Abstract
This chapter argues that Middle English lyrics portray Christ as a vernacular speaker just as often as they portray him as a bodily sufferer; and that the narrative structure of Christ’s Lyric voice creates a textual community united by shared interpretive reading practice. It argues further that this narrative goal reveals a “poetics of comfort” within Middle English poetry: the presentation of Christ’s biblical and extra-biblical speech in vernacular lyric poetry meant to comfort and reassure through repetition, variation, and participation. The chapter traces the narrative and poetic construction of Christ’s voice across multiple lyrics—from the well-known “Surge Mea Sponsa” and “Quia Amore Langueo” to the less familiar “Complaint of Christ”—within one fourteenth-century miscellany: Lambeth Palace MS 853. In arguing for discursive and spiritual innovation within lyrics often dismissed as derivative or poetically inferior to narrative poetry, it demonstrates how the poetics of comfort developed by the Middle English passion lyric not only functioned as reassurance for lay readers, but simultaneously reconfigured the late medieval imaginary of the vernacular Word of God.
Then shall the Priest say,
Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.
Come unto me, all that travail and are heavy laden , and I will refresh you. St. Matthew xi.28.
So God loved the world , that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. St. John iii.16.
Hear also what Saint Paul saith
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. 1 Timothy i.15.
Hear also what Saint John saith
If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins. 1 St. John ii. 1,2.
After which the Priest shall proceed, saying,
Lift up your hearts.
Answer. We lift them up unto the Lord.
Priest. Let us give thanks unto our Lord God.
Answer. It is meet and right so to do.
Then shall the Priest turn to the Holy Table, and say,
It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God.
—from The Order of Administration of the Lord’s Supper, or, Holy Communion
The Book of Common Prayer (1928)
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Notes
- 1.
The Book of Common Prayer (1929) Accessed 15 January 2017 http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1928/HC.htm
- 2.
Middle English Dictionary Accessed 15 January 2017 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=headword&q1=comfort&rgxp=constrained
- 3.
I argue elsewhere for what I term the “Lyric Christ” as a particular effect of Middle English lyric poetry broadly speaking. While this essay shares this interest in Christ as speaker, I attend here to the fifteenth century manifestation of this literary phenomenon, as well as its material and textual afterlives and influence.
- 4.
This tradition is traced in full detail in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and more recently in Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
- 5.
Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). See particularly pages 19–66 and 183–238.
- 6.
Kathleen Tonry succinctly describes the situation, “until recently, the literary history of the fifteenth century was written as a series of authoritative pressures working to produce a general cultural submissiveness—of Lydgate to Chaucer, of dissenters to ecclesiastical authority, or court poets to the Lancastrians. The resulting literary landscape was derivative, infantilized, or simply an adumbration of broader institutional powers.” Tonry, “Introduction,” Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 9. For discussion of the fifteenth century more broadly see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 7.
Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 218.
- 8.
Sarah Stanbury, for example, argues that the visual affectivity of Passion Lyrics enables a cross-gendered inhabitation of speaking voice, in which “the gaze is articulated through dialogue.” Stanbury, “Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics,” A Companion to the Middle English Lyric ed. Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 241.
- 9.
I base this claim on my survey of Middle English lyrics in Christ’s voice in manuscript and on the many anthologies of Middle English lyrics published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the series of collected lyrics published by Carleton Brown: English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), English Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), and English Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939); on Douglas Grey’s A Selection of Religious Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Thomas Duncan’s recent Medieval English Lyrics and Carols (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2013). None of these anthologies include fifteenth century complaint lyrics that consist entirely of Christ’s speech. Two outstanding exceptions to this history of critical neglect are recent studies by Rebecca Krug and Elisabeth Salter. See Rebecca Krug, “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late-Medieval Readers,” in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 110–132; even as Krug offers new critical insight to the function of Jesus’ voice, however, her analysis does not extend to the Middle English lyric, focusing instead on The Fifteen Oes, Thomas Van Kempen’s Imitation of Christ, and The Book of Margery Kempe . See also Elisabeth Salter, “Evidence for Devotional Reading in Fifteenth-Century England: A Comparative Analysis of One English Poem in Six Manuscript Contexts,” in Vernacularity in England and Wales c. 1300–1550 ed. Ian Johnson and Helen Wicker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 65–97; while Salter argues for “Complaints of Christ” as their own genre (distinct from the passion lyric), her analysis centers on the codicological and circulation history of a fourteenth-century complaint (“Jesus appeals to Man by the Wounds”) with more conventional affective designs than the fifteenth-century complaints examined here.
