Abstract
The English carol’s mixture of vernacular and Latin lyrics has caused difficulties for its reception: was it once connected to high status, liturgical, Latin song of the church, or was its preservation in manuscript a fortuitous exception to the popular song of the Middle Ages that has otherwise all but vanished? The carol’s poetic topics—which range from the Nativity to satire and social commentary—have likewise compounded the problems of categorization for anthologists. In the present study, Colton and McInnes distance themselves from the nationalism and nostalgia that have led to carols’ primary reception as low-status lyric, arguing that the genre cut across social categorizations. Close analysis of several examples demonstrates ways in which carols crossed popular and liturgical traditions and underlines the potential significance of the carol for understanding insular devotional culture before 1450.
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Notes
- 1.
The piece is No. 21 in John Stevens ed., Mediaeval Carols. Musica Britannica 4 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1952; revised edition, 1958) 14–15. Stevens’s edition is being prepared for publication in revised and updated form by David Fallows.
- 2.
Richard L. Greene ed., The Early English Carols, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); the first edition of Greene’s book was published in 1935. On the classification of all short medieval poetry as “lyric ,” when individual topics, utterances, and cultural contexts may have been wildly different, see Julia Boffey, “What To Call A Lyric? Medieval English Lyrics and their Titles,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’histoire, 83 (2005): 671–83, at 672. Boffey focuses on the table of contents and main manuscript headings within the Vernon manuscript, identifying a range of descriptive words for lyric, such as the relatively interchangeable “song,” “tretys,” and “dite;” “What To Call A Lyric,” 673–5.
- 3.
Greene, The Early English Carols, xxxii–xxxiii.
- 4.
Most accounts continue to name the chorus as “burden” for earlier examples of this structural component; recognizing the potential for anachronism and noting the designation of “chorus” in some musical sources from the fifteenth century, we use refer to “burden” where we refer to previous scholarship that uses the term but prefer “chorus” in our own analysis. On the application of the term “burden” for the earlier repertory, see Karl Reichl, “The Middle English Carol,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas Gibson Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 150–70, at 157.
- 5.
The song that has formed part of this discourse most prominently is the well-known rota “Sumer is icumen in;” on this song, and its reception, see Lisa Colton, Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 13–38.
- 6.
Only a handful of English-texted songs are found in continental sources, and none of them are carols; David Fallows, A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
- 7.
Stevens, Mediaeval Carols, xiii. Stevens’s edition also included the carols of the London, British Library, Egerton 3307, a fifteenth-century source discovered after Greene’s work was published; GB-Lbl 3307 contains 32 songs, of which 25 were not already known from concordances; Stevens, Mediaeval Carols, xiv.
- 8.
The words of Manfred F. Bukofzer and Richard L. Greene in their review of Stevens’s edition for Musica Britannica, which excluded sixteenth-century carols; Journal of the American Musicological Society, 7 (1954), 63–82.
- 9.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Paul Battles (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012), 105–6. The translation of the word “coundutes” is problematic, since it may indicate a specific type of newly composed, Latin-texted song found in manuscripts of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France and England or may simply imply “song” more generally.
- 10.
On the use of the word “carol” in relation to lyric genres, see Kathleen Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum:” Three Fifteenth-Century Collections of Communal Song (PhD diss., University College, London, 2008), 33.
- 11.
Lori Ann Garner, “Contexts of Interpretation in the Burdens of Middle English Carols,” Neophilologus, 84 (2000): 467–82, at 467.
- 12.
“Geoffrey the Grammarian (fl. 1440),” J. D. Burnley in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, ed. David Cannadine, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10537 (accessed 3 October 2016).
- 13.
Promptorium parvulorum, Early English Text Society, extra series, 102, ed. M. L. Mayhew (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1908) 62.
- 14.
