Abstract
As a dialectical interaction between inscription and performance, the poetics of enshrinement traces cultural trajectories in the late Middle Ages among visual art, conceptual discourses on representation, and narrative poetic form. But this method of understanding poetic representation also applies itself to a category of verse that dominates poetic culture after the Middle Ages: the lyric. This study will end by investigating the possibility of a specifically lyric poetics of enshrinement for the late Middle Ages. As with other forms of poetry we have examined, medieval lyric similarly negotiates between the modes of inscription and performance. The enshrining dialectic of inscription and performance provides a way of characterizing the nature of lyric voice. And as I shall ultimately argue, this characterization of voice and the lyric self not only has relevance in medieval literary traditions but also contributes usefully to the study of certain postmedieval lyric traditions.
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Notes
Olson, “Toward a Poetics,” in Vernacular Poetics, p. 227.
Gregory Roper, “The Middle English Lyric ‘I,’ Penitential Poetics, and Medieval Selfhood,” Poetica 42 (1994): 71–72 [71–103].
See, for instance, Ann Astell’s reading of the Song of Songs as a basis for understanding the secular components of religious lyrics. Astell, Song of Songs, p. 139.
On Froissart’s use of lyric in this context, see, for example, Julia Boffey, “The Lyrics in Chaucer’s Longer Poems,” Poetica 37 (1992): 30 [15–37]. See also Glending Olson’s discussion of the late-medieval authorial tendency to juxtapose secular and sacred modes in Olson, “Toward a Poetics,” in Vernacular Poetics, p. 237.
Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 99.
Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, pp. 39–40.
Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, pp. 13, 99–100.
Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, p. 84. Wenzel addresses the performative potential of this work in his comment that while the act of preaching differs from the meditative context Rosemary Woolf associates with lyric, “the subject matter and ultimate purpose of both are entirely the same” (p. 13).
Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, p. 116.
Alan J. Fletcher, “The Lyric in the Sermon,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas G. Duncan (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005), p. 197 [189–209].
Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, pp. 122–23.
Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, p. 134.
Christiania Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, p. 102 [96–119].
Whitehead, “Religious Lyrics,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, pp. 103, 108.
Steiner, Documentary Culture, p. 80.
Bodleian MS Douce 326, fol. 14r. Indexed in Carleton Brown and R.H. Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), index no. 927. Printed in R.T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics (London: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 201.
Brown and Robbins, Index, index no. 1761. According to Davies, this lyric exists in ten manuscripts; for a fuller discussion see Medieval English Lyrics, pp. 120, 324–25.
Julia Boffey, “Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts,” in A Companion to theMiddleEnglishLyric, p. 2 [2–18].
Boffey, “Middle English Lyrics,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, p. 14; Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, p. 84.
As Brantley points out, “the division of English poems into visible metrical lines dates from the Middle English period” (Reading in the Wilderness, p. 122).
Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, pp. 167–69.
Brown and Robbins, Index, index no. 717. Printed in Maxwell Luria and Richard L. Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 121. A digital image of this manuscript page appears at http://www.diamm.ac.uk/diamm/apps/DisplayImage.jsp?imageKey=8444, accessed April 25, 2008. The DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) Web site provides useful resources not only for musicologists, but also for literary scholars and historians of the Middle Ages.
Rosamond McKitterick and Richard Beadle, Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge V: Manuscripts I. Medieval (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1993), p. 13.
I thank Barbara Zimbalist for her analysis of this manuscript page’s musical content.
On other uses of the IHC monogram in conjunction with lyric, in addition to the crossed transverse as a way of suggesting a cruciform shape, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, p. 142, and Figures 4.6 and 4.9.
As Brantley has argued, monograms contained the kind of talismanic power that would allow them to transcend their textual identity and subsume it: “holy words become ‘objects’ meaningful beyond their transparent, grammatical sense, and their manifestation in monograms and pictures, often unvoiceable, is imbued with the power to work miracles” (Reading in the Wilderness, p. 179).
See n. 9, Introduction.
Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, pp. 89–90.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 154.