- 10.
Douglas Gray, Selection, viii.
- 11.
McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). See especially chapter six, “Kyndenesse and Resistance in the Middle English Passion Lyric,” 174–206.
- 12.
I base this observation on a survey of Complaint Poems in Middle English as recorded by the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, as well as my examination of the anthologies discussed in footnote nine.
- 13.
Lee Patterson, “Writing Amorous Wrongs: Chaucer and the Order of Complaint,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in honor of Donald R. Howard ed. James M. Dean and Christian Zacher (Delaware: The University of Delaware Press, 1992), 55–71.
- 14.
As in Woolf’s dismissal of the later Passion Lyrics as poetically inferior because didactic (see note seven) and the general critical situation—which in the last ten years has begun to change—described in note six. An additional facet of this critical narrative is the tendency to read devotional texts, specifically vernacular theology, as self-consciously less theologically or even aesthetically sophisticated after Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409; this critical view tends to identify itself as developing the arguments first proposed in Nicholas Watson’s “Censorship and Cultural Change: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409” Speculum 70.4 (1995): 822–864 . Watson himself, however, notes that vernacular theology does not translate easily or entirely into devotional text, a distinction often overlooked by subsequent critics. More recent critical reassessments provide nuanced commentary on the reception of this important work. See in particular After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth Century England ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).
- 15.
This is of course a clear example of Foucault’s author-function in action. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory ed. Vincent Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010).
- 16.
Carolyn Van Dyke, “‘To Whom Shul We Compleyn?’: the Poetics of Agency in Chaucer’s Complaints,” Style 31.3(1997): 370–90, 372.
- 17.
Patterson writes that Complaint marks “a subjectivity that is less that of identity than a site where different selves are constituted and decomposed.” (62) Patterson, “Writing,” 62. See also Spearing, Medieval Autographies: the “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); and Cervone, “‘I’ and ‘We’ in Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity,” Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 195–212.
- 18.
Jennifer Bryan, “Hoccleve, The Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,” PMLA 117.5 (2002) 1172–1187, 1173.
- 19.
“The Complaint of Christ” was mistakenly catalogued by the Index of Middle English Verse and the Digital Index of Middle English Verse as two different poems: DIMEV 5704, “This is Christ’s own complaint, ‘The Complaint of Christ to Man and Man’s Answer;’” and DIMEV 5707, “This is God’s Own Complaint, ‘The Complaint of God.’” I suspect that this confusion may be the result of inconsistent distinction of speaker in the manuscript marginalia as well as in the Victorian editing; several versions preserve marginalia designating the speaker as “God,” while some designate the speaker as “Christ.”
- 20.
The “Complaint of Christ” appears in the following manuscripts: (ten stanzas): 1: Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce 78 (SC 21652), ff. 5–7v; 2: Cambridge UK, Trinity College R.3.20 (600), pp. 234–235; (eleven stanzas): 1. Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley 596 (SC 2376), ff. 12–14; 2. Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawlinson C.86 (SC 11951), ff. 67–69; 3. London, British Library Addit. 39574, ff. 54–57; 4. London, British Library Harley 2380, ff. 71v–72v; 5. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ 34.7.3, ff. 75–76v; 77–77v; 6. London, Lambeth Palace Library 306, ff. 145–147; 7. London, Lambeth Palace Library 853, pp. 81–88; 8. Cambridge MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Eng. 530, ff. 1–4.
