomas Lawrence Long Kathryn L. Lynch Julia Marvin Wendy Matlock David Matthews Sarah McNamer

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Robert J. Meyer-Lee Jennifer Miller Maura Nolan Anita Obermeier Stephen Partridge Niamh Pattwell Nancy P. Pope William A. Quinn Raluca Radulescu Masha Raskolnikov Sharon M. Rowley Martha Rust Daniel Sawyer Elizabeth Scala Misty Schieberle Valerie Schutte George Shuffelton Anna Siebach-Larsen D. Vance Smith Kathryn A. Smith Sebastian Sobecki A. C. Spearing Lynn Staley M. Teresa Tavormina John J. Thompson Michael Van Dussen Míċeál F. Vaughan David Wallace Lawrence Warner Claire M. Waters Nicholas Watson Jocelyn Wogan-Browne R. F. Yeager

Michael Johnston

Introduction In 2010, I found myself seated next to Susanna Fein during a panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. We were both there to listen to a pair of papers about the manuscripts of Robert Thornton. I was a very green, very junior member of the profession, just finishing my second year in an academic job, and Susanna Fein was, well, Susanna Fein. And while we waited for the session to start, she remarked, to no one in particular, that we need a collection of essays about Thornton. After returning home from the conference, I worked up the courage to email her, asking if she wanted to co-edit such a volume. She graciously said yes. Over the next eighteen months, we worked together on gathering essays, commenting on them, and getting them into publishable shape. She consistently proved a model co-editor, and she has become a model mentor, colleague, and friend over the years since. Fein’s comment at that session, seemingly so offhand, nicely encapsulates two traits that I have come to value in her scholarly career: the desire to unpick complicated manuscripts, coupled with a genuine belief that research works best when undertaken by multiple scholars putting their heads together. I trust I speak for the contributors to this volume—and no doubt many of you reading this, as well—when remarking that these are timeless qualities that our field needs now more than ever. And so it is that Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Derek Pearsall, and I wished to mark this moment of Susanna Fein’s retirement by this volume. The collection of essays we have gathered here, celebrating the scholarship of Susanna Fein, offers us all a chance to reflect upon her rich body of work, which is always marked by a deep commitment to unraveling the complexities of medieval manuscripts and to editing and translating as central scholarly enterprises. What is most remarkable about Fein’s many influential essays and editorial projects is that she consistently keeps both literary meaning and manuscript forms in view. Fein is indeed that rare scholar who has mastered the nuances of codicology and paleography, and yet who, at the same time, is adept at thinking about how texts make meaning within manuscripts. She seems driven always to ask how we might use manuscript evidence to recover the voices of medieval poets in their original reading environments. Margaret Connolly has recently remarked that “Interrogating texts in their manuscript contexts has been the mantra of

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Middle English studies for the last forty years.”1 Without a doubt, Susanna Fein has been one of the most important scholars in making this so. Drawing from this dual focus on manuscripts and literary meaning, Fein’s work has indelibly affected how we understand some of the most important manuscripts in Middle English studies. She has, for example, offered bracing interventions into studies of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts, Digby 86, the Auchinleck Manuscript, John Audelay’s manuscript, and the Thornton Manuscripts. And, along with Carter Revard (whose most important work she herself shepherded into print), Fein is the unquestioned expert on Harley 2253, one of the most important manuscripts in all of Middle English. But she has also challenged how we think about the lyric, love poetry, alliterative verse, devotional poetry, penitential poetry, the Psalms, Pearl, Audelay, Chaucer, and romance. Revisiting Susanna’s scholarship (and even encountering some pieces for the first time) alongside the contributions to the present volume has afforded me the chance to reflect upon precisely what is so searching and influential about her methods. I wish to suggest here that the commitments exemplified by Susanna’s scholarship fall under three broad headings: first, careful attention to both literary meaning and material form. Second, a belief that small details matter to larger narratives of cultural history. And third, a belief that editing is an act of service to the field which, when done with care and dedication, can advance our knowledge of medieval England as much as books and articles can. Individually, each of these commitments are sorely needed in our field, and the career of any scholar who attended to a single one of them would be of note. But when all three are synthesized in one robust body of scholarship—as we find in the work of Susanna Fein— then such a scholar is worthy of celebration indeed.

The Synthesis of Literary Meaning and Material Form A commitment to both literary meaning and studying the details of manuscripts marks nearly everything Susanna has published. Perhaps the most trenchant manifestation of this is her critique of the editing of Middle English lyrics, published in

 Margaret Connolly, “The Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and the Significance of Its Material Form,” in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, ed. Holly James-Maddocks, Derek Pearsall and Margaret Connolly, York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 3 (York: York Medieval Press, 2022), 222–40, at 229.

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Poetica in 2008.2 In this piece, Fein persuasively shows how modern editions render lyrics’ meaning opaque by anthologizing them and giving them modern titles, offering a balanced, nuanced articulation of what we—as readers—lose when we move from the manuscript to the anthology of lyrics. But this is no revanchist rejection of editing, nor is it a quixotic call for a return to reading from manuscripts, as such arguments inevitably become in blunter scholarly hands. Rather, Fein’s essay serves as a reminder to readers always to be conscious of the transformations editing effects, alongside a call for better, more self-conscious practices of titling: “In assigning titles to medieval works, we editors of Middle English ought not lose sight of the changes that our translations will have wrought.”3 The respect for the medieval page modeled in Fein’s Poetica essay is certainly not a one-off within her oeuvre. In her analysis of Four Leaves of the Truelove, for example, she recovers how this poem was originally designed to be laid out over precisely four manuscript leaves, creating a brilliant pun on the truelove flower’s four leaves and the four leaves of a bifolium.4 As originally designed, this poem’s depiction of the Harrowing of Hell would have occurred right at the midpoint—crossing from the bottom of leaf 2 to the top of leaf 3. But perhaps most remarkably, Fein is able to demonstrate this poetic intention in spite of the fact that none of the surviving manuscripts, nor Wynkyn de Worde’s print edition, follow this design. That is, Fein perceives a design to the poem that several late medieval scribes and a printer failed to note. But, as in all her scholarship, in this essay Fein is careful to articulate for her readers why attention to the shape of words on the page matters. This is no mere piece of trivia, nor some slick advertisement of a nifty observation. Instead, Fein reveals something fundamental about medieval readers and their relationship to the forms of their books—a form of engagement that is almost completely opaque to us today: “Even though poetic shaping strikes moderns as ingenious and somewhat artificial, [. . .] [t]he endeavor asserts that ultimate meanings derive from God and exist outside the poet’s own efforts, that is, in forms that may materialize from words meaningfully and artfully sequenced.”5 Fein has not limited her searches to these comparatively obscure corners of Middle English poetry, for she finds similar things happening in Audelay and Pearl, as well. As she shows with Audelay, the poet’s self-conception is deeply imbricated with the very form of his autobiographical poetry on the manuscript

 Susanna Fein, “The Epistemology of Titles in Editing Whole-Manuscript Anthologies: The Lyric Sequence, in Particular,” Poetica 71 (2008): 49–74.  Fein, “The Epistemology of Titles,” 61.  Susanna Fein, “Quatrefoil and Quatrefolia: The Devotional Layout of an Alliterative Poem,” Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999): 26–45.  Fein, “Quatrefoil and Quatrefolia,” 27.

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page. In examining Audelay’s Epilogue, for example, Fein’s sleuthing abilities are on full display, as she observes that this poem possesses thirty-nine thirteen-line stanzas, which are said to be indebted to the Trinity (469–76) and made by “the Holé Gost wercheng” (497). The numerology is therefore openly trinitarian: thirteen times three stanzas of thirteen lines each. By my calculation, Epilogue proceeds in semantic groups of three stanzas each (that is, thirty-nine-line units), with four basic arguments worked out in nine stanzas each (that is, three groups of three). Symmetry causes one group to operate as the centerpiece, so that, with thirteen three-stanza groups, the full argument arranges itself into four parts and a center: 9|9|3|9|9 (number of stanzas) or 1–9|10–18|19–21|22– 30|31–39 (sequential stanza numbers).6

And one would think that, although it is hospitable to new and evolving ways of reading, Pearl has little about its form still left to be discovered. But I must admit to sitting up in surprise when encountering Fein’s remark that the poem’s very central lines play on the semantic richness of the word ryche/rice: “Of more and lasse in Godez ryche,” Þat gentyl sayde, “lys no joparde, For þer is vch mon payed inlyche, Wheþer lyttel oþer much be hys reward.”

This punning on ryche, Fein shows, right at the center of the poem, illustrates the poet’s larger project of exploring and exposing the limitations of human language and thought when set against the divine economy. For this word can mean riches/treasury—as in, God’s pockets are deep enough to allow each laborer to be paid the same rate, regardless of how long they worked. This is a meaning one can understand easily enough, for it merely requires us to grasp basic accounting, leaving us still mired in the world of human economic thought. But rice can also mean kingdom—as in, God’s kingdom is large enough to house everyone who worked, no matter how long their shift. This idea of boundless capaciousness would challenge our understanding of fixed space, and thus challenges the limitations of human thought. By conflating financial accounting with the supernatural physics of God’s kingdom through such wordplay, the Pearl-maiden knocks the dreamer (and, by extension, the reader of the poem) off guard, forcing him to reconceptualize human finances in light of the divine economy. It took Susanna Fein’s careful attention to lineation to note that this pun comes precisely at the poem’s center.

 Susanna Fein, “Example to the Soulehele: John Audelay, the Vernon Manuscript, and the Defense of Orthodoxy,” Chaucer Review 46, no. 1–2 (2011): 182–202, at 196.

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Honoring the Small Details Sharing in this commitment to fine-grained analysis is what I perceive as the second of her main scholarly commitments: grounding cultural history in the small details. Such careful attention, by lingering over the seemingly mundane, makes what is staid come alive and sparkle with cultural-historical significance. In this regard, her pair of articles on the Harley-scribe, published in the Journal of the Early Book Society, stand out, for Fein looks beyond the Harley-scribe himself, paying careful attention to the role of the other scribes in the three manuscripts associated with this scribe (London, British Library MSS Harley 273, 2253, and Royal 12.C.xii).7 This seems like such an obvious scholarly question to address, but there was little attention to the Harley-scribe’s collaborators before Fein. And, more importantly, Fein shows us that this matters greatly to understanding how the famous collection of Middle English lyrics came to be. In the earlier of the two essays, she shows that Scribe C, who plays a minor part in the actual copying of Harley 2253, may well have had a larger role in determining the manuscript’s shape than the Harley-scribe himself. But even more importantly, Fein shows that the scribe of what is now a binding pastedown in Harley 2253 was actually a collaborator with the Harley-scribe in the earlier Harley 273. Before Fein, no scholar had attended to the peripheral parts of the manuscript in such detail. And by doing so, Fein was able to show that these two scribes worked together over a long period of time, urging us to think of the celebrated Harley 2253 less as a piece of innovation by the lone scribe and more as a collaborative scribal venture. In the later of these twin essays shedding new light on the Harley-scribe, Fein turns to Harley 273, arguing that in this manuscript the Harley-scribe worked as junior partner. Fein is able to show this by attention to decorative features, demonstrating convincingly that the Harley-scribe’s partner farmed out most of the rubrication and initials to the Harley-scribe. By analyzing “how the collaboration worked, booklet to booklet and text to text,” Fein illuminates the joint venture “between two scribes from Ludlow, the seasoned one leading an aspirant young clerk through material essential for his devotions and desirable for a future career as priest or chaplain in a parish or a secular household.”8 Both of these articles stand out as testaments to just how important small details are to understanding larger cultural narratives—in this case, narratives about the production of vernacular  Susanna Fein, “The Four Scribes of MS Harley 2253,” Journal of the Early Book Society 16 (2013): 27–53; and Susanna Fein, “The Harley Scribe’s Early Career: New Evidence of a Scribal Partnership in MS Harley 273,” Journal of the Early Book Society 19 (2016): 1–30.  Fein, “The Harley Scribe’s Early Career,” 11.

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literature in secular English households in the first half of the fourteenth century. One could extend this observation to Fein’s work on Audelay and numerous lyrics, as well, for such loving attention to detail is inherent to Fein’s very methodology.

Editing as an Act of Scholarly Service Without any doubt, the field of Middle English studies will long be in Fein’s debt for her selfless dedication to editing enterprises of all sorts: an academic journal, collections of essays, and primary texts. Her edition of essays about John Audelay, for example, remains the first stop for work on this underappreciated poet.9 In this volume, she solicited and oversaw important new work on Audelay’s life records,10 as well as a much-needed reopening of the question of Langland’s influence on Audelay.11 Her collection of essays on Harley 2253 brought us the staggering essay by Carter Revard, in which he meticulously traces developments in the Harley-scribe’s hand over time by reference to numerous dated charters.12 Fein’s own contribution to the collection of essays on the Thornton Manuscripts (which she co-edited with me) is a painstaking list of all the texts in Thornton’s two manuscripts, along with bibliography and a list of other manuscripts in which each text survives.13 The hours of work that went into assembling this material have allowed scholars of these two manuscripts easy access to the numerous editions of Thornton’s texts and have allowed us a convenient overview of Thornton’s compilations. Fein’s edited collection on the Auchinleck Manuscript shows just how tirelessly she works to bring together scholarly voices on important manuscripts. The volume was only published in 2016, but as she notes in her introduction, most of its essays grew out of a symposium in London back in 2008, for which she was  My wyl and my wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009).  Michael J. Bennett, “John Audelay: Life Records and Heaven’s Ladder,” in Fein, My wyl and my wrytyng, 30–53.  Derek Pearsall, “Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition,” in Fein, My wyl and my wrytyng, 138–52; and Richard Firth Geen, “Langland and Audelay,” in Fein, My wyl and my wrytyng, 153–69.  Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). For Revard’s contribution, see “Scribe and Provenance,” in Fein, Studies in the Harley Manuscript, 21–109.  Susanna Fein, “The Contents of Robert Thornton’s Manuscripts,” in Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014), 13–65.

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not the organizer.14 Fein is too humble to draw attention to her own efforts in print, but certainly she was the driving force who recognized the importance of the papers at this symposium. Thus she took it upon herself to see it to print. This collection has proven quite important, offering several powerful revisions to stale narratives: in the wake of this collection, for example, we can no longer think of Auchinleck as exclusively a London product, nor can we read it exclusively in a teleological vein, as a piece of an emerging Middle English vernacular.15 This volume has also re-opened the old question of how many scribes were involved in its production and what the working relationship between them was.16 And, most recently, Fein has gathered for us a series of essays on Digby 86.17 Interpreting MS Digby 86 offers fresh perspectives on the interaction between languages in this manuscript, the interaction between genres, careful attention to the stages of production, and new evidence on early provenance. This collection, in particular, is much overdue, and will carve out space for this manuscript to sit alongside the well-known Harley 2253 as important exemplars of early trilingual miscellanies. Fein has also offered the world four editions in the TEAMS Series from The Medieval Institute/Western Michigan University Press, more than any other scholar (and hence, it was entirely fitting that this volume appear with this press, now under the aegis of de Gruyter).18 Her edition of John Audelay has allowed this poet  Susanna Fein, “Introduction: The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives,” in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2016), 1–10, at 1.  See, for example, Patrick Butler, “A Failure to Communicate: Multilingualism in the Prologue to Of Arthour and Merlin,” in Fein, The Auchinleck Manuscript, 52–66; and Ann Higgins, “Sir Tristrem, a Few Fragments, and the Northern Identity of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” in Fein, The Auchinleck Manuscript, 108–26.  See, for example, Timothy A. Shonk, “Paraphs, Piecework, and Presentation: The Production Methods of Auchinleck Revisited,” in Fein, The Auchinleck Manuscript, 176–94; Míċeál F. Vaughan, “Scribal Corrections in the Auchinleck Manuscript,” in Fein, The Auchinleck Manuscript, 195–208; and Ralph Hanna, “Auchinleck ‘Scribe 6ʹ and Some Corollary Issues,” in Fein, The Auchinleck Manuscript, 209–21.  Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire, ed. Susanna Fein (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2019).  By my count, Fein is tied with Eve Salisbury for the honor of editing or co-editing the greatest number of TEAMS editions. See Moral Love Songs and Laments, ed. Susanna Fein, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998); John the Blind Audelay, Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302), ed. Susanna Fein, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009); The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Susanna Fein, trans. Susanna Fein, David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski, 3 vols., TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014–2015); and The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-Norman Otinel, ed. Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein and David Raybin, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI:

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to enter the classroom and to assume his deserved place of prominence within Middle English studies. Previously, Audelay had withered away in obscurity, locked behind a difficult Shropshire dialect, but Fein’s edition made his poetry, in a word, readable for the first time. But it is certainly her three-volume edition of the complete Harley 2253 that will remain her most enduring editorial legacy. This edition has allowed teachers to bring manuscript studies more fully into the classroom, for we can now offer our students the chance to read across an entire literary collection, gathered together into three volumes. Her devotion to publishing with TEAMS is particularly to be praised, for Fein has chosen to offer the scholarly world her editions through an accessible and affordable series, one that reaches scholars and students alike. Writing in Speculum, Jamie M. Fumo justly praises this edition, drawing attention to how Fein’s editorial efforts offer us a much-needed context for the Harley Lyrics: “In redirecting our fondness for themed compilation to historical practices of assembly, Fein’s exemplary edition provides both raw material and interpretive guidance for an invigorating range of new approaches to fourteenthcentury English textual culture in scholarship, in the classroom, and on graduate reading lists.”19 By encountering Harley 2253 in this way, students can learn about the interaction between England’s three languages, the ways that the religious and secular intermingled, and the ways the fantastic sat comfortably alongside the pragmatic. (No doubt, a more comprehensive list of this edition’s virtues will occur to many readers quite immediately.) Of course, Fein would be the first to remind us that this edition does not offer an unmediated experience of the medieval manuscript. But what it does offer us all—scholars and students alike—is an amazingly rich set of texts, out of which we can reconstruct shards of an amazingly rich medieval reading context. Fein is also well known for her editorship of Chaucer Review, a journal she has helmed alongside David Raybin since 2001. Under this dynamic co-editorial duo, Chaucer Review has assumed a place as one of the best venues for scholarship on the whole gamut of Middle English literature. Fein and Raybin are particularly to be commended for being so receptive to special volumes, many of which have moved the field and will be looked to for years to come. I am particularly fond of the volume on manuscripts and formalism, as well as the volume exploring the

Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). As I was finishing this introduction, Susanna informed me via email that she also has an edition of the poems from Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 forthcoming with Medieval Institute Publications.  Jamie M. Fumo, Review of “Susanna Fein with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski, eds. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript,” Speculum 92, no. 2 (2017): 522–24, at 524.

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practice of historicism after the passing of Lee Patterson.20 And where would scholarship on Middle English be without Anthony Bale’s essay on the scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe, Robert Meyer-Lee’s provocative revision of the fragments of The Canterbury Tales, or Alexandra Gillespie’s and Glending Olson’s contextualizations of Chaucer’s poem to Adam, of crucial importance in the wake of Linne Mooney’s argument that Chaucer’s own scribe was named Adam?21 I single out these particular essays as my favorites, and no doubt each student of Middle English literature would construct their own canon of Chaucer Review essays—and that is the point: this journal has, thanks to the labors of Fein and Raybin, and the respect they have garnered within the scholarly community, become one of the primary venues for top-notch scholarship. ✶✶✶ I do not pretend here to have exhausted the range of ways in which one might conceptualize the scholarship of Susanna Fein, but what I hope is clear from this introduction is that her numerous outputs (consistently thoughtful, penetrating, lucid, and charitable) deserve special commemoration. To that end, the essays that Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Derek Pearsall, and I have gathered here speak to our admiration and gratitude for Fein’s publications and extensive scholarly career. All of these essays are unified in responding to some aspect of Fein’s work. Some, for example, engage with texts on which Fein has published in influential ways. Others follow Fein’s model of careful attention to how manuscripts condition the meaning of their literary texts. Others trace Fein’s footsteps by attending to small details of literary texts and exploring how such careful attention can affect our wider understanding of literary culture. And many of these essays are directly dependent upon texts Fein herself edited. We have gathered contributions by a range of scholars, from the seasoned veterans of Middle English studies to midcareer scholars to emerging voices within the field. Such is only fitting as a tribute to Fein’s work, which both stands the test of time and offers fresh challenge to those bringing new methodologies to bear on medieval literary culture.

 “Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, & the Literary Text: Guest Edited by Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie,” Chaucer Review 47, no. 4 (2013); and “Thinking Historically after Historicism: Essays in Memory of Lee Patterson: Guest Edited by Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington,” Chaucer Review 48, no. 4 (2014).  Anthony Bale, “Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe,” Chaucer Review 52, no. 2 (2017): 173–87; Robert Meyer-Lee, “Fragments IV and V of The Canterbury Tales Do Not Exist,” Chaucer Review 45, no. 1 (2010): 1–31; Alexandra Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” Chaucer Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 269–83; and Glending Olson, “Author, Scribe and Curse: The Genre of Adam Scriveyn,” Chaucer Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 284–97.

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To that end, we offer these essays under three groupings, corresponding to the three main commitments within Fein’s scholarship, which I proposed above. Part I, “Manuscripts and Meaning,” begins with Martha W. Driver’s “Visualizing Susanna: Another Look at ‘The Pistel of Swete Susan’ and Later Imagery in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.” In this essay, Driver offers a meticulously constructed background to “The Pistel,” a poem about whose meter and theology Fein has published. Driver discusses the Morgan Library manuscript of this poem, putting this text in dialogue with the Susanna-legend’s appearance within medieval art, liturgy, and Books of Hours. For those interested in the place of this biblical legend within a range of late medieval media, Driver’s essay offers a comprehensive port of entry. Phillipa Hardman, inspired by Fein’s edition of the Anglo-Norman “Trailbaston” from Harley 2253, revisits another well-known outlaw narrative, The Tale of Gamelyn. As many of us will know, this text only ever survives in manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, yet no scholar today understands it as authentically Chaucerian. Hardman works to bring this text back within the fold of Middle English romance, from which it had been exiled by many scholars because of its extreme violence and uncouthness. To effect this return from generic exile, Hardman shows that Gamelyn is not so different from other contemporary romances. She then ends her essay with some provocative thoughts on how Gamelyn might have resonated with medieval readers of The Canterbury Tales, providing a fitting conclusion to Fragment I. Next is Carissa M. Harris’s “Wayward Maidens and Cuckold-Makers: Multilingual Female Lyric Voices in BL MS Egerton 3537,” which, of all the essays in this volume, follows most closely in Fein’s methodological footsteps by attending to how poetry works in its specific manuscript contexts. In this case, Harris examines Egerton 3537, focusing on two leaves from this mid-sixteenth-century commonplace book. Of particular interest to Harris is the manuscript’s pairing of two macaronic lyrics that ventriloquize female laments about the loss of virginity and abandonment by a lover. Harris traces how common these lyrics were in the sixteenth century, also demonstrating that the textual variants introduced into Egerton 3537 amplify the woman’s indignation, thereby lingering over female subjectivity in ways that other versions of these lyrics fail to do. Part I ends with my own contribution to the volume, “A Lydgate Anthology: The Codicological Vicissitudes of Rawlinson C.48.” In this essay, I examine the stages behind the construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.48, showing that the two scribes copying this manuscript had a strict division of labor, with one scribe responsible for the Latin materials, who would only copy on parchment in a textualis script. The second scribe copied the Middle English materials (almost exclusively Lydgate’s poetry), working in mixed quires, and

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copying in cursive. But the manuscript’s collation shows these two scribes collaborating in a remarkably labyrinthine manner, one which is marked by an anomalous series of stops and starts, and one which challenges scholarly attempts to categorize a manuscript’s constituent units. But, in spite of the production oddities lying behind this codex, I argue that the final product speaks in a unified voice to the householder, reminding him of the need for moderation and the need to be mindful of death’s omnipresence. Part II, “Honoring the Small Details,” begins with Julia Boffey’s “Making Sense of Anelida’s Complaint: The Fifteenth-Century Reception of Anelida and Arcite and Its Stanza Forms.” Here, Boffey attends to the lyric form—always a subject close to Fein’s heart—of Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, tracing how various scribes tried to make sense of this poem, often confused about whether its two parts, the narrative and the complaint, were meant to go together. Fascinatingly, as she shows, John Shirley even handled this question differently in different copies of the poem. Boffey also traces how scribes tried to make sense, on the manuscript page, of the poem’s rather anomalous nine-line stanza form, showing how often scribes found themselves confused. But, as Boffey shows, this form would not remain anomalous for long, for by the fifteenth century we find poets adopting this stanza form. Then, Richard Firth Green plays something of the enfant terrible in “Pearl’s Rhymes,” in which he challenges scholarship’s “almost universal expression of admiration for [the Pearl-poet’s] skills as a prosodist.” Green’s work here is indebted to Fein’s 1997 Speculum essay on Pearl, but Green strikes off in his own direction by tracing numerous mismeterings and solecisms introduced by what he argues to be the poet’s less-than-perfect skills. Suggesting even the merest fault in the skills of this poet may strike many as heretical, and thus this essay is sure to offer readers a fresh provocation. Part II ends with “Pedagogy and the Proverbs of Hending,” in which Wendy Scase examines this series of seemingly inert, mundane proverbs—surviving in Harley 2253 among numerous other manuscripts—arguing that it inculcates “an imaginary of proverb pedagogy modeled and made fashionable—indeed, socially prestigious—for its audiences by its association with earlier, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Francophone, multilingual households.” This tradition, Scase shows, licensed authors/scribes to freely adapt new proverbs of their own, attributing them to Hending, and thus the tradition was an inherently accretive one. The final section of this collection, “Fein’s Editions at Work,” comprises essays responding directly to texts edited by Fein. Marjorie Harrington, in “The Role of the Interpreter in the Estoyres de la Bible (British Library, MS Harley 2253),” offers the first of two essays taking up texts from the Harley Manuscript. Harrington argues that the Harley-scribe was no mere copyist, but rather that he

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was an active translator and author of sorts: “In addition to being a translation of the Vulgate, supplemented by some external sources, the Estoyres are fundamentally about translation.” In “Prediction, Prognosis, and the Efficacious Book,” Jennifer Jahner shares with Harrington an interest in neglected texts from Harley 2253—in this case, the manuscript’s various prognosticatory texts. And like Harrington, Jahner attends to the Harley-scribe’s role in textual creation, suggesting that “his work indicates curiosity in the meeting point between causation as a philosophical question and its applications in everyday life through forecasting and prediction.” As Jahner shows, numerous texts in both Harley 273 and Harley 2253 prohibit a passive reading experience, requiring that the reader ponder how reading about the future might affect the future itself. Finally Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s “Writing Inclusively for Educated Women: Clerical Proletarian-Patroness Relationships and the Shaping of Audelay’s Poetry of Beatific Vision and Spiritual Intimacy” applies the questions at the heart of her recent monograph—how did the precarious economic and professional position of late medieval England’s educated clerical class affect the production of literary texts—to the poet John Audelay.22 Kerby-Fulton shows that Audley’s Salutations are simultaneously deeply rooted in Latin devotional culture, while always imagining an audience of laity and, remarkably often, lay women. This collection of essays, then, stands as a testament to the influence that Susanna Fein has had upon how we approach Middle English manuscripts and literary texts. This is a celebration of a scholar who speaks comfortably to both the literary and the codicological wings of our field. At conferences, when literaryinclined scholars retreat to a quiet corner, kvetching among like-minded colleagues, they will often remark that manuscript scholars are too interested in piling up facts and are guilty of some form of positivism. Across the room is apt to be a group of codicologically inclined scholars, grumbling that the literary inclined among us do not have a grasp of some of the basic facts and methodologies important to understanding medieval texts. When I hear either of these camps quietly grousing, one of the first things I want to respond to each of them is: It doesn’t have to be this way! Read Susanna Fein’s work! It is my hope that this current collection of essays will further Susanna Fein’s lifetime project of synthesizing the best of diverse medieval scholarship. But, finally, I must close with a sad bit of the history of this collection. In October 2020, I emailed Derek Pearsall to ask if he might be interested in co-editing

 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

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essays for Susanna. He gladly agreed, remarking in his email reply, “I’ve got the greatest admiration for her.” Derek and I then gathered commitments from these nine contributors, all of whom, when accepting, similarly enthused about their admiration for Susanna. (It was almost too easy getting people to agree to contribute!) Derek subsequently aided in the initial proposal for this volume and the gathering of abstracts. When Derek passed away in October 2021, I immediately asked Kathryn Kerby-Fulton to step in as co-editor (she was already signed on as a contributor). As Derek’s former student, Kathryn kindly agreed and has ably helped me guide this volume to its completion. We are, I trust, all grateful that Derek lived to finish out his catalogue of Gower manuscripts and his co-edited Festschrift for Linne Mooney.23 We are only too sad that he couldn’t have seen this present volume’s final shape. But the passing of someone so beloved by scholars from across the world is a reminder of the importance of these sorts of honorary volumes. Marking career milestones, like Susanna Fein’s retirement from teaching, is both a duty and a privilege. We can only hope that Susanna will take inspiration from Derek and continue treating us to new scholarly insights well after she has left her post in the academy.

 Linne Mooney and Derek Pearsall, A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio amantis, Publications of the John Gower Society 15 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021); and Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England, ed. James-Maddocks, Pearsall and Connolly.

Part I: Manuscripts and Meaning

Martha W. Driver

Visualizing Susanna: Another Look at “The Pistel of Swete Susan” and Later Imagery in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries “The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.”1 —Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”

When considering the story of Susanna and the Elders as told in medieval manuscript illumination, early printed book illustration, and the poetry of the later Middle Ages, the observer is struck time and again by the fluidity of the imagery, the ways in which the story of Susanna can signify many meanings.2 Susanna has been variously considered as a Jewish heroine, as a type of Eve, as prefiguring the Virgin Mary, as a figure for wisdom, as a type for Christ, and as “a figure for Ecclesia, the Church itself.”3 Susanna Fein has produced two inspiring and comprehensive articles on “The Pistel of Swete Susan,” a late fourteenth-century

 For their advice in researching this essay, I am indebted to Michael P. Kuczynski for his suggestion of which online Vulgate to consult, to Jessica L. Savage for her help in the use of the online Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University, to Mary Beth Winn for sharing her notes and bibliography on marginal illustration in printed Books of Hours, to librarians María Isabel Molestina and Sylvie Merian as well as to the curators at the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, for allowing me access to manuscripts and printed books during COVID-19, and lastly to Susanna Fein, who has provided both friendship and inspiration over many years. Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 8–10, at 10. The notion that memory functions as music is a central theme in Stevens’s retelling of Susanna’s story; he also seems to enjoy his own wordplay, twice rhyming “Byzantines” with “tambourines.”  Three editions of the Middle English poem were consulted: Alice Miskimin, ed., Susannah: An Alliterative Poem of the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969); Thorlac Turville-Petre, “A Pistel of Susan,” in Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 120–39; and Russell A. Peck, ed., “The Pistel of Swete Susan,” in Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS and Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 73–108. I used Turville-Petre’s edition for citation.  Miskimin, Susannah, 196; Piero Boitani, “Susanna in Excelsis,” in The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. Ellen Spolsky (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516481-002

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alliterative poem composed in a Midland dialect in an unusual thirteen-line stanzaic format.4 The poem appears in five extant manuscripts dating from circa 1400 to 1460. These are Vernon (Bod. Eng. Poet. a. 1), Simeon (British Library Add. 22283), Phillips (Huntington HM 114), and Ingilby (Morgan M.818), with a large fragment in British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ii (pt.I); the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts both may have connections to women owners or readers. None of these manuscripts is original, but they reflect the popularity of the story of Susanna in fifteenthcentury England; only the Morgan manuscript, which I have recently consulted, will be discussed briefly here. This essay considers Susanna from several perspectives, discussing the typological pairing of Susanna with the woman taken in adultery in the liturgy and then the pairing of Susanna with Bathsheba (the latter illustrating and introducing the Penitential Psalms of David in late-medieval Books of Hours, both in manuscript and print), and finally looks at the representations of Susan in “The Pistel of Swete Susan.” As Fein points out, the extant manuscripts of “The Pistel of Swete Susan” suggest that the poem circulated in England for nearly a century,5 but several of its analogues and associations traced in this essay have a longer reach, well into the later fifteenth century and beyond. While discussion of earlier sources provides context for reading and interpreting “The Pistel of Swete Susan,” this paper also aims to give fuller insight into the reception and wide-spread circulation of Susanna’s story through the end of the Middle Ages. Many of these observations are based on my first-hand study of manuscripts and printed books in the Morgan Library & Museum, and elsewhere.

