A Companion to the Middle English Lyric.

A Companion to the Middle English Lyric. Ed. by Thomas G. Duncan. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2005. xxv + 328 pp. 50 [pounds sterling]. isbn: 978-184384-065-7.

It is a pleasure to review a collection with such consistently good contributions. This volume is dedicated to Douglas Gray and will prove as important a milestone in criticism of the Middle English lyric as the authoritative studies by Rosemary Woolf and Douglas Gray, published in 1968 and 1972 respectively. These are critical essays, but everywhere the significance of manuscript contexts in their interpretation is given its due. Equally appropriately, the relationships between English, French, and Latin lyrics (some other linguistic traditions) are weighed with fresh and up-to-date expertise.

We begin with Julia Boffey's account of 'Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts', an outstanding compendium of research and analysis--virtually a short reference book in its own right on this subject. Thomas Duncan comes next with a fine essay on metre that helpfully explores the links to issues of editing, and the problems of relationships between Latin and English metre. John Scattergood's scholarly and original essay on the difficult and disparate subject of the love lyric before Chaucer, giving numerous fresh insights into what are, in his words, often 'astonishing and strange texts' (p. 51), draws on wide critical and historical perspectives to open up plausible interpretations of many particularly elusive compositions. Vincent Gillespie's 'Moral and Penitential Lyrics' takes a clever approach, in view of the fact that many readers today will lack the Christian background to make full sense of the assumptions underlying the medieval texts: he arranges his material so that the essay also conducts a master-class. Its deft arrangement of things begins with fear of death and gently takes its reader through a sequence of the ensuing theological doctrines. Gillespie brings out well the emotional subtleties of much of this writing, while explicating the intricate connections between vernacular religious lyrics and the Latin and learned worlds of theology and liturgy that fed them. The same is true of Christiania Whitehead's essay on Middle English religious lyrics, which also explores the narrative and visual affinities of many, and their varied material contexts: not just lyrics scribbled in the margins of other manuscripts, but such profoundly unmodern accompaniments to the 'literary' text as reckonings of how many years off Purgatory will be won by frequent recitals of particular lyrics.

If one could specify any one topic that might have been included in the menu for the book and is not, it is that of performance contexts and audiences. But, despite the absence of a single essay wholly dedicated to this, it is handled in a state-of-the-art fashion in several of the contributions. This is particularly so in Douglas Gray's masterly account of 'Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII', which makes a powerful rehabilitation of late medieval courtly lyrics through a myriad of contexts and affinities, especially manuscripts and illustrations, and many different types of upperclass social 'game': court rituals and 'entertainments. Each page reaches out to a concisely indicated wealth of links and speculations, and it includes a sparkling short new analysis of Chaucer's lyric output.

Performance appears also in Karl Reichl's essay on the Middle English carol, which examines both the texts and their musical contexts, ecclesiastical and secular, with an expertise likely to satisfy the music historian as well as literary critics, and with information about some parallel Spanish and French developments. Contexts feature too in Alan Fletcher's 'The Lyric in the Sermon', which pushes forward our understanding of both sermons and their lyrics, and also, as he says, of our 'appreciation of the weight of cultural work that these lyrics were allowed to support' (p. 189). With its characteristic combination of wit and learning, both equally illuminating, his chapter manages to make strongly convincing its proposition that 'in the sermon the lyric found its natural habitat' (p. 209) and that we ignore this at our peril. Thorlac Turville-Petre's lively essay on political lyrics gives a useful guide to some political backgrounds, with a particularly helpful consideration of the MS Harley 2253 lyrics, but concentrates its focus on 'hate literature'--lyrics of abuse, indignation, and xenophobia--and makes a robust defence of the inescapable presence of much medieval vituperation and insult, against modern, politically-correct critical attempts to make these features of the period 'disappear by the magic of irony' (p. 185). Bernard O'Donoghue, on popular lyrics, looks back to the questioning of the courtly-popular distinction by Rosemary Woolf and others, and discusses both the 'precariousness of survival' and the insecure place of these lyrics in the modern critical mainstream. He points to interesting possible links between some of them and Chaucer's writing. Sarah Stanbury's finely nuanced and wide-ranging essay on 'Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics' argues that the religious lyric, through its use of both voices and the gaze, 'repeatedly unsettles expectations we might have between male/female relationships' (p. 229). A. A. Macdonald's 'Lyrics in Middle Scots' makes some especially interesting observations about what manuscripts reveal of English-Scots connections and influences, in both directions.

Each of these contributions manages to overcome the difficulty of providing an overview and an account of where their subject is now, while offering in addition an important new critical essay.

Helen Phillips 

Cardiff University