We are grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens, who has assisted in our interpretation of the word “palinode.” The term has its origins in the work of Stesichorus (c. 630–555 BC), who wrote songs that first insulted and then praised Helen of Troy: essentially they took back (repeated) their first topic with an opposite perspective. Holford-Strevens has noted that “since in Greek, Latin, and English “again” and “back” may be expressed the same way, palinodia, “back/again-song,” might also be applied to repetition” (personal correspondence, 10 November 2016). Recantation is rarely a feature of the carol repertory, but examples such as Of all creatures women be best, / Cuius contrarium verum est (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Eng. poet e.I, copied c. 1460–80) may be seen to conform to the etymological roots of the palinode. On this carol, see Joanna Kazik, “‘Of all creatures women be best, Cuius contrarium verum est:’ Gendered Power in Selected Late Medieval and Early Modern Texts,” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 1 (2011): 76–91.
- 15.
Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 32–33.
- 16.
Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 33.
- 17.
Greene, The Early English Carols, xxxiii. See also Robert Mullally, The Carole, A Study of a Medieval Dance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
- 18.
Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 39.
- 19.
For evidence of women’s participation in carol traditions, and discussion of carols about women, see Louise McInnes, “The Social, Political and Religious Contexts of the Late Medieval Carol” (PhD diss., University of Huddersfield, 2013), 146–90; Kathleen Palti, “Singing Women: Lullabies and Carols in Medieval England,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 110 (2011): 359–82. Gwynn McPeek argued that the lyrics to Comedentes convenite make no sense without the presence of women in a live performance, an argument initially made by Greene. See Richard L. Greene, “Two Medieval Music Manuscripts: Egerton 3307 and Some University of Chicago Fragments,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 7 (1954): 1–34; and Gwynn S. McPeek ed., The British Museum Manuscript Egerton 3307 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). The complex relationship between gendered poetic voices and historical reality is explored in several studies; see, for example, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours,” Speculum, 67 (1992): 865–91; Lisa Colton, “The Articulation of Virginity in the Medieval Chanson de none,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 133 (2008): 159–88.
- 20.
The most comprehensive study of connections between carols and liturgical chant is Beth Ann Zamzow, “The Influence of the Liturgy on the Fifteenth-Century English Carols” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2000).
- 21.
Rossell Hope Robbins “Middle English Carols as Processional Hymns,” Studies in Philology, 56 (1959): 559–82; Frank Ll. Harrison, “Benedicamus, Conductus, Carol: A Newly-Discovered Source,” Acta Musicologica, 37 (1965): 35–48. John Stevens rejected both Robbins’s and Harrison’s arguments, noting that the service books for processions continue to require standard chants during the post-Christmas season, and that no vernacular songs are recorded as requirements in any liturgical books of the period; Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 43. Literary scholars have likewise been skeptical of emphasizing a close link between carols and liturgy; Karl Reichl, “The Middle English Carol,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas Gibson Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 150–70, at 164.
- 22.
Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 42.
- 23.
Palti, “Singe we now alle and sum,” 36.
- 24.
See, for example, John C. Hirsh, Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
- 25.
The nationalist agenda of early commentators is well represented by the conclusions of Robbins, who asserted that the English carol’s “main tradition was not vernacular, secular, and foreign; but Latin, religious, and native;” “Middle English Carols as Processional Hymns,” 582.
- 26.
Reichl, “The Middle English Carol,” 170. See also comments on musico-textual associations in Ther is no rose, the object of Reichl’s comments, in Lisa Colton, “Song in Space and Space in Song: Physical and Conceptual Boundaries in English Devotional Music, 1250–1500,” in Julia Perratore, Elisa Foster, and Steve Rozenski eds. Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives (Leiden: Brill, 2017), tbc.
- 27.
For studies that explore genres that are sometimes presented without musical notation in manuscript sources, see Jennifer Saltzstein, Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013); Lauren McGuire Jennings, Senza vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
- 28.
For the cultural context of the ars antiqua motet c. 1300, as a sort of clerical (men-only) chamber music, following the writing of medieval theorist Johannes de Grocheio, see especially Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The repertory set, and sometimes mixed, both French vernacular and Latin texts; see Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford and New York; Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 29.