Susanna in Liturgy As several scholars have observed, the “epistle” of Susanna (from which the title of the Middle English poem derives) in Daniel 13 was “featured in the ancient Latin lections” during Lent, “on the Saturday after the Third Sunday of Lent, or even during

 Susanna Greer Fein, “The Early Thirteen-Line Stanza: Style and Metrics Reconsidered,” Parergon 18, no. 1 (July 2000): 97–126, at 111–15. Susanna Greer Fein, “Trinitarian Piety and Married Chastity in The Pistel of Swete Susan,” in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey, ed. Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), 203–18.  Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 215. See also Lynn Staley, “Susanna and English Communities,” Traditio 62 (2007): 25–58, at 55–57; Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 198–203.

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Holy Week.”6 In the Vulgate version, the chaste wife Susanna is observed by the lecherous Elders as she bathes in her garden and “is trapped, slandered, condemned to death by stoning,”7 the traditional punishment for adultery. Through the power of Susanna’s prayer, God sends the young prophet Daniel to intervene. In the Lenten liturgy, the Susanna story was read along with John 8:1–11, the New Testament passage that tells of the testing of Christ through the case of the woman taken in adultery. In the second story, an adulterous woman is brought to Jesus for condemnation to death by stoning; this is a ruse to entrap Him, which causes Jesus famously to say, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in illam lapidem mittat). As the accusers drift shamefacedly away, Jesus pardons the woman: “Go, and now sin no more” (vade, et jam amplius noli peccare).8 In these Lenten liturgical readings, Susanna is an exemplar of Old Testament (Hebrew) justice, as she is justly rescued from a false accusation of adultery, which is contrasted with Christ’s forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery, “an exemplar of New Testament mercy.”9 As David Lyle Jeffrey notes, “the woman taken in adultery provides an important and vivifying context for a medieval Christian audience’s appreciation of Susanna’s peril and deliverance.”10 Kathryn A. Smith describes this pairing as “particularly appropriate for the Lenten season, since Christians were required to abstain from sexual intercourse during Lent,” and cites the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome, where the two texts were read “as part of the stational liturgical ‘program’ that preceded large numbers of baptisms administered immediately before Easter,” baptism being early associated with Susanna’s momentous and life-changing bath, the catalyst for her story’s main action.11 Located near the Baths of Diocletian, this church dates from the

 Catherine Brown Tkacz, “Women as Types of Christ: Susanna and Jephthah’s Daughter,” Gregorianum 85, no. 2 (2004): 278–311, at 286. See also Kathryn A. Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian Art,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 3–24, at 20. David Lyle Jeffrey, “False Witness and the Just Use of Evidence in the Wycliffite Pistel of Swete Susan,” in Spolsky, Judgment of Susanna, 57–71, at 59–60.  Jeffrey, “False Witness,” 60.  All Bible quotations, both in Latin and English, come from the online Douay-Rheims Vulgate, http://www.drbo.org/index.htm.  Catherine Brown Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type of Christ,” Studies in Iconography 20 (1999): 101–53, at 101.  Jeffrey, “False Witness,” 60.  Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity,” 20.

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third century and was “one of the earliest of the tituli,” or a private residence in which worship was conducted.12 Susanna also figures in the Jewish and Christian prayer for the dying and the dead known from the third century, Commendatio animae quando infirmus est in extremis, or the commending of the soul. This consists of thirteen petitions and cites various Old Testament heroes, Job and Noah, for example, along with the story of the sacrifice of Isaac and “the rescue narratives of Daniel.”13 The petition that cites Susanna reads “Libera, Domine, animam ejus, sicut liberasti Susannam de falso crimine” (Lord, free his soul as you freed Susanna from her false accusation), an invocation “as an example of salvation from false witness.”14 Susanna’s deliverance from false accusation, “of her grace given deliverance,”15 was seen as analogous to the deliverance of the soul; her earliest portrayals in the Roman catacombs and elsewhere were funerary. The Commendatio litany continued well beyond antiquity and was popular in England, remaining extant in a number of variations. It appears, for instance, in a thirteenth-century Book of Hours for Sarum use (British Library Add. 33385, fol. 198r) made for Beatrice, Countess of Richmond (1242–1275). This asks “God who liberated Susannah from false accusations, and Jonah from the belly of the whale, and Daniel from the lion’s pit” to “liberate me from this tribulation and distress, and from the power of all my enemies.”16 Another version is included in the DuBois Hours (Morgan M.700, fols. 29–30v), a Sarum Hours likely made in London between 1325 and 1330 for Hawisia DuBois. This invokes “Almighty, everlasting God who freed Susannah from false accusation and saved Jonah from the lions’ den [sic]” to “free your servant Hawisia from all tribulations and troubles and slanders and snares of the fiend, and from the power of all enemies.”17 A similar

 Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity,” 20. Boitani, “Susanna in Excelsis,” 7, 16–19, describes “the progressive elevation of Susanna” to Catholic saint.  Catherine Brown Tkacz, “Commendatio Animae,” in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1:488; see also Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity,” 3.  Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity,” 3; see also Boitani, “Susanna in Excelsis,” 11; Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 101.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 133.  Charity Scott-Stokes, trans. and ed., Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England: Selected Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 131, item 20.1.  Scott-Stokes, Women’s Books of Hours, 123, item 17.7. For more on this book, see Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller with Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997), 14; and Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours (London: British Library, 2003), 82–119.

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prayer occurs in the Hours of Richard III (fol. 181) that asks God for deliverance: “even as you delivered Susanna from false accusations and testimony and Judith from the hand of Holofernes,” and so on.18 Fein, citing Eamon Duffy, finds related prayers in the writings of Robert Thornton (b. in or before 1397, d. in or before 1465?), the fifteenth-century compiler of the Thornton manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 [A.5.2]). In one prayer, Thornton petitions the Trinity for deliverance from his enemies “as you freed Susanna from a false accusation.”19 The merchant-grocer Richard Hill (fl. 1508–1536) includes in his commonplace book (Balliol College, MS 354) a prayer for rescue against his foes: “free me as you freed [. . .] Susannah from false accusation.”20 Through reference to her heroic story, the Commendatio animae not only reassured the dying but also gave strength to the living against enemies both spiritual and temporal.

Susanna in Medieval Art and Literature Among many other depictions, Susanna and the woman taken in adultery were shown together in stained glass of the late fourteenth century, now lost, in the Church of St. Albans, as known from surviving tituli in Bod. Lib. I. E. 31.21 Ideas about Susanna as a beautiful penitent wrongly accused and then redeemed appear in several Middle English texts. In the Middle English version of the Speculum humanae salvationis, composed between 1310 and 1324 and extant only in one early fifteenth-century copy, Susanna is described as among the elect in heaven, where souls are given power, strength, and beauty: “Fairere than Absolon & Joseph or Moyses, witt thowe this wele, / Judith and Susanne, the faire Rebecca, Sara & Rachele.”22 Chaucer’s Parson cites the example of Susanna in his cautions against false witness, especially directing his remarks to “questmongeres

 Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, The Hours of Richard III (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1990), 77. Nigel Morgan has located another prayer to Susanna which may take the form of a commendation on an added leaf of a Book of Hours, now in private hands, owned by Margaret of York. See Nigel Morgan, “Texts of Devotion and Religious Instruction Associated with Margaret of York,” in Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and the Visions of Tondal, ed. Thomas Kren (Malibu, HI: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992), 63–76, at 65, and 260, item 13.  Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 205; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 267.  Duffy, “Stripping,” 267–68.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 134.  Avril Henry, ed., The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 209.

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(juries) and notaries / Certes, for fals witnessyng was Susanna in ful gret sorwe and peyne, and many another mo” (l. 797).23 In The Man of Law’s Tale, when falsely charged with the murder of Hermengyld, Custance kneels and prays: “Immortal God, that savedest Susanne From false blame, [. . .] If I be giltlees of this felonye, / My socour be, for ellis shal I dye!” (ll. 639–44).24 Chaucer especially seems to have been well acquainted with the details of Susanna’s story. Catherine Brown Tkacz has found the Susanna story in twenty-five manuscripts of the Biblia pauperum on the Continent, which are typological texts with illustration;25 typology refers to biblical interpretation that sees prophetic connection between specific Old Testament events that prefigure those in the New Testament or that reflect the actions of Christ. The Biblia pauperum presents the story of Susanna as “deriving a type of Christ from Daniel 13.”26 In one manuscript, London, British Library Add. 15249, a Biblia pauperum of the mid-fifteenth century, for example, Susanna is seen “as a type of Christ in Gethsemane.”27 The Biblia pauperum manuscripts are mainly German and later circulate in print as block books. In addition to our one English example, Susanna also can be found in Continental copies of the Speculum humanae salvationis, a typological work related to the Biblia pauperum that circulated in both manuscript and print. She appears as well in the Typologische Taferelen uit het Leven van Jezus (Morgan M.649, fol. 4v, Figure 1), a manuscript in Middle Dutch copied in Bruges about 1440 and illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings and wash that have been attributed to the Gold Scrolls group.28 In one panel, Susanna (labeled “Susannen”) is depicted kneeling in prayer, a soldier holding a stone standing behind her, as Daniel (labeled “Daniel”) interrogates the Elders. The panel beside it illustrates the adulteress, who is clasped around the waist by a man holding a stone in his raised hand, with a mob behind him. A nimbed Jesus speaks to a high priest. Both drawings feature rather ominous piles of stones, indicating the traditional punishment for adultery. The parallels between the stories and between the two saviors, Daniel in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New, are shown clearly and dramatically.

 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 315, l. 797.  Chaucer, 96, ll. 639–44.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 118, 137–43.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 118.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 119.  M.649 is described in Morgan Corsair, Morgan Library, http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/ msdescr/BBM0649a.pdf.

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Figure 1: Susanna and Daniel. Woman Taken with Jesus. Typologische Taferelen uit het Leven van Jezus (MS M.649), fol. 4v. Bruges, Belgium, ca. 1440. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1920.

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Susanna and the woman taken in adultery are also illustrated in the Bible moralisée, or moralized Bible,29 and in the Bible historiale, which was written in French but often read and owned by English readers. A two-volume Bible historiale (Morgan M.322, M.323) written in French, illustrated by the Maubeuge Master, and copied about 1325, has two illustrations of Susanna.30 In volume 1, “Le liure de Susanne” is introduced by a picture of Susanna accused by the Elders as Daniel intervenes (fol. 236r). The rubric continues: “comment Susanne fu deliueree de faus tesmoing par Danyel” (how Susanna is delivered from false testimony by Daniel). The second volume has a scene of Susanna’s marriage to Joachim (fol. 146r). In these editions of Bible stories, Susanna’s narrative is more fully developed; she is given a backstory, and her faithful marriage to Joachim is emphasized. In the late fifteenth century, the Bible historiale began to be printed, the first editions produced by Guillaume Le Roy in Lyons but quickly taken over by Antoine Vérard in Paris.31 Myra Orth describes an early sixteenth-century manuscript of the Bible historiale in two volumes (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 385, MS 386), again in French, that has a miniature of a haloed Susanna wrongly introducing the book of Jeremiah instead of the Daniel story (MS 386, fol. 266). The Oxford manuscript is “a faithful transcription of the printed editions” produced by Vérard about 1498–1499 in Paris, another example of the story of Susanna in transition from manuscript to print (and in this case back to manuscript).32 Susanna is further said to be portrayed in Continental Lenten plays and Corpus Christi processions33 but is most frequently found in Books of Hours, sometimes in the Sufferages, the prayers to the saints. In Morgan Library H.3, folio 188v, a prayer book made in Paris about 1490 and written in Latin and French, Susanna is shown nimbed (fol. 188v), naked to her thighs in a tub, with her hands clasped in prayer as the two Elders look on, one raising his left hand, the other his right. Her rubric reads: “De Sancta Susanna.”34 In a Book of Hours made for use of Rome (Morgan M. 12) in France, possibly in Tours, about 1500, Susanna (fol. 71v), again given a halo, is shown bathing in a square fountain, naked to the thighs (figure 2).35 As she looks  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 134, 153, n. 90.  M.322 is described in Morgan Corsair, Morgan Library, http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/ msdescr/BBM0322-323a.pdf.  John Macfarlane, Antoine Vérard (London: Chiswick Press, 1900 for 1899), 54, item 105.  Myra D. Orth, Renaissance Manuscripts: The Sixteenth Century (London: Harvey Miller, 2015), 2:73–76, at 76, item 14.  Tkacz, “Susanna as a Type,” 119.  Morgan H.3 is described in Morgan Corsair, Morgan Library, http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/ msdescr/BBH0003a.pdf.  Morgan M.12 is described in Morgan Corsair, Morgan Library, http://corsair.morganlibrary. org/msdescr/BBM0012a.pdf. Many of these Books of Hours deserve further study.

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downward, two Elders are seen partially concealed in the trees beyond, one pointing to Susanna. This again is from the section of Hours text with prayers to saints; Susanna is preceded by Mary Magdalene and St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read (fol. 71r) and is followed by scenes from the life of St. Barbara (fol. 72r), who is also shown naked in a fountain, her hands clasped in prayer as she is baptized (Figure 3). The emphasis on nudity in both cases seems a narrative as well as artistic choice. In an Hours made in Rouen for Rome use in about 1510 (Walters MS 424), which contains only five prayers in the Suffrages, Susanna appears as the final saint in the section, after St. Margaret, St. Anne instructing the Virgin, St. Barbara, and St. Catherine. Here she is shown veiled in water up to her thighs as the Elders peer at her from the shrubs (fol. 87); this little manuscript in the Walters is believed to have been made for a woman patron.36 We find Susanna again in the Suffrages to the saints in the Prayer Book for Claude de France (Morgan M.1166), made about 1517.37 In this case, Susanna is shown in very detailed (and modest) marginal illuminations (fol. 48r, Figure 4), first reading in an inset illustration, and below, in the margin, fully clothed but dipping her feet and legs in a square fountain as the Elders look on. This last example of a clothed Susanna is an anomaly. Most representations in later Books of Hours, whether these were made for women or for men, show her naked or partially draped, which calls up a raft of religious associations (Eve before the Fall, baptism as seen in Walters MS 424, even the virtue of humility) as well as erotic ones, while focusing on a central moment in Susanna’s story.38

 Lilian M. C. Randall, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery, vol. 2, France, 1420–1540 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press with the Walters Art Gallery, 1992), 407–501, at 499, part 2, item 205; in recent correspondence (November 19, 2021), Randall stated that the book was made for a woman and illuminated by the followers of the Master of Petrarch’s Triumphs; see also Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: Braziller, 1988), 205–6, item 74.  The description of M.1166 is missing from Morgan Corsair, the Morgan Library’s online catalogues. See also Thomas Kren, “Bathsheba Imagery in French Books of Hours Made for Women, ca. 1470–1500,” in Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. James H. Marrow, Richard A. Linenthal and Matthew Noel (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 169–82; Roger S. Wieck, “The Prayerbook of Claude de France,” in Marrow et al., Medieval Book, 183–95.  See Diane Wolfthal, “Sin or Sexual Pleasure? A Little-Known Nude Bather in a Flemish Book of Hours,” in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. M. Lindquist (New York: Routledge, 2012; repr. 2016), 279–97, at 285–86; Sherry C. M. Lindquist, “The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art: An Introduction,” in Lindquist, Meanings of Nudity, 1–46.

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Figure 2: Sancta Susanna. Book of Hours for Rome Use (MS M.12), fol. 71v. France, perhaps Tours, about 1500. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) before 1913.

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Figure 3: Sancta Barbara. Book of Hours for Rome Use (MS M.12), fol. 71v. France, perhaps Tours, about 1500. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) before 1913.

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Figure 4: Susanna Bathing her Legs. Prayer Book of Claude de France (MS M.1166), fol. 48r. Tours, France, about 1517. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum. Gift of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg in memory of her husband Alexandre Paul Rosenberg, 2008.

In early medieval England, Susanna likely gets the fullest treatment in the de Brailes Hours,39 a manuscript made about 1240 by William de Brailes, a commercial

 British Library Add. 49999 is described in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, British Library, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=6430. See also Lilian

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scribe and illuminator, in Oxford “for a patron perhaps named Susanna,” as Fein notes.40 This manuscript, “the first known Book of Hours,”41 has four portraits of an anonymous woman owner shown “kneeling or prostrate in prayer in three-line initials to the final collect in Compline in the Hours of the Virgin, two collects after the Litany, and Psalm 101 of the Penitential Psalms.”42 The Old Testament narrative of Susanna is then retold in six further historiated initials, introducing four of the Fifteen Gradual Psalms.43 To open Vulgate Psalm 119, Susanna prays as the Hand of God emerges from a cloud above (fol. 90r); a caption in Anglo-Norman written in red ink explains “Ele clama Deu en sa tribulaciun” (She cries out to God in her tribulation). The caption echoes the opening lines of Psalm 119:1–2: “In my trouble I cried to the Lord: and he heard me. O Lord, deliver my soul from wicked lips, and a deceitful tongue.” (Ad Dominum cum tribularer clamavi, et exaudivit me. Domine, libera animam meam a labiis iniquis et a lingua dolosa). To introduce Psalm 120 (“My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” [Auxilium meum a Domino, qui fecit caelum et terram]), Susanna is shown accused by the Elders before a judge (fol. 90v). This has the red ink caption “[. . .]st eie de Deu.” Five folios later (fol. 95r), at the opening of Psalm 126 (“Unless the Lord build the house” [Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum]), Susanna, clad in white, is shown kneeling with her hands raised toward the Hand of God above. The caption reads: “Susanna est deliure” (Susanna is delivered). The final scene of Susanna’s story illustrates her death: she lies on her deathbed as two angels lift her nimbed soul in a cloth (fol. 96r). This historiated initial comes at the start of Psalm 127 (“Blessed are all they

Randall, “En Route to Salvation with William de Brailes,” in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation: Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, ed. Peter Rolfe Monks and D. D. R. Owen (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 83–93; Claire Donovan, “The Mise-en-Page of Early Books of Hours in England,” in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), 147–61; Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (London: British Library, 1991).  Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 207, and others have noted the resemblance of the female patron in four historiated initials to figures in the Susanna sequence. Donovan, de Brailes Hours, 24, therefore identified the patron as Susanna. See also Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Not So Silent After All: Women Intellectuals and Readers in Medieval Oxford,” in: Giving Voice to Silence. Essays in Memory of Catherine Innes-Parker, edited by Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoe Yosikawa (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer: 2023), 180–204, esp. 193–196.  Donovan, “Mise-en-Page,” 152.  Randall, “En Route,” 89.  Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 68, explains that these are Psalms 119–33 in the Vulgate, where they are called “canticum graduum,” translated as “gradual canticle.” These are thought to be “psalms recited when going up to the annual festivals in Jerusalem, pilgrim-songs”; “Gradual Psalms: Fifteen Psalms,” Catholic Answers, https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/gradual-psalms.

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that fear the Lord: that walk in his ways” [Beati omnes qui timent Dominum, qui ambulant in viis ejus]), and the caption reads, “l’ame Susanna vet a Deu” (Susanna’s soul flies to God). The historiated initials illustrate the dramatic moments of Susanna’s story, each tied to a Psalm; the final scene recalls Susanna’s earliest depictions in Christian funerary art as a symbol of the Resurrection.44 As we have seen, Susanna begins as an Old Testament heroine. Her story is graphically retold in the de Brailes Hours, a book made prior to the Jewish expulsion in 1290, suggesting perhaps more ready acceptance of an Old Testament heroine as a model of faith, but even earlier on, by the third century, Susanna is beginning to be appropriated as a Christian saint. As Alice Miskimin notes, “Evidence abounds, in the history of biblical exegesis, Christian iconography (in painting, sculpture, and the minor arts), and in Latin poetry, that by the fourteenth century the legend of Susannah was accepted as a familiar, traditional Christian exemplum of virtue rewarded.”45

Susanna and Bathsheba The association of Susanna with the Psalms is also found elsewhere in Books of Hours, most notably in conjunction with Bathsheba. This section of text explores the many meanings of the Susanna story that are both enriched and complicated by this connection, where Susanna is again paired with a woman taken in adultery. A scene of a nude or partially draped Bathsheba in the bath (Figure 5) often opens the text of the Penitential Psalms in French, Flemish, and English Books of Hours, usually with King David shown looking at her from a window above. In 2 Samuel 11:1–26, David is described as waking from a nap in the afternoon and walking on the roof, from which he sees a woman bathing, and “the woman was very beautiful” (2 Sam. 11:2). David seduces Bathsheba, and she becomes pregnant. But Bathsheba is married to Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s top commanders in battle against the Philistines. Knowing he is condemning Uriah to death, David sends him into the thick of battle against the Ammonites, where Uriah is slain; David then marries Bathsheba, and she bears his son. The prophet Nathan rebukes David for his adultery and murder. David’s first child with Bathsheba dies (2 Sam. 12:15–18), and David repents: “And David comforted his wife Bethsabee, and went in unto her, and slept with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon, and the Lord loved him” (2 Sam. 12:24).

 Donovan, de Brailes Hours, 115–27. I describe only depictions of Susanna in this manuscript; two further initials feature Daniel; Donovan, de Brailes Hours, 117–99, at 175.  Miskimin, Susannah, 199.

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Figure 5: Bathsheba Bathing in a Fountain, David with Two Onlookers. Book of Hours (MS M.85), for Composite Use (Rome and Southern France), Master of Morgan M.85, fol. 72v. Paris, France, ca. 1510–1520. Photo: The Morgan Library and Museum. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) in 1905.

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The Penitential Psalms, a set text in the Book of Hours, with their prefatory illustration of the beautiful Bathsheba, were said to have been inspired by David’s remorse when he repents of his adultery.46 Because her picture regularly appears at the start of the Penitential Psalms in Books of Hours, Bathsheba becomes directly associated with the first of these, Psalm 6, “O Lord, rebuke me not in thy indignation” (Domine ne in furore tuo arguas me).47 The connection of Bathsheba with the Penitential Psalms is made in the thirty Books of Hours manuscripts I have examined, the first line of the Psalm often functioning as an incipit or title of the illustration of Bathsheba in her bath.48 Among the Penitential Psalms are Psalm 101, which begins, “Hear, O Lord, my prayer: and let my cry come to thee. Turn not away thy face from me: in the day when I am in trouble, incline thy ear to me,” an appeal for God’s help in a time of distress; Psalm 129 (the famous “De profundis”), “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord”; and Psalm 142 “Hear, O Lord, my prayer: give ear to my supplication in thy truth.”49 Some of the Penitential Psalms also become associated with the story of Susanna. The stories of Bathsheba and Susanna share common elements: both are married women bathing in secluded places who are unknowingly the source of illicit male desire.50 In an historiated initial in a Sarum Hours of the Virgin with Hours of the Passion (Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.11.7), made between 1413 and 1422, Susanna is shown nude to the thighs bathing in an octagonal fountain as the two Elders make their proposition (fol. 66v). This is one of thirteen historiated initials in the book and introduces the psalter.51 And in at least one case, a sixteenth-century Hours of the Virgin for the use of Rome, Susanna is substituted for Bathsheba at

 Duffy, Stripping, 226; Wieck, Painted Prayers, 91–92.  Wieck, Painted Prayers, 91.  These are: Morgan M.194, Morgan M.179, Morgan M.276, Morgan M.61, Morgan H.1, Morgan M.197, Princeton Garrett MS 52, Morgan M.312, Morgan M.1160, Morgan M.1161, Princeton Garrett MS 57, Morgan M.1004, Morgan M.175, Morgan M.366, Morgan M.677, Princeton Taylor 7, Morgan M.1003, Morgan M.359, Morgan M.1080, Morgan M.356, Morgan M.6, Morgan M.131, Morgan M.144, Morgan M.12, Morgan M.1114, Morgan M.166, Morgan M.85, Princeton Garrett 58, Morgan M.156, and Morgan M.646. Most of these (with some exceptions) were made in France, mainly in Paris or Rouen, in the fifteenth century.  Wieck, Painted Prayers, 91–92. The Penitential Psalms are numbers 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18, coined the phrase “male gaze,” a term much discussed in literary and feminist criticism for some two decades. For more, see A. C. Spearing, “Theories of Looking,” in The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking & Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 1–25, 30–35.  Reproduced as frontispiece in Miskimin, Susannah. Cited in Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490: A Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 152, item 147.

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the start of the Penitential Psalms (Huntington Library, MS HM 48, figure 6).52 Susanna is shown bathing in a square fountain, which is a typical feature in such illustrations, very likely a reference to the Song of Songs. She is naked to the hips in the water, nimbed and looks downward, lost in her own thoughts, though her maid notices the Elders, who are shown as “frowning white-bearded old men,” lurking in the bushes.53 Her garden resembles an herb garden, neatly laid out. The same artist, whom John Plummer calls the Master of Morgan 85, has contributed a Bathsheba at the beginning of the Penitential Psalms in an early sixteenth-century Book of Hours made in Rouen; here Bathsheba is shown bathing again in a fountain (Figure 5) as her two maids gossip, and King David, crowned, looks on with two other men from a window above.54 Illuminated Horae manuscripts were models for late fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury printed Books of Hours, popular in England and in France; here again, we frequently find Bathsheba introducing the Seven Penitential Psalms with a border series of metal cuts (or woodcuts) telling the story of Susanna in the margins of the main text. The illustrations appear in Books of Hours printed in Paris by Simon Vostre, Phillip Pigouchet, and Thielman Kerver. In the main illustration, Bathsheba is shown partially draped but otherwise naked to the thighs, bathing in a fountain, surrounded by four ladies who hold a comb, cup, a plate of pasties, and a mirror as David observes the scene from a tower window. This illustration appears in editions printed by Phillipe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre for Paris, Rome, and Sarum use (Figure 7). In the side panels of the main text of the Penitential Psalms, the story of Susanna unfolds (Figure 8): she is shown with her maids, then disrobing, bathing in a fountain, and accosted by the Elders in her bath, the story concluding with the just judgment of the young prophet Daniel and the arrest and execution of the Elders.55 In some volumes, the Susanna border cuts run

 Orth, Renaissance Manuscripts, 2:79–81, item 16.  Orth, Renaissance Manuscripts, 2:80.  John Plummer with Gregory Clark, The Last Flowering: French Painting in Manuscripts, 1420–1530 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 91–92, item 118, fig. 118.  STC 15887. See also Duffy, Stripping, fig. 88 (STC 15896, sig. j8r). A reproduction from Pigouchet’s Heures à l’usage de Rome can be found in Douglas Percy Bliss, A History of Wood Engraving (London: Spring Books, 1928; repr. 1964), 63. For more on later portrayals, see Susan Dackerman, “The Danger of Visual Seduction: Netherlandish Prints of Susanna and the Elders” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1995); Ellen Spolsky, “Law or the Garden: The Betrayal of Susanna in Pastoral Painting,” in Spolsky, Judgment of Susanna, 101–17.

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Figure 6: Susanna as Bathsheba (with Elders). Hours of the Virgin for Rome Use, Master of Claude de France and Master of Morgan M.85, ca. 1515–1520. Huntington Library MS HM 48, fol. 57. Photo: By permission of the Huntington Library.

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Figure 7: Bathsheba in her Bath as David Looks On. Horae: ad usum Sarum (Salisbury), sig. k4r. Paris: Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, 16 May 1498. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 576. Purchased with the Bennett collection, 1902.

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Figure 8: Susanna Sequence. Horae: ad usum Sarum (Salisbury), sig. k4v. Paris: Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, 16 May 1498. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 576. Purchased with the Bennett collection, 1902.

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alongside the illustration of Bathsheba (Figure 9) at the start of the Penitential Psalms. Occasionally, these pictures have captions in Latin.56 In Books of Hours printed for Simon Vostre from the 1490s, these inscriptions can also appear as highly abbreviated French verse captions that retell the story of Susanna (Figure 10). A full set of captions consists of twelve stanzas, rhymed abaab, accompanying twelve wood- or metal-cut illustrations. The first verse explains that Susanna, completely naked, with her ladies is hidden out of view in her garden, with its fresh flowers: “Susanne par ces damoiselles / Se fait despouiller toute nue / Secretement est avec elles / Au jardin, ou sont fleurs nouvelles.” The wicked Elders are introduced (“Les luxurieux viellar virent Susann”) and make their claim; Susanna prays devoutly to God (“Mais Dieu pria devotement”); God inspires the young hero (“jeune infant”) Daniel who rescues Susanna; the judges are then punished by stoning.57 The popularity of these printed Hours cannot be underestimated; they circulated widely in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries both in France and England, continuing to promote the stories of Bathsheba and Susanna.

 I examined in the Morgan Library & Museum the following Hours printed in Paris by Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre: PML 576 Horae ad usum Sarum, May 16, 1498, on vellum, once owned by Elysabeth Woodhouse, a sixteenth-century owner who wrote her name on the page (sig. K3v) facing the Bathsheba illustration (sig. K4r), Susanna border series in text; PML 125445, Horae ad usum Romanum, August 22, 1498, on vellum, Bathsheba (sig. e3r) followed by Susanna series; PML 46606, Book of Hours for use of Noyon, August 8, 1498, hand-colored metal cuts, Bathsheba (sig. g4r) with Susanna sequence following; PML 578, Horae ad usum Romanum, August 22, 1498, another copy (PML 125445); PML 579, Horae ad usum Romanum, September 16, 1498, Bathsheba at sig. F6r with four border pieces of Susanna, same page, then following on sig. F6v and F7; PML 125444, Horae ad usum Romanum, August 22, 1498, vellum, Bathsheba with Susanna sequence beginning sig. e3r. I also looked at PML 126036, Ces presentes heures a lusaige de Paris, printed in Paris for Simon Vostre, ca. 1508, with no Bathsheba, but a Susanna sequence runs in the margins from sig K7v to L3r in the Penitential Psalms. For Kerver as printer of illustrations of Bathsheba and Susanna sequences, see Hugh Wm. Davies, Catalogue of a Collection of Early French Books in the Library of C. Fairfax Murray (London: privately printed, 1910), 303–5.  The “Susanne” verses titled “Les Psaumes de la Pénitence” are transcribed in F. Soleil, Les heures gothiques et la littérature pieuse aux XV e et XVI e siècles (Rouen: E. Augé, 1882), 108–11; I thank Mary Beth Winn for this reference and for sending along her transcription of related verses as well as a photocopy of the full set of marginal illustrations with French captions telling the Susanna story. For more on typological borders in printed Books of Hours, see Mary Beth Winn, “Biblical Typology in the Borders of French Books of Hours (1488–1510),” Acta 15 (1988): 101–20; Mary Beth Winn, “Printing and Reading the Book of Hours: Lessons from the Borders,” Text and Image: Studies in the French Illustrated Book from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Special Issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 81, no. 3 (1999): 177–204.

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Figure 9: Bathsheba with Marginal Susanna Sequence. Horae: ad usum Romanum (Rome), French and Latin, fol. e3r. Paris: Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, 22 August 1498. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 125444. Bequest of Beatrice Bishop Berle, 1993.

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Figure 10: Susanna Sequence with French Verse Captions. Book of Hours for Simon Vostre, ca. 1512, singleton, np. Photo: Author’s copy and photograph.

Though some of these examples postdate “The Pistel of Swete Susan” by more than a hundred years, they may suggest further contexts for the poem’s appreciation. So far, we have seen Susanna as a moral exemplum paired with the woman taken in adultery. She is invoked as an important Old Testament heroine by petitioners who may be near death. Susanna is a model of beauty and wifely virtue. In Books of Hours, she is associated with the Psalms and is sometimes represented as a saint. Or she may be shown with Bathsheba, who commits adultery but, forgiven, becomes the mother of Solomon; on occasion, an unwitting artist substitutes Susanna for Bathsheba. And, like Bathsheba, Susanna becomes associated with the Seven Penitential Psalms.

