The performances are simultaneous and multiple, as Cnut sings his song over (and with) a chorus of the monks’ and knights’ liturgical song and continues either aloud or mentally, by “tossing [it] around in his mind.”7
The surviving quatrain, too, takes as its subject its own composition and in particular its debts to, and differences from, its inspiration. The lyric first describes the occasion of its composition in the third person (“Merie sungen the munekes binnen Ely / Tha Cnut king rew ther-by”). It then shifts tense (from past to present), point of view (from third person to first person), and mood (from indicative to imperative): “Roweth, cnihtes, ner the land, / And here we thes munekes sang.” Who speaks the final two lines? The first-person plural at once suggests that Cnut’s voice is speaking and invites other singers, past and present, into the voice of the lyric. The combination of all three grammatical shifts marks a distinction between the temporalities of the song and the chronicle. Where the chronicle narrates a linear and completed history, the song continuously re-performs itself as an ongoing event. All of the lyric’s singers and audiences—past, present, and future—are invited to “here … thes munekes sang.” The chronicler represents Cnut’s song as a kind of contrafactum, or lyric written to fit existing music, which can be sung along with the liturgical offices, recalling the original even as it transforms it. As Sarah Kay remarks, a medieval person would ask of these lyrics not “who is speaking?” but “what am I hearing?” (i.e., what is the musical referent?).8 Thus, the line, “here we thes munekes sang,” alludes at once to an irrecoverable, singular past event and to a recurrent one, the daily singing of the Divine Hours; it is commemorative but also generative. The monks’ singing is vigorously present in the line’s deixis (“thes munekes”), in the melody of the immediate performance, and in the acknowledgment of the synchronic liturgical performance. And while the lyric’s inspiration is affective (Cnut “[e]xpress[es] with his own mouth his joyfulness of heart”), its content is practical: “here we thes munekes sang.” Following its composition, Cnut’s song persists as a lyric (“sung publicly by choirs”) and also migrates to other textual forms (“remembered in proverbs”). Indeed, the song survives for modern readers because of its inclusion in the more robustly attested textual form of the chronicle.
Cnut’s boat song merits a place of distinction in English literary history as the first post-Conquest record of an English lyric and thus, in some sense, the first “later medieval” (if not perhaps “Middle English”) lyric. Yet this quatrain is also in many ways representative of much of the surviving corpus of insular lyrics between 1100 and 1500. It takes as its subject its own composition and projects its future reception, as many of these lyrics do. Its emphasis is somatic and yet the lyric itself is rhetorically and formally undistinguished by modern standards. Finally, it is incomplete. Far from the “verbal icon” of a complex and totalized poetic object, as the influential twentieth-century critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley described the lyric poem, Cnut’s boat song is permeated by its own history of composition, reception, and transmission.9
The song thus raises many questions. Is this a lyric? What does it mean to use as a generic descriptor a word that only enters English in the sixteenth century and comes in the twentieth century to designate a genre whose ascendency is tied to the associated critical practice of “close reading”? Given these anachronisms, does the corpus we call “Middle English lyrics” indeed represent a coherent genre? Do these short poems share features that organize and distinguish them from other medieval literary, didactic, or practical texts? Does identifying them as a genre suggest specific critical reading practices? These questions have come to concern many readers of medieval and later lyric poetry, and they apply equally to most Middle English short poems, as well as to many of those in French and Latin that circulated in later medieval England. Further, examining the generic properties of these poems promises to contribute to broader concerns in literary studies, such as historical poetics (the study of how historical circumstances influence poetic forms and practices) and New Formalism (the integration of formalist and historicist methodologies for literary study), that have motivated scholars across periods to return to questions of literary form, poetry, and the genre of lyric.10 Some provocative essays and book chapters on medieval English lyrics, notably by Ardis Butterfield, Nicolette Zeeman, and Jessica Brantley, have sought to answer the above questions by considering lyrics as lateral clusters of texts, as implicit literary theory, and as multimedia objects.11 Yet the last influential book-length study on the medieval lyrics of England, Rosemary Woolf’s The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, appeared in 1968.
This book undertakes such a study. My central claim is that in later medieval England, the lyric genre is defined as much by its cultural practices as by its poetic forms. As Cnut’s song shows, plural practices (whether actual or imagined) are attested in the texts of medieval lyrics themselves, as well as in the apparatus and contexts of their survival. Further, lyrics’ constellation of practices emerges indirectly and obliquely from regulated institutional forms, such as liturgical performance and ecclesiastical chronicles. They are propagated within and outside these institutions, as singers, audiences, readers, and writers follow and depart from their norms in varying degrees. In short, these lyric practices are tactical, in the sense defined by twentieth-century social theorist Michel de Certeau. In tactical practices, subjects find unauthorized, spontaneous, and makeshift pathways among institutional structures (just as Cnut’s new song uses and departs from the liturgical offices). By contrast, strategic practices follow defined and normative uses of those structures (e.g., the monks singing the Hours). The tactical reliance on and departure from the institutional forms of textual production define the genre of later medieval English lyric, which draws on other literary and cultural norms both to shape itself as a distinct kind of literary object and to reform the structures that shaped it. And while other medieval genres, such as drama and romance, enjoyed vigorous performance practices and written forms throughout the later Middle Ages, I will argue that the vernacular lyrics that circulated in later medieval England had a unique place within this textual culture because of their particular formal features.12
While this study centers on Middle English lyric, it also includes Anglo-French and macaronic poems in its analysis. As several scholars have recently observed, the multilingual environment of England during this period and its situation within a regionally rather than nationally organized Europe invite the expansion of our understanding of medieval “English” literature to include texts in other languages.13 Lyrics, in particular, are vibrant participants in this multilingual landscape. Their brevity allows for their frequent inclusion in multilingual compilations. Their participation in oral-performative as well as written practices (discussed in greater detail below) allows them to draw on the different registers of each of these languages, which limned a range of “microliteracies” and sociolinguistic practices.14
Nonetheless, as Ardis Butterfield has recently observed, insular lyric texts and practices differ markedly from those of their Continental neighbors. In France, Germany, and Italy, lyric poetry is more coherently anthologized and theorized beginning in the thirteenth century.15 Perhaps because of this coherence, Continental medieval lyrics have been more greatly admired and more extensively theorized than their insular counterparts. While English lyrics bear some marks of the influence of mainland poetry, their practices and forms are largely unique. Thus, while I often situate English lyrics in relation to Continental contexts, and where appropriate draw on critical approaches developed for mainland lyrics, more often the study of insular lyrics demands a departure from these ways of thinking. While the French tradition, in particular, greatly influences English lyric, critical models developed for French lyrics do not completely account for insular practices. To cite just one influential example, while the insular corpus offers examples of the kind of textual lability that Paul Zumthor called mouvance, whereby performed texts undergo linguistic changes that defy the determination of a stable “best text,” this concept does not account for the kind of transformation witnessed in the relationship between the sung liturgical offices and Cnut’s composition.16 Rather, this is an essentially social relationship of tactics, as a regulated textual performance is transformed by occasional practice. In short,