On the relationship between carols and preaching, see McInnes, “The Social, Political and Religious Contexts of the Late Medieval Carol,” 222–67.
- 30.
Elizabeth Aubrey, “Reconsidering ‘High Style’ and ‘Low Style’ in Medieval Song,” Journal of Music Theory, 52 (2008): 75–122.
- 31.
McPeek, Egerton 3307, 21. Egerton 3307 was initially described by Bertram Schofield, “A Newly Discovered 15th-Century Manuscript of the English Chapel Royal – Part I,” The Musical Quarterly, 32 (1946): 509–36; and Manfred Bukofzer, “A Newly Discovered 15th-Century Manuscript of the English Chapel Royal – Part II,” The Musical Quarterly, 33 (1947): 38–51. See also Greene, “Two Medieval Music Manuscripts.”
- 32.
Aubrey, “Reconsidering ‘High Style,’” where markers of high and low style and register are explored at 75–81.
- 33.
For a re-examination of this matter, see Louise McInnes, “‘That we with merth mowe savely synge:’ The Fifteenth-Century Carol, a Music for the People?” Early Music Performer, 36 (2015): 4–12.
- 34.
Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 3.
- 35.
Boffey, “What To Call A Lyric?” 674.
- 36.
Paul Zumthor, Langue et techniques poétique à l’époque romane (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), 123–78.
- 37.
Helen Deeming, “The Sources and Origin of the ‘Agincourt Carol,’ ” Early Music, 35 (2007): 23–38 at 31.
- 38.
Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 4–5.
- 39.
See Saltzstein, Refrain, draws on Kay’s Knowing Poetry in distinguishing between the anonymous use of textual material (quotation) and the use of textual material with authorial attribution (citation).
- 40.
See Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
- 41.
GB-Lbl 2593 is a 37-folio paper miscellany, without musical notation, copied by a single scribe in the first half of the fifteenth century. It was made available in an edition by Thomas Wright in 1856, following an earlier publication of a selection of 20 of its songs. Greene’s later edition of songs from GB-Lbl 2593 excluded the 3 Latin songs and the 15 songs he had assessed as not exhibiting formal aspects of the carol genre. Thomas Wright, Songs and Carols from a Manuscript in the British Museum of the Fifteenth Century (London: T. Richard, 1856) is the complete edition. The earlier edition of 20 songs was Thomas Wright, Songs and Carols Printed from a Manuscript in the Sloane Collection of the British Museum (London: W. Pickering, 1836). Palti’s dissertation includes a fully annotated modern edition of this source; “Singe we now alle and sum.”
- 42.
See Judith Aveling, “The Holy Name of Jesus: A Literate Cult?” In Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted: The Experience of Worship in Cathedral and Parish Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016) 191–204.
- 43.
Aveling, “The Holy Name of Jesus: A Literate Cult?” 200–1.
- 44.
Helen Deeming, “Music and Contemplation in the Twelfth-Century Dulcis Jesu memoria,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139 (2014): 1–39.
- 45.
See Magnus Williamson ed., The Eton Choirbook: Facsimile and Introductory Study (Oxford, Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, 2010).
- 46.
For concordances see Greene, The Early English Carols, 55–6.
- 47.
Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: 2006), 118.
- 48.
See Helen Deeming ed., Songs in British Sources c.1150–1300. Musica Britannica 95 (London: Stainer and Bell, 2013).
- 49.
Greene, The Early English Carols, p. xciii.
- 50.
Zieman, Singing the New Song at 3, argues this position in reference to a range of literature, but does not explore the carol genre.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to convey our thanks to David Fallows and Leah Stuttard for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Colton, L., McInnes, L. (2019). High or Low? Medieval English Carols as Part of Vernacular Culture, 1380–1450. In: Jager, K. (eds) Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18334-9_5
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