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“The Pistel of Swete Susan” In his monumental Old English and Middle English Poetry, Derek Pearsall briefly summarizes the Middle English poem Susannah, as he calls it, as “a simple, romantic and dramatic retelling of the story of Susanna and the Elders.”58 Though certainly dramatic, the poem may have suggested much more to its first audiences because of the many associations the story of Susanna had accrued by the end of the fourteenth century. The typological significance is not drawn out, as Pearsall observes, nor is the poem a sermon, but through its many allusions, readers or listeners become deeply engaged in the story and are encouraged to make a number of connections.59 The poem is alliterative, written in twenty-eight “boband-wheel” rhymed stanzas of thirteen lines each. This structure allows the Susan poet more scope to amplify the story, with more space to dramatize the action than in any of the French captions discussed earlier.60 “The Pistel of Swete Susan” is strikingly visual and highly detailed. As Fein comments, “The poet’s understated delicacy ought not to cause us to overlook the sophistication in his handling of the story.”61 Following the Vulgate, the poet introduces Joachim, Susan, and the Elders in quick succession (stanzas one, two, and three). His impulse to elaborate and develop the story is there from the beginning. In the first stanza, we learn that Joachim’s extensive lands and orchards are surrounded by a moat (“a dep dich,” l. 5), making of his realm a little world, a kind of Eden.62 The trees that play a central role in

 Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry, The Routledge History of English Poetry 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 185. The poem has been given a range of titles. “Pystyl of swete susan” is written in a fifteenth-century (?) hand on the inside front cover of Morgan M.818; this is made of rough cloth and sewn to the vellum binding. Pearsall, like Miskimin, calls the poem “Susannah” (140, 142, 185, 297, 321 n. 69); Turville-Petre titles his text “A Pistel of Susan”; Peck names his “The Pistel of Swete Susan” (the title also used by Fein in her criticism), which I retain here.  Pearsall, Old English and Middle English, 185. Staley describes a Latin narrative composed about 1300 by the Cistercian Alan of Melsa, extant in one manuscript (British Library Harley MS 2851), as one possible source for the Middle English poem (“Susanna and English Communities,” 26–27; Island Garden, 195–97).  Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 76, explains that “Andrew of Wyntoun in his Cronykil of Scotland (1420), attributes ‘The Pistil of Suet Susane’” to “‘Huchown of the Awle Ryale.’” The author was erroneously thought to be Scottish, so “The Pistill” was included in Scottish Alliterative Poems in Riming Stanzas, ed. F. J. Amours (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1897), cited in Pearsall, Old English and Middle English, 321, n. 69. Turville-Petre, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 121, says “nothing is known of this author.” Miskimin, Susannah, 21, comments that “almost every anonymous alliterative Middle English poem has at one time or another been attributed to Huchon.”  Fein, “Early Thirteen-Line Stanza,” 114.  Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 208; Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 73–74.

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formulating Daniel’s final judgment are there, too, introduced at line 9. In the second stanza, Susan, described as “sotil and sage” (l. 14), is also “Louelich and lilie-whit” (l. 16), a reference to her name; “Susanna” is Greek from the Hebrew word for lily.63 The lily is also associated with the Virgin Mary and is one of the flowers that grow profusely in Susan’s garden.64 Susan has been taught not only the law, as in the Vulgate, but has learned the “lettrure of heore langage” (l. 18); that is, she is literate. Russell Peck notes, “That Susan is lettered and can read Scripture may have been to a fourteenth-century audience an important feature of the narrative, lending ‘biblical’ authority to the practice of teaching women to read.”65 The third stanza describes the Elders; their “wikkednes comes / Of þe wrongwys domes / Þat þei haue gyue to gomes” (ll. 37–38); that is, they have been corrupted by their wrongful judgments in the past. The poet later wonderfully describes them as hoary-headed, covetous old sinners, the descendants of Cain: “Heore hor heuedes from heuene þei hid apon one./ Þei cau3t for heor couetyse þe cursing of Kai [Cain]” (ll. 58–59). In the fourth stanza, when the poet launches into his detailed description of Susan’s lush garden, he seems truly in his element; the poetry fairly pops off the page. In a flourishing summer landscape, Susan walks with her maids, Sibell and Jane (l. 66), among the trees, the palms, poplars, pear trees, and planes. “Bliþe briddes” (l. 78) perch in their blossoming branches; these include nightingales (l. 76), parrots (l. 81), goldfinches (l. 84), and turtledoves (l. 90).66 The alliterative list continues, naming fruit and nut trees bursting with blooms, followed by a catalogue of flowers and herbs: “Fele floures and fruit, frelich of flayre” (l. 98). The poet’s powerful imagery portrays a near-surfeit of abundance, of fruitfulness in Susan’s garden, and recalls Eden (as all gardens do), but the layering of detail upon detail is more reminiscent still of the Song of Songs, the most powerful erotic poem ever penned, with its vivid descriptions of fruitful vineyards (1:5), flocked with turtledoves (1:9, 2:12), and its references to myrrh, cypress, fig, and apple trees, to lilies (2:1–3) and

 Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 208, notes this is a “floral symbol”; Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 94, identifies the lily as “a symbol of purity.” Miskimin, Susannah, 196, cites Augustine’s commentary on the story of Susanna in which the lily represents “the purity of Christ.”  Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 94, says the phrase “lovely and lily-white” is “a phrase often associated with the Virgin Mary.” Turville-Petre, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 123, notes that the lily represents the Virgin and is used this way as well in the Harley Lyrics.  Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 95. See also Kerby-Fulton, “Not So Silent,” 194–95.  Staley cites the extended description of the garden in both Alan of Melsa’s Latin narrative and “The Pistle,” even down to the mention of parrots (“Susanna and English Communities,” 47; Island Garden, 199), as one indicator of Alan’s text as a source. Parrots also appear, along with other birds, in visual depictions of Susanna’s garden through the seventeenth century. One example is an English tapestry of Susanna and the Elders in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession 64.101.1300).

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other flowers, and to spices, cinnamon, spikenard, and saffron, many of which are also named by the Susan poet. The stanzas in Susan are vividly visual; one can almost see the sixty birds, “Turtils troned on trene / By sixti I say” (ll. 90–91), “enthroned” in the luxuriant trees, and hear their song. In a typological parallel with Eden before the Fall, the garden in the Middle English poem is overseen by both Joachim and Susan, as Fein points out, who “are equal custodians.”67 The garden is “hir hosbondes and hire þat holden were hende” (l. 119). Fein observes further that “In human terms, the garden is also Susan. [. . .] Woman and garden are figuratively equivalent,” which is a very important point.68 While some critics have seen in Susan’s garden aspects of the metaphorical garden in the Roman de la Rose (which seems outside the purview of this poem, a modern interpolation perhaps), the connection between the garden and woman in the Susan poem is essential to its meaning, which is a dramatic rewriting of biblical narrative.69 In the Song of Songs 4:12, the garden is personified as the woman: “My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed” (Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus). Even the lily represents Susan, another direct reference to the Song of Songs 2:1–2: “I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters” (Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium. Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias). And it is Susan’s garden that provides the material evidence that enables the young Daniel to make a just judgment against the Elders, when he questions them about the tree under which Susan purportedly conducted her adultery, asking each elder separately about this critical arboreal detail. One says he saw her with her lover “Vnder a cyne” (l. 316), or hawthorn tree; the other under “a prine” (l. 342), or holm-oak. This divergence in their testimonies clearly reveals their fraudulent charges as the young Daniel states quite succinctly, “‘Nou þou liest loude, so helpe me vr Lord!’” (l. 343). Susan is thus vindicated through her faith, her integrity, and through the trees in her own garden that wordlessly testify to her chastity.

 Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 208.  Fein, “Trinitarian Piety,” 208.  Turville-Petre, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 126, also mentions the garden in the Merchant’s Tale; Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 97–98, repeats this more or less verbatim. Both cite Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, “The Enclosed Garden,” in Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (London: University of Toronto, 1973), 76–118, which gives an overview of various gardens in biblical and medieval literature but does not cite the Susan poem. (There is, however, a quotation from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning” in Pearsall and Salter’s discussion of the Temple of Venus in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, “The Enclosed Garden,” 97).

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As Susan prepares for her bath, the Elders approach her and make their perverse proposition. Here they might remind a reader or listener of the foxes in the Song of Songs 2:15, who are intent on destroying the vineyard: “Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines” (Capite nobis vulpes parvulas quae demoliuntur vineas). Horrified, Susan cries out, so loudly her servants are amazed: Wiþ þis Þo cast heo a carful cri, Þis loueliche ladi; Hir seruauns hedde selli; No wonder, iwis! (ll. 152–156)

Susan’s powerful cry is cited again in the next line. It has raised the “kene men of hir court [who] comen til hir cri” (l. 157). This is based on Daniel 13:24, “With that Susanna cried out with a loud voice” (Et exclamavit voce magna Susanna). But the poet, true to form, adds dramatic elaboration, a side comment (“No wonder, iwis!”). Two mentions of Susan’s outcry emphasize her dramatic response to the Elders (also found in the Vulgate), and her vehement cries are echoed by the loud cry of Daniel later in the story. Inspired by God, Daniel interrupts Susan’s execution: “Þo criede þat freoly foode: ‘Whi spille 3e innocens blode?’” (ll. 283–84). This, too, comes from the Vulgate, Daniel 13:46, when Daniel cries “out with a loud voice I am clear from the blood of this woman” (et exclamavit voce magna: Mundus ego sum a sanguine hujus). In his commentary, Jerome links Susanna’s cry, “although men would not listen to it, her outcry to God was great,” with Daniel’s, “Because the Holy Spirit was roused up within him and dictated to the boy what he should say, his voice was great.”70 Their outcries are seen as the righteous and heroic response to the Elders’ attempted crime. Daniel’s poignant question, “‘Whi spille 3e innocens blode?’,” seems to allude to the diatribe in Psalm 105:38, which describes the unjust sacrifices of the Israelites: “And they shed innocent blood: the blood of their sons and of their daughters” (Et effuderunt sanguinem innocentem, sanguinem filiorum suorum et filiarum suarum). Susan’s earlier anguished prayer to God also has Psalmic echoes. Raising her hands to heaven, she calls on the “Maker of Middelert” (l. 263) to hear her voice, “herkne my steuene”:

 St. Jerome, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, trans. Gleason L. Archer (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 193–94.

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Seþþe I am deolfolich dampned and to deþ diht, Lord hertelich tak hede and herkne my steuene So fre. . . . Þou wost wel I am clene. Haue merci on me. (ll. 269–73)

Her lines call up a whole raft of evocations of Psalms in which the speaker calls upon God for help (as seen earlier in the de Brailes Hours, for example). In Psalm 27:2, for instance, the Psalm opens, “Hear, O Lord, the voice of my supplication, when I pray to thee; when I lift up my hands to thy holy temple” (Exaudi, Domine, vocem deprecationis meae, dum oro ad te, dum extollo manus meas ad templum sanctum tuum). Psalm 26:7 says, “Hear, O Lord, my voice, with which I have cried to thee: have mercy on me and hear me” (Exaudi, Domine, vocem meam, qua clamavi ad te; miserere mei, et exaudi me).71 Perhaps the most direct echo of Susan’s prayer can be found in Psalm 129:1–2, the “De profundis” and sixth Penitential Psalm thought to have been composed when the Jews were in Babylon, a psalm we have seen before: “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication” (De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine; Domine, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuae intendentes in vocem deprecationis meae).72 Susan’s words and these lines from the Penitential Psalm in particular recall the illustrations of Susanna with her antitype Bathsheba found in Books of Hours and in at least one of the Gradual Psalms introduced by the historiated initial of Susanna in the de Brailes Hours (Psalm 119). There may be more subtle links to Bathsheba, too, or very distant allusions in the descriptions of Susan’s uncovered head and bare shoulders at her trial: Hir here was 3olow as wyre, Of gold fyned wiþ fyre, Hir scholdres schaply and schire, Þat bureliche was bare. (ll. 192–95)

Susan is attired in a silk gown (“a selken schert,” l. 197) that shows off her bare shoulders that are mentioned twice (“scholdres wel schene,” l. 197), another place in the story where the poet uses repetition for emphasis.73 None of this is mentioned in

 See also Psalm 4:2, Psalm 17:7, Psalm 26:7, Psalm 119:1–2 for similar invocations.  Wieck, Painted Prayers, 92.  Miskimin, Susannah, 147, n. 197, points out that “schert” or “shert” derives from OE scyrte (skirt). The term might also describe a gown or robe. See the Middle English Dictionary online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED40726.

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the Vulgate version (Daniel 13:31), which says only, “Now Susanna was exceeding delicate, and beautiful to behold” (Porro Susanna erat delicata nimis, et pulchra specie). A married Jewish woman would cover her head in public in accordance with the law, unless she is suspected of adultery (Numbers 5:18, Isaiah 3:17). Attending court without a head covering, showing off her golden hair, may suggest Susan’s outward acceptance of (or humiliation at?) the verdict. These details in the Middle English poem are elaborations on Daniel 13:32, which says, “those wicked men commanded that her face should be uncovered, (for she was covered,) that so at least they might be satisfied with her beauty” (At iniqui illi jusserunt ut discooperiretur (erat enim cooperta), ut vel sic satiarentur decore ejus); this might be read as another trespass against Susan that links her with the woman taken in adultery. The specificity of the Susan poet’s visual details in this scene—her silk dress, bare shoulders, and uncovered golden head—suggests these may be drawn from observation of illuminations or visual depictions of Susanna and Bathsheba, who are usually portrayed as blonde, sometimes draped in silk, often with bare shoulders. After her condemnation, Susan meets with Joachim in a poignant parting scene that has been much discussed, another addition to the Vulgate text, where she says: “Iwis I wraþþed þe neuer, at my witand, / Neiþer in word ne work, in elde ne in 3ouþe.” The lines spoken by Susan to Joachim here about their peaceable marriage seem reminiscent of those in Sir Orfeo when Heurodis says to Orfeo, before their forced parting: “Sethen we first togider were, / Ones wroth never we nere; / Bot ever ich have yloved the / As mi liif and so thou me” (ll. 120–24).74 Following the tests of Daniel, the Elders are summarily condemned, dragged on trees, and executed, a fitting end for their misdeeds, and thus the poem ends, first by asserting God’s goodness to those believing in him (“Hose leeueþ on þat Lord, þar him not lees, / Þat þus his seruaunt saued þat schold ha be schent / Vnsete,” ll. 358–60), then with praise of Daniel. As Lynn Staley has remarked, the poem “describes a judicial coup, where the false is purged, the true restored.”75 While Susan is not portrayed here as a saint or directly paired with the woman taken in adultery, her story is used to assert, as in so many texts and

 Peck, “Pistel of Swete Susan,” 74, mentions that Susan’s bath occurs “near the magical time of noon, and she is under a laurel tree as she undresses—auspicious phenomena in the fairy conventions of the day.” He comments further that “the situation is akin to that in Sir Orfeo, when Herodis [sic] sleeps under the ympe-tree at undren” (100); Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, “Sir Orfeo,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/laskaya-and-salis bury-middle-english-breton-lays-sir-orfeo.  Staley, “Susanna and English Communities,” 54.

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illustrations elsewhere, that God is indeed a very present help in times of trouble, to paraphrase Psalm 46:1. This essay has considered the many portrayals of Susanna both before and after the writing of “The Pistel of Swete Susan” to shed further light on Susanna’s character and on her reception in the later Middle Ages. Hers is hardly a simple story. Susanna and the woman taken in adultery are paired as type and antitype in the penitential liturgy for Lent; Susanna is identified early on as a saint and cited in the Suffrages in Books of Hours. In the de Brailes Hours, she introduces four of the Gradual Psalms. In later Books of Hours, Susanna and Bathsheba are paired in the Penitential Psalms. In some manuscript illuminations, Susanna is conflated with Bathsheba. For Bathsheba, God’s forgiveness is shown with the birth of Solomon. Susanna, on the other hand, is venerated as a saint from the third century as an innocent who calls upon God and is vindicated by the power of her prayer. Her story is both poignant and visually evocative, as the poet of “The Pistel of Swete Susan” conveys in his dramatic version. Here he vividly imagines Susan’s garden as a projection of Susan herself, using imagery and ideas found also in the Song of Songs as well as references to the Psalms. His version of Susan is both theatrical and as visual as a tapestry, its milles fleures garden setting functioning not only as backdrop but as an active participant in the plot. The scribe of Morgan M.818, the last and latest of the surviving manuscripts of “The Pistel of Swete Susan,” written in the mid-fifteenth century, ends his version of the poem this way: “Qui scripsit carmen sit benedictus amen” (Blessed be the man who wrote the poem amen) (fol. 5r), an apparent sign of his approbation. And, as we have seen, the story of Susanna continues to be told from manuscript to print, circulating in manuscript and printed Books of Hours through the sixteenth century.

Phillipa Hardman

Finding a Context for Gamelyn: Between Romance and Canterbury Tale This essay owes its inspiration to Susanna Fein: at a meeting about a new edition of Chaucer, her evident surprise that it would include the text of Gamelyn challenged me to look past questions of textual transmission and scribal interventions, and think further about issues of reception, context, and narrative achievement. More specifically, I am indebted to Susanna for illuminating an important text in the greenwood outlaw tradition with some parallels to Gamelyn, the Anglo-Norman “Trailbaston,” in her masterly edition of MS Harley 2253.1 Gamelyn is a paradox among Middle English romances: at twenty-seven manuscript copies it is far and away the best preserved; but had it not been for its inclusion with the incomplete Cook’s Tale in half of the extant manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it would not have been preserved at all, for there is not a trace of it outside the Chaucerian tradition. This unusual history is reflected in critics’ responses. Nancy Mason Bradbury calls it a “stowaway” in the Canterbury Tales, a survival “in ‘fugitive’ form in a cultural monument to which it has no known legitimate connection,”2 and A. S. G. Edwards excludes it from a survey of manuscripts containing romances alongside works of Chaucer: “I disregard, of course, the special case of Gamelyn, which survives only with Canterbury Tales manuscripts as the Cook’s Tale.”3 Excluded from most editions of Chaucer,4 its

 The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Susanna Greer Fein, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), 3: Art. 80, “Talent me prent de rymer e de geste fere.” See n. 14 below.  Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Gamelyn,” in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: Brewer, 2012), 129–44, at 131.  A. S. G. Edwards, “Gender, Order and Reconciliation in Sir Degrevaunt,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), 53–64, at 64, n. 23. Unlike Bradbury, Edwards acknowledges that “Gamelyn is so frequently and exclusively associated with Chaucer’s work from an early stage in its textual transmission as to suggest a general confidence that it had something to do with him.” A. S. G. Edwards, “The Canterbury Tales and Gamelyn,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 76–90, at 89.  It first appears in print in John Urry’s edition of Chaucer’s Works (1731). Modern scholars almost universally agree that it is not by Chaucer. W. W. Skeat prints it as an appendix in his edition of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), and subsequent https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516481-003

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credentials as romance have also been repeatedly questioned. Although Gamelyn is placed among the “Romances Derived from English Legend” in the Manual,5 alongside King Horn, Havelok, Athelston, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Warwick, editors and critics have long doubted its romance identity. Derek Pearsall calls it “a questionable candidate for romance-hood.”6 Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren point to its “lack of any kind of aristocratic connection or dealing with women,” preferring the category “popular epic.”7 Bradbury terms it a “popular tale,”8 as does Neil Daniel, observing “there is nothing fabulous or romantic about Gamelyn” by contrast with the heroes of Anglo-Norman outlaw romances, and neither does Gamelyn share the “semi-chivalric” qualities of the hero of the Robin Hood ballads.9 Alex Davis, on the other hand, disputes a “popular” attribution, pointing rather to “an aesthetic of deliberate crudity,” and describes Gamelyn as “an entirely uncourtly romance.”10 (I shall return to this idea of “crudity” as an aspect of romance.) Other critics also seek to reconcile the poem’s atypical characteristics with the expectations of romance: W. R. J. Barron creates a sub-category within the Matter of England to accommodate Gamelyn as a “romance of the greenwood,” whose formulaic structure and archaic verse style contribute to its idiosyncratic status,11 while John Scattergood, recognizing its archetypal romance patterns and themes, argues that the poem is using “the form of romance” to address political and social issues otherwise dealt with in contemporary satires and political songs.12

editions of Chaucer exclude it altogether. All quotations of Gamelyn in this essay are from Skeat’s edition, which is to date still “the only full annotated edition.” T. A. Shippey, “The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of Genre,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 78–96.  A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, vol. 1, Romances, ed. J. B. Severs (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967).  Derek Pearsall, “The Metre of The Tale of Gamelyn,” in The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metre, Manuscripts and Early Prints, ed. Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018), 33–49, at 43. Pearsall places the meter of Gamelyn in relation to other contemporary texts using the “old long line” (46), such as the romance Sir Ferumbras and the Tale of Beryn.  The Tale of Gamelyn, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997).  Bradbury, “Gamelyn,” 130.  Neil Daniel, “The Tale of Gamelyn: A New Edition” (unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1967), 15, 10, 13.  Alex Davis, “Game in The Tale of Gamelyn,” Medium Ævum 85 (2016): 97–117, at 112.  W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London: Longman, 1987), 80–84.  John Scattergood, “The Tale of Gamelyn: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero,” in Meale, Readings in Medieval English Romance, 159–94, at 162, 178.

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My purpose in this essay is to explore Gamelyn’s unique position between romance and Canterbury tale: first, by revisiting its relationship to the expectations of Middle English romance. For example, critics have made much of Gamelyn’s extreme violence,13 sometimes seeing this aspect as placing it with the tradition of outlaw tales rather than romances;14 yet an unquestioned contemporary romance, Sir Degrevant, is just as extreme in the violence of the hero’s revenge, and the resulting death-toll is far higher. As Edwards points out, Gamelyn and Sir Degrevant share a concern with real-world social issues otherwise untouched in Middle English romance,15 and it is worth exploring their relationship further. Secondly, I shall briefly address the question routinely asked of other medieval texts, but not very often of Gamelyn: what can be learned about its reception from its manuscript context? How might it have been read in the light of its companion texts? The plot structure of Gamelyn is markedly simpler than that of most romances. It has none of the convoluted adventures or wide-ranging wanderings that extend and complicate the histories of a Guy or an Ipomadon, and no hint of the love motive that drives their journeys. On the contrary, it is one of the more exclusively masculine Middle English romances, in which the only references to women (apart from the Virgin Mary) are one-line mentions of Gamelyn’s unnamed mother as “a lady” (l. 108), his wife as “a wyf, bothe good and feyr” (l. 898), and his bondsmen’s wives (l. 713). The story of Gamelyn is best known to students of English literature as the basis for Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde or Euphues’ Golden Legacy (1590), itself the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but the later texts extend the scope of the medieval narrative, developing it in a new and more conventionally “romantic” direction. Geoffrey Bullough gives an excellent summary of Gamelyn in his magisterial collection of Shakespeare sources (where he interestingly describes it as a “lay,” as distinct from Lodge’s prose “romance”), and he characterizes the alteration thus: “Out of this virile tale Lodge developed the first part of his Rosalynde, changing the tone to suit his pastoral intent and expanding the last line just quoted [‘And siththen wedded Gamelyn a wyf bothe

 Jean E. Jost, “Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence,” in Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 223–48, at 228–32.  Bradbury, “Gamelyn,” 130. The Anglo-Norman lyric known as “Trailbaston” offers a scenario of imagined violence visited on corrupt jurors by a wronged innocent, fled to the greenwood as an outlaw, in physical terms closely resembling the violence enacted by Gamelyn and Adam (“Talent me prent de rymer e de geste fere,” 29–31, 37–39, in Fein, Harley 2253, Art. 80).  Edwards, “Gender, Order and Reconciliation,” 54.

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good and feyr’] into a love story of the kind found in Montemayor.”16 Lodge also “adds a courtly element” and multiplies the stories of characters other than the central hero, features common in medieval as well as renaissance romance plots, but the “stirring opening” of Rosalynde, with its outbreaks of brotherly animosity and physical violence closely based on the model of Gamelyn, is just as integral a part of Lodge’s romance.17 The archetypal theme of the mistreated youngest son restored to his rights belongs to the tradition of folk tale: indeed, Gamelyn has often been classed as a “male Cinderella” story-type, notably in Rosalind Field’s comparison with another example, Havelok.18 But Havelok, with its large cast of characters, wide social range, geographical reach, and its engagement with issues of national destiny, is a far better fit with Field’s category of “the romance of the popular hero.” Havelok’s “action-laden career” serves to mold him into the ideal king who has earned “the trust of an entire people,” but Gamelyn does not really have a “career,” and while the king appoints him to royal office (ll. 891–92), it is in no way the culmination of his destiny as the crown is for Havelok.19 Gamelyn is all about the righting of a specific wrong. The single-mindedness of its plot has parallels in other short, folk-tale-type romances such as Sir Amadace and Sir Cleges, even though they do not share its exclusively male-focused action and have different ethical concerns; and in one important respect Gamelyn stands apart from the others, for while both Amadace and Cleges employ a magical or miraculous occurrence to provide the hero with a solution to his misfortune, Gamelyn holds firm to its aesthetic of strictly non-supernatural, real-world (albeit fantasized) possibilities. However, all three stories center on the restoration of the hero’s material fortune: in each case there is a clear pattern of initial prosperity, rapid loss of funds and descent into poverty, and (the main action) the hero’s successful efforts to regain his former status and wealth. There are some recurrent narrative tropes: they all feature the protagonist’s extravagant feasting of his peers, though in Gamelyn this is not a major impetus for the plot as it is in Amadace and Cleges. Gamelyn’s propensity for violence, as manifested in his use of great oak staves to right his wrongs, is

 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975), 2:143, 145. Bullough refers to Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559).  Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 2:145, 147.  Rosalind Field, “Popular Romance: The Material and the Problems,” in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Cory Rushton (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009), 9–30, at 25–28.  Field, “Popular Romance,” 27.

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mirrored in Cleges when the hero takes revenge on his opponents by measuring out their “rewards” in violent blows with his staff. All three are concerned with the gentry status of the protagonist. In Cleges, Dame Clarys thanks God “Fore sche had both knyght and squyre” (l. 560), after the king recognizes her husband as his “awne knight” (l. 528), provides him with “All that longes to a knight” (l. 542), and makes her son a squire.20 The question of qualification for knighthood is implicitly addressed in Amadace, as Michael Johnston argues, when the knight’s lavish spending leaves him with only £40, the amount of annual income forming the minimum threshold of distraint for knighthood: a sum far beneath the rents of £300 a year that he had squandered (l. 400).21 Furthermore, he reveals his gentry status by his courteous behavior: “Sir Amadace kidde he was gentilman borne” (l. 334).22 The question of gentry status in Gamelyn is equally crucial, and is explicitly addressed not through income, possessions, or manners, but through blood. Gamelyn reacts to his eldest brother’s calling him “gadeling” (a word that could mean either a person of low birth, or a bastard)23 by invoking his gentle birth: “Cristes curs mot he have that clepeth me gadeling! / I am no worse gadeling, ne no worse wight, / But born of a lady and geten of a knight” (ll. 106–8). The idea of gentle birth or inherited nobility is a commonplace topos of romance,24 but it intersects interestingly with the real-life experience of late-medieval knighthood as represented in these texts and others designated “gentry romances.”25 Both Amadace and Cleges understand that the performance of their knightly status requires the public display of wealth in various ways: a large household, lavish gift-giving and feasting, alms to the poor; and that their loss of wealth entails loss of status. Cleges experiences his lowered status in the hostile language and threats of physical violence offered by the king’s servants (ll. 257–64, 290–94,

 Sir Cleges, in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Middle English Popular Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008).  Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 82–87. The sum in the Heege MS copy (NLS Adv MS 19.3.1) is more modest: 100 marks (£66).  Sir Amadace, in Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).  MED, “gadeling,” 1(b).  The romance topos of inherent nobility is invoked again when Gamelyn believes that he and Adam will be hospitably treated by the outlaw king (despite the counter-experience of his brother’s behavior): “‘Adam,’ seyde Gamelyn, ‘go we in Cristes name, / He may neyther mete nor drink werne us for schame. / If that he be hende and come of gentil blood, / He wol yeve us mete and drink and doon us som good’” (ll. 661–64).  Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, 49.

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323–27, 349–54) when he appears at court dressed in poor, old clothes; while Amadace, keenly aware of the monetary basis of status prestige (ll. 398–405), ruefully recognizes that he is now no different from the deceased spendthrift merchant whose debts he paid (ll. 208–10). And Gamelyn, although his speech and behavior are replete with the brash self-confidence of youth, nevertheless clearly understands the implication of his brother’s mismanagement of his inheritance: with his parks broken down and robbed, his oaks felled, his crops unsown, and his buildings decayed, all rendered incapable of producing income, and his armor and horses lost (ll. 83–88, 95–100), he has no recourse against his brother’s treatment of him as a household servant who is expected to work in the kitchen to earn his food and clothing (ll. 89–92, 102–4), except to proclaim his gentle birth (ll. 106–8). The family’s gentry status is emphasized from the outset of the text, where the dying father, Sir John of Boundys, is identified as “the knight” twelve times in the opening lines (ll. 1–65); and the deathbed scene is obsessively focused on the knight’s desire to bequeath his property to his three sons. As Knight and Ohlgren note, “the poem keeps returning, as he does, to the question of his lands. [. . .] The identity of landowner and land, the difficult dissolution of that bond and the crucial nature of its re-formation, these issues central to the period and the land-holding classes, lie behind the emphatic language of this highly effective opening passage.”26 Unlike Sir Rowland de Boys in As You Like It, Sir John of Boundys is fully aware of the precarious situation of younger sons when family property is bequeathed in accordance with the custom of primogeniture, and he expresses a shrewd sense of the likely outcome: “Selde ye see ony eyr helpen his brother” (l. 40). To protect the interests of his younger sons, especially Gamelyn the youngest, who is felt to be especially vulnerable, the father sends letters to his neighbors, “wyse knightes,” “goode men that lawe conne of londe” (ll. 17, 63), summoning them to hear and execute his will. Sir John’s will is designed with careful logic: the eldest son is to inherit the family patrimony, “Iohan myn eldeste sone schal have plowes fyve / That was my fadres heritage whyl he was on lyve” (ll. 57–58); the second son is to have the land that the knight earned by military service, “And my middeleste sone, fyve plowes of lond / That I halp for to gete with my righte hond” (ll. 59–60); while the youngest son is to have the remaining land, which the father has acquired by other means, “And al myn other purchas, of londes and leedes, / That I bequethe Gamelyn and alle my goode steeds” (ll. 61–62).27 Similar concerns about the future prospects of younger sons were expressed by parents in families such as the Pastons in the  Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Introduction to The Tale of Gamelyn.  The division of land in terms of the different means of acquisition suggests a traditional plan for the three sons’ futures: the eldest to manage the family estate, the second son to follow a military career, and the youngest to find his own way in the world.

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fifteenth century, for whom status anxiety, the fear of downward social mobility, was a constant preoccupation.28 For example, A. T. Brown cites Agnes Paston’s draft will of 1466, in which she records her husband’s complaint that the inheritance of his two youngest sons “was so littill that they miht not leve theron wythouht they shuld hole the plowe be the tayle.”29 We may compare Gamelyn’s refusal to be his brother’s cook, and his angry response to the socially derogatory term “gadeling.” The narration ensures that readers do not fail to associate Gamelyn’s right to his land with his inherited gentle status. However, the principle of primogeniture was so deeply established that when Sir John’s neighbors hold conference to divide the sick knight’s lands, their automatic first thought is “to delen hem alle to oon” (l. 43), and their final decision is a compromise: Al the lond that ther was they dalten it in two And leeten Gamelyn the yonge withoute londe go, And ech of hem seyde to other ful lowde His bretheren mighte yeve him lond whan he good cowde. (ll. 45–48)

The atypical nature of Sir John’s will, when law and custom would have upheld the original instinct of the wise knights to leave the whole estate to the eldest son, sets up the dispute that ensues between the brothers when Johan, the eldest, appropriates his youngest brother’s lands and excludes Gamelyn’s claim, following the traditional practice of primogeniture. As Alex Davis observes, “it is made clear that John, the wicked son, has the weight of society on his side, and that the legal authorities of his community fully support him in his conflict with his brother.”30 The sympathies of the narration, however, are made abundantly clear in the initial character sketches which contrast the undeserving eldest son with his two brothers who “loved wel here fader and of him were agast” (l. 7). Davis argues that the eventual fulfillment of the father’s unconventional will stages a radical challenge to established traditions of inheritance in favor of “an ideal of ownership so powerful as to see in it the right to flout both law and custom,” and

 A. T. Brown, “The Fear of Downward Social Mobility in Late Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval History 45 (2019): 597–617.  Brown, “Fear of Downward Social Mobility,” n. 89; Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 1976), 1:44 (#31). The draft further records William Paston’s dying words: “I will not geve so mekyll to on that the remenaunt xal haue to littill to leve on” (1:45).  Alex Davis, Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 61.

