poetry seek to integrate formalist methodologies with their political and historicist critiques, the medieval lyric’s difference from the post-Romantic genre promises to make it paradigmatic rather than marginal, as it has frequently been conceived in literary histories of English poetry. This premodern corpus offers a lyric theory that precedes the early modern appropriations of Classical poetics that defined lyric poetry as a genre, as well as Enlightenment concepts of subjectivity that influenced modern poetics.72 In order to begin to locate medieval short poems in this longer history of lyric genre, I describe below how this corpus came to be identified with the genre, despite the lack of a generic name or poetic theory in the Middle Ages. I then briefly discuss the post-Romantic aesthetic theories that defined and privileged the lyric genre, as well as their more recent critiques, suggesting how medieval lyric can advance culturally and historically inflected formalisms and poetics.
If individual medieval lyrics take shape by means of rhetorical and material tactics, so too does imagining this corpus as a genre—within its own cultural context as well as transhistorically—require tactical thinking. For a medieval person, there was no such thing as a lyric. The Latin lyricus seldom appeared in the Middle Ages, and the word “lyric” entered the English language only in the sixteenth century, when it was used to translate Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the neoclassical treatises on poetics of Sir Philip Sidney and others.73 In one of its few medieval appearances, in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (615–30), lyricus is affiliated with song: “Lyric poets are named after the Greek term ληϱεɩ̃ν (lit. ‘speak trifles’), that is, from the variety of their songs. Hence also the lyre is named.”74 Indeed, of the lyre’s etymology, Isidore says, “The lyre is so called from the word ληϱεɩ̃ν, that is, from ‘variety of voices,’ because it renders diverse sounds.”75 For the Benedictine schoolmaster Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070–1150), lyric is merely one of eleven poetic forms (including pastoral, comic, tragic, elegiac, etc.). According to Conrad, “The verse-form in which drinking-parties with their accompanying amusements are described is lyric. It gets its name from apo to lirin, that is from variation, hence delirus (‘crazy’) is he who alters from what he was.”76 Of course, the short poems of which Isidore and Conrad speak are Latin compositions whose forms vary greatly over the five centuries separating the two writers and further bear only an attenuated relationship to the poems we now think of as medieval English lyrics.77 Yet it is worth noting that “variety” seems to be a defining feature of lyricus, suggesting at once its plurality and variability. The variety of medieval songs is also evident in the array of vernacular terms that described short poems in later medieval England. These include “all-purpose terms like song, dite, and tretys, … function-related titles such as complaint and supplication, and the formal terms (usually French-derived) like ballade and roundel.”78 Thomas Duncan suggests that the term “song,” with its implications of musical accompaniment, best names this corpus, since many of these poems were either composed for singing or took their verse forms from music.79
If the names for short poems are diverse, medieval poetic theory also tends to separate them by type. Manuals of lyric forms generally focus on Latin or Continental vernacular poetry. John of Garland’s Parisiana Poetria (1220–35) includes a section on the ars rithmica that describes rhyming and rhythmic Latin poetry, including lyrics.80 Dante’s polemic on vernacular literature, De vulgari eloquentia, comes closest to unifying diverse forms of lyric poetry (the sonnet, ballata, and any “arrangement of words that are based on harmony”) under a single term, canzone or “song,” which privileges the words rather than the music of these compositions and emphasizes authorship.81 The French produced manuals on troubadour poetry and anthologies of lyric quotation in the thirteenth century and treatises on the newly popular fixed forms (rondeaux, balades, virelais, etc.) in the fourteenth century.82 However, the most influential poetic treatises focus on narrative poetry: Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova (1208–13), Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars Versificatoria (1175), and the anonymous Tria Sunt (1256–1400).83
Most medieval English lyrics demonstrate only patchy or limited awareness of Continental treatises, and as we have seen, they survive in very different material forms from their Continental analogues. Thus, our current conceptions of the corpus and theorization of “Middle English lyrics” emerge largely from twentieth- and twenty-first-century editorial and critical work. The pioneering editions of Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, published between 1924 and 1952, created a broadly conceived corpus from the short poems scattered across a diverse collection of manuscripts and made it visible to readers.84 The Index of Middle English Verse and its permutations cast an even wider net, including all English verse texts, making possible the comparison of versions and analogues of the short poems. If this kind of editorial work tends toward broad inclusivity, contemporary criticism generally subdivides the corpus thematically or formally. Religious lyrics have been most comprehensively studied.85 Rosemary Woolf described these poems as “meditative” and traced their motifs across the Latin tradition.86 Peter Dronke’s Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric takes a similar approach to secular lyric, locating Continental and English courtly love lyrics in relation to Latin literary rhetorics. Manuscript contexts also reveal localized meanings and functions of lyrics, from verses that act as distinctiones in thematic sermons to the regional politics of the poems of MS Harley 2253.87
Yet medieval lyric practice, whether sacred or secular, was not only textual but also read, heard, spoken, and sung—in short, embodied, as a growing critical literature demonstrates. As Emma Dillon points out, the implicit theory of song that emerges from Occitan troubadour lyrics links verbal expression with sound: in these songs, “there are no words which do not have voices.”88 Private devotional reading can also invite performative “habits of thought” into the monastic practice of lectio, as Jessica Brantley shows in her discussion of a fourteenth-century Carthusian manuscript containing illustrated lyrics of Richard Rolle.89 And the poetics of devotional lyrics affect audiences cognitively and psychologically: figurative language mirrors the union of human and divine in the incarnation, for example, and lyric texts can “script emotional performance” in order to instruct readers and speakers in particular modes of feeling.90 At the same time, secular love lyrics are as much indebted to embodied performance—especially in song and dance—as to conventional textual figures, tropes, and idioms. And like their modern counterparts, medieval lyrics have been studied according to formalisms old and new, from R. L. Greene’s magisterial study and compilation of English carols to Nicolette Zeeman’s suggestive readings of the “imaginative theory” implicit in English chansons d’aventure.91
Given the difficulties of working with this corpus, this body of scholarship represents a relatively vigorous critical literature. But while medievalists embrace lyric readings, they are less forthcoming with lyric theories that would unite these diverse texts under a single and comprehensive generic identity.92 It is perhaps this scarcity that accounts for the elision of the premodern short poem in the broader transhistorical reassessment of English lyric and poetic form.93 For if medieval English lyrics have been undertheorized in their own time and in ours, they differ starkly from the post-Romantic lyric, whose generic identity is central to the development of modern literary criticism. For Hegel, the three primary literary genres—lyric, epic, and drama—were determined by the relationships they presented between the inner and outer worlds, or “subjectivity” and “objectivity.” In this theory, lyric is subjective, epic objective, and drama at once subjective and objective.94 His theory had a long afterlife: to cite one example, Stephen Dedalus paraphrases it in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.95 But while this tripartite theory of genres claims to descend from Aristotle and Horace, its modern permutations elide the modal system on which Classical aesthetics is based, which is less dialectical and more tabular in its structure. That is, Classical aesthetics separated rhetoric from content, implicitly constructing a matrix of genres that permit combinations
