lyric manuscripts (including the two studied in subsequent chapters) contain French and Latin texts. We find versions of the same lyric in French, English and Latin, such as the lyric beginning “Love is a selkud wodenesse [strange madness],” in Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 139, where it is copied with Latin and French versions of the same quatrain.32 And we even find all three languages in the same lyric, as in the lyric beginning “Dum Ludis Floribus,” whose final stanza reads,
Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis;
Mon ostel est enmi la vile de Paris;
May Y sugge namore, so wel me is;
Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit ys!
[I’ve written these songs on a tablet. My lodging’s amid the city of Paris. I may say no more, as seems best; should I die for love of her, sad it is!]33
Further, the relationship between a written text and its medieval performance contexts is necessarily attenuated. As a category of medieval culture, “performance” is less a distinctly demarcated event than a mode or habitus that was available within a range of medieval activities, from socializing in the town center to private reading.34 As befits their name, many lyrics were sung, but it is often unclear whether surviving lyric manuscripts are directly connected to performance. Some lyric collections that have been dubbed “minstrel manuscripts” have potential institutional affiliations and may be as well suited to private reading as to singing.35 Lyrics were also sung by nonprofessionals. The performance instructions for the thirteenth-century lyric “Sumer is icumen in,” found in a manuscript associated with Reading Abbey and accompanied by music and the parallel Latin text “Perspice Christicola,” describe the round form for singing its verses and chorus and suggest that “this canon may be sung by four companions.”36 A handful of other medieval English lyrics also survive with musical accompaniment.37 The absence of music does not necessarily mean a poem went unsung; many lyrics may have been adapted to well-known tunes contrafactually.38 For instance, the Latin lyric “Flos pudicitie,” which appears with music alongside its French analogue, “Flur de virginite,” in British Library MS Arundel 248, bears the rubric “Cantus de Domina post cantum Aaliz.” Its editor speculates that this refers to a troubadour or secular song based on the romance connotations of the name “Aaliz.”39 In two manuscripts, the lyric “Man mai longe lives weene [expect]” appears with musical notation, where it is followed immediately by a contrafactum (without notation), “On hir is mi life ilong” (My life belongs to her).40
While music is perhaps the most obvious indicator of lyric performance, other performance structures also influenced lyric practice. A significant part of the surviving corpus of Middle English lyrics appears in the form of carols, refrain-driven poems that once accompanied a round dance but in the later Middle Ages had an existence independent of the dance form. Guests at fifteenth-century banquets were often asked to sing carols.41 Other lyrics also have their origins in dance songs, especially those taking the French forms of the balade, roundel, or virelai that started to appear in England in the second half of the fourteenth century. The sermon lyrics mentioned above were, of course, influenced by a rhetorical tradition that placed as much emphasis on performance as on the composition of the written text.42 Preachers sometimes drew on the very popularity of performed lyrics, taking them as the texts of their sermons and explicating their moral meanings. In the thirteenth century, one friar built his sermon around an English carol, “Atte wrastlinge my lemman I chese.” Another, Stephen Langton, took the French carol “Bele Aelis” as his theme.43 Evidence of lyric performance, possibly apocryphal, also survives in chronicles like the Liber Eliensis that records Cnut’s boat song, as well as in Pierre Langtoft’s Chronicle, later translated by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, which records invective lyrics of Scottish “flyting.”44
The plural forms of lyric survival and transmission have implications for the widely discussed concept of auctorite, the idea that material textual apparatus confers or reifies authorship and authority in medieval English literature.45 While some critics have argued that particular poets—Chaucer, Gower, and Richard Rolle—developed a kind of authority based on the lyric form, medieval English lyrics more often tend to be, as Rosemary Woolf says, “genuinely anonymous”: authors’ names were lost not through the vagaries of archival survival but rather because of their unimportance to contemporary scribes and readers.46 Indeed, practices of lyric composition—from the mouvance and variance of a lyric’s multiple versions, to the citation of known lyrics in new poems, to the composition of contrafacta—meant that it was often meaningless to speak of a single lyric author.47 Further, the legal and scholastic institutions that produced the written texts of the auctores seldom copied vernacular literature, and in England, short poems were even less likely than longer works to be framed with the apparatus of auctorite.48 And while the scholastic prologue’s well-defined taxonomy of forms offers a structure for reifying auctorite that was deployed by some vernacular authors, if we survey a broad range of vernacular prologues, we discover a more expansive and open-ended literary theory.49 As Emily Steiner points out, “Authority is something that one is always in relation to, that one is never absolutely identical to, and that one can only provisionally be said to possess.”50 The editors of a collection of English literary prologues note, “Latin theorizing is often too far removed from the situation in which vernacular texts came into being to provide a satisfactory governing template for understanding these prologues or the texts they introduce.”51 With their diverse material contexts and performance practices, insular lyrics require reorienting our “governing template” for literary analysis away from Latinate models, which are too often taken as foundational in the study of medieval English literature, and also away from the hegemonic authority presumed to be the aim of this literature and its composers. What these lyrics demonstrate, instead, is a vital tradition of the literary as a component of community, in which a text’s range of potential practices defines and shapes its social and literary existence and importance.
The written records and performance contexts of medieval English lyrics reveal their distinct constellation of practices across the institutions of documentary production and cultures of performance. Further, these lyrics’ formal features, especially their (relative) brevity, their mutability (via mouvance, variance, citation, and contrafacture), and their reliance on rhetorical topoi, which I discuss in the next section, differentiate them from other performed texts like romances or plays. These formal features distinguish lyrics as a particularly nimble and modular group of texts, able to insinuate themselves into and around longer narrative or didactic texts, or into the literal blank spaces of the manuscript page, as marginalia or filler. Lyrics also traverse the distinct yet not isolated categories of French and English vernacularity, of writing and performance, of official and popular practices. In sum, what unites these shorter poems as a genre is not only their formal features but also the ways in which these features permit and encourage a set of practices that navigate later medieval England’s specific textual and performative cultures.
Lyric Tactics
The brief survey of lyric survival above reflects the complexity of textual and performative cultures in later medieval England. What has been described as a culture in “transition” from orality to literacy can be understood instead as a culture of generative hybridity, in which written texts and performance practices intersect in the corpus of short poems we now call lyrics. Such poems are deeply implicated in, but not entirely of, a range of institutional forms and practices. Yet, by and large, they are not characterized by their resistance to or subversion of such forms and practices; indeed, lyrics frequently emerge from and circulate within institutional contexts. Thus, a participatory and interdependent account of the encounters between lyrics and the institutions of textuality is needed. In particular, the social theorist Michel de Certeau’s admittedly speculative and incomplete concept of “tactics” offers a way to describe the practices surrounding medieval lyrics.