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he proposes that “The Tale of Gamelyn might be understood as a fantasia on what Blackstone’s Commentaries were later to call the ‘sole and despotic dominion’ involved in possession, and the sovereign rights of disposal inherent to it.”31 Yet this reading perhaps gives undue prominence to Sir John’s self-assertion as landowner, and pays too little attention to his concerns as a father. His dying care is not for the future of his lands, but “How his children scholde liven after his day” (l. 12); and to ensure security for all three of them, given his mistrust of schemes depending on brotherly goodwill such as that devised by the wise knights, he has no option but to divide the land. Still, by reserving to his eldest son the “heritage” that had passed down from his own father, Sir John demonstrates respect for the principle of primogeniture: the problem for him is not so much the law as the failure of brotherly love. This was a problem in life as in romance, where “atypical” counter-narratives on the pattern of Sir John’s concerns can clearly be seen, for example, in Agnes Paston’s continuing conflict with her eldest son John on the interpretation of her husband’s will in relation to her younger sons.32 It has been argued that medieval romance speaks especially to the predicament of younger sons, left unprovided for by the hereditary custom of primogeniture,33 and it could be claimed that Gamelyn is a prime example: indeed it is the only Middle English romance specifically to address the figure of the younger son. In Lodge’s and Shakespeare’s adaptations of the plot of Gamelyn, the episodes of the wrestling match and the sojourn in the greenwood are the most prominent borrowings.34 But in the Middle English narrative, these are interludes (important for their positive portrayal of Gamelyn’s good heart, and potential for lordship) between the stages of the main story, which chronicles Gamelyn’s attempts to regain his inheritance. The four stages follow a clear pattern: in every case the eldest brother contravenes their father’s will that each son have his share, by withholding Gamelyn’s inheritance, misusing his property, or denying him justice; Gamelyn seeks redress and, when no help is forthcoming, takes the law into his own hands. (1) Johan denies Gamelyn’s right to his inheritance and orders he be beaten with  Davis, Imagining Inheritance, 69.  Davis, Paston Letters, 1:45 (#32), 47 (#33). Agnes’s son John Paston I disputes the bequest of certain manors to his younger brothers, “seyyng þat by the lawe the seyd manerys xulde be hijs” (1:46).  Stephen Knight, “The Social Function of the Middle English Romance,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, & History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 99–122; Georges Duby, “Youth in Medieval Society,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), 112–22.  Readings of Gamelyn often highlight its “greenwood” element and see it in relation to the Robin Hood tradition; however, it is importantly different in that the forest is a strictly temporary abode for all the outlaws, who are only there while they wait to be reconciled to society.

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staves; Gamelyn defends himself with a makeshift staff (ll. 101–28).35 (2) Johan promises to restore Gamelyn’s inheritance, but later locks him out of the family seat; Gamelyn forces entry and feasts his followers, alleging the expense is owed to him in lieu of sixteen years’ lost rent (ll. 155–66, 285–362). (3) Johan promises to make Gamelyn his heir, but tricks and binds him, refusing him food; Gamelyn appeals to the visiting churchmen for justice, and when they refuse, he and Adam beat them with staves and bind Johan (ll. 364–540). (4) Johan steals Gamelyn’s goods and mistreats his tenants; Gamelyn takes his case to the shire court but is imprisoned by Johan, who is now sheriff. Later, their brother Ote, standing surety for Gamelyn, is set to be hanged by Johan’s corrupt judge and jury; Gamelyn takes the judge’s place, hangs the guilty, makes peace with the king, regains his inheritance, and also becomes his brother’s heir, thus reuniting their father’s lands (ll. 697–768, 783–897). In his classic study of the historical context of Gamelyn, Richard Kaeuper shows that, apart from its typically optimistic ending, the actions and language of the romance correlate fairly accurately with the markedly litigious and sometimes very violent behavior of the real-life fourteenth-century country gentry in pursuit of their perceived rights, and equally with the frequently corrupt administration of justice in the king’s local courts.36 Just as the picture of family members coming to blows over land disputes rings true, so does the evocation of the gentry estate at the heart of the story, with its carefully amassed lands (some inherited, some earned by military service, some acquired by purchase), and its modestly fortified dwelling, where the hall with its solar and turret and all the courtyard buildings are protected by a wall with a gate and locked wicket and postern gates. The whole family estate extends to 3000 acres (ll. 57–60, 358),37 consisting of arable farms, woods, and deer parks, and the exactness of these details contrasts tellingly with the vague formulaic references to “londus brode,” “castels hee,” and “townus made” in Sir Amadace (ll. 391–92). In Gamelyn there is a strong sense of local identity—the estate is not merely a notional marker of wealth and status as are Amadace’s lands and castles, but is the family land-holding, passed down through at least three generations, the center of webs of relationships with tenants and neighbors, as well as being a network of fields, woods, houses, and

 Gamelyn’s “pestel” is almost certainly not the culinary implement editors and critics have supposed (why would it be leaning against an outdoor wall?), but a metal-studded wooden threshing tool. See MED, 1(b), quotation from Medulla, glossing Lat. tribulum.  Richard Kaeuper, “An Historian’s Reading of The Tale of Gamelyn,” Medium Ævum 52 (1983): 51–62.  The three brothers inherit five, five, and fifteen ploughlands, each of which is the equivalent of 120 acres.

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parkland, all requiring maintenance in order to produce income. Amadace flees to a foreign country where he wins new lands as prizes in a tournament: “Fild and frithe, towne and toure, / Castelle and riche cite” (ll. 536–37), and half the kingdom when he marries the king’s daughter; and although he sends messengers to his own country to redeem his mortgaged lands, he never returns to live there, becoming king of his wife’s country instead (ll. 841–46, 853–61). Gamelyn, on the other hand, flees only to the nearby woods, and even when the king makes him “Chief Iustice of al his free forest / [. . .] bothe in est and west” (ll. 891–92), an office which, as Davis points out, was held by great peers of the realm and utterly transforms Gamelyn’s social position,38 Gamelyn wants nothing more than restitution of his own “lond and his leede” (l. 895), where he lives with his wife until he dies and is buried in the ancestral earth (ll. 898–900). This sense of a peculiarly local identity is just as prominent in the romance Sir Degrevant, as Johnston notes: “Unlike most romances, which encompass wide geographical spaces and exotic or supernatural characters, the conflict in Sir Degrevant is of an abidingly local nature.”39 The local conflict between Degrevant and his neighbor, the Earl, has some parallels with Gamelyn’s complaints against his brother: both center on the aggressor’s abuse of the hero’s deer parks, and his mistreatment of tenants and bondsmen (Degrevant, ll. 139–44; Gamelyn, ll. 85, 704); in both cases, the aggressor repeatedly infringes the hero’s property rights; and crucially, the resolution of both conflicts leaves the hero in full possession of the same local estates that were at the heart of the conflicts. The concern with land-owning interests so evident in Gamelyn, with the need for legal protection against appropriation and trespass, and the protagonist’s recourse to violence in self-defense when other means prove unsuccessful, are all shared with Sir Degrevant, albeit on a lower social stratum. Where Sir John of Boundys inhabits a modest country house, Sir Degrevant has his pick of castles and halls (ll. 73–74), and his estate produces £1000 rent per annum, besides the “houndered plows” (1200 acres) of demesne land (ll. 65–69).40 However, it is worth noting that the two copies of the romance differ as to his income and land-holding: the Thornton copy (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91) sets a level considerably less extravagant than that imagined in the Findern copy quoted (CUL MS Ff.1.6), with £100 in rent and “many ploughes” in demesne (fol. 130), and while the squire whom Degrevant sends on errand to the Earl has rents valued in Findern at £100 (l. 158), in Thornton it is a more modest “ten powndis” (fol. 130v). Further, it is only in the Findern copy that Degrevant is said to  Davis, “Game in the Tale of Gamelyn,” 110; Davis, Imagining Inheritance, 59.  Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, 188.  Sir Degrevant, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005).

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be “nevew full nere” (l. 26) of Arthur and Guinevere.41 These variations perhaps indicate a somewhat different reading of the text in each case, with the Thornton copy setting the romance a little closer to the world of Gamelyn. Plot summaries of Sir Degrevant tend to emphasize the love story with its richly decorative courtly setting. Davenport analyzes the narrative structure to demonstrate the “compositeness” of the plot, with its interlocking scenes of public feud and private wooing;42 but an alternative pattern can be seen when the romance is read in comparison with Gamelyn: one which is driven by the persistent animosity of the Earl towards Degrevant. The love plot between Degrevant and Melidor, the Earl’s daughter, plays out as an extension of the men’s enmity. The story of the local conflict is framed within a wider setting of international and fabulously elevated chivalry (ll. 1–32, 1825–96), but as in Gamelyn, the conflict itself is marked by extreme violence and by repeated acts of hostility stemming from the initial injury. In both romances, the hero at first tries to resolve matters without violence, Gamelyn by reminding his brother of his birthright, and Degrevant by sending the trespassing Earl a letter (informed by legal process) to demand restitution.43 In both cases the transgressor responds by further provocation (sixteen deer killed in Degrevant), and the hero resorts to violence (Degrevant kills 800 of the Earl’s men). But Degrevant still wants satisfaction for the damage done to his estates, even if it causes more deaths (ll. 433–64), and when the Earl refuses, Degrevant kills sixty of his deer and plunders his waters of swans and pikes. Degrevant’s sudden love for Melidor is presented like Romeo’s for Juliet: an “enemy” (ll. 586, 998), who has killed her relatives; while the combat between Degrevant and Melidor’s approved suitor, the Duke of Gerle, is prefaced by the Earl’s complaint against Degrevant to the Duke, who undertakes to kill him. The tournament is unusually violent, and the Duke is defeated. Later, Degrevant is ambushed by the Earl’s men as he visits Melidor, and he and his squire kill sixty opponents; at which the Earl threatens to kill Melidor, until the Countess reminds the Earl of his initial unprovoked attack on Degrevant’s property. Even when a reconciliation is privately arranged, Degrevant is suspicious and brings sixty armed men. As this sketch shows, the romance is constructed by violent acts, and even if the interpersonal acts of violence seem to be rendered less brutal than in Gamelyn

 W. A. Davenport argues that “Degrevant” is a form of the name “Agravain,” brother of Gawain. W. A. Davenport, “Sir Degrevant and Composite Romance,” in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellowes and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 111–31, at 115.  Davenport, “Sir Degrevant and Composite Romance,” 119–20.  The legal processes are discussed in Cheryl Forste-Grupp, “‘For-thi a lettre has he dyght’: Paradigms for Fifteenth-Century Literacy in Sir Degrevant,” Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 113–35.

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by the elaborate, chivalric style of the narration, the hero’s casual attitude to deaths in the pursuit of his “right” (very large numbers of deaths in Sir Degrevant) is not different. Indeed, the casual attitude towards death is shared by the narrative voice, as in the note of black humor evident in the account of the ambush: The stewarde Sir Aymere Come a lyttill to nere; Þe heuede by þe colere He cuttid awaye. Þe body satte on þe horse, Þat was an vnsemly corse! Þe stede strak ouer þe force, & strayed on straye. (Thornton MS, fol. 137)44

Black humor also features prominently in the staging of violence in Gamelyn, especially when Adam and Gamelyn plan their escape from Johan’s hall. Gamelyn begs the assembled clergy to free him, and when they not only refuse, but call for his death (ll. 479–85), he and Adam set about “absolving” the churchmen of their sins with oaken staves: Gamelyn sprengeth holy-water with an oken spire, That some þat stoode upright fellen in the fire. (ll. 503–4) “Gamelyn,” seyde Adam, “do hem but good, They ben men of holy chirche: draw of hem no blood. Save wel the croune and do hem non harmes, But brek bothe her legges and siththen here armes.” (ll. 521–24)

The combination of violence and black humor shared by Gamelyn and Sir Degrevant is not unusual in Middle English romances derived from epic tradition, such as the romances of Charlemagne,45 and it is notable that both Gamelyn and Sir

 The Thornton copy offers the better text at this point. Compare Kooper, Sir Degrevant, ll. 1649–56.  See Phillipa Hardman and Marianne Ailes, The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England: The Matter of France in Middle English and Anglo-Norman Literature (Cambridge: Brewer, 2017), 296. An interesting parallel can be seen between Melidor and Floripas in the Fierabras romances: both love their father’s enemy and are threatened by their father with death.

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Degrevant (the feud plot) have been placed in relation to heroic poetry,46 or Northern saga tradition.47 There is much else that the two romances share: the precision with which they address legal issues and terminology; the lively realism of their dialogue; the unromantic, real-world motivations attributed to Adam (in Gamelyn) and Melidor’s maid (in Sir Degrevant), who agree to help the hero achieve his goal in return for substantial future reward. Gamelyn promises to grant Adam a share of his “free lond” (ll. 402, 410), and Adam helps him “In hope of avauncement that he him biheet” (l. 418); Degrevant secures the maid’s help by betrothing her to his squire (whom he knights on the spot) with a bond and charter for £100 worth of land (ll. 881–92, 965–76). Most of all, however, they are connected by Edwards’s observation, that Gamelyn and Sir Degrevant stand apart from other Middle English romances in their “exploration of issues that were clearly of real significance to sections of late fourteenth-century society,”48 issues that Johnston identifies as the defining concerns of gentry romance, a category for which Sir Degrevant “provides the paradigmatic example.”49 One major difference between them is the lack of any real love interest in Gamelyn, but this is hardly surprising when the family situation of each romance is taken into account. Degrevant’s gentry credentials are convincingly established, as Johnston shows, by the initial “tabulation” of his possessions and income, and by surrounding him with “the recognizable features of gentry life.”50 When the narration opens, Degrevant is an independent adult, and has already enjoyed a successful knightly career; his celibate status is a matter of his own virtuous choice (ll. 61–64). Gamelyn, on the other hand, is introduced as the youngest son of his father, a young child still in his infancy, a young boy dependent on his brother’s care; when his own story begins sixteen years later, making him an adolescent on the verge of manhood, the emphasis is still on his youth (ll. 105, 113, 170, etc.), and he is presented as an innocent, lacking experience of the world (ll. 167–68). Not until the very end of the romance, when he has regained “his lond and his leede” (l. 895), is Gamelyn able, as an established gentry landowner like Degrevant, to think of marrying. Gamelyn’s repeatedly stressed youth points towards another group of narratives with which comparison might be made: those dealing with the hero’s enfances.

 J. A. W. Bennett, Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 163, cited in Knight and Ohlgren, Introduction to The Tale of Gamelyn.  Davenport, “Sir Degrevant and Composite Romance,” 114.  Edwards, “Gender, Order and Reconciliation,” 54.  Johnston, Romances and the Gentry, 60, 189.  Johnston, Romances and the Gentry, 60, 190.

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The corpus of Old French chansons de geste includes several texts narrating the youthful exploits of celebrated heroes, such as Oger the Dane, but none of them made the transition into Middle English romance. However, a number of romances covering the whole life of a knight deal at length with his childhood and youth,51 typically to demonstrate the nurture that prepares him for a successful chivalric career, and in one case to show the result of an upbringing without such nurture. This is the romance of Sir Percyvell of Galles, found with Sir Degrevant in the Lincoln Thornton MS. Like Gamelyn, Percyvell is an infant at the start of his story, and the narration constantly reiterates that he is young, particularly when, still aged fifteen, he wins a wife and a kingdom (ll. 1737, 1753, 1761, 1878).52 In most respects, the story has little in common with Gamelyn, but there is a striking similarity in the way the two uneducated youths, both of whom are presented as gullible innocents, express themselves with violence. Sir John of Boundys’s concern for “nurture” (l. 4) indicates what he would wish for Gamelyn, but Johan neglects his younger brother, not only letting his inheritance decay, but feeding and clothing him badly (l. 73) and treating him as a kitchen boy; nevertheless, Gamelyn grows to be extraordinarily strong (ll. 77–80) and, presumably knowing no better for lack of nurture, he uses his natural strength to defend himself and to express his simple sense of justice. The naïf hero’s situation is even more explicitly dealt with in Sir Percyvell of Galles. On the death of his noble father in the jousts celebrating young Percyvell’s birth, his mother withdraws her infant son from chivalric society and brings him up in forest seclusion, to save him from the same fate. He receives no education, “Nowther nurture ne lare” (l. 231); nevertheless, he grows tall and strong, and thrives as a self-taught huntsman (ll. 193–228), but he has no idea how to express himself except with threats of death (ll. 275–76). He demands whatever he wants, information or knighthood, of knights and king alike, with the same violent ultimatum: “I sall sla [. . .]” (ll. 293, 384, 528). Percyvell has no moral compass (“He knewe nother evyll ne gude,” ll. 593–94), so when his violence results in the deserved death of malefactors, it is largely by accident; and he does not really understand the connection between his violent acts and death, as seen in the darkly comical episode of the Red Knight’s death and subsequent disarming (ll. 685–800). The death of the porter in Gamelyn, which some critics have found problematic, should perhaps be read in a similar light. Gamelyn has thrown the champion wrestler with a bone-cracking “pley” (ll. 254, 256) and returns joyfully home, only to find the gate locked and the porter refusing his mild request to open it; Gamelyn then repeats his “play” (l. 307) with the porter, in words that  See Phillipa Hardman, “Popular Romances and Young Readers,” in Radulescu and Rushton, A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, 150–64, at 152–54.  Sir Percyvell of Galles, in Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).

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closely echo the wrestling match and create an equivalence between the two acts of violent play,53 despite the apparently fatal outcome of the second throw. The “aesthetic of deliberate crudity and recalcitrance” that Davis detects in Gamelyn,54 the validation of violence in support of plain-speaking guilelessness and against falsity, has a bearing on Percyvell as well; while Ad Putter’s analysis of “crudeness” as a positive choice in the narrative structure of Percyvell, where “the poet set out, systematically, to expose the ‘crude’ ingredients of narrative: that is, the story line with its beginning, middle and end,” fits Gamelyn too.55 As features of “crudeness,” Putter identifies clarity of structure, economical narrative, articulation into segments, and repetition, and he discusses their significance in the context of the aural reception of such romances. However, all these features of both form and content might equally well be related to an expected audience of young people, who could readily identify with the youthful protagonists, legitimately enjoying their temporarily naïf behavior and violent actions in the knowledge that narrative logic will ensure a satisfying, symmetrical ending, tying up all loose threads, reconciling the young hero with his true social community, and restoring his lost birthright. In both cases, the ending also returns to the issue of parental concern with which the romance commences. Percyvell returns to the forest to find his mother who, believing her son to be dead, is living “wilde in the wodde” for grief (l. 2163); he reclothes himself in his forest garb and brings her out, carrying her to the castle where she is carefully restored to her right wits with clothes, drink, and sleep, in a touching reversal of the parent-child relationship, as Percyvell re-enacts with her his own integration into society. Gamelyn, operating within its very different fictional world, invokes the careful father, whose dying concern for his sons began the narrative, to validate the final execution of his will at the end. The hanging of the eldest son Johan is explained as “the meede that he hadde for his fadres curs” (l. 886), echoing the original prophecy: “The eldest deserved his fadres curs and had it at the last” (l. 8), and answering Johan’s unnatural oath, “by thi fader soule, that the bigat and me” (l. 748) when he swears to Ote that he will punish either him or Gamelyn (with hanging). With Johan removed, the remaining two brothers act in accord with the father’s intentions: “Sire Ote was eldest and Gamelyn was ying,” “Thus wan Gamelyn his lond and his leede,” “And sire Ote his brother made him his heir” (ll. 887, 895, 897).

 “And gerte him in the nekke that the bon to-brak, / And took hym by that oon arm and threw him in a welle” (ll. 304–5; cf. ll. 245–46).  Davis, “Game in The Tale of Gamelyn,” 112.  Ad Putter, “Story Line and Story Shape in Sir Percyvell of Gales and Chretien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 171–96, at 174.

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Setting Gamelyn in the context of comparable Middle English romances offers a characterization somewhat different from its reputation either as “the most ferocious of the outlaw legends,”56 or as a “deeply anti-authoritarian popular tale.”57 It emerges as a possible addition to the group of nine narratives identified by Johnston as gentry romances,58 and at the same time, a member of the intersecting group of romances that cater particularly to the concerns of young people and their parents, “romances of nurture.”59 Four of Johnston’s nine romances are found in the Lincoln Thornton MS (Octavian, Isumbras, Eglamour, and Degrevant) and, together with their three companion romances (Erl of Toulous, Awntyrs of Arthure, Percyvell), they form a corpus of narrative texts that embody the concerns of gentry families: maintaining possession of their lands, and ensuring the succession of their heirs.60 Gamelyn, with its focus on these same concerns, could have fitted very comfortably into Robert Thornton’s collection, had it ever come to his hand. However, the collection of texts in which it has actually been placed, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, offers no such context. Gamelyn is the only tale to have been added to the Canterbury Tales in more than one manuscript.61 No doubt its early addition to the tradition gave it apparent authority and a secure placement at the end of the first fragment,62 though few of the manuscript witnesses make a more than perfunctory attempt to attach it plausibly to the Cook.63 However, the decision to insert Gamelyn in the sequence of

 Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 89.  Bradbury, “Gamelyn,” 130.  Amadace, Cleges, Degrevant, Eglamour, Isumbras, Launfal, Octavian, Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, The Avowing of Arthur.  Hardman, “Popular Romances and Young Readers,” 153–54.  Hardman, “Popular Romances and Young Readers,” 160–61.  A possible exception is the Ploughman’s Tale (Hoccleve’s Legend of the Virgin), uniquely added in Oxford, Christ Church MS 152, after the Squire’s Tale, in a different hand on blank leaves; John Bowers argues that corrections imply a previous exemplar including this tale. John Bowers, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), Introduction to The Ploughman’s Tale.  Gamelyn is included in two of the earliest Canterbury Tales manuscripts, both copied by the same scribe: Ha4 (London, British Library MS Harley 7334), and Cp (Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 198).  By contrast, the Ploughman’s Tale and The Tale of Beryn (uniquely added in Alnwick Castle MS 455), are deliberately integrated into the sequence. The Ploughman’s Tale begins with a Prologue modeled on the Host’s words to the pilgrims in Chaucer’s text, in which the Host invites the Ploughman to tell a tale; while Beryn, placed after the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale as the Merchant’s return journey tale, is introduced by “the Canterbury Interlude,” a 679-line account of the pilgrims’ stay in the city, followed by the Host’s words (modeled on the Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale) and the Merchant’s volunteering Beryn (ll. 680–732).

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Canterbury tales implies some sense of its compatibility with the other tales. Given their heterogeneity of form, style, and content, if the compiler(s) had an eye to the comprehensive variety encompassed in the collection of tales, perhaps Gamelyn was seen to offer a complete, coherent narrative of a distinctive kind otherwise unrepresented in the Canterbury Tales: a “virile,” “crude,” gentry romance written in “the old long line,” an irregular but vigorous verse form unlike that of any of Chaucer’s own tales.64 Whatever the rationale, another question remains: what can be learned about the reception of Gamelyn from its manuscript context as a Canterbury tale? The link provided between the incomplete Cook’s Tale and Gamelyn in MS Lansdowne 851 gives one insight into its contemporary reception, when the Cook as teller is made to exclaim: Fye þerone it is so foule I will nowe tell no forþere For schame of þe harlotrie þat seweþ after A velany it were þareof more to spell Bot of a knyhte and his sonnes my tale I wil forþe tell. (fol. 54v)

Gamelyn is here offered as an antidote to potential contamination from exposure to the social and moral degradation of the Cook’s Tale: a “gentry romance” promising a more wholesome narrative of respectable family concerns. Seen in this way, Gamelyn’s position at the end of the first sequence makes sense: after the increasingly sordid tales of the Miller, Reeve, and Cook, Gamelyn’s mixture of innocence and fierce but justified retaliation, clearing away corruption, offers some kind of purifying end. It is a good fit in other ways too: the physical violence so prominent in Gamelyn can be linked to the increasingly violent catastrophes of the Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales, while the vivid contemporary details that, as Barron notes, “anchor the poem in the real world,”65 produce a gentry estate and its environs offering a complementary provincial reality to those of Oxford, Cambridge, and London in the previous three tales. Further, noting the reiteration of the word “game” in Gamelyn and its connection to the name “Gamelyn,” Alex Davis considers the tale in relation to the theme of “game” in the Canterbury Tales, arguing that Gamelyn’s focus on ideas of “game” echoes the identity of the Cook’s Tale as “game and pley” (I. 4354) and reflects the whole “game” of tale-telling (though ultimately it is at odds with the sophisticated “play” of the Canterbury Tales).66

 Pearsall describes this metrical form as “variously based on alexandrines and septenaries, with admixture of four-stress ‘alliterative’ lines with or without alliteration.” Pearsall, “The Metre of the Tale of Gamelyn,” 49.  Barron, English Medieval Romance, 84.  Davis, “Game in The Tale of Gamelyn,” 111–12.

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The game of tale-telling proposed by the Host is no doubt the most important aspect of the Canterbury Tales as a context for understanding the reception of Gamelyn. Unlike Thornton’s manuscripts, or other comparable household collections of reading matter, Chaucer’s diverse collection includes only one text that is not a narrative fiction: the Parson’s Tale. This treatise or “meditacion” on penitence has its parallel in Thornton’s Lincoln MS, where a lengthy rubric introduces John Gaytryge’s sermon as a guide to “scrifte” (fol. 213v); but while Thornton’s penitential manual is embedded in a large corpus of religious treatises, meditations, and prayers within the compilation, Chaucer’s occupies an awkward place as the final Canterbury tale. The Host indicates his pressing reason for asking the Parson to tell a tale: “breke thou nat oure pley; / For every man, save thou, hath toold his tale. / [. . .] Telle us a fable anon” (X. 24–25, 29); but the Parson explicitly rejects fiction: “Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me” (X. 31), and offers instead his penitential manual, a “tretice” scholastically arranged in “chapitres” and “braunches” (X. 955–57), as “a myrie tale in prose” (X. 46).67 The exceptionality of the Parson’s Tale thus sets all the other Canterbury tales against it in a single category, “fable”; and this is the context most revealing of the contemporary reception of Gamelyn: as a fiction of a particular kind in contest with all the other, diverse contenders for approval. It would have been read in the context of a collection of stories within a frame insisting on the quality of storytelling, on the values of good narrative, as is signaled in the reactions and comments of the pilgrim listeners throughout the Canterbury Tales. Critics writing about Gamelyn have often focused on questions of its historical verisimilitude or its violence and have had little to say about its achievement as a narrative fiction. Rosalind Field offers a welcome corrective: “However, it is a dramatic, humorous and idiosyncratic work that is a pleasure to read.”68 Perhaps its repeated inclusion in manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales indicates that its reception by contemporary readers was equally positive.

 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).  Field, “Popular Romance,” 26.

Carissa M. Harris

Wayward Maidens and Cuckold-Makers: Multilingual Female Lyric Voices in BL MS Egerton 3537 At the top of fol. 59r of London, British Library, MS Egerton 3537 are copied two erotic lyric fragments in women’s voices, And I war a madyn and Mi love is gone to London, in both English and Latin versions. The popular song And I war a madyn addresses its first-person lesson about wayward sexuality and regret to an audience of “moni” maidens. The delightfully vehement Mi love is gone to London, discussed here for the first time, articulates a woman’s anger over her lover’s departure to London and her vow to cuckold him as revenge for his abandonment. This essay examines fol. 59r’s two bilingual scraps of verse in conversation with each other, focusing on how they portray feminine sexuality, erotic transactionality, and local context. I analyze And I war a madyn and Mi love is gone to London as a lyric sequence, following Susanna Fein’s methodology of carefully reading understudied English lyrics copied sequentially in manuscripts in order “to grasp the motives that impelled particular lyrics to be grouped and disseminated as collections” and to tease out the social and textual meanings that these lyrics might have generated together.1 As Carter Revard notes, manuscript miscellanies such as these are “not merely assembled but structured, demonstrat[ing]

 Writing about a manuscript across the ocean during the COVID-19 pandemic was possible only thanks to the generosity of many individuals. I am grateful to the British Library for providing manuscript access, and to Temple University’s Summer Research Award and College of Liberal Arts Research Award for funding my travel; to Barbara Newman, Joshua Byron Smith, Lora Walsh, and Joseph Malcomson for their Latin insights; to my writing group members (Kinohi Nishikawa and Rebbeca Tesfai; Claire Falck, Marissa Nicosia, and Thomas Ward) for sharing feedback on early drafts of this piece; to the Zoom audience at the Early Book Society’s July 2021 conference for their insights and questions; and to Michael Johnston and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton for their invaluable assistance with Rayner’s Latin. Most importantly, I am indebted to Susanna Fein for encouraging my work on manuscripts and understudied female-voiced lyrics over many years, beginning when I was a graduate student at the Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting in March 2012. Susanna Fein, “All Adam’s Children: The Early Middle English Lyric Sequence in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II),” in Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 213–26, at 217, 226. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516481-004

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both a principled selection of items and a principled arrangement of them.”2 I show how the scribe’s consecutive copying of these two female-voiced English songs, along with his use of them as prompts for Latin translation, sheds light on how people used, experimented with, and expanded upon vernacular lyrics. My analysis straddles traditional periodization boundaries by tracing the varied forms taken by late medieval fragments in sixteenth-century manuscripts.3

MS Egerton 3537 and Its Compiler: Performing Upwardly Mobile Masculinity MS Egerton 3537, a seventy-five-folio paper codex copied between 1552 and 1578, was the commonplace book of Sir William Rayner (ca. 1530–1606), heir of an upand-coming Huntingdonshire gentry family who sought tenaciously to improve their social rank over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.4 Rayner’s November 1606 will, produced the same month as his death, names him as “William Rayner of Orton Longvile in the countye of huntington knyght,” locating him in a village and civil parish that is now part of Orton, a southwestern suburb of Peterborough; MS Egerton 3537 contains numerous references to “orton longfeld.”5 The manor of Orton Longueville was purchased by Rayner’s father, Robert Rayner (d. 1550), from Robert Kyrkham, knight, and his wife Sibil in 1548.6 Kyrkham was presumably down on his luck at the time, selling large amounts of property not only to Robert Rayner but also to John Tunstale between 1545 and

 Carter Revard, “‘Gilote et Johane’: An Interlude in B. L. MS. Harley 2253,” Studies in Philology 79, no. 2 (1982): 122–46, at 127; emphasis in original.  Holly A. Crocker makes a similar argument for tracing the early modern lives of medieval texts; see, for example, her analysis of Criseyde’s sixteenth-century afterlives in “The Problem of the Premodern,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 146–52.  Note from W. Paley Baildon, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1912–1913, ser. 2, vol. 25 (Oxford: Horace Hart for the Society of Antiquaries, 1913), 181–83.  Rayner’s will is dated November 13, 1606 and held in The National Archives, Kew, PROB 11/108/ 376; “Parishes: Orton Longueville with Botolphbridge,” in A History of the County of Huntingdon: Volume 3, ed. William Page, Granville Proby and S. Inskip Ladds (London: Victoria County History, 1936), 190–98; British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/hunts/vol3/pp190198 (accessed May 14, 2022); MS Egerton 3537, fol. 6r.  G. J. Turner, ed., A Calendar of the Feet of Fines Relating to the County of Huntington: Levied in the King’s Court from the Fifth Year of Richard I to the End of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1194–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1913), 135, 136, 137–38, 139.

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1548.7 Robert Rayner’s four separate purchases of the struggling knight’s manor, land, cottages, and the rights to “free fishing in the water of the Nene in Overton Longevile and Overton Waterfelde” points to the family’s striving for increased holdings and status.8 William Rayner was knighted in 1603, reflected by his naming as “knyght” in his will three years later. His family’s upward mobility through purchasing property, acquiring knighthood, and making advantageous aristocratic marriages is likewise exemplified by his daughter Elizabeth Rayner (d. 1612), whom he designated as his heir and whose second husband was Henry Talbot (1563–1596), youngest son of the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury.9 Much of what we know about William Rayner is due to the notoriety of his larger-than-life third wife, Mary Beaumont Villiers Rayner Compton, Countess of Buckingham (ca. 1570–1632), whom he married in June 1606.10 Villiers, a widow with four young children, was forty years Rayner’s junior. She married him just five months after her first husband’s death in January and four months before Rayner’s own death in November, giving her the dubious distinction of being widowed twice in the same year. She was a powerful matriarch whose most famous offspring was James I’s lover Sir George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). She defied the counsel of Anglican Bishop William Laud by publicly embracing Roman Catholicism in the early 1620s, although she continued to spend time with her son and James I until the king’s death in 1625.11 One author of a seventeenthcentury manuscript libel poem attacked her as inappropriately ambitious and accused her of being sexually involved with John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, while the pamphleteer Christopher Newstead dedicated his Apology For Women; or, Women’s Defense (1620) to her and addressed her as “the right excellently virtuous

 Turner, Calendar, 136.  Turner, Calendar, 135, 136, 137–38, 139.  John Clay, The Extinct and Dormant Peerages of the Northern Counties of England (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1913), 219; S. M. Thorpe, “TALBOT, Henry (1563–96), of Orton Longueville, Hunts. and Burton Abbey, Yorks.,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1981), https://www.historyofparlia mentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/talbot-henry-1563-96.  David L. Smith, “Villiers [née Beaumont], Mary, suo jure Countess of Buckingham,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/92425; Laura Estill, “Mary Beaumont Villiers Rayner Compton, ca. 1570–1632,” in A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500–1650, ed. Carole Levin, Anna Riehl Bertolet and Jo Eldridge Carney (London: Routledge, 2016), 141–43; Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981), 5–10.  Lockyer, Buckingham, 115.