- 21.
All quotations from both complaints from Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Political, Religious, and Love Poems, EETS o.s. 15 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1866).
- 22.
Rebecca Krug argues that fifteenth-century lyrics in particular offered readers opportunity to imagine themselves in dialogue with a divine speaker. See Krug, “‘Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late Medieval Readers,” in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 110–29.
- 23.
The poem is catalogued in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse as 4312. Very little critical attention has been paid to Litchfield with the exception of Amy Appleford and Nicholas Watson, “Merchant Religion in Fifteenth-Century London: The Writings of William Litchfield,” The Chaucer Review 46.1–2 (2011): 203–222.
- 24.
The manuscripts that contain Litchfield’s “Complaint” are: 1. Oxford, Corpus Christi College 237, ff. 137v–146; 2. Cambridge University Library Ff.2.38, ff. 3ra–6ra; 3. Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College 174/95, pp. 469–480; 4. Cambridge, Magdalene College Pepys 1584, ff. 1v–13v; 5. Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.21 (601), ff. 182–189; 6. London, BL Harley 2339, ff. 82–100v; 7. London, British Library Addit. 36983, ff. 275rb–279va; 8. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ 19.3.1, ff. 158–170v; 9. London, Lambeth Palace Library 306, ff. 147–152; 10. London, Lambeth Palace Library 853, pp. 193–225; 11. Cambridge MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Eng. 530, f. 1; 12. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library HM 144, ff. 1–9v; 13. STC 20881.3. Litchfield, William, The remors of conscyence [London: Wynkyn de Worde, ca. 1510], ff. 2–6v.
- 25.
Amy Appleford and Nicholas Watson, “Merchant Religion in Fifteenth-Century London: The Writings of William Litchfield,” The Chaucer Review 46.1 & 2 (2011): 203–222, 219.
- 26.
As Appleford and Watson put it, “the call to amend must be made again and again. The sincere resolution to hear the call must also repeat itself, with contrition and self-recrimination but never despair.” Appleford and Watson, “Merchant Religion,” 209.
- 27.
Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8.
- 28.
Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 14.
- 29.
Elisabeth Dutton explains: “a miscellany is a collection of texts which may be partly or entirely unrelated, which may have evolved as a collection possibly over time and possibly as the result of more than one collector. The texts in a miscellany are connected primarily by the simple fact of their appearing in one codex…An anthology is a collection of texts which are presented as separate works, but which are thematically connected and appear together by design. Texts may be presented whole or in part, but the texts remain distinct. A codex may comprise an anthology only, though this need not be the case with an anthology, which could appear in a codex alongside other texts.” Dutton, Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 3.
- 30.
Orlemanski, “Thornton’s Remedies and Practices of Medical Reading,” Robert Thornton and His Books, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (York: York Medieval Press, 2014) 235–256.
- 31.
Jill Havens, “A Narrative of Faith: Middle English Devotional Anthologies and Religious Practice,” Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004): 67–84.
- 32.
For the most complete description of the manuscripts’ contents and codicology, see the entry in Lambeth Palace Library’s online catalogue: http://archives.lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk/calmview/
- 33.
Margaret Connolly, “Practical Reading for Body and Soul in Some Later Medieval Manuscript Miscellanies,” Journal of the Early Book Society 10 (2007): 151–174.
- 34.
Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985), 21.
- 35.
Again, for the most complete description of the manuscript’s contents and codicology, see the entry in Lambeth Palace Library’s online catalogue: http://archives.lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk/calmview/
- 36.
Laura Miles, “The Origins and Development of Mary’s Book at the Annunciation,” Speculum 89.3(2014): 1–38.
- 37.
Elisabeth Salter, Popular Reading in English: c. 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
- 38.
Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems.
- 39.
Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 198.
- 40.
Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 199.
- 41.
Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 198–199.
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Zimbalist, B. (2019). Rethinking the Passion Lyric: Verbal Devotion, Narrative Variation, and the Poetics of Comfort in Middle English Poetry. 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_6
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