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Lady, Mary, Countesse of Buckingham.”12 Villiers was blamed by some for contributing to James’s death because she procured for him a wrist plaster “that was supposed to eat down into his stomach to cure his fever” during his final illness but instead only seemed to worsen his condition.13 William Rayner, born around 1530, was in his early twenties when he copied this portion of the manuscript, which dates from 1553–1554.14 Fol. 59r’s bilingual mix of proverbs and lyric fragments is part of a section titled “adagiorum felix auspitium” (lucky prosperity of proverbs) running from fol. 57r to 61v.15 Elsewhere Rayner jotted down two other English lyrics, a moral poem (fol. 3r), an English-Latin word list (fols. 63v–64r), and a popular male-voiced courtly love lament (fol. 1r).16 Rental records for Rayner’s familial estate of Orton Longueville from 1562 to 1576 fill the bulk of his notebook’s pages (fols. 15v–52r). Its other contents include inventories of Orton Longueville’s household goods from various points between 1554 and 1576 (fols. 54r, 62r, 54v, 65v–66r), lists of various payments and debts, medical recipes (fol. 64v), and an account of Atalanta’s race from the English Gesta Romanorum printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510 (fol. 2r–v). This manuscript’s compilation process from Rayner’s early twenties through his late forties follows his developing masculine identity: in his twenties, he performed acquisitive, upwardly mobile youthful masculinity by amassing popular proverbs about male conduct and songs in women’s voices and translating them into imperfect Latin. In her analysis of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commonplace books owned by men, Christina Fitzgerald traces the cultural and codicological phenomenon of “performing middle class, worldly masculinity” through “rearrangeable, aphoristic couplets of advice, voiced from man to man, [that] appear over and over in a large range of poems in manuscripts owned or compiled by men,” and we can situate Rayner’s copying of proverbial material as part of

 On the libel, see Estill, “Mary Beaumont Villiers Rayner Compton,” 141; for Newstead, see Susan Gushee O’Malley, ed., “Custome Is an Idiot”: Jacobean Pamphlet Literature on Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 109–66, esp. 109–10, 120.  Lockyer, Buckingham, 233–34.  This portion includes lists of payments and a reference to the birth of Rayner’s son George, dated to the first and second years of the reign of Mary I. For more see William A. Ringler Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558 (London: Mansell, 1992), 26; manuscript description on the British Library website: tinyurl.com/mu24rzjt (accessed January 6, 2023); Baildon, Proceedings, 181–82.  I am indebted to Michael Johnston for sending me an image of fol. 58v when I was unable to travel during the Covid-19 pandemic.  A cumly reson now have rede (Ringler, Bibliography, no. 4) and Mornyng morning now may I syng (Ringler, Bibliography, no. 1025; DIMEV 3572) (DIMEV = Digital Index of Middle English Verse).

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this trend.17 The household inventories and manorial rental records that Rayner copied in his thirties and forties show him overseeing the accretion of wealth as the steward of a large country estate. Egerton 3537’s contents, assembled across three and a half decades of its compiler’s life, follow Rayner as he strives to improve his social status by learning Latin, assembling bits of masculine popular wisdom, and managing his familial estate’s growing wealth.

And I war a madyn: Sexuality, Transactionality, Transgression Fol. 59r begins with a first-person quatrain about feminine erotic volition, in a scrap of popular English song that Rayner translates into difficult-to-parse Latin that I attempt to unpack below. Its speaker imagines being a chaste “madyn” with the capacity to make different choices if she could relive her adolescent years: And I war a madyn as moni here is for all the gold in this toune I wold not don a mise.18 Non me aurum mide criciner opes violarent Si virginitas immaculata foret (They would not corrupt me with the gold of Midas, If my virginity were to remain unstained.)

Rayner copies these lines neatly, but in a way that does not follow the line breaks established by their rhyme scheme (“is”/ “mise”), and his unique changes disrupt their typical scansion. The speaker’s introduction of her musings with the conditional conjunction “and” (if), coupled with her use of the conditional verbs “war” and “wold,” rhetorically positions her as not a chaste “madyn,” but rather as a carnally experienced woman imagining an alternate virginal past.19 She imagines being offered “gold” in exchange for “do[ing] a mise,” with “mis” and “amis” carrying connotations of transgression and sin, framing her sexuality as a commodity with monetary value.20 This portrayal of youthful feminine transactional

 Christina M. Fitzgerald, “Copying Couplets: Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry,” Exemplaria 32, no. 2 (2020): 107–29, at 123, 109.  DIMEV 520; Ringler, Bibliography, no. 154. For an intriguing reversal of this trope of the regretful sexually experienced woman, see William Blake, “An old maid early eer I knew,” in William Blake: Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 43.  MED s.v. “and” (conj.), 5(a); I am reading “war” as the past form of “ben” (v.).  MED s.v. “amis” (adv.), 3, from “mis” (n.), 1a(a), meaning “sin, sinfulness, evil, wickedness.”

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sexuality resonates with Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras’s assertions that, for singlewomen, sex and material gain were often inseparable from one another.21 The speaker insists that she would refuse this imagined offer of “all the / gold in this toune” and follow the rules of chastity instead, portraying virginity as a material asset whose value is nonetheless limited to the specific local bounds of “this toune.” Egerton’s And I war a madyn is a well-known song that appears in at least three other manuscripts from the early sixteenth century as well as a printed interlude first performed in 1537, demonstrating its widespread presence in popular culture. Its earliest survival is the inclusion of its first line only as a musical prompt in the Norfolk carol anthology Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.e.1 (ca. 1500), a portable, neatly organized little sixty-two-folio paper compilation of drinking songs, misogynist carols, Marian lyrics, and lullabies.22 On fol. 45v the scribe has written “A song in the tune of (And I were a mayd &c,” using a single lanula (round parenthesis) to introduce the original song’s title, before copying the words to Swet Jhesus is cum to us, a nativity carol detailing Jesus’s birth, life, and death.23 And I war a madyn’s status as a contrafactum—“a song” whose words and music were so well-known by the turn of the sixteenth century that a religious carol could follow its “tune” as a reference point and a scribe could cite its first half-line followed by “etc.” and assume that readers would recall its music from memory—attests to its popularity by the time Rayner used it as a pedagogical prompt half a century later. And I war a madyn’s longest version is copied, with musical notation, as a three-quatrain song for five voices in London, British Library, MS Additional 31922 (ca. 1522), fols. 106v–107r. This richly decorated songbook was associated with the

 Judith M. Bennett, “Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwite and Its Historians,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 131–62, at 155–57; Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 127–45, esp. 134–36.  Daniel Wakelin, “The Carol in Writing: Three Anthologies from Fifteenth-Century Norfolk,” Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2006): 25–49; Kathleen Rose Palti, “‘Synge we now alle and sum’: Three Fifteenth-Century Collections of Communal Song: A Study of British Library, Sloane MS 2593; Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e.1; and St. John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.54” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2008). Palti discusses this contrafactum on 205–7.  Swet Jhesus is cum to us (DIMEV 5074), Oxford, Bodleian Library. Eng.poet.e.1, fols. 45v–47v; Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 48–50; Wakelin, “The Carol in Writing,” 36. I am grateful to Wakelin for making images of this manuscript publicly accessible online: https://www.flickr.com/photos/133734300@N05/19273867299/in/ album-72157655499640972/ (accessed December 31, 2021).

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court of a young Henry VIII and is known as the Henry VIII Manuscript.24 It is a trilingual miscellany created for vocal performance, containing courtly songs, erotic forester lyrics, pro-England political songs, and lyrics voicing exuberant masculine sexuality such as one beginning “Let not us that yongmen be / Frome venus ways banysht to be.”25 Many of its songs were written by the king himself in his early twenties, with several others by Tudor court musician, composer, and masquemaker William Cornish (ca. 1474–1523). The Henry VIII Manuscript’s version of And I war a madyn, which I discuss elsewhere as an erotic lyric performing peer sexual education, features two additional stanzas in which the speaker narrates her formative experiences as a twelve-year-old “wanton wench” and a fifteen-year-old confident in her peerless desirability: And I war a maydyn As many one ys, For all the golde in Englond I wold not do amysse. When I was a wanton wench Of twelve yere of age, These cowrtyers with ther amorus They kyndyld my corage. When I was come to The age of fifteen yere, In all this lond, nowther fre nor bond, Methought I had no pere.

After imagining an alternate chaste past introduced by the conditional construction “And I war,” the speaker relates her adolescent sexual experiences (“When I was”) in the subsequent two verses, which are both in the past tense. Her recounting of her history as a twelve-year-old “wanton wench” whose desire was “kyndlyd” (inflamed, exploited) by amorous courtiers echoes Geoffrey Chaucer’s Alisoun of Bath’s sexual autobiography (“For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age [. . .] Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve”).26 This echo places And I were a

 Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 159–61, 235–36. For more on the manuscript and an edition of this version, see Raymond G. Siemens, ed., The Lyrics of the Henry VIII Manuscript (Grand Rapids, MI: English Renaissance Text Society, 2013), 56.  Siemens, Henry VIII Manuscript, 52–53, lines 1–2.  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue 3.4, 6, in The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I am grateful to A. S. G. Edwards for pointing out this song’s Chaucerian echo to me and encouraging me to think about it more deeply.

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mayden in the discursive context of verse voiced by carnally bold and unrepentant women who recount experiences of exploitation or victimization while insisting on their enjoyment, agency, and complicity in them. The Henry VIII Manuscript’s version’s account of precocious female sexuality also recalls the outspoken Gilote in MS Harley 2253’s anonymous Anglo-Norman performance poem Gilote e Johane (1301), who declares, “Je estoie pucele, mes ore ne su mie” (I was a virgin, but now I’m not at all); here, “pucele” carries connotations of youthful femininity and virginity similar to its English counterpart “maiden.”27 And I war a madyn’s first line also survives in British Library, MS Harley 1317, a trilingual compilation of legal statutes. Here, the line was written in the early sixteenth century at the top of fol. 94v along with the first couple of lines of another lyric to create a new hybrid song fragment: And I were a mayden loley to syng & sey as here aperythe to the sycht of a ma[n?] and of a talle.28

This is followed on the verso by four differently spelled pen-trials of the name “homffrey dymmock,” scribbled in the same cursive hand and brown ink, along with a couple of proverbs (“evyll have he that evyll dothe think”; “mote maket and klays / Shapyt but maners maket the man”). William Ringler interprets these lines as “incipits of two songs” and lists them under two separate entries in his index of Tudor manuscript verse.29 Richard Leighton Greene similarly categorizes them as “two snatches of songs,” while the manuscript description on the British Library’s website characterizes them as “A reference to a performance of the song ‘And I war a maydyn.’”30 These sources agree that “loley to syng and sey . . . ” is another well-known bit of floating song, with “loley” an interjection popular in drinking

 Gilote e Johane, in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2, ed. Susanna Fein with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), 156–73, line 27; Alan Hindley, Frederick W. Langley and Brian J. Levy, Old French-English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), s.v. “pucele”: “virgin, maid, maiden; maidservant.” Carter Revard traces the affinities between Alisoun and Gilote in “The Wife of Bath’s Grandmother: Or, How Gilote Showed Her Friend Johane That the Wages of Sin Is Worldly Pleasure, and How Both Then Preached This Gospel throughout England and Ireland,” The Chaucer Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 117–36.  For more on the manuscript, which was copied in the second half of the fifteenth century and also contains Latin letters between men and household inventories added in 1514–1515, see Greene, Early English Carols, 302; Ringler, Bibliography, 27; British Library, “An abridgment of the statute laws,” https://tinyurl.com/ycxxjk5s (accessed January 11, 2023).  Ringler, Bibliography, 27, no. 154, no. 963: “Loley to syng and sey as here [. . .] Incipit only of a song.”  Greene, Early English Carols, 302; British Library, “An abridgment of the statute laws.”

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song refrains “expressing gaiety or idle abandon” that also functioned as “a soothing expression used in lullabies” such as the well-known Coventry Carol.31 The phrase “as here aperythe to the sycht of a ma[n?] and of a talle” resists easy interpretation: echoing the carnal connotations of the opening line, it could mean “of a man and of a penis,” with “talle” functioning as the common genital euphemism “tail,” putting the transgressive woman’s voice in an explicitly sexual bodily context.32 It could, as the British Library’s catalogue suggests, describe a specific performance of the songs And I war a mayden and Loley to syng and sey (or a single lyric opening with the lines “And I war a mayden / Loley to syng and sey”), with “to the sycht of . . . ” referring to the audience watching the performance; here, “talle” might signify “a group of persons, company.”33 By combining the first line of And I were a mayden with another snatch of verse, Humphrey Dymmock’s scribbling hand rewrites the song’s associations with feminine sexual regret and longing for bygone chastity, instead incorporating sentiments of merriment or sounds of soothing from the multivalent interjection “loley” and the popular alliterating verb pair “syng and sey.” Eton schoolmaster Nicholas Udall’s comic interlude Thersytes (printed ca. 1562; first performed in October 1537), adapted and expanded from a Latin dialogue by the French humanist Johannes Ravisius Textor (ca. 1470–1542), names And I were a maiden as a song sung by women after copious adolescent sexual activity.34 The play’s titular character, a bellicose boaster who embodies aggressive youthful masculinity, swaggers through the streets on a sword-buying errand. After insulting every man he meets and inviting each one to fight with him, he encounters a woman and references And I were a maiden in a harassing monologue directed at her:

 MED s.v. “trolli lolli” (interj.), 1; “lullai” (interj.), 1(a). For the Coventry Carol, see DIMEV 4049; for other songs with “lullay” in the first line or burden, see DIMEV 351 through 366.  MED s.v. “tail” (n.), 1b(c).  MED s.v. “tale” (n.), 5(c).  Nicholas Udall, A new enterlude called Thersytes (London: John Tysdale, 1562), B2r; Marie Axton, ed., Three Tudor Classical Interludes: Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 37–63. For more on Udall, an Oxford-educated schoolmaster, playwright, and Protestant propagandist who was imprisoned for buggery in 1541, see Matthew Steggle, “Udall [Yevedale], Nicholas (1504–1556),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2006, https://doi.org/10. 1093/ref:odnb/27974. For more on Thersytes, see Claire Kenward, “‘Of arms and the man’: Thersites in Early Modern English Drama,” in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison and Claire Kenward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 421–38, esp. 421–22.

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Fye! blusshe not, woman, I wyll do you no harme Excepte I had you soner to kepe my backe warme. Alas, lyttle pums, why are ye so sore afrayd? I praye you, shew how longe it is sence ye were a mayd. Tell me in myne eare. Syrs, she hathe me tolde That gone was her mydenhead at thrustene yeare olde. Byr ladye! she was lothe to kepe it to longe. ‘And I were a mayde agayne’ nowe maye be here songe. Do after my counsel, of maydens the hoole bevye, Quickly red your maydenhed for they are vengeaunce hevy. (ll. 254–64)

Noting that the woman is “blussh[ing]” and “sore afrayd” at his unwanted advances, Thersites continues to harass her and attempts to shame her publicly by loudly proclaiming that her “mydenhead” was “gone [. . .] at thrustene [thirteen] yeare old,” recalling the Henry VIII Manuscript’s “wanton wench / Of twelve yere of age.” In his deployment of the song as a tactic of street harassment, Thersites’s insistence that “And I were a mayde agayne” is the characteristic “songe” of women recalling their formative erotic experiences connects the song’s fictional content with its performers’ embodied realities. Like the fragmentary manuscript versions, Udall’s Thersytes attests to And I were a madyn’s popularity as a song in the early-to-mid-sixteenth century, while his addition of the adverb “agayne” to the song’s opening line makes its speaker’s counterfactual rhetorical return to sexual inexperience even more explicit. Performing Ardis Butterfield’s “way of reading laterally that involves reading deeply,” and tracing Egerton 3537’s version of And I war a madyn across its larger textual network in manuscript, performance, and print, illuminates the song’s popularity and significance across the late medieval and early modern periods, showing how it functioned differently in various contexts.35 We can see that it was widely known by the turn of the sixteenth century as a “songe” for its musical “tune” as well as other “points of contact,” using David Lawton’s definition of “voice,” between literary first-person “I” and lived experience.36 These points of contact include the lyric’s gendered first-person “I,” its emotional valences, its intimate connection to a particular sexual history. The song’s multiple textual lives constitute a rich case of what Butterfield identifies as the “textual recycling /remixing” of “medieval lyrics as clusters of myriad smaller elements that then combine and recombine in new forms and contexts.”37  Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?,” ELH 82 (2015) 319–43, at 335–36.  David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1.  Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?,” 328.

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Egerton 3537’s And I were a madyn, albeit brief, is important due to its unique textual variants and its usage as a pedagogical prompt for Latin composition, in addition to the fact that it is followed on the page by another female-voiced scrap. It differs in two small but significant ways from its longer version in the Henry VIII Manuscript, which opens, “And I war a maydyn / As many one ys,” whereas this one specifies “as moni here is.” Rayner’s inclusion of the adverb “here” (in this place) lends specificity and immediacy to the song’s sentiments by imagining it as sung by or before a gathering of maidens, with an experienced woman sharing her warning about adolescent sex with her still-virginal peers.38 The longer version declares, “For all the gold in Englond / I would not do amiss,” which Rayner changes to “all the gold in this toune.” Rather than situating herself simply “in Englond,” Rayner’s speaker imagines the particular urban setting of “this toune,” with the adjective “this” denoting locational specificity.39 Rayner’s two variants —“here,” “in this toune”—furnish an immediate, local context for the song’s sentiments about feminine sexual rule-breaking. Rayner’s excerpting of the song’s first stanza changes its overall sense: without the subsequent stanzas’ narrative details of the speaker’s experiences as a self-confident “wanton wench,” we are left only with regret, with her insistence that if she “war” still a maiden, she “wold not” do anything to transgress. Rayner’s abbreviated version closes with the phrase “don amis,” with connotations of agency in the verb “don” as well as sin and culpability in the adverb “amis.” The song’s new ending changes it from a first-person sexual autobiography to a single quatrain that is less narratively specific and more didactic. “If I still shared your particular bodily state, I would make different choices,” the speaker tells her audience of “moni” “madyn[s],” leveraging her status as their erstwhile peer and harnessing the emotional valences of guilt and regret attached to “amis”—the song’s last word—to teach a lesson about sexual conduct. And I war a madyn’s didacticism is intensified by Rayner’s use of it as a prompt for Latin translation, formatting it as a pedagogical exercise rather than a song for recreational performance. We can read its English and Latin together using the methodology employed by Marjorie Harrington in her work on how paired translations “accret[e] new layers of meaning.”40 In textual pairs, Harrington identifies “the act of translation [as] a mode of analysis, as authors choose particular connotations and native rhetorical effects in order to express different aspects of multivalent

 MED s.v. “her” (adv.), 1a(a).  MED s.v. “ther” (adj.), 1b(b).  Marjorie Harrington, “Bilingual Form: Paired Translations of Latin and Vernacular Poetry, ca. 1250–1350” (PhD diss, University of Notre Dame, 2017), 2.

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topics.”41 In fol. 59r’s case, both English and Latin versions of And I war a madyn are in the first person (“I”/“me”) and retain their conditional framing (“And”/“si”), but Rayner’s Latin contains marked divergences. He leaves some English bits untranslated—such as the locative phrase “in this toune”—and uses Latin to intensify the song’s focus on sex and material gain. He heightens its emphasis on erotic transactionality by including multiple Latin synonyms for riches: he translates “gold” as both the straightforward “aurum” (gold [as currency or medium of exchange]) and the more general “opes” (resources, riches, wealth).42 Between these two terms for wealth, Rayner writes “mide criciner” as one word, although it is likely two. “Mide” is probably the genitive case of Midas, the mythical gold-hungry king.43 “Criciner,” possibly an adjective, is more difficult to translate. It could be “a weird name specifying a particular type of gold,” perhaps a Latinization (crica) of the English “crike” (an inlet of the sea, cove, small estuary; also, a small stream, creek) indicating “a place where gold is from and whose name has been awkwardly Latinized.”44 Rayner amplifies the song’s focus on gendered embodiment by translating “madyn”—a noun that could refer specifically to a virgin or more generally designate a young, unmarried woman—as “virginitas immaculata” (unstained virginity).45 The adjective immaculata, meaning “unblemished, pure” (in reference to the hymen) and “(with reference to human behaviour) pure, without the stain of sin,” paired with virginitas’s sense referring “to the integrity of the hymen,” clarifies the English quatrain’s emphasis on bodily experience.46 Rayner ends his first Latin line with a verb (“violarent”) evocative of penetration, meaning “to violate the physical integrity of, break into, pierce.”47 In addition to penetration, “violare” also carries connotations of pollution, defilement, corruption, adultery, incest, and rape, signifying both transgression and violation.48

 Harrington, “Bilingual Form,” 5.  DMLBS s.v. “aurum” (n.), 2; “ops” (n.), 3(a) (pl.).  Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “Mida” (n.). I am grateful to Barbara Newman for suggesting this to me (personal correspondence, December 29, 2021).  For these speculations I am indebted to Joshua Byron Smith and Lora Walsh (personal correspondence, July 17, 2021) and Joseph Malcomson (personal correspondence, December 11, 2021); DMLBS s.v. “creca” (n.); MED s.v. “crike” (n.[1]), 1(a).  MED s.v. “maiden” (n.), 1(a), 2(a).  DMLBS s.v “virginitas” (n.), 1b; “immaculatus” (adj.), 1, 3.  DMLBS s.v. “violare” (v.), 3.  DMLBS s.v. “violare” (v.), 1, 2, 4.

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Mi love is gone to London: Abandoned Maidens and Revenge Cuckoldry Egerton 3537’s unique version of And I war a madyn is followed on the manuscript page by another female-voiced erotic fragment, creating a lyric sequence centered on connections between emotion, volition, and young women’s sexual rule-breaking: Mi love is gone to London; the devyll of hell go with him! I shall make him cocold or he comm home. Whi wold he not take me with him? Londinium consessit amans cornice malingna Petiens serebit cornix hic reddict (My lover went away to London, with a wicked horn, [I am] seeking to bestow on him a horn when he returns here.)49

We cannot be sure that this is a lyric and not just a phrase for practice translation, as I explore in this chapter’s subsequent section, but I am choosing to read as such based on its shared content with and physical proximity to And I war a madyn. These lines initially resemble a sorrowful lament of betrayal and desertion, of male movement and female stasis, typical of Middle English songs voiced by abandoned maidens: the speaker mourns the fact that her lover has left her for the capital city while she remains at “home.”50 She asserts her claim of exclusive desire for her partner and centers his erotic connection to her by opening with the possessive pronoun “mi” and the noun “love.” By alliteratively linking “love” with “London,” she underscores his newfound connection with the city rather than with her. This standard song-type of feminine lament is exemplified by another early sixteenth-century fragment copied with music about a bereft maiden “lokyng for her trew love longe or that yt was day” (looking for her true

 I have not found any reference to this piece elsewhere. It is not listed in the DIMEV or Ringler’s Bibliography. I am indebted to Michael Johnston, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, and Barbara Newman for assistance with Rayner’s bad Latin.  For more on how “the disconsolate woman mourning her lover’s absence constitutes the most common, and well-known, portrayal of feminine emotion in medieval English vernacular song,” see Carissa M. Harris, “Sexuality, Pedagogy, and Women’s Emotions in Middle English Songs,” in A Companion to Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, ed. Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 297–319.

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love long before it was daylight) and pleading for her lover’s return: “Then thys pour mayd / To hyr self [say]d, / ‘My love, wyll ye not com?’”51 The second half of Mi love is gone to London’s opening line, however, abruptly revises these conventional emotional valences, turning the speaker’s lament of desertion to an articulation of fury: “the devyll of hell go with him!” she exclaims. Rather than pining for her absent lover, she curses him with vicious imprecations and consigns him to hell.52 Her anger at her lover’s departure also animates the subsequent line, in which she promises to “make him cocold” as revenge.53 Like the speaker in And I war a madyn, she imagines her sexuality as a valued commodity to be leveraged for her benefit: whereas the first song’s erstwhile “madyn” imagined retaining her virginity as worth more than a large amount of “gold,” this woman portrays sex with other men as interpersonal payback for her lover’s faithlessness. With the declaration “I shall,” she positions herself as a purposeful, determined sexual-grammatical agent. While the opening clause’s standard lyric subject position of the betrayed maiden casts young women as victimized by men’s duplicity and geographical mobility, powerless save for their capacity to voice their emotions in sorrowful song, the cuckold-maker wields power over men through her ability to re-“make” a man’s identity from “love” to “cocold” through her corporeal choices. She imagines sex as an embodied expression of feminine anger, as a tool for disempowering men and making them suffer as revenge for mistreatment. The lyric’s final line—“Whi wold he not take me with him?”—articulates a question that can be read in a range of emotional registers as heartfelt, plaintive, exasperated, or

 Lokyng for her trew love (DIMEV 3185), in New York, New York Public Library, MS Drexel 4184, front flyleaf, verso. The full fragment, badly cropped when the original sixteenth-century manuscript was repurposed as endleaves for a set of seventeenth-century songbooks, reads: [Lok]yng for her trew love long or that yt was day, Lokyng for her trew love longe or that yt was day. Thys mayde her bowre Bylt by þe [sh]ore With bowys and whytt blossom And styll she [. . .] Then thys pour mayd To hyr self [say]d, “My love wyll ye not com?” She cowde not [. . .]  Another English lyric that features a “mayden” both lamenting and cursing the man who abandoned her is As I me rode this endre dai (DIMEV 614); Greene, Early English Carols, 274.  For examples of the popular construction “make [him/a man/her husband] cuckold,” see several of the quotations listed under MED s.v. “cokewold” (n.), 1(a).

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seething with resentment and fury. With that closing question, the speaker indicates that she does not want her lover to “comm home” so much as she wants to go “with him” to London. Rayner’s Latin translation amplifies the fragment’s emphasis on sexuality and geographical location. In contrast to the English piece, with its first-person pronouns “mi,” “I,” and “me,” Rayner’s translation is entirely in the third person. It opens with “Londinium,” the accusative of place to which, centering London as the object of the speaker’s focus. Rayner’s first Latin half-line (“Londinium consessit amans”) straightforwardly translates the English poem’s opening clause (“Mi love is gone to London”), save for the fact that it lacks a Latin equivalent for the first-person possessive pronoun “mi.” Then, attempting to extend the English piece’s emphasis on the “cocold,” Rayner incorrectly uses both “cornice” and “cornix,” a third-declension feminine noun signifying a crow or raven, instead of “cornu,” a fourth-declension neuter noun meaning “horn.”54 Rayner’s repetition of “co” echoing across both English and Latin versions, with its hard consonants—“cocold,” “comm,” “consessit,” “cornice,” “cornix”—nonetheless underscores his focus on cuckoldry in spite of his imperfect Latin. In addition to signifying cuckoldry, the second “cornix” could be genital innuendo, for “cornu” was a common penis euphemism in classical Latin; in that case, the final line indicates that the wayward lover will “beget a horn” (suffer the cuckoldry that he has engendered through his faithless actions) or “produce a horn” (take out his penis once again).55 If “petens” (erroneously written by Rayner as “petiens”) refers to the male speaker, we can read it as the legal term for plaintiff, one who sues in court, or as a participle, meaning “petitioning, seeking, trying to obtain” his former lover’s forgiveness, or at least her sexual companionship.56 And if “petens” refers to the female speaker, it could signify that she is “seeking” to bestow a horn on him.57 “Serebit,” a later addition written in the space left between “petiens” and “cornix,” is perhaps the third-person future form of the verb “serere,” which carries a range of generative meanings: “to sow (seed or crop), figuratively,” “to beget, produce, bring forth.”58 Or, “serere” could possibly mean “to overspread, occupy,” carrying sexual implications due to the popular obscene usage of “occupy”; in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, “fottere” is glossed “to jape, to fuck, to sard, to swyve, to occupy.”59 Rayner leaves the final English line (“Whi wold he not

 DMLBS s.v. “cornix” (n.), 1; “cornu” (n.), 11.  J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 22.  For the legal sense, see DMLBS s.v. “petere” (v.), 7(f); for the others, see 3, 5.  I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for supplying this suggestion.  DMLBS s.v. “serere” (v.), 1(b), 4.  R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources (London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1965), s.v. “sero” (v), with thanks

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take me with him?”) out of his Latin translation entirely, closing instead with the wayward lover’s imagined humiliating, yet perhaps priapic, return (“reddict,” likely an error for “reddet”). In three brief, irregular lines akin to a flash narrative, Mi love is gone to London revises the standard abandoned maiden’s lament in bawdy, vindictive fashion: after declaring that her lover has left her for the capital’s urban delights, she curses him to hell, voices her intention to sleep with other men as revenge, and vents her fury at the fact that he did “not take [her] with him” to London. Rather than casting herself as disempowered by men’s duplicity, her bold voice insists that she will use her sexuality to gain leverage in the situation.

Form, Voice, and Gender: Fols. 58v–59r’s Lyric Pedagogies Egerton 3537’s female-voiced lyric sequence is as rich as it is brief, shaped by its relationships between languages and textual versions as well as its connections between poems, to fols. 58v–59r’s proverbial material, to popular pedagogical practices, to Rayner himself. Fol. 59r poses the problem of textual form: Can we discuss And I war a madyn and Mi love has gone to London as lyrics? For And I war a madyn, the answer is an uncomplicated yes due to its attested status elsewhere as a song for five-part vocal performance and its “huge horizontal field of lateral connections” across manuscripts, texts, and time, which Ardis Butterfield identifies as a distinguishing feature of medieval lyric.60 Mi love has gone to London is more difficult to categorize. Unlike And I war a madyn, with its simple abab rhyme scheme and six to seven syllables per line, its meter and rhyme scheme are irregular, with its only end-rhyme elements the repeated prepositional phrase “with him” closing multiple lines. The most straightforward explanation is that this is simply a case of scribal corruption. Or, it could be a pedagogical prompt that we are invited to read as lyric or lyric-adjacent due to its connections in theme, voice, and manuscript proximity to And I war a madyn. Perhaps it originated as a “game of consequences” in which different people took turns adding lines to a well-known song opening in a classroom exercise

to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton for providing the reference; John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), 137, s.v. “fottere.”  Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?,” 336.

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that took on a life of its own.61 This last possibility would make sense in the context of the folio’s date and contents: William Rayner, in his early twenties, copying English verses and translating them into imperfect Latin, perhaps with the help of his peers. Regardless of what these lines are—an instance of scribal corruption, a lost song fragment, a pedagogical exercise, a game played by multiple people, or a combination of these things—their form is further complicated by their textual relations, for they share format and folio space on fols. 58v–59r with LatinEnglish proverbial translation exercises. All of the items on these facing pages— three bits of song and sixteen proverbs—follow the same layout: first an English snatch of well-known popular discourse, followed by its rendering in Latin. For example, Rayner copies the proverb “It is as like as a napill & a noister” (It is as similar as an apple and an oyster) followed by “Rosa cu(m) anemona co(n)fers” (to compare a rose with an anemone), a Latin saying printed in Erasmus’s Adagia that echoes the English proverb’s comparison between two dissimilar objects.62 This format is a standard feature of the late medieval manuscript schoolbooks analyzed by Christopher Cannon, in which young men “had to invent [. . .] the Latin to translate an English prompt,” making it “difficult to differentiate a poem from an exercise.”63 But fol. 59r’s opening lyrics are unlike many of the vernacular contents in English schoolbooks, which tend to be popular moral verse voiced by and addressed to men; instead, they are songs in women’s voices, used as prompts to generate masculine Latin mastery. One item straddling the recto’s divide between feminine lyric voice and masculine self-making comes at the very bottom of the facing page (fol. 58v). Fol. 59r’s song scraps are immediately preceded by another first-person erotic song about gendered sexuality, this one in a man’s voice:

 This possibility was suggested by Julia Boffey during the Q&A for an early version of this essay at the Early Book Society Biennial Meeting, Bangor, Wales (virtual), July 12, 2021.  John Clarke’s translation of Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek and Latin proverb compendium Adagia (ca. 1500–1536), titled Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina in usum scholarum concinnata. Or proverbs English, and Latine methodically disposed according to the common-place heads, in Erasmus his adages (London: Felix Kyngston for Robert Mylbourne, 1639), follows Rayner in pairing the English proverb “As like an apple is to an oyster” with Erasmus’s “Rosam cum anemo(n)a confers,” 97; Bartlett Jere Whiting and Helen Wescott Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), A164.  Christopher Cannon, From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 71, 80. Cannon discusses examples of students translating English verse into Latin on pages 77–83.

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I have bene a fauster this longe and mani a day A fauster woll I be no more No longer honte I may.

This is a verse from the genre of “forester songs” popular in the early decades of the sixteenth century. These lyrics, suffused with double entendre, are voiced by men who identify themselves as “fosters” (hunters), fondly recalling their days of “hunting” women and announcing their retirement from erotic pursuits or insisting on their continued virility.64 They use the multivalent language of hunting and shooting to discuss masculine embodiment and sexuality in violent, predatory terms. Like And I war a madyn, whose longer version survives in the Henry VIII Manuscript, Rayner’s lines also appear in nearly-identical form in the same manuscript as the burden of a song by Tudor court composer and chaplain Robert Cooper (ca. 1465–1539/40): I have bene a foster long and many a day foster wyl I be no more no lenger shote I may yet have I bene a foster. (ll. 1–5)65

Rayner’s differences from Cooper’s version are slight: Cooper writes “shote” where Rayner copies “honte,” and Rayner includes an extra pronoun (“this”) and article (“a”). Cooper’s song, likely performed at a forester-themed pageant staged by William Cornish for Henry VIII’s court at Windsor in June 1522, echoes an even earlier song in another Tudor musical anthology, British Library MS Additional 5665 (ca. 1510), which begins with the lines “Y have ben a foster / Long and meney day” (ll. 1–2).66 The longer versions of this song are explicitly bawdy, figuring the foster as a paragon of virility who “shoots” tirelessly with his penile “bowe” or “arow”; here, as in fol. 59r’s And I war a madyn, the obscene subtext is present but not as prominent as in other versions.

 MED s.v. “foster” (n.[1]), 1(a). For more on forester lyrics, see Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 210–14.  Siemens, The Henry VIII Manuscript, 46–47; DIMEV 2176; Roger Bowers, “Cowper [Cooper], Robert (ca. 1465–1539/40),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/70480.  London, British Library, MS Additional 5665, fol. 53v; DIMEV 2175. I discuss this song in Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 211–14 and include an edition on page 244. Other forester songs are Wherfor shuld I hang up my bow (DIMEV 6503) and Cornish’s Sore this dere strykyn ys (DIMEV 5005).

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The other English bits that Rayner copies on fols. 58v–59r are shorter aphorisms and proverbial phrases. In sharp contrast to the female-voiced lyrics at the top of fol. 59r, but in accordance with I have bene a fauster on fol. 58v, many (but not all) of these proverbs are by and about men. Even if “man” functions in some cases as a gender-neutral universal designation, the aggregate emphasis on masculinity is striking, especially in the context of the male-voiced “fauster” lyric. These proverbs teem with male pronouns, references to “mani a man” and “everi man,” urban mercantile-class figures such as the “marchant” and the “bocher,” the “coke” who teaches younger male birds his ways, and the folk hero Robin Hood: “He is a man alone”; “As the auld coke cruithe the yong coke lernit”; “He hath a grett hed and littell witt”; “Mani a man talkit off Robin hude that never shotte in his boo”; “he is as rede as a bochers bole.”67 These proverbs teach the importance of “witt” and savvy wisdom for men, and touch on issues of trust and personal identity in relationships among men (“Be cause tho art a fauce knave thu thynkyth that everi man be so”). One centers on masculine knowledge regarding commodities and their ever-shifting prices: “If a man knowe wat wold be deyer he wolde be marchant but a yeyr” (If a man knew what items would be expensive, he would only need to be a merchant for just a year), echoing the female-voiced lyrics’ focus on erotic transactionality and sexual value. The proverbs chosen by Rayner foreground the significance of gendered experience, with the claim that “mani a man” speaks of the outlaw Robin Hood, but few can emulate his martial deeds by “shott[ing] in his boo” (shooting in his bow); in Egerton 3537’s manuscript context, the reference to men shooting with bows carries a bawdy echo of I have bene a fauster. This is the tenth proverb and final item Rayner copies onto fol. 59r, leaving the rest of the page blank even though there is room for one or two more items. With this concluding proverb, Rayner moves from “moni” “a madyn” in the recto’s opening line to “mani a man” at its end. We can read Rayner’s copying and translation of female-voiced lyrics as part of “the tradition of boys performing emotional speeches in women’s voices in schools” explored by Marjorie Curry Woods.68 The process of learning Latin required not only that young men use floating bits of English popular culture as translation prompts, as discussed by Cannon, but also that they inhabit feminine lyric subjectivities by performing laments about abandonment, rape, and other experiences of gendered mistreatment and bodily vulnerability to masculine aggression. “The emotions and hence the texts are remembered in the body as well

 Whiting, Proverbs, C347, H226, M502, R156.  Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1.

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as the mind,” writes Woods of this process’s pedagogical efficacy.69 In translating these intimate first-person scraps into Latin, Rayner “proverbializes” them, a process in which the lyric “I”—which “unites the affective, social, and circumstantial particulars of a speaker in literary voice,” to use Ingrid Nelson’s useful phrasing —takes on a universalizing, didactic character.70 These lyrics’ form and pedagogical context open up myriad interpretive possibilities regarding gender, embodiment, and lyric voice. David Lawton defines “voice” as “a point of contact [. . .] aesthetic or formal, such as prosodic or generic markers; ideological, offering the chance to agree with or dissent from a particular discursive position; rhetorical, signs that alert us to readerly engagement or distance, or otherwise stir affect; intertextual, overtly keying our present reading into an antecedent text; or pointers to a speaker or narrator, to whom we may respond with identity or difference or simply puzzlement.”71 The voices in this sequence offer several of these points of contact: “intertextual,” as in the case of And I war a madyn’s presence across multiple manuscripts and in oral culture; “pointers to a speaker,” with their repeated “I”s; and “intertextual” connections to abandoned maiden’s laments and other songs about female sexuality. The fact that fol. 59r’s lyric sequence opens with “and”—a conjunction that “introduce[s] [. . .] a condition,” the irresistible “if” of lyric that enables a speaker to temporarily inhabit the identity of the “I” following it—points to the sequence’s preoccupation with lyric voice’s capacity to enable scribes, performers, and speakers to occupy gendered subjectivities other than their own.72 The sequence consisting of I have bene a fauster, And I war a madyn, and Mi love is gone to London contains the only instances on fols. 58v–59r where Rayner writes the pronoun “I,” loopy and oversized, a total of five times, in contrast to the repeated generic he’s and man’s in the proverbial material. Rayner’s version of And I war a madyn effectively de-genders the song’s voice: without the additional stanzas in which the speaker explicitly identifies as a former “wanton wench,” we can read Egerton’s speaker as perhaps not even a woman at all, with the song’s introductory conditional “and” opening up new possibilities. The lines “And I were a madyn / As moni here is” resonate with the opening lines of William Blake’s The Angel, another gender-crossing lyric in which a male lyric persona takes on the identity of “a maiden”:

 Woods, Weeping for Dido, 111.  Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 32.  David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1.  MED s.v. “and” (conj.), 5(a).

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“I Dreamt a Dream! What can it mean? / And that I was a maiden Queen.”73 But after these moments of rhetorically inhabiting other embodied subjectivities and sexual histories, Rayner’s textual persona must return to the masculine proverbial matter of buying and selling, of wit and wisdom, of relationships among men. Fol. 59r shows William Rayner reframing a well-known female-voiced erotic song in a pedagogical format, where it is truncated and translated into Latin along with a lesser-known fragment featuring a snapshot story of love, abandonment, fury, and revenge cuckoldry. And I war a madyn and Mi love is gone to London center on feminine sexual transgression—the former casting it as something to be avoided, the latter portraying it as a useful interpersonal weapon—and feminine sexual volition: “I wold not don amis,” declares one; “I shall mak him cocold,” insists the other. These verses imagine women as making choices about sexuality: the first dreams of going back in time to conduct herself differently, while the second declares her intention to cuckold her departed lover. They express emotional sentiments—regret, sorrow, longing, fury—about sexuality in contrast to the rest of the folio’s third-person proverbial sayings about men that offer detached general wisdom. They invoke local, urban contexts—the first imagining speaking among many maidens “here,” “in this toune” and the second recounting how her lover left her for “London”—that depart from the capacious generalities and mixed-gender moralizing of the proverbial statements on the rest of the folio, even as they provide an intriguing counterpart to the first-person masculine “I” of the erotic forester lyric at the bottom of the facing folio.

 Blake, William Blake: Selected Poems, 27, lines 1–2. I am grateful to Thomas Ward for suggesting this connection.

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A Lydgate Anthology: The Codicological Vicissitudes of Rawlinson C.48 When working with Middle English manuscripts, it is not unusual to encounter codices produced in a discontinuous manner, copied by multiple scribes collaborating in ways that may strike us as haphazard or less than efficient. Indeed, as I outlined in the introduction to this volume, Susanna Fein is one of the modern masters at unlocking the complicated history of manuscripts. Across her scholarly essays and editorial efforts, she has shed much light on how scribes undertook often erratic and surprising forms of collaboration. And yet, as part of all her investigations, Fein studiously keeps questions of literary meaning in mind. Here, inspired by Fein’s enviable codicological sleuthing skills, I will examine a manuscript with opaque—and, because anomalous, potentially telling—evidence about the stages of its production. And, like Fein, I will attempt to keep questions of the literary in view. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.48, the subject of my investigation, contains an assortment of John Lydgate’s poetry, alongside an epistle by pseudoBernard of Clairvaux and “Dum iuvenis crevi,” an anonymous Latin poem concerning old age. The two scribes at work on this manuscript maintained a strict division of labor, with one working on the Latin materials, in a textualis script, on parchment, while the second contributed the Middle English materials, in a cursive script, on mixed quires of parchment and paper. This fussy distribution of stints is interesting enough on its own, but what makes this scribal teamwork more unusual yet, I will argue, is that the second scribe’s addition to the manuscript has the look of someone working independently of the first scribe, producing a discrete set of quires that were at some point added to the first scribe’s work. (As those who have worked with manuscripts to any extent will testify, independently produced units being compiled together in a manuscript is not an uncommon phenomenon.) But on closer inspection, evidence of the quiring shows that these two scribes could not have worked independently, as I will discuss in detail below. Moreover, as a literary artifact, Rawlinson C.48 is also worth examining, for I will argue that the various twists and turns of this scribal partnership ultimately yielded a manuscript with clear thematic resonances. What emerges in Rawlinson C.48 is a book for a paterfamilias, encouraging him to inculcate moderation in his household, while also reminding him that death is inevitable, and thus the household—no matter how properly constituted—is only ever temporary.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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The manuscript contains the following texts: Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola (fols. 1r–4v)1 John Lydgate, Siege of Thebes (fols. 5r–78r; DIMEV 6276–5)2 Id., “Verses on the Kings of England” (fols. 78v–80r; DIMEV 5731–8)3 Id., “On the Five Joys” (fols. 80r–81v; DIMEV 4431–3) Anon., “Cum iuvenis crevi” (fol. 83r–v)4 Benedict Burgh, Cato Major (fols. 84r–111v; DIMEV 1418–2) John Lydgate, “Fifteen O’s of Christ” (fols. 111v–116v; DIMEV 3843–2) Id., “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep” (fols. 117r–128r; DIMEV 1075–4) Id., “Dietary” (fols. 128v–130r; DIMEV 6586–2)5

 I wish to thank Charles Campbell, Daniel Conner, and Matthew Gorey for help translating and parsing much of the Latin material I discuss here and to Isaac Wang for creating Figure 2, which appears below. Thanks are also due to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, my co-editor, for her insightful remarks about this essay. This text is untitled in the manuscript. For an edition, see PL 182: cols. 647–51, where it is titled Epistola CDLVI: Ad Raymundum dominum castri Ambruosii. Migne places this text among the spurious works of Bernard of Clairvaux, and no authorship attribution has since been made. This was a popular text in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Latin and several European vernaculars: see Ruth Miguel Franco, “La Epistola de cura rei familiaris atribuida al Pseudo Bernardo: Consideraciones sobre la génesis et difusión de sus traducciones hispánicas,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86 (2009): 485–502.  As Alain Renoir and C. David Benson, “XVI. John Lydgate,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 6, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980), 1809, note, “The works of John Lydgate have attracted an unusually large number of alternate titles.” In what follows, I adopt the primary title used by Renoir and Benson. “DIMEV” numbers refer to the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (dimev.net), where one can also find reference to each text’s corresponding number in The Index of Middle English Verse and The New Index of Middle English Verse.  For a discussion of this text by Lydgate and a similar, anonymous, version, see Linne R. Mooney, “Lydgate’s ‘Kings of England’ and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings,” Viator 20 (1989): 255–89; and Margaret Connolly, “The Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and the Significance of Its Material Form,” in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, ed. Holly James-Maddocks, Derek Pearsall and Margaret Connolly, York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 3 (York: York Medieval Press, 2022), 222–40. Connolly identifies a new manuscript of Lydgate’s text.  Most versions of this poem begin “Dum iuvenis crevi.” See Morton W. Bloomfield, Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 A.D. (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1979), #1812 (p. 166). Note that Richard Newhauser and István Bejczy, A Supplement to Morton W. Bloomfield et al., “Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 A.D.,” Intrvmenta Patristica et Medievaliae: Research on the Inheritance of Early and Medieval Christianity 50 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), subsequently deleted this text from the canon of medieval Latin texts about virtues and vices, since it “deals with differences between youth and old age” (131).  On the manuscript history of Lydgate’s “Dietary,” see Jake Walsh Morrissey, “‘To al indifferent’: The Virtues of Lydgate’s ‘Dietary,’” Medium Ævum 84, no. 2 (2015): 258–78 and Julie

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Id., “Stans puer ad mensam” (fols. 130r–131v; DIMEV 3588–5)6 Id., “Ballade on an Ale Seller” (fols. 131v–133r; DIMEV 4466–1) Id., “Ballade on an Ale Seller Become Constant” (fol. 133r–v; DIMEV 6104–1) Id., “Stella celi exterpavit, Version 2” (fols. 133v–134r; DIMEV 3850–1) Id., “Prayer to Blessed Virgin” (fol. 134r; DIMEV 4068–1) Anon., “Prayer on the Holy Name” (fol. 134v; DIMEV 2840–1)7 Anon., “Salve Regina” (fol. 135r–v; DIMEV 4778–1)

Rawlinson C.48 witnesses a remarkable range of noteworthy codicological features: the intermixing of Latin and Middle English; early provenance information; a calfskin binding over wooden boards, likely original, or perhaps dating from the manuscript’s ownership in 1554;8 a rather ornate opening to The Siege of Thebes, “which is reminiscent of the ornamental first membranes of the Common Pleas Roll copied by clerks working in Westminster”;9 the gathering together of Lydgatean verse, with two explicit acknowledgments of Lydgate’s authorship;10 and extensive later

Orlemanski, “Thornton’s Remedies and the Practices of Medical Reading,” in Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014), 235–55.  On the manuscript history of Lydgate’s “Stans puer,” see Michael Johnston, “Reading Courtesy Texts in Late Medieval England: The Audience of Lydgate’s ‘Stans puer ad mensam,’” Chaucer Review (forthcoming, 2024). I also discuss the entire manuscript tradition of Lydgate’s “Dietary” and “Stans puer” throughout The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming [2023]).  These final two texts were later additions, on leaves originally left blank, though they are roughly contemporary with the two main scribes of the manuscript.  “Iste liber pertinet ad me gulielmum Robins / 1554” appears on fol. 82r, while the year 1554 is also written, seemingly in the same hand, on fol. 4v. There is also an armorial device sketched on the verso of the opening flyleaf. I have not managed to discover any information about this William Robins or this device.  Sonja Drimmer, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 41. Drimmer provides images of this opening initial and the strapwork initial of a Common Pleas Roll, and the resemblances are striking indeed (43).  “Explicit quod Lydgate” (fol. 116v); “Explicit Lidgate” (fol. 130r). On the emerging trend of creating single-author manuscript anthologies in fifteenth-century England, see Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “Literary Texts,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 555–75, at 558–59. For some general remarks on Lydgate anthologies, see Julia Boffey, “Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate in Two Fifteenth-Century Collections,” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 69–82; and Joel Fredell, “‘Go Litel Quayer’: Lydgate’s Pamphlet Poetry,” Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (1996): 51–74.

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interventions into The Siege of Thebes, with a reader from the second half of the sixteenth century offering frequent corrections and inserting new leaves to supplement textual losses.11 Here, however, I wish to focus particularly on the interaction and cooperation between the manuscript’s two fifteenth-century scribes, for they worked together in some puzzling ways. Attending to their interactions will, I aim to show, usefully complicate our notions of the constituent units of a manuscript. The result of their (often seemingly convoluted) efforts was a manuscript imparting economic and moral lessons to the paterfamilias of a late medieval household.

The Two Scribes of Rawlinson C.48 Putting aside, for a moment, the opening text, if one turns first to fol. 5, the second leaf of the second quire, one finds a page design that looks as if it should form the opening of a manuscript.12 Containing the beginning of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, this leaf is decorated with a seven-line initial –u, which, combined with the –u of the text proper, forms the –w that commences Lydgate’s poem (so, it reads “Uuhan phebus passid was the Ram . . .”) (Figure 1b). This opening –u is decorated with strapwork, filling the top third of the leaf. Atop the –u the scribe (or a decorating artist, working separately?) has drawn a crown with the word magister inside it, likely referring to Lydgate’s status as moral authority. Alongside the large opening – u, the scribe has copied the poem’s first two lines in a large textualis script, then switching to cursive from line 3. All in all, then, this is a highly decorated, if monochromatic, textual opening. Given that the preceding text is in Latin, in textualis, on parchment, and by a different scribe, if one had proceeded only this far into the manuscript, one might reasonably posit that this copy of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes was originally a separate manuscript and was subsequently bound up with an independently produced manuscript, being placed after it. Indeed, the inclusion of the year 1554 on fol. 4v, after the conclusion of Epistola, might lead one to conclude that Epistola originally formed a standalone booklet that found itself in the hands of an owner in 1554, having the Lydgate materials bound up with it at a later date.

 Fols. 38–41 were added by this later corrector/reader. They added numerous corrections to The Siege of Thebes up through fol. 37, but then after the insertion of the additional leaves, ceased correcting.  I follow the modern foliation, which began numbering leaves on the second folio. Although it was part of his original quire, the scribe left the first folio blank, which is thus today unnumbered. So while the first quire is an intact four, the second quire begins, by the modern foliation, with fol. 4. See Figure 2.

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Figure 1a: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 48, fol. 4v. Photo: Reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0.

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Figure 1b: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 48, fol. 5r. Photo: Reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0.

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However, a closer examination shows that these two units were actually produced in coordination—although exactly how close that coordination was remains inscrutable to me. The opening scribe’s Epistola begins in a quire of 4, which was subsequently extended by a bifolium. He left both sides of the first leaf blank, and then copied the Epistola on four parchment folios. These are fols. 1–4 in the manuscript’s modern foliation but are recte fols. 2–5 of the manuscript as it was originally folded. This mismatch resulted when the modern librarian, responsible for the foliation, numbered the opening folio, which the scribe had left blank, as -ii. By doing so, this librarian erroneously denoted the opening leaf as a flyleaf, when it is clearly integral to the first quire as originally folded. Such certainly sounds like a convoluted narrative, doubts about which have caused me to revisit this manuscript on several occasions. But on my last visit to the Bodleian, I noted that the opening quire has begun to come loose from the binding (I do hope this is not entirely due to my handling of the manuscript!). As a result, one can immediately perceive that what is labeled fol. -ii is quite patently part of the first quire (Figure 2). So the scribe’s copy of Epistola filled the entirety of the opening quire of 4 (fol. ii + fols. 1–3), plus fol. 4r–v, the first leaf of the second quire. Since he had extended his opening quire with a bifolium, and only needed the opening leaf of that additional bifolium (fol. 4), he was left with a blank sixth leaf (today, this is fol. 17). This appears, then, originally to have been a standalone booklet of two quires (14, 22), containing only the Epistola, with opening and concluding leaves left blank.

Figure 2: Representations of Quires 1 and 2. Black lines = parchment leaves; white lines = paper leaves.

But then, interpolated into this bifolium, in the hand of the second scribe, one finds the decorated opening of Siege of Thebes—facing the conclusion of the Epistola, that

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is. Each of this second scribe’s subsequent quires are 12s, with parchment inner and outer bifolia, with the other folios on paper. But his first quire is a 14, with—like all his other quires—a parchment inner bifolium. But in this case, this opening quire of the manuscript’s Lydgate section has two outer bifolios of parchment—with the recto and verso of the first leaf taken up by the conclusion of the previous scribe’s Epistola. This can only mean that the Lydgate-scribe folded his usual quires of 12, but instead of placing his first quire after the existing quires of 4 and 2, containing Epistola, he tucked it inside the bifolium that had been created as the Epistola-scribe’s second quire. This resulted in a quire of 14, with two outer parchment leaves. Every succeeding quire by the Lydgate-scribe regularly contains 12 leaves. And while this may sound like an unnecessarily intricate process of extending a manuscript, physical inspection of the quires shows this to be the case.13 For here, we are fortunate that the binding is coming undone, and one can see that fols. 4 and 17 are conjoint, showing that the manuscript’s second quire is indeed a 14. From here, the Lydgate-scribe proceeded to copy texts 2–4 (see the list of contents, above). And at this point, one might suspect that the Lydgate-scribe merely tacked his materials onto the end of the pre-existing work of the Epistola-scribe, extending an independent manuscript for his own, new purposes. That is, one could easily posit that these were independent productions, with the Lydgatescribe growing a manuscript he found somewhere or was asked by an owner to extend. However, the Epistola-scribe soon reappears, and in a way that shows he was working in coordination with the Lydgate-scribe. The Lydgate-scribe completed the Marian lyric (text 4) on fol. 81v, about one third down the leaf. He left the remainder of fol. 81v blank, as well as fol. 82r–v, and then the following leaf, the quire’s fifth leaf, must have been excised (whether by the Epistola-scribe or the Lydgate-scribe is undeterminable), making fol. 83, the central bifolium, on parchment, the next leaf to be written upon. And here, in the middle of this doctored quire, is where the Epistola-scribe reappears, this time copying “Cum iuvenis crevi” on fol. 83r–v (Figure 3). Since the Epistola-scribe’s second stint commences mid-quire, in a quire begun by the Lydgate-scribe, the Epistola-scribe was not likely to have been working independently. Moreover, the ruling pattern for the Epistola-scribe shows he was working with the quire already set up by the Lydgate-scribe. In this case, the ruling for the bottom line on fol. 83r, the central parchment bifolium containing the opening of “Cum iuvenis crevi,” runs across the gutter and extends onto the previous leaf,

 For a study of an even more complicated process of textual surgery within mixed quires of parchment and paper, see Orietta da Rold, “The Quiring System in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” The Library 4, no. 2 (2003): 107–28.

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Figure 3: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 48, fol. 83r. Photo: Reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0.

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fol. 82v, which had been left blank. This could not have been ruled like this by the Lydgate-scribe, since in his stints he merely uses dry-point indentations to frame his text box. The Lydgate-scribe, then, must have ceased his copying efforts before handing back to the Epistola-scribe to copy a text in Latin, in textualis. And since the Latin text that the Epistola-scribe had copied at the manuscript’s opening was entirely on parchment, it is safe to conclude that one of these two scribes removed a paper leaf to allow this second Latin text to be contained entirely on parchment, as well. As a result, within Rawlinson C.48, the Epistola-scribe only ever copies on parchment, in Latin, in textualis, while the Lydgate-scribe only ever copies on mixed quires, in Middle English (save for a few lines of Latin within Lydgate’s poetry), in cursive (save for the textualis employed for the opening lines of Siege of Thebes). After the completion of “Cum iuvenis crevi” (the only text copied by the Epistola-scribe after the manuscript’s opening text), the Lydgate-scribe reappears and copies more Lydgate (and some Lydgate-adjacent) poems through to the end of the manuscript (excepting the final two texts, which were added later). All subsequent quires follow the scribe’s previous pattern of being in 12s, with an outer and inner parchment bifolium. Quires of mixed parchment and paper are not uncommon, often with a quire’s outer and inner bifolia of parchment, and the rest on paper, as the Lydgate-scribe did here. Scholars have typically assumed that such a quiring practice allowed scribes to use paper, a less expensive product, for the majority of the manuscript, while providing parchment inside and out to strengthen the quires. But such is merely an educated guess, as we have no contemporary explanations for the motivations behind such quiring practices. Scholarship inquiring about the frequency of this practice shows that, in the second half of the fifteenth century (precisely the period of Rawlinson C.48’s production), it was frequent enough that it would not have struck a reader as unusual.14 But what, then, to make of the care which was taken to ensure that the Epistola-scribe copied exclusively on parchment? (Remember that his opening stint was in two parchment quires, a 4 and a 2, and then in his second stint, the paper  Francesco Bianchi et al., “Une recherche sur les manuscrits à cahiers mixtes,” Scriptorium 48, no. 2 (1994): 259–86, shows that in manuscripts of the Latin West, this practice peaked in the second half of the fifteenth century, occurring in as many as 20% of manuscripts (265–67). Orietta da Rold, Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 161–62, surveys the manuscripts in Cambridge University Library that date from ca. 1350 to ca. 1500, finding that, among manuscripts with paper, one third have both paper and parchment, while two thirds are exclusively on paper. But cf. R. J. Lyall, “Materials: The Paper Revolution,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11–29, at 12–13, who finds a significantly lower proportion of manuscripts composed of mixed quires.

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leaves preceding him were either left blank or excised, so that he copied on the parchment bifolium at the quire’s center.) It may well be the case that this pair of scribes associated set scripts with parchment and cursive with paper/mixed quires. Orietta da Rold’s recent comprehensive study of paper in late medieval English manuscripts complicates the relationship between paper and cursive/amateur/cheap books, demonstrating that paper was not merely a poor alternative to parchment. But at the same time, in making this argument, da Rold affirms that English scribes employing set scripts continued to prefer parchment to paper.15 In such a finding, da Rold affirms earlier work from the Continent: for example, Erik Kwakkel’s survey of dated paper manuscripts from Western Europe, encompassing eighty-four examples from the period 1340–1400, reveals only one such codex copied in a set script.16 Karin Schneider makes an even more explicit connection between script and material when she suggests that set hands were easier to copy on parchment than on paper: “Dicken, rauhen und weichen Papier ließ sich Kursive leichter schreiben als die breiten Schäfte und feinen Haarstriche der Textualis” (The thick, rough and soft paper meant that cursive was easier to write than the broad shafts and the fine hairlines of textualis).17 So, while we will never know what motivated the Epistola-scribe to copy exclusively on parchment, it remains a strong possibility that he connected textualis with this material. Also striking about this manuscript is the odd way the Lydgate-scribe chose to commence his copying, which simultaneously—and contradictorily—signals both independent and collaborative production with his predecessor, the Epistola-scribe. His copying stint may, at first, have begun as a discrete quire of 12 leaves, with the outer and inner leaves being parchment. But once he tucked that quire inside the Epistola-scribe’s bifolium, he continued copying right onto fol. 17, the second leaf of the bifolium into which he placed his quire of 12. So even if the Lydgate-scribe initially worked independently, the independence of his production ended the minute he tucked his first quire inside the Epistola-scribe’s bifolium, for his copying runs over onto that final leaf, which was integral to the Epistola-scribe’s copying. But then why create such an ornate opening for The Siege of Thebes, given that it was to be placed within a manuscript, not at the manuscript’s opening? Such a question, alas, does not admit of definitive answers, but given the codicological evidence, we must next ask how we are to categorize

 da Rold, Paper in Medieval England, ch. 3.  Erik Kwakkel, “A New Type of Book for a New Type of Reader: The Emergence of Paper in Vernacular Book Production,” The Library 7, no. 4 (2003): 219–48.  Karin Schneider, Paläographie und Handshcriftenkunde für Germanisten: Eine Einführung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 58. See also da Rold, Paper in Medieval England, 108–9.

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such a manuscript. As I will argue, none of the existing terminology quite captures the complex forms of interaction between these two scribes.

Questions of Terminology So what, then, ought we to call this sort of manuscript? The main term that scholars of Middle English manuscripts have deployed to understand groupings of quires is the “booklet.”18 Pamela Robinson offered the first widely cited definition of this term, denominating it “a small but structurally independent production containing a single work or number of short works.”19 Ralph Hanna subsequently offered a compelling addendum to Robinson, suggesting that she relied too heavily on booklets as individual, prefabricated units compiled together in a manuscript, thus failing to attend to the ways medieval scribes themselves employed booklet production in their practice of creating manuscripts: “[B]ooklets could become contextualized at various points in production. That is, a plan for the incorporation of several such units into a single codex might emerge.”20 For Hanna, then, working by booklets offered scribes a flexible way to build up a manuscript that was not planned in its entirety from the beginning. The typical way Middle English manuscript scholarship has understood the booklet is, following Hanna, as a tool used consciously by scribes to allow them to keep books open-ended and thus to defer a final shape to the book’s quires. We often justifiably hypothesize that so many scribes worked by booklets because they were constantly holding out the hope that more texts would become available that would fit the themes of the manuscript-in-progress. Working by booklets, so the thinking goes, allowed such scribes to accommodate new texts by

 The term was first used influentially by P. R. Robinson, “‘The Booklet’: A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts,” Codicologica 3 (1980): 46–69; and subsequently modified by Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 21–34. See also Alexandra Gillespie, “Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 16 (2011): 1–29; Jean-Pascal Pouzet, “Réflexions sur la transmission de textes en anglo-français insulaire (XIIIe–XIVe s.): Prolégomènes à une étude codicologique,” Journée d’études anglo-normandes: IIème Journée d’études anglonormandes, ed. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: Acadeémie des inscriptions & belles-lettres, 2012), 35–97; and Erik Kwakkel, “Late Medieval Text Collections: A Codicological Typology Based on Single-Author Manuscripts,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 56–79.  Robinson, “‘The Booklet,’” 46.  Hanna, Pursuing History, 24–25.

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growing quires, and even truncating others, as a plan for the book emerged and evolved. Examples of booklets being employed as a part of conscious scribal practice abound among Middle English manuscripts. London, British Library MS Egerton 2862, for example, is an important compilation of Middle English romances from ca. 1400. The scribe of this manuscript clearly worked in two booklets, placing couplet romances in the first and tail-rhyme romances in the second. The quires of each booklet are through-copied, indicating the scribe copied each discrete booklet seriatim. Yet, there is a single blank leaf and no catchword at the end of the final quire of the first booklet, containing couplet romances, suggesting this was produced separately and then joined up with the booklet containing tailrhyme romances. But the mise-en-page of the entire manuscript—of both booklets, that is—is more or less identical, with running titles and forty lines/leaf, all of which suggests that it was intended, ab initio, as a single collection of Middle English romances.21 So for this scribe, working by booklets offered him a way to keep his romances sectioned off by metrical form. Robert Thornton’s two manuscripts—Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 and London, British Library MS Additional 31042—provide yet another example. As I have written elsewhere: The procedures Thornton followed in compiling his manuscript are remarkably labyrinthine. We know, for example, that he relied on a series of booklets that he kept unfinished and added to slowly, over a number of years, as texts fitting the thematic structure of each booklet became available. Reliance upon booklets allowed for an overall flexibility to his compilation practice, affording him multiple places into which he could slot any given text from an exemplar that became available.22

For Thornton, then, booklets facilitated protracted copying, allowing him to maintain a rough generic homogeneity within sections of both manuscripts. What I hope is now obvious is that the term “booklet” does not adequately capture the complexity of Rawlinson C.48’s production: what we have in this manuscript certainly exemplifies booklet production, but it is so much more. It is a manuscript that seemingly began as a two-quire, single-scribe booklet, containing only Epistola. But the Lydgate-scribe later extended that booklet, perhaps in coordination with the Epistola-scribe, or perhaps initially working independently. His work looks like it was meant to stand alone, but before the first quire was complete, it was integrated into the already-existing second quire of the Epistola-

 Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 110–12 (and see also figure 3.1).  Johnston, Romance and the Gentry, 173. For a fuller bibliography of Thornton’s copying via booklets, see 173–74, n. 48.

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scribe, thereby contradictorily pointing to both independent and coordinated production. And then the Epistola-scribe re-appeared in the middle of that extension to the original booklet. This series of rolling revisions, with a scribe disappearing and re-emerging, and with a scribe seeming to start a new codicological unit, but then inserting it into one that was already completed, is complicated indeed, and needs to be differentiated from the more controlled and systematic processes like that which informed Egerton 2862 or Thornton’s manuscripts. Of course, anyone working on late medieval manuscripts will be used to encountering composite manuscripts of various sorts, where the plan for the book clearly evolved as production was underway.23 But J. P. Gumbert’s taxonomy for multi-text codices allows us to move beyond the omnibus term of composite and to categorize the various types of interaction that informed such productions. As we will see, Gumbert’s terminology gets us closer to understanding what gave rise to Rawlinson C.48, but even his categories do not quite do justice to its complexity. Among composite manuscripts, Gumbert suggests that one can distinguish manuscripts whose multiple units are completely independent of one another, able to be placed in any order (which he terms paratactic units), and those where units were made to fit with preexisting units (which he terms hypotactic units).24 The addition of The Siege of Thebes to the quire containing the end of the Epistola is clearly hypotactic, since its first quire was nested inside the Epistola’s already-existing quire and thus could not have been placed anywhere else. But the trick comes in identifying the genesis of this composite. Gumbert offers three types of composites: the homogenetic, where all the units are from the same origin, produced as a single production act; the monogenetic, where all the units are ultimately from the same producer(s), but were not produced at one time to go together; and the allogenetic, where units are from disparate productions.25 Rawlinson C.48 is certainly not allogenetic, since the Epistola-scribe reappears in the middle of the Lydgate-scribe’s additions to the manuscript, and thus these scribes did not work in a manner completely isolated from one another. But it is not clear how closely they coordinated. Did the Lydgate-scribe begin extending the manuscript independent of the Epistola-scribe, and some later serendipity brought them back into contact, when the Epistola-scribe added “Cum iuvenis crevi”? Or were they working together from the beginning, with a predetermined division of labor, with the Epistola-scribe responsible for the Latin materials, with an understanding that

 In The Middle English Book, ch. 4, I term this sort of manuscript “The Evolving Book,” analyzing numerous examples.  J. P. Gumbert, “Codicological Units: Towards a Terminology for the Stratigraphy of the NonHomogeneous Codex,” Signo e Testo 2 (2004): 17–42, at 28.  Gumbert, “Codicological Units,” 29–30.

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he would only copy on parchment and in textualis? If the former, then Rawlinson C.48 would be homogenetic; if the latter, then it would be monogenetic. Most manuscripts have much clearer evidence of the stages behind their production, but Rawlinson C.48, by offering such mixed evidence, troubles attempts at making clean and clear distinctions. But then, compounding these terminological difficulties, what to call the method by which the Lydgate-scribe added his texts to the end of the Epistola-scribe’s opening text? This act of extending the manuscript qualifies as what Gumbert terms an “extended codicological unit”: [A] scribe can begin to write a longish text on a blank piece at the end of a unit (like a guest text), and then continue his work on new quires, which he adds to the existing unit. One is tempted to call the new text a separate codicological unit; but it does not correspond to the definition [. . .] If the composite can be likened to a train, where the carriages are simply put one behind the other and can be given any desired order, here, in the extended codicological unit, the image is more like a trailer: the new piece rests in part upon the old base. It is characteristic of such an accretion that the scribe, on the moment he puts the first letter on the page, fixes the attachment and the order of the two for good.26

One can tell by Gumbert’s hesitation here (“one is tempted to call this [. . .] but it does not correspond to the definition”) that moments when a new scribe adds to a manuscript can trouble the boundaries of codicological terminology. As I discussed above, in Rawlinson C.48, when one first meets the Lydgate-scribe adding to the work of the Epistola-scribe, “one is tempted to call” the manuscript allogenetic—suggesting two discrete acts of copying. But when the Epistola-scribe reappears to copy “Cum iuvenis crevi,” we learn that these two scribes indeed were in regular contact, and thus the manuscript must either be homo- or monogenetic. But there is, so far as I can tell, no way to determine with confidence which of these two terms best describes Rawlinson C.48. Thinking further about their working relationship, we can only speculate about who these scribes might have been. If indeed the Lydgate-scribe was associated with a Westminster bureaucratic office, as his strapwork decoration could indicate, then we do not have many obvious analogues for this practice, since most of the scholarship on Westminster scribes copying literary manuscripts hones in on the first half of the fifteenth century, and this manuscript is certainly from the second half of that century.27 Nor does the recent spate of work on

 Gumbert, “Codicological Units,” 32 (emphasis in original).  See, for example, John H. Fisher, “Piers Plowman and the Chancery Tradition,” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron and Joseph S. Wittig (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), 267–78; and Sebastian Sobecki, “The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks,” Review of English Studies 72, no. 304 (2020):

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metropolitan copying of vernacular literature offer much purchase, since its focus is, again, on the first half, or even more precisely the first quarter, of the fifteenth century.28 But if this book is indeed a metropolitan, collaborative venture, it would be contemporary with other such London productions from the second half of the fifteenth century, like the manuscripts of John Shirley or of the Hammond Scribe.29 Both Shirley and the Hammond Scribe are apt exemplars, for they both had a particular fondness for copying Lydgate’s verse, and the Hammond Scribe was not adverse to collaborating. Hence, production in a milieu like theirs might explain the origins of Rawlinson C.48. At the same time, if the strapwork design does not necessarily indicate a Westminster scribe (and more research is needed before we determine that a scribe operating far from Westminster could not have produced such a design), then this sort of collaboration could have happened in any locale that united two capable writers, access to exemplars, and access to materials. As I have argued elsewhere, when evidence of scribal dialect survives, such evidence indicates that scribes with similar dialects tended to work together and thus that collaboration often took place near the home of those scribes.30 As a result, scribal collaboration, like we

253–79. Also worthy of note is the observation in A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), 163–210, at 174, that Scribe C of the famous Trinity Gower Manuscript “wrote a small neat hand modelled on anglicana of a type found in some de luxe copies of the Statutes and in documents of some offices of state.” Noteworthy in attending to government hands involved in copying manuscripts in the second half of the fifteenth century is Sebastian Sobecki, “The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King’s French Secretaries,” in Connolly, James-Maddocks and Pearsall, Scribal Cultures, 82–124.  See, for example, Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013); and Lawrence Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  On the Hammond Scribe, see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, “Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Add. 34360): A Contribution to the Bibliography of John Lydgate,” Anglia 28 (1905): 1–28; and Linne R. Mooney, “A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths,” in The English Medieval Book: Essays in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna and Vincent Gillespie (London: British Library, 2000), 113–23. On Shirley, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), and the extensive bibliography cited there.  Michael Johnston, “Copying and Reading The Prick of Conscience in Late Medieval England,” Speculum 95, no. 3 (2020): 742–801. I discuss this feature in much greater detail in The Middle English Book, ch. 6. But cf. Wendy Scase, Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, ca. 700–ca. 1550, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 54 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 306–17, who offers a plausible alternative explanation for dialectal similarities in Middle English manuscripts.

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meet with in Rawlinson C.48, could have happened virtually anywhere in late medieval England, and we need not limit ourselves to London/Westminster. Alas, the texts in Latin obviously do not tell us anything about the scribes’ Middle English dialect, and the rest of the manuscript, being by Lydgate, is too late to admit of meaningful dialectal analysis.31 But regardless of where these two scribes worked and what their professional identities were, by collaborating together in this extended manner, they produced a manuscript for some late medieval reader, reminding them of the importance of moderation for the household, while also reminding them that death is always nearby, the topic to which I now turn.

Thematic Coherence? The final question to emerge from an analysis of Rawlinson C.48 is what this complex series of scribal interactions yielded—does, that is, legible literary meaning arise from this compilation? This is a particularly pressing question with Rawlinson C.48, since its scribes engaged in several discrete acts of copying, extending, and modifying the codex, and thus one wonders whether these efforts were aimed at a meaningful textual sequence. There is good reason to think this is the case. If a painter returns to their canvas to alter a painting on multiple occasions, it causes one to wonder if they might be signaling a constant and evolving desire to make the painting manifest some visual ideal. Or if a composer returns to their score, over and over, then one might surmise that this composer is constantly revising the music to capture some aural ideal. Likewise with Rawlinson C.48: what

 On the colorlessness of much fifteenth-century Middle English, see M. L. Samuels, “Spelling and Dialect in the Late and Post-Middle English Periods,” in So Meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project, 1981), 43–54. More recently, Merja Stenroos has argued, in a series of publications, that there was a growing supralocal dialect in the fifteenth century, and that this concept of supralocality should replace older conceptions of a growing London standard dialect spreading throughout the fifteenth century. See Merja Stenroos, “Identity and Intelligibility in Late Middle English Scribal Transmission: Local Dialect as an Active Choice in Fifteenth-Century Texts,” in Scribes as Agents of Language Change, ed. Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite and Bettina Beinhoff, Studies in Language Change 10 (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton), 159–82; “Regional Language and Culture: The Geography of Middle English Linguistic Variation,” in Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500, ed. Tim William Machan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 100–125; and “Regional Variation and Supralocalization in Late Medieval English: Comparing Administrative and Literary Texts,” in Records of Real People: Linguistic Variation in Middle English Local Documents, ed. Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs, Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 11 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 95–128.

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sort of meaning emerged when the second scribe, in appending Lydgate’s texts to the Epistola, created a new textual sequence? And then, how did the addition of “Cum iuvenis crevi” by the Epistola-scribe add further thematic resonances to this developing sequence? There are certainly a few dominant themes that resound across texts in this manuscript. The pairing of Siege of Thebes with “Verses on the Kings of England,” for example, offers readers a means to unite the history of England with one of the central historical myths of Western Europe. Rawlinson C.48 also gathers together a number of Marian lyrics, so this particular devotional flavor certainly emerges strongly when reading across the codex. But two particular themes stand out more clearly as cutting across both the manuscript’s Latin and Middle English texts—and thus uniting the work of both scribes. First, there is a marked emphasis on memento mori. The Epistola, the manuscript’s opening text, primarily consists of advice to someone running a household (and I will have more to say about this theme in a moment). But in the midst of these pieces of advice, pseudo-Bernard reminds the paterfamilias-reader of the inevitability of aging, decay, and death: Appropinquat tibi senectus. Consulo tibi quod pocius Deo quam tuo filio conmittas. Disponis legata tua consolo & primo creditoribus solvi mandes. Diligentibus personam tuam non conmittas animam tuam, sed diligentibus animam [t]uam. Debes disponere ante morbum animam tuam. (fol. 4r) (Old age approaches you. I advise that you entrust yourself more to God than to your son. I advise that you arrange your will and that you command that your creditors be paid first. Do not entrust your soul to those who love your position, but rather entrust your soul to those who love your soul. You should get your soul in order before you become sick.)32

Death is certainly not a major focus of this opening text, but these admonitions come near the conclusion, leaving the reader with a sobering reminder as they progress onto the succeeding texts that, in spite of all those texts’ ruminations on household maintenance, a paterfamilias’s role will inevitably be resolved by death. The Middle English texts that immediately follow focus on death in a much more overt and central way. Following Siege of Thebes—itself certainly one of the most death-centric texts in all of Western literature—is Lydgate’s “Verses on the Kings of England,” a remarkably popular text, one which is overridingly formulaic and prosaic. When read within the compilation as a whole, its emphasis on death’s ineluctability comes into focus, and this emphasis is particularly relayed through

 For all of the texts discussed here, I quote directly from the manuscript. All translations from Latin are my own. Punctuation and capitalization are editorial.

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the poem’s repeated formulas. The poem devotes a stanza to each king since William I, outlining the major events that took place during his reign. Each stanza then ends by noting where the king is buried—telling us, for example, that Henry II “Yerris xxxv regned as it is maade mynde / Atte Font Everad lith buried as I fynde” (fol. 79r), and that Richard II “Att Langley buried first so stood the cas / Aftir to Westmenstir hys body caried was” (fol. 79v).33 Such a recital of each king’s mortality underscores for the reader that death comes for all, for if even kings are not spared, then the reader must reckon with their own mortality. Lydgate repeats this very idea in “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep.” Near this poem’s conclusion, he asks “Tween riche and poor what is the difference / Whan dethe approchithe in any creature?” (fol. 127v). Although not so poignant as Langland’s “For in a charnel at chirche cherles ben yvel to knowe, / Or a knyght from a knave there—knowe this in thyn herte,” the message is much the same.34 “Cum iuvenis crevi,” the second text copied by the Epistola-scribe, is entirely taken up with laments about bodily decay and impending death. This touching lyric, told from the perspective of a man near death looking back upon his life, opens with an elegy for the foolishness of a misspent youth: Cum iuvenis crevi ludens nunquam requievi. Sepe senes sprevi quia auferam memor evi, Sperans mente levi semper fore sanum me vi. Tempore valde brevi senui ludendo quievi. (fol. 83r) (When I was young, I never ceased playing. I often spurned the old because I failed to be mindful of age, Thinking in my frivolous mind that I would always be in health. In a very short while I grew old and ceased playing.)

Now, having grown old himself, he experiences firsthand the pains of aging: Aures surdescunt, manus, caput, ossa tremescunt, Dentes putrescunt, mala membris undeque crescunt, Cor dolet & pectus gravat ir[a] placet mihi lectus. Tunc sum despectus; facit hoc mea magna senectus. Incurvo dorsum, caputque declino deorsum. Vertor retrorsum plus vivens deteriorsum. (fol. 83r)

 For an edition, see John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS ES 107, 192, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911, 1934), 2:717–22.  William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), B.VI.48–49.

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(My ears grow deaf, my hands, head and bones tremble My teeth rot, bad things grow in my members. My heart is pained, my chest is pressed with anger, and I want to go to bed. Then I am scorned, my great age has caused all this. My back is curved and my head declines downward. I turn back, living even worse.)

After expressing remorse for his sins, the poet ends by calling upon God to shepherd him through death: Atque Ihesu digno memet moriendo resigno, Quem crucis in ligno salvabis sanguine signo. Post mortem diram de me, Deus, accipe curam. Et tunc securam in vitam redde futuram. (fol. 83v) (And I resign myself to a death worthy of Jesus I, whom you will save by the sign of your blood and the wood of the cross. After my dreadful death, God, take care of me And then give me salvation.)

More than in any other text in the manuscript, then, death is front and center of “Cum iuvenis crevi.” But perhaps an even more overt focus across Rawlinson C.48’s texts is the importance of moderation for proper household maintenance. Of course, women played a large (though often historically subsumed and opaque) role in medieval households, but this manuscript imagines the running of a household as a predominately masculine affair. Both the Latin and Middle English texts in this manuscript imagine an exclusively male readership needing these lessons. The Epistola, for example, addresses the question of “qualiter paterfamilias debeat se habere” (fol. 1r) (how a paterfamilias ought to comport himself). Pseudo-Bernard’s answer to this question revolves first and foremost around moderation: Audi ergo & attende: Si in domo tua sumptus & redditus sint equales, casus inopinat[u]s poterit destruere statum tuum. Status hominis neglige[n]tis domus est ruinosa. Quid est negligentia domum gubernantis? Ignis in domo validus & accensus. Discute diligenter eorum diligenciam qui tua ministrant. (fol. 1r) (Listen, therefore, and pay attention: If the expenses and income in your house are equal, an unforeseen circumstance could ruin your state. The state of a negligent man makes for a ruined house. What is the negligence of one governing a house? A large fire lit within the house. Consider carefully the diligence of those who administer your things.)

Anticipating Winner and Waster’s pitting of prodigality vs. thrift, pseudo-Bernard goes on to contrast gula and bursa (the throat and the purse) as the twin polarities

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that an effective paterfamilias must always keep in balance. Neither should be given favoritism: “Fac gulam litigare cum bursa, et caveas cujus advocatus existas” (fol. 1v) (make the throat go to court against/contend with the purse, and beware whose advocate you are). Equating men with running households, as these texts do, is certainly a selective act. Women were, after all, centrally involved in household management in late medieval England. As Katherine L. French has recently shown, the period following the first wave of the Black Death through the sixteenth century saw London households increasingly identifying with women—both materially and morally: “While society had long understood laundry and some aspects of childcare as women’s work, and supervising servants was the housewife’s duty, in London, cleaning, tidying, and sorting only became overtly gendered in the second half of the fifteenth century”35—precisely, I would note, when this manuscript was compiled. But if French is right, the scribes of this manuscript, or the person on whose behalf they compiled the manuscript, did not get the memo, for these texts consistently imagine men as the ones of authority in the household, and they identify the very household itself with that masculine authority. Such an emphasis continues with the manuscript’s fifth text, Benedict Burgh’s Cato Major.36 One of the more popular pieces of Middle English verse, this didactic poem addresses a young reader who will one day be in a position to oversee a household. Its message is fundamentally the same as pseudo-Bernard’s emphasis on moderation: don’t be too trusting of your neighbor, your wife, or your servant; be sure to give generously to those in need, but be careful of overspending; do not praise yourself overmuch, but also do not engage in self-deprecation; do not allow your wife to be too boisterous, but take her counsel if she proves wise; etc., etc. Such is summed up most clearly in the poem’s overt insistence on moderation: To much is nouht of any maner thyng The meen is good and moste comendable. That man stant surest heer in his lyuyng With meen estat that halt hym greable. Plente and pouerte be nat suffrable For than is the ship in the see moste sur Whan tyme that the flode excedithe nat mesur. (fol. 92v)

 Katherine L. French, Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 127.  For an edition using Rawlinson C.48 as its base text, see “Die Burghsche Cato-Paraphrase,” ed. Max Förster, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 115 (1905): 298–323; 116 (1906): 304–23. For consistency’s sake, I continue to cite directly from the manuscript.

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Unsubtle, perhaps, but as a pedagogical strategy this text’s insistence on the virtue of moderation makes its meaning unmistakable. More than any other poem in Rawlinson C.48—and, one is tempted to say, more than any other poem in all of Middle English literature—Lydgate’s “Dietary” is centrally concerned with moderation as the key to a good life. This poem focuses less on the running of a household, and more on the morality surrounding one’s eating and drinking habits. The reader, for example, is advised to “Eten at grete flessh for no gredynesse / And fro frutis hold thin abstinence” (fol. 128v).37 But some lines near the poem’s end remind us that Lydgate has in mind one in charge of a household as his audience, even if he does not address such a reader as overtly or frequently as pseudo-Bernard or Burgh did: “Suffre no surfetis in thyn hous at nyht / Ware of rere soperis and of grete excesse” (fol. 129v). The only person in a position not to suffer any particular practices in the household would be the paterfamilias himself. Coupled with the possessive adjective “thyn,” these lines make clear that Lydgate’s advice is primarily aimed at such a figure. ✶✶✶ The point of this extended unpacking of the scribal interaction giving rise to Rawlinson C.48 is to show that manuscripts can be remarkably complicated entities, resisting easy categorization. As the product of human beings working to create a material artifact, manuscripts are subject to all the vicissitudes of human life. The rhythms and variability of work demands, family demands, weather, sickness, supply chains, the liturgical season, etc., mean that our freedom to attend to a project—copying a manuscript, building a treehouse for your child, reading that new novel, bingeing a television show—can wax and wane. When you multiply the people involved by collaborating on a project, like the two scribes of Rawlinson C.48 did, such vicissitudes are only exacerbated—hence, the stops and starts of each scribe’s work on this codex. But this manuscript is also a reminder that, once those vicissitudes have been overcome, the human labor giving rise to a manuscript does not result in an inert object. With manuscripts, human labor—as variable as it sometimes is—results in an object endowed with cultural meaning, taken up in the hands of real medieval people. Of course, we must always use caution when attempting to read the texts in a manuscript in light of one another, as scholars like Julia Boffey, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, and Derek Pearsall have powerfully reminded us.38 But in

 For an edition, see Lydgate, Minor Poems, ed. MacCracken, 2:702–7.  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “Towards a Taxonomy of Middle English Manuscript Assemblages,” in Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu, Proceedings of the British Academy 201 (London:

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the case of Rawlinson C.48, the back and forth between these two scribes shows us that they must have been after something. We cannot know precisely why or how they brought these texts together, but if any multi-text manuscript is going to allow itself to be read as a literary compilation, then something so intentionally and methodically produced as Rawlinson C.48 must be one such codex. Its scribes’ sporadic efforts ultimately yielded for the medieval reader a lesson that moderation is essential to the proper running of a household. But such efforts also reminded the reader that whatever success arises from such moderation will not last, since, as “Cum iuvenis crevi” puts it, “Mors venit estremo, valet hanc evadere nemo” (Death comes in the end and no one can escape it).

Oxford University Press, 2015), 263–80; Ralph Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England,” in Nichols and Wenzel, The Whole Book, 37–51; and Derek Pearsall, “The Whole Book: Late Medieval English Manuscript Miscellanies and Their Modern Interpreters,” in Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 17–30. But cf. Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), who offers a sophisticated rethinking of intention in light of manuscript compilations.

Part II: Honoring the Small Details

Julia Boffey

Making Sense of Anelida’s Complaint: The Fifteenth-Century Reception of Anelida and Arcite and its Stanza Forms The small corpus of lyrics and short poems generally attributed to Chaucer illustrates many kinds of formal experiment with the effects to be achieved with varieties of line length, rhyme scheme, and length of stanza. Often overlooked in comparison with Chaucer’s longer, formally innovative works, these miniature poetic experiments had a dynamic influence on short forms of post-Chaucerian verse and (perhaps in tandem with Gower’s short poems) prompted varieties of emulation. But innovative compositions can sometimes present challenges to scribes and readers, and it seems the case that not all of those who first encountered Chaucer’s short poems recognized quite what they were dealing with. Anelida and Arcite, a complicated amalgam of narrative and intricately crafted complaint, presented particular problems, with modulations of form relating to line and stanza length that evidently confused some of the scribes who copied it. As a tribute to Susanna Fein’s pioneering work on the forms and prosody of Middle English verse, this discussion will explore the structure of Anelida and Arcite, its handling by fifteenth-century scribes, and some features of its reception that seem to have been especially influential on poetic practice in the century after Chaucer’s death.

Chaucer’s Work? And One Work or Two? As conventionally presented in printed editions of Chaucer’s works from Caxton onwards, Anelida and Arcite comprises a proem and narrative of 210 lines, in rhyme royal stanzas, followed by a 140-line “complaint,” in a variety of stanza forms, voiced by Anelida.1 An opening proem invokes the help of Mars and of Polyhymnia, the muse associated with sacred song and (by virtue of her descent from Mnemosyne) with memory. Then the narrative section, supposedly following Statius and a

 Caxton’s edition (STC 5090) was printed in 1476 or 1477. Reference to Chaucer’s works throughout this discussion, unless specified otherwise, will be to The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Anelida and Arcite is cited from that edition (375–81, 991–93, 1144–46), according to the line numbers given there. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516481-006

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mysterious “Corinne,” although more probably indebted to Boccaccio’s Teseida, describes the Athens of Theseus and Hippolita, the war with Thebes, and following this a love affair between Anelida, queen of Armenia (“Ermonye”) and the Theban knight Arcite. Things turn sour when Arcite betrays Anelida and takes another lover, and Anelida’s complaint deplores at length his falseness and her foolish constancy. Having itemized the symptoms of her grief, she ends by hinting that she is close to death. A single concluding rhyme royal stanza (ll. 351–57), present in only some of the witnesses, notes that the effort involved in writing out the complaint causes Anelida briefly to swoon before she vows to make a sacrifice to Mars, leading to a tantalizing promise from the narrator of an outcome “That shapen was as ye shal after here” (l. 357). Certain features of this composite work echo other of Chaucer’s poems. As an experiment in lyrico-narrative concerned with unhappy love, it can be aligned with The Complaint of Mars and, on a more diffuse scale, Troilus and Criseyde. On the pattern of The Complaint of Mars, it uses the rhyme royal stanzas employed in Troilus and Criseyde to lead into a complaint in longer stanzas that are more intricately shaped. It seems likely to date from the period of Chaucer’s writing life when he was exploring the potential of formal experiments based on both French and Italian models: the late 1370s and 1380s.2 The interest in female complaint that animates Anelida and Arcite suggests the emphases of The Legend of Good Women (often assigned to the mid-1380s), and the concern of that work with the women’s voices modeled in Ovid’s Heroides. References in the narrative section of Anelida and Arcite to Statius, and to Theseus, Ipolita, Emelye, and Arcite, invoke the world of “The Knight’s Tale,” a version of which is likely to postdate Chaucer’s acquaintance with Boccaccio’s Teseida gained on his Italian trip of 1378.3 The grounds for crediting Chaucer with authorship of narrative and complaint are reasonably firm: his name is invoked in three of the thirteen early witnesses (details of these are listed in the table on pp. 115–17. The copy of the narrative section made by the scribe John Shirley in London, British Library Add. MS 16165, is headed “Balade of Anelyda Qwene of Cartage made by Geffrey Chaucyer” (fol. 256v). And although the copy of the complaint that Shirley made

 On matters of dating, see Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, xxviii–xxix, 991–92, 1144; and the introductions in that volume to individual works. For arguments locating the composition of Anelida and Arcite between the completion of Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women, see John Norton-Smith, “Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite,” in Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett, Aetatis Suae LXX, ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 81–99.  The relationship of Anelida and Arcite to Chaucerian sources and analogues is explored by T. S. Miller, “Chaucer’s Sources and Chaucer’s Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” JEGP 114 (2015): 373–400.

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Table 1: Anelida and Arcite: witnesses, order of parts, and special features. Witness

Narrative present?

Complaint present?

Order of elements

London, British Library Add. MS  (John Shirley)

√ √ (fols. (fols. v–v) v–v)

Cambridge Trinity College MS R. .  (John Shirley)

x

√ Complaint (pp. –) only

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 

√ (fols. –)

√ (fols. –)

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 

√ (fols. v–v)

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 

√ (fols. v–v)

Continuation stanza present?

Lacunae etc.

Authorship noted?

Narrative: – (missing leaf); –; –. Complaint: – condensed into five lines; –; – precede ; .

Narrative: “Balade of Anelyda Qwene of Cartage made by Geffrey Chaucyer” (fol. v). Complaint: “Þe compleynt of Anelida” (fols. v, v, and running titles)

x

Complaint: –; –.

Complaint: “þis compleynt . . . englisshed by Geffrey Chaucier” (p. )

Complaint precedes narrative

x

x

x

√ (fols. –)

Complaint precedes narrative

x

Narrative: – (eyeskip?)

x

√ (fols. v–)

Narrative precedes complaint

√

x

x

Complaint, x and narrative, separated by other works

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Table 1 (continued) Witness

Narrative present?

Oxford, √ (fols. Bodleian v–) Library MS Digby  (scribe: John Brode)

Complaint present?

Order of elements

Continuation stanza present?

Lacunae etc.

Authorship noted?

√ (fols. –v)

Narrative precedes complaint

√

x

x

London, British Library Harley MS 

√ (fols. r–v)

√ (fols. v–r)

Narrative precedes complaint

x

Complaint: –

x (but with a heading in Shirley’s idiom)

London, British Library Harley MS 

√ (fols. –)

√ (fols. v–v)

Narrative precedes complaint

x

x

“Chaucer” (fol. v, in a hand contemporary with that of main scribe)

Warminster, √ (fols. Longleat –v) House MS 

√ (fols. –)

Narrative precedes complaint

√

Narrative: x  (scribal oversight?)

Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. . 

x

√ (fols. –v)

Complaint only

√

x

x

Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 

x

√ (pp. –; incomplete: ends line )

Complaint Impossible to only, ascertain ending line  because of missing leaves

Complaint: – – (missing leaves)

x

San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 

x

√ (fols. –)

Complaint only

Complaint:  – –

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) Witness

Narrative present?

Caxton, √ Annelida and false Arcyte, ? (STC )

Complaint present?

Order of elements

Continuation stanza present?

Lacunae etc.

Authorship noted?

√

Narrative precedes complaint

x

–

x (no attribution, but is followed by Chaucer’s Purse, ascribed)

at an earlier point in this manuscript (on fols. 241v–243v) is unattributed, he names Chaucer in the very detailed heading he provides for the complaint in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 3. 20: Takeþe heed sirs I prey yowe of þis compleynt of Anelyda Qweene of Cartage Roote of trouthe and stedfastnesse þat pytously compleyneþe vpon þe varyaunce of daun Arcyte lord borne of þe blood royal of Thebes englisshed by Geffrey Chaucier In the best wyse and moost Rethoricyous þe moost vnkouþe metre coloures and Rymes þat euer was sayde tofore þis day o redeþe and preveþe þe sooþe. (p. 106)4

In British Library Harley MS 372, a hand contemporary with that of the scribe who copied first the narrative and then the complaint notes at the end of the latter section the word “Chaucer” (on fol. 60v), but whether this is a reference to just the complaint or to both parts of the work is not clear. A list of Chaucer’s works by Lydgate is similarly ambiguous in remarking that “Of Annelida and of fals Arcite / He made a complaint dolefull and piteous” (Prologue to The Fall of Princes, Book I, ll. 320–21). The authorship of a work in two parts might reasonably invite a degree of vagueness on the part of the readers and scribes involved in its transmission, and part of the challenge posed by Anelida and Arcite arises from the fact that the narrative and complaint sections seem to have circulated separately. Not every witness preserves both parts, and in certain of the instances where both parts are present, they appear in different orders, complaint sometimes preceding narrative section and sometimes following it.5 These anomalies have prompted arguments that  On Shirley and his manuscripts, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).  See the chart on pp. 115–117. In the list of manuscripts in Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, 1144, Tanner 346 is incorrectly given as Tanner 372, and not all of the lines omitted from the witnesses

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neither of the two parts now assumed to constitute the whole work is necessarily the work of Chaucer.6 A more cautious hypothesis might be that, at the very least, the earliest written copies passed from Chaucer’s hands into circulation at different points and/or in different contexts. It is possible to imagine circumstances in which a complaint came into being after the completion and initial circulation of the narrative section; or equally plausibly, the reverse situation, with the narrative conceived as a retrospective setting-of-the-scene for an already completed complaint. Chaucer’s involvement in both sections seems likely, if not provable, on the grounds of the features of content and emphasis that each section shares with other of his attested works. As is the case with other of his short poems, however, the copies that passed into circulation do not seem to have been in any way authorially tidied for transmission beyond their early audiences; the connectedness of the narrative and complaint sections of Anelida and Arcite, along with other features of its transmission history, remain puzzlingly unclear.

Making Sense of the Two Parts Faced with textual constituents whose relationship to each other must at least in some cases have been obscure, the scribes of Anelida and Arcite, or those in a position to advise and direct them, chose various ways of presenting its two parts. London, British Library Additional MS 16165 contains what is likely to be the earliest copy, made by the scribe John Shirley in the 1420s.7 This offers first the complaint (fols. 241v–243v), and at a later point in the manuscript the narrative (fols. 256v–258v). Both parts lack portions of text that are present in later witnesses, and both differ from other witnesses at some points in the ordering of lines. The narrative section, for example, into which the loss of a leaf after fol. 257 has introduced a lacuna at lines 66–126, also lacks lines at 141–47 (a single stanza), and 193–210 (two-and-a-half stanzas). The text of the complaint, disordered in comparison with later copies, also has some omissions.8 Somewhat confusingly, the narrative section is termed “Þe compleynt of Anelida” in its introduction, colophon, are noted. For a fuller account of the manuscripts, see A. S. G. Edwards, “The Unity and Authenticity of Anelida and Arcite: The Evidence of the Manuscripts,” Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 177–88, at 185–86.  See especially Edwards, “Unity and Authenticity.”  On the dating, see Ralph Hanna, “John Shirley and British Library, MS Additional 16165,” Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996): 95–105, and Connolly, John Shirley, 27–33.  The complaint has lines 211–55 followed by displaced 308–16, 256–63, 264–71 condensed into five lines, 272–89, 299–334 (308–16 displaced, as noted), 336–50.

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and running titles, as also in Shirley’s prefatory list of the manuscript’s contents on fol. 2: a fact that may at least suggest that Shirley understood the two parts to be connected. Shirley copied the complaint alone into another anthology he made in the 1430s, now Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 3. 20.9 But differences here from the text in Add. MS 16165 seem to indicate that Shirley was by this point able to consult another exemplar. The lacunae at lines 265–68 and 290–98 remain, and the “continuation” stanza (ll. 351–57) is absent, but the stanza apparently displaced in Add. MS 16165 (ll. 308–16) now follows line 307 rather than line 255, and line 335 is present. At some point Shirley may have produced at least one further amalgam of narrative and complaint in a lost copy which served as an exemplar for one of the scribes involved in the compilation of British Library MS Harley 7333, made probably ca. 1450–1475.10 The Harley 7333 amalgam is introduced in distinctively Shirleian idiom (“Lo my lordis and ladyes here folowyng may ye see the maner of the lovyng bytwene Arcite of Thebes and Anelida the faire Quene of hermony which with his feyned chere doublenesse and flateryng disteined her wtouten cause she beyng than oon of þe trewest gentilwomen that bere lyf compleyneth her I beseche you,” fol. 134), and although the texts of its two component parts vary in some respects from those in Shirley’s own manuscripts, it shares the omission of lines 290–98 common to Shirley’s own copies. This omission is also a feature of the amalgams in Caxton’s printed edition of 1476 or 1477, and in the late fifteenth-century copies of the complaint in Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys MS 2006 and in San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 140.11 A textually distinct group of copies that evidently came into being shortly after the production of Shirley’s manuscripts includes those in the mid-fifteenth-

 For a description of the manuscript, see Connolly, John Shirley, 68–101; the dating is discussed on 77–80.  For descriptions and discussion, see John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 1:207–18; Timothy A. Shonk, “BL MS Harley 7333: The ‘Publication’ of Chaucer in the Rural Areas,” Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998): 81–92; M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, vol. 1, Works before “The Canterbury Tales” (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 21–23. There is general agreement that the production of this manuscript continued over a number of years.  See Manuscript Pepys 2006: A Facsimile, intro. A. S. G. Edwards (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 2006), where dating is discussed at xxii–xxiii. Missing leaves in the manuscript after line 310 mean that it is impossible to know whether the continuation stanza was present at the end of the complaint (or indeed if the narrative section was placed after it, as in MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638). Huntington MS HM 140 is described in C. W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, 2 vols. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library 1989), 1:187–90. This copy also lacks lines 237 and 302–3.

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century Chaucerian anthologies Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638, both of which present the complaint before the narrative section.12 Textually related to these, but with the narrative section preceding the complaint, are copies in the anthologies that are now Bodleian MSS Tanner 346 and Digby 181, British Library MS Harley 372, and Warminster, Longleat House MS 258, along with the complaint alone in Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 1. 6.13 Apart from British Library Harley 372, these last noted manuscripts, including rather curiously the complaint in CUL MS Ff. 1. 6, are those that include the “continuation” stanza (ll. 351–57). Collation of all manuscripts suggests that texts in both groupings (that is, in the witnesses relating to Shirley’s copies; and the other group of witnesses) preserve evidence of scribal or editorial attempts to smooth and improve the work over time. If, as seems likely, the narrative section and the complaint were preserved or first circulated in unamalgamated form, it is understandable that the process of bringing them together might have taken time and effort. The exemplars which Shirley used in the 1420s and 1430s appear to have presented the narrative section and the complaint as separate entities, and—in the case of whatever he used when copying Add. MS 16165—to have had gaps and to have been disordered or hard to follow. For the scribes of MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638, who seem to have ignored the fact that the narrative section made better sense as an introduction to the complaint, the poem may also have been available as two separate exemplars; and on the evidence of MSS Huntington HM 140 and CUL Ff. 1. 6, the complaint remained in circulation as an independent work. Somewhere in the history of transmission a plausible order of narrative followed by complaint was established for the two parts. Shirley may have had a hand in this, creating a (now lost) version that served as exemplar for the scribe of Harley 7333. But the changes could equally have resulted from the availability of a manuscript not known to or consulted by Shirley, or indeed from the independent exercise of scribal and/or editorial intelligence in the preparation of the copy in MS Tanner 346 and the related texts in MSS Digby 181, Harley 372, and Longleat 258. These copies, along with the complaint alone in

 See Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, intro. John Norton-Smith (London: Scolar Press, 1979), vii, where a dating of ca. 1450 is suggested, and Manuscript Bodley 638: A Facsimile, intro. Pamela Robinson (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), xxii–iii, where dating (late fifteenth-century) is discussed.  Manuscript Tanner 346: A Facsimile, intro. Pamela Robinson (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1980), xix, where a date possibly before 1450 is suggested. On Digby 181, Harley 372, and Longleat 258, see Seymour, Chaucer Manuscripts, 1:30–31, 37–38, 31–33; and on CUL MS Ff. 1. 6, see The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 1. 6, intro. Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen (London: Scolar Press, 1978), vii, where compilation over a number of years in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is suggested.

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CUL MS Ff. 1. 6, are those that include the “continuation” stanza. Over the course of the fifteenth century, some cross-contamination between texts in the Shirley and non-Shirley groups seems quite likely: the team involved in the production of Harley 7333, for example, may well have used more than one exemplar in order to make sense of the copy of Anelida and Arcite that they included. Evidence that they made efforts to sanitize some of The Canterbury Tales that they copied suggest that they were not unwilling to make textual interventions, and may have had access to a range of exemplars.14

Anelida’s Complaint in Transmission The formal intricacy of Anelida’s complaint, one of the features for which it has been much admired, posed special difficulties for those who copied it. Beginning and ending with the same line (“So thirleth with the point of remembraunce,” ll. 211 and 250) it falls in its fullest version into two seventy-line sections constructed on the same pattern: each section has an introductory nine-line stanza (pentameter lines, rhyming aabaabbab5), four further nine-line stanzas of the same kind, one sixteen-line stanza (falling into four groups of three tetrameter lines, each group followed by one pentameter line, rhyming aaa4b5aaa4b5bbb4a5bbb4a5), and another nine-line stanza. As an extra flourish, each of the nine-line stanzas that follows the two long stanzas of sixteen lines (ll. 272–80, 333–41) has further internal rhymes.15 Scribes and indeed readers of Middle English verse would not necessarily have been unfamiliar with stanzas of nine lines. A thirteenth-century prayer to

 Barbara Kline, “Scribal Agendas and the Text of Chaucer’s Tales in British Library MS Harley 7333,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 116–44.  F. J. Furnivall’s Chaucer Society transcriptions add headings that divide the Complaint into “Movements”; see A Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, Part II, Chaucer Society, 1st series 57 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1879), 149–71; Supplementary Parallel Texts of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, Part II, Chaucer Society, 1st series 59 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1880), 39–57; A One-Text Print of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, Part II, Chaucer Society, 1st series 61 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1880), 109–22; More Odd Texts of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, Chaucer Society, 1st series 77 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1886), 17–24. The layout in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1:365–78, divides the complaint into a one-stanza proem, a matched six-stanza “strophe” and six-stanza “antistrophe,” and a onestanza “conclusion.” This structure is retained in Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, 376–81, and in Geoffrey Chaucer: Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 201–5.

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the Virgin in CUL Add. MS 2585(b), formed of nine stanzas rhyming abababaab, suggests that early examples existed; and from the fifteenth century there are instances among the poems of John Audelay, and in the form of religious lyrics, carols, and verse prophecies.16 Some longer narrative poems in circulation by the fifteenth century, including The Tale of the Basin, The Tournament of Tottenham, and The Three Kings and Herod, also use nine-line stanzas in forms of tail-rhyme.17 The Three Kings, for example, constructed on the pattern aaa4b2ccc4b2b4, mixes groups of monorhymed tetrameter lines with short two-stress “bobs” at lines four and eight, before rounding each stanza off with a concluding tetrameter line. The nine-line stanzas of Anelida’s complaint, even though made up of longer lines, and with the added elaboration of occasional internal rhyme, would not necessarily have been incomprehensible. Although the scribe of Digby 181 momentarily forgot (on fol. 42v) that he was copying nine-line rather than eight-line stanzas, and had to correct his copy by adding line 286 in the margin, scribes seem not to have balked at the stanza form that predominates in Anelida’s complaint. The variation that is a marked feature of Anelida’s complaint does, however, seem to have constituted a challenge. The scribes’ decisions about layout—in particular how to signal the patterns of rhyme—suggest considerable uncertainty about what they were dealing with. Some of this uncertainty may relate to the exemplars that came their way; it is only too likely that experimental pieces of verse writing, such as Anelida’s complaint, took messy shape in their earliest instantiations. Shirley’s efforts with the complaint in Add. MS 16165, probably the earliest surviving copy, suggest that he may have been working (possibly uncomprehendingly) with an exemplar in which the text was still somehow in process. At first sight his copy  For DIMEV 1628 (the thirteenth-century prayer to the Virgin), see Thomas J. Heffernan, “Four Middle English Religious Lyrics from the Thirteenth Century,” Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981): 131–50 at 146–50. Audelay’s hymns to St. Bridget (DIMEV 1727) and St. Winifred (DIMEV 1759), both rhyming ababcdddc, and his Hours of the Cross (DIMEV 1017), rhyming aaaabcccb, are in John the Blind Audelay: Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302), ed. Susanna Greer Fein, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), items XXXI, XXXII, XIV (https://d.lib.rochester. edu/teams/publication/fein-audelay-poems-and-carols-oxford-bodleian-library-ms-douce-302 [accessed December 23, 2021]). Religious lyrics and carols include DIMEV 1542, 1636, 1644, 5951, 6724; prophecies include DIMEV 4140, and 5478?. One of the verse inserts in Langtoft’s Chronicle (DIMEV 1397) is a single nine-line stanza.  For the Tale of the Basin (DIMEV 4213) see Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/ furrow-ten-bourdes [accessed December 23, 2021]); for the Tournament (DIMEV 4143), see Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005) (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/kooper-sentimental-humorousromances [accessed December 23, 2021]); and for The Three Kings (DIMEV 6282), see Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 127–30.

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seems neat and orderly; the text is in single columns, with each new stanza signaled with a nota sign, and with the shorter lines of the stanzas that depart from the nineline pattern set out in groups of four. But the symmetry of the two-section structure is obscured by the placing of lines 308–16 after line 255, and the absence of lines 290–98; and the stanza patterns are disturbed by the absence of part of what is in other copies the first sixteen-line stanza (ll. 265–68), and a further omission in the second of these (l. 335; all these omissions are unsignaled).18 Somehow, whether through consultation of another exemplar or more careful scrutiny and consideration of what he was copying, Shirley’s later copy of the complaint (without narrative section) in Trinity MS R. 3. 20 restored lines 308–16 to what seems their rightful place, and supplied line 335, although lines 265–68 and 290–98 are still absent (as already noted, neither Add. MS 16165 nor Trinity MS R. 3. 20 included the “continuation” stanza). In the Trinity copy, more attention is paid to the layout of the sixteenline stanzas on pages 108 and 110, with brackets linking the groups of three monorhymed lines (aaa and then bbb) and the longer fourth line in each small group (b and then a) set out in the right-hand margin; this is a mode of organization often used by scribes copying tail-rhyme (Figure 1).19 The compilers of British Library MS Harley 7333, who may have relied on a now lost Shirleian exemplar for the amalgam of narrative and complaint, made good some of the deficiencies in Shirley’s two surviving copies. Here the complaint follows immediately after the narrative section in plausible sequence, and the two sixteen-line stanzas are present in full. Since this manuscript employs a two-column format, the scribe lacked space to set out the sixteen-line stanzas as they appear in Trinity MS R. 3. 20, with the longer lines set out in the right-hand margin, but the departure from nine-line stanzas is made visible by the employment of brace lines signaling the rhyme scheme of the sixteen-line sections (Figure 2). The other texts that can be loosely categorized as “Shirley-tradition” dealt in a variety of ways with the layout of the complaint. The incomplete copy in Pepys 2006 replicates Shirley’s version in Trinity MS R. 3. 20, with the single short-line stanza that is present (ll. 256–71) set out in groups of three bracketed monorhymed lines with the fourth line of each group in the right-hand margin. The scribe of Huntington MS HM 140, who copied the complaint alone, did something rather different, reproducing the first sixteen-line stanza (ll. 256–71) as consecutive lines, but shaping the second sixteen-

 As noted above, the narrative section was copied at another point in Add 16165 (fols. 256v–58v), and presumably reached Shirley separately; this too has omissions, lacking lines 66–126, 141–47, 193–210. Neither complaint nor narrative has the “continuation” stanza (ll. 351–57).  See Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 66–85; and Daniel Sawyer, Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350–c.1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 123–24.

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Figure 1: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 20, pp. 108–9. John Shirley’s copy of Anelida’s Complaint, showing the layout of the first 16-line stanza (lines 256–71, here lacking lines 265–68). Photo: Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

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Figure 2: London, British Library, MS Harley 7333, fol. 135r. Anelida’s complaint, showing the layout of the first 16-line stanza (lines 256–71). Photo: © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images.

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line interpolation as two separate eight-line stanzas.20 Caxton’s printed edition followed this layout as well, setting out the first set of sixteen lines (ll. 256–71) as one long stanza, without marking the distinctive rhyme scheme in any way, and the second interpolation as two eight-line stanzas. The texts not closely associated with Shirley’s copies show less variation in their treatment of the complaint’s distinctive stanza forms and rhyme schemes. The scribes of MSS Fairfax 16, Bodley 638, Tanner 346, Digby 181, Longleat 258, Harley 372, and CUL Ff. 1. 6 all present each of the sixteen-line interpolations as two stanzas of eight lines each. There are some small indications that the copying of the complaint overall presented some challenges. The allocation of lines to the page in Tanner 346 has a slightly uneven appearance, perhaps resulting from the accommodation of stanzas of uneven lengths. There are only occasional signs that the scribes recognized and wished to highlight the elaborate formal features of the complaint. Aware of the distinctive internal rhyme patterns in the nine-line stanzas beginning at lines 272 and 333 (“My swete fo, why do ye so, for shame?” and “The longe night this wonder sight I drye”) the scribe of Harley 372 carefully divided each line into three sections by means of punctus marks (intermittent use of virgules marks this structure in some other copies). In general, though, the evidence of surviving manuscripts suggests that the scribal presentation of Anelida’s complaint can have done little to highlight or clarify its formal inventiveness. The omission of lines 290–98 in copies in the Shirleian tradition brought about a discrepancy in the balance of the two sections (one section of seventy lines, 211–280, is balanced by another of sixty-one lines, 281–89, 299–350). The presence in copies in the non-Shirleian tradition of the “continuation” stanza at the end of the complaint, likely to have been a post-Chaucerian addition, interferes with the effect of repeating the first line of the complaint at its conclusion. More significantly, the striking intricacy of metrical and rhyming patterns in the groups of sixteen lines at 256–71 and 317–32 is visually obscured in the copies where these are presented as eight-line stanzas, a layout that downplays the “turn” by which the final word of one group of four lines supplies the rhyme-word for the following group. Only the most careful of readers might pause to analyze the structure of these sections and weigh their complex effects.

 A marginal nota sign at the start of the final group of four lines may suggest some scribal uncertainty about these lines.

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The Complaint’s Reception For some fifteenth-century readers, the formal features of Anelida’s complaint were evidently striking (Shirley signals in his introduction to the complaint in Trinity MS R. 3. 20 its “vnkouþe metre coloures and Rymes”: “vnkouþe” in this context meaning novel, unfamiliar, and foreign).21 Modulations of stanza form and line length, varieties of rhyme scheme, and intricate internal rhyme all contribute to an effect of rich complexity. The unfamiliar and “foreign” flavor of the poetic texture might well have brought to mind for some readers the complaintes and lays produced by Chaucer’s French contemporaries—in particular the setpieces inserted by Machaut and Froissart into longer dits, the kinds of lyriconarrative with which Anelida and Arcite has been compared.22 The nine-line stanzas of the complaint have some parallels in French ballades, and the sixteen-line insertions with various experimental French forms.23 Jenni Nuttall has explored the likely importance of the sixteen-line stanzas into the fifteenth century and beyond as models for amatory complaints, sometimes confusingly called “virelais” in English sources. With other commentators, she has also noted the vogue for nine-line pentameter stanzas among post-Chaucerian writers of courtly verse.24 Chaucer’s experiments with nine-line stanzas survive not just in Anelida’s complaint but also in the male-voiced lament of The Complaint of Mars (ll. 155–298: aabaabbcc5), where the appropriateness of the form to the sentiments expressed in the stanzas is perhaps emphasized by the speaker’s reference to what

 Middle English Dictionary (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary [accessed December 23, 2021]): “uncouth,” 1–3.  W. A. Davenport, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), 7, 29; James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 123–26.  Some features of French lyrics in nine-line stanzas are discussed by J. C. Laidlaw, “The Cent Ballades: The Marriage of Content and Form,” in Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 53–82. The sixteen-line stanzas of Anelida and Arcite were assumed by Skeat to be modeled on the French virelai: see Skeat, Chaucer, 1:536. In a valuable recent article, however, Jenni Nuttall argues that this form is more properly characteristic of complainte: see “The Vanishing English Virelai: French Complainte in English in the Fifteenth Century,” Medium Aevum 85 (2016): 59–76. Nuttall’s two blogs, “Dressed to the Nines” and “Internal Rhyme I” at http://stylisticienne.com/dressed-to-the-nines/ and http://stylisticienne.com/internalrhyme-i/ [accessed December 22, 2021], contain further valuable insights, as does her essay “‘Many a lay and many a thing’: Chaucer’s Technical Terms,” in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 21–37, especially 25–26.  See Nuttall, “The Vanishing English Virelai.”

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he understands to be the requirements of “the ordre of compleynt” (l. 155).25 The rhyme scheme of the nine-line stanzas in this complaint gives it the structure of an elaborated rhyme royal stanza (rhyme royal is the form used here for the narrative introduction), and its incorporation of three rhyme endings, compared with two in the Anelida nine-line stanza, makes it perhaps less challengingly elaborate. Womanly Noblesse, cautiously attributable to Chaucer although surviving only in one late fifteenth-century witness (British Library Add. MS 34360), constitutes another experiment with nine-line stanzas on the model aabaabbab5, here woven around the same two rhyme-sounds across its three stanzas.26 The sentiments of this very intricately constructed poem perhaps owe more to balade than to complainte, since its mode is laudatory rather than lamenting, and it concludes with a six-line flattering envoy. The French connections of the complainte in nine-line stanzas, as well as the presence of some Chaucerian models, may well have been an element of its attraction for those writing poetry in English in the fifteenth century. Unsurprisingly given the French antecedents, and again as Jenni Nuttall has pointed out, a number of lyrics in this form appear among the English works of Charles d’Orléans, and scattered instances also survive among the works of other poets writing in Frenchinfluenced Chaucerian vein, such as Hoccleve.27 Scots poets, whose responses to Chaucerian models may also have been shaped by a history of strong cultural connections between Scotland and France, were notably enthusiastic in turning to nine-line stanzas to mark points of special importance in longer works.28 The stanza forms of both Anelida’s complaint (aabaabbab5) and The Complaint of Mars (aabaabbcc5) were influential. Henryson used the Anelida stanza in The Testament of Cresseid,29 and it appears in three further courtly poems of approximately the same date: The Quare of Jelusy, The Lufaris Complaint, and The Lay of Sorrow (the last two of these pay even more marked homage to Anelida’s complaint in their inclusion of

 Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 643–47.  Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 649–50, entitled in the manuscript “Balade that Chaucier made.” The second stanza has only eight lines, aababbab; one line seems to be missing between 12 and 14.  Nuttall, “The Vanishing English Virelai.” Hoccleve, DIMEV 1537, 6116.  See Janet M. Smith, The French Background of Middle Scots Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934), and William Calin, The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014).  The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 111–31 (ll. 406–69). In Orpheus and Eurydice (Fox, Poems of Robert Henryson, 132–53), a poem much concerned with eloquence and “suete proporcion” (l. 368), the ten-line stanzas used for Orpheus’s lament are similarly structured, but with the addition of a tenth-line refrain, “Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudice,” or some close variation on this (aabaabbcbC; ll. 134–83).

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sections of sixteen short lines, on the model of these parts of Chaucer’s poem).30 Blind Hary included in The Wallace an experiment with the form, evidently seeing it as appropriate for a complaint partly voiced by Wallace from prison.31 The nine-line stanza would continue to exert a dynamic appeal in Scotland, appearing (with some variations) in the work of William Dunbar (The Golden Targe), Gavin Douglas (The Palice of Honour and parts of the Eneados), and David Lyndsay (The Testament of the Papynjay).32 As already noted, various forms of nine-line stanza survive in Middle English verse outside the Chaucerian tradition, and may well have been known to these Scots poets. Specifically Chaucerian forms of nine-line stanza would have been available to them in a number of contexts. Caxton’s edition of Anelida and Arcite was printed in 1476 or 1477 (STC 5090), and the earliest surviving printed edition of The Complaint of Mars, that of Julian Notary, is conventionally assigned to 1500? (STC 5089). So Anelida and Arcite, at least, could have been accessible in printed form to Henryson and Blind Hary and Dunbar.33 Manuscript copies of Chaucer’s short poems

 Respectively DIMEV 5729.3, 926, 786. The Quare of Jelusy, ed. From MS Bodley Arch. Seld. B. 24, ed. J. Norton-Smith and I. Pravda, Middle English Texts 3 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1976), lines 191–316 in stanzas on the pattern aabaabbab5; K. G. Wilson, “The Lay of Sorrow and The Lufaris Complaynt: An Edition,” Speculum 29 (1954): 708–26, supplemented by P. J. Frankis, “Notes on Two Fifteenth-Century Scots Poems,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 61 (1960): 203–13.  The Wallace: Blind Hary, ed. Anne McKim (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), Book II, lines 171–359 (aabaabbab5).  The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), 1:184–92 and 2:415–21 (stanzas in the form aabaabbab5); The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2nd ed., Scottish Text Society, 5th series 2 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2003), 3–133 (see pp. l–li for analysis of stanza forms: prologue and Books I and II in stanzas aabaabbab5, Book III in stanzas aabaabbcc5; concluding address in various forms of nine-line stanzas; sporadic use at various points of internal rhyme); Prologue to Eneados Book III (aabaabbab5) and Prologue to Eneados Book V (aabaabbcc5) in Virgil’s Aeneid translated by Gavin Douglas, ed. David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols., Scottish Text Society, 3rd series 25, 27–28, 30 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1956–1960); The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount 1490–1555, ed. Douglas Hamer, 4 vols., Scottish Text Society, 3rd series 1–2, 6, 8 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1931–1936), 1: 55–90 (ll. 1–72; aabaabbcc5). The intermittent presence of nine-line stanzas in William Peeris’s “Verse Chronicle of the House of Percy,” composed between 1517 and 1523 for the 5th Earl of Northumberland, may further support arguments that the form had an especially northern vogue; see A. S. G. Edwards, “A Verse Chronicle of the House of Percy,” Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 226–44.  Little can be hazarded about the date of the Testament, except that it seems to have been in circulation by 1492; see Fox, Henryson, xv–xix. Blind Hary was apparently at work on The Wallace from 1471 to 1479; see McKim, The Wallace, introduction. The Golden Targe may date from the 1490s or the early 1500s; see Bawcutt, Dunbar, 2:413–14. On the early circulation of printed editions of Middle English verse in Scotland, see J. A. W. Bennett, “Those Scotch Copies of Chaucer,” Review of English

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could have been in the hands of Scottish readers from a much earlier date. James I, author of The Kingis Quair, was clearly familiar with a range of Chaucer’s works, and may have brought copies to Scotland with him when released from captivity in England in 1424; the construction and content of The Kingis Quair testify to a keen interest in poetic form, emphasized by its author’s reference to the “lynis seven” of his own rhyme royal stanzas in his concluding recommendation of the work to Chaucer and Gower (ll. 1373–79).34 The production in Scotland of the largely Chaucerian anthology that is now Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, beginning some time after 1489, testifies to the later availability of exemplars of some of Chaucer’s works. The main scribe of the Chaucerian part of this anthology included The Complaint of Mars in the selection of works he copied, and although Anelida and Arcite is not present in the manuscript, the influence of its modes and form is apparent in The Quair of Jelusy, The Lay of Sorrow, and The Lufaris Complaint, copies of which were added among works of a more obviously Scottish flavor by a second scribe.35 Late medieval and early sixteenth-century English sources preserve less evidence than Scottish ones of enthusiasm for nine-line stanzas on Chaucerian models. It may be the case that keenness to explore an expanding range of formal possibilities simply diffused the taste for stanzas specially authorized by connection with Chaucer’s name. Evidence of this adventurous spirit is preserved in the formally very complex Epitaffe of the moste noble & valyaunt Iasper late duke of Beddeforde (STC 14477), where nine-line stanzas appear sporadically among stanzas of very many other kinds.36 Among the nine-line stanzas present in Tudor songs and carols, and in the verse associated with the Wyatt circle, are forms that employ configurations of line length and rhyme very different from those in the complaints of Anelida and Mars. A new emphasis on song-like forms may have encouraged a preference for shorter lines, and patterns sometimes akin to tail-rhyme. Nonetheless, the stanzas of Anelida’s complaint and The Complaint of Mars must have reached

Studies n.s. 32 (1981): 294–96, and Joanna M. Martin, “Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature,” Review of English Studies n.s. 60 (2009): 561–77.  See the edition in Fifteenth Century English Dream Visions, ed. Julia Boffey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 94–157.  The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and “The Kingis Quair”: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, intro. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 1–24; Boffey and Edwards, “Bodleian MS Arch. Selden. B. 24: The Genesis and Evolution of a Scottish Poetical Anthology,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 2005), 14–29; T. S. Miller, “Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home: MS Arch. Selden B. 24 as the ‘Scottish Ellesmere,’” The Chaucer Review 47 (2012): 25–47.  DIMEV 4482, printed by Richard Pynson in 1496.

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new audiences in the form of Thynne’s 1532 printed edition of Chaucer’s works (STC 5068), to remain somehow live in the form of successive new editions. The experiments made in Chaucer’s corpus of short poems, if initially baffling for those who first copied and transmitted them, significantly widened the range of possibility for those producing poetry in English.

Richard Firth Green

Pearl’s Rhymes A. C. Spearing’s assessment of Pearl as “a showpiece of virtuosity” that produces “a verbal effect as bejeweled as the other world it describes,” has rarely been questioned.1 In particular, the formal demands that the Pearl-poet makes on himself through the choice of a twelve-line stanza, an elaborate rhyme-scheme, and a concatenation of stanzas and groups of stanzas by means of refrains and link-words (on all of which Susanna Fein has written authoritatively),2 have led to an almost universal expression of admiration for his skills as a prosodist. “The poetry of Pearl,” wrote E. V. Gordon in his 1953 edition, “ranks with that of Dante or Donne as proof that an ‘artificial’ poetic form is itself no barrier to the expression of deep emotion [. . .] The poet of Pearl is rarely guilty of using his technique in mechanical or slovenly fashion.”3 Almost sixty years later, John M. Bowers would go even further: “perhaps the most brilliantly crafted poem in the English language, second only to Dante’s Divine Comedy in European literature [. . .] one of the greatest masterpieces in English poetry in terms of technical performance. Every detail remains under the author’s exacting control.”4 It is with some trepidation, then, that I propose a corrective to such views, though I must stress from the outset that I am not

 A. C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 98. One dissenting voice is Kenneth Sisam’s: “the form distracts attention from the matter by its elaborateness. [. . .] With such intricacy of plan, it is not surprising that the rime is sometimes forced, and the sense strained or obscure.” Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 58.  Susanna Greer Fein, “Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date of Pearl,” Speculum 72 (1997): 367–98.  Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), xxxvii. All quotations from Pearl are taken from this edition on the grounds that its philological assumptions have generally been accepted by subsequent editors. Other editions of Pearl that have been consulted are those of Sir Israel Gollancz, Pearl, an English Poem of the XIVth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, revised ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), and Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, The Works of the Gawain Poet (London: Penguin Books, 2014). Regrettably, Thorlac Turville-Petre’s edition of Pearl (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2021) appeared too late to be consulted for this paper. Quotations from the other poems in London: British Library, MS. Cotton Nero A. x are taken from Andrew and Waldron, Poems.  John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 103 and 104–5. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516481-007

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arguing Pearl is a bad poem, merely pointing out that, despite its many excellencies, we should be cautious about overpraising its prosody. The one area of Pearl’s prosody that has received extensive attention is its meter. That many lines in Pearl, as it stands in the manuscript, appear rhythmically ungainly is obvious to the most untutored ear and various attempts have been made to square this with the perception of the poem as a technical masterpiece. Critics have generally accounted for their difficulties with Pearl’s scansion as being a result of either prosodic conventions to which we are unaccustomed or the failure of scribes to represent the poet’s original intentions; adherents of the first school tend to see Pearl’s basic prosodic unit as “a development of the four-stress native alliterative line,” while the second group argue for a “four-stressed accentual verse of an iambic pattern,” based on French models.5 In this latter group, Hoyt N. Duggan makes the most radical suggestions for restoring what he sees as Pearl’s original iambic tetrameter by not only juggling final e’s but syncopating words like other (or), never (ner), sythen (syn), and over (ore);6 he characterizes editors who are reluctant to embark on such wholesale emendation as “maidenly,” but gives no reason why such extensive sophistication should be ascribed to the Cotton-Nero scribe or one of his precursors. Ironically, Putter and Stokes, who also hear iambic tetrameters, have argued that Pearl’s orthography offers important clues to its meter, an argument that leads them to claim that its author’s spelling has been carefully reproduced by his copyist(s)!7 Hitherto, neither school can be said to have presented an irrefutable case, and it is difficult to see how lines like, “Arayed to þe weddyng in þat hyl-coppe” (l. 791), “Bot of þe Lombe I haue þe aquylde” (l. 967), or “Þat þe Vertues of heuen of joye endyte” (l. 1126) could ever be adequately scanned by appealing to either miscopied iambic tetrameters or loosely arranged alliterative lifts. However, other than highlighting the challenge that the Pearl-poet’s metrical solecisms poses to his reputation for technical expertise, my interest in this paper lies elsewhere: in the Pearl-poet’s use of rhyme.8

 For an excellent characterization of these two schools, see Richard Osberg, “The Prosody of Middle English Pearl and the Alliterative Lyric Tradition,” in English Historical Metrics, ed. C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 150–74, at 150–51, and nn. 1–2.  Hoyt N. Duggan, “Libertine Scribes and Maidenly Editors: Meditations on Textual Criticism and Metrics,” in McCully and Anderson, English Historical Metrics, 219–37. Duggan’s approach was anticipated by Clark S. Northup, “A Study of the Metrical Structure of the Middle English Poem The Pearl,” PMLA 12 (1897): 326–40.  Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, “Spelling, Grammar and Metre in the Works of the Gawain-Poet,” Parergon 18 (2000): 77–95.  The following online reference works have been consulted for this paper: A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (CDOE): https://archive.org/details/concisedictionar001857; A Linguistic Atlas of Late

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It must be said at once that the rhyme-scheme chosen by the poet (ABABABABBCBC) makes great demands on his stock of rhyming words. Not only must he find six such words for his B-rhyme, but since the C-rhyme is carried over into the four remaining stanzas of each section, he must be able to find six more rhymes there too (or in the case of Section XV, seven). Even Elizabethan sonneteers did not have to dig quite so deep. In the matter of rhyming, then, we should probably cut him some slack, but the fact remains that Pearl’s deployment of rhymes is far from perfect. Critics, both textual and literary, seem generally to have worked from the assumption that since he was a master craftsman any apparent evidence to the contrary must be put down to the reader’s ignorance rather than the author’s failings. We know too little of his language or his poetic constraints, the argument runs, to be able to find fault with his technique. Of course, such an attitude is not exclusive to scholarship on Pearl, but a single manuscript witness (and consequent lack of scribal variants) makes its presence there more obvious. While E. V. Gordon, Pearl’s most philologically influential editor, felt compelled to admit that “there are some imperfect rhymes, and most of the obscurities of meaning have their basis in a rhyme-word” (p. xxxix), like many of those who have succeeded him, he nonetheless directed much of his energy to glossing over or explaining away such blemishes. One major phonological claim made by Gordon, which appears to account for a number of otherwise anomalous rhymes, must be addressed from the very beginning. He claims that “the voiced plosives b, d, g, when final were unvoiced in the West Midlands to p, t, k, respectively,” even while conceding that “traditional spelling” (by which he means a non-phonetic, conventional spelling) was often retained (p. 93).9 Thus, Gordon has no problem with the fact that ‘found’ is spelled fande (l. 871) and rhymes with farande, stande, and thowsande in one place (even though he presumably imagines that the Pearl-poet pronounced these as farante, stant, and thousant), and yet elsewhere it is spelled fonte (l. 170) and made to

Middle English (eLALME): http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-projects-hub/project/elalme/; Le Dictionnaire de Moyen Français (DMF): http://zeus.atilf.fr/dmf/; The Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND): https://anglo-norman.net/entry/a_1; The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS): http://www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk/web/online.html; The Dictionary of Old English, A–I (DOE): https://doe. artsci.utoronto.ca/; The English Dialect Dictionary (EDD): https://eddonline-proj.uibk.ac.at/edd/index. jsp; The Middle English Dictionary (MED): https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/ dictionary; The Oxford English Dictionary (OED): https://www.oed.com/. Individual references are by entry (s.v.). I have also made use of the online Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse at the University of Michigan’s Middle English Compendium (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/).  See also Gordon, Pearl, p. xlvi.

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rhyme with wonte, brunt, blunt, frount, and atount.10 So, too, when ‘found’ occurs in the middle of a line, as with “Now haf I fonde hyt, I schal ma feste” (l. 283), we must assume that he believed that despite the spelling it was pronounced font. There is no question that the similar unvoicing of final -d, as a past tense marker—agrete, ‘agreed’ (l. 560), rert, ‘reared’ (l. 591), and bycalt, ‘called’ (l. 1163)—does occur in rhyme elsewhere in Pearl, and even occasionally in non-rhymed contexts, like dyt, ‘did’ (l. 681), but does that mean that, despite appearances, nouns like joparde and rewarde (ll. 602–4) must have been pronounced with an unvoiced final -t, merely because they rhyme with a weak past charde (l. 608)? It is particularly ironic, if so, that the etymological final -t of ‘jeopardy’ (< Fr. jeu parti) should have been spelled with a -d.11 Despite Gordon’s suggestion (p. 93) that poyned (