As a number of critics have pointed out, this phrase does not necessarily derive from a hortatory statement about a necessary parallel between the two art forms. See, for instance, Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 9. For a discussion of early modern interactions between text and classical art, see Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). As Barkan argues, “The conjunction of text and object raises questions about textual authority itself by exposing the rhetoricity of the text. The solution to these uncertainties is to find truth in the object rather than in the text” (pp. 6–7).
On Leonardo, see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), p. 6; on Lessing, see Norman Bryson, “Intertextuality and Visual Poetics,” Critical Texts 4.2 (1987): 1 [1–6].
See in particular E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1961). For a discussion of the ways in which Gombrich himself ultimately reestablished some of these more traditional boundaries and the reaction of art critics
and semioticians to his work, see Murray Krieger, “The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E.H. Gombrich Retrospective,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 184–87 [181–94].
Henryk Markiewicz, “Ut Pictura Poesis…A History of the Topos and the Problem,” New Literary History 18.3 (1987): 542 [535–58].
Murray Krieger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Moment of Poetry: Or, Laokoön Revisited,” in Perspectives on Poetry, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 325 [323–48]; Michael Davidson, “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42.1 (1983): 72 [69–79]. See also Fred Moramarco, “John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets,” Journal of Modern Literature 5.3 (1976): 436–62.
Davidson, “Postmodern Painter Poem,” 77. As he puts it, O’Hara and Ashbery are both “acutely aware of how the painting offers a variety of formal solutions to their own compositional interests.”
Leo Spitzer, “A Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 415 [414–22].
Spitzer, “A Note,” 418–21.
Allen, “Grammar, Poetic Form,” in Vernacular Poetics, p. 208. See also Rita Copeland, “The Middle English ‘Candet Nudatum Pectus’ and Norms of Early Vernacular Translation Practice,” Leeds Studies in English 15 (1984): 64–65 [57–81], on the shifting of voice and speaker as part of the process of translating meditative traditions into vernacular lyric. In addition, Sarah Stanbury makes the case that the lyric speaker in the Middle English Passion lyric often sustains a complicated relationship to the Marian gaze that this “I” portrays, demonstrating another way in which the lyric speaker locates itself variously. Stanbury, “The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,” PMLA 106.5 (1991): 1085, 1089 [1083–93].
Roper, “The Middle English Lyric ‘I,”’ 77; emphases in original.
David L. Jeffrey, Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 2.
Louise Fradenburg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169–202.
On the numbering of these lines, see Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, p. 1137. Line 480 is skipped to preserve the traditional numbering while omitting a line added in William Thynne’s edition. Thynne’s emendations attempt to replicate the rhyme scheme found in the knight’s lyric at lines 1175–80.
Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 12; Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, p. 106.
On the “functional structure of the mark,” see Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 48.
Arthur Bahr, “The Rhetorical Construction of Narrator and Narrative in Chaucer’s the Book of the Duchess,” The Chaucer Review 35.1 (2000): 55 [43–59].
Bahr, “Rhetorical Construction,” 50.
Robert A. Watson, “Dialogue and Invention in the Book of the Duchess,” Modern Philology 98.4 (2001): 545 [543–76].
Lois Ebin, “Poetics and Style,” in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, p. 267 [263–93].
Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3, 10. As Meyer-Lee points out, lyric tradition itself in the fifteenth century, even when centered around historically specific figures such as Charles d’Orléans, functions as part of a courtly mode that does not participate in these same poetics of authorial self-construction and self-designation (p. 9).
Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 405–7 [405–34].
Michael Greer, “Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing, or the Naming of ‘Language Poetry,”’ boundary 2 16.2/3 (1989): 336, 343 [335–55].
Oren Izenberg, “Language Poetry and the Collective Life,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2003): 148 [132–59].
Cited in Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject,” 405.
Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading,” in Close Listening, p. 362.
Bob Perelman, ed. Writing/Talks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 1985.
Greer, “Ideology and Theory,” 345.
Izenberg, “Collective Life,” 156.
Michael Palmer, “Sun,” in Sun (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 84.
In a sense, this move simply forms part of a larger tendency to turn toward specific elements of postmodern culture—particularly its means of disseminating information—to understand more completely medieval epistemologies, aesthetics, and ways of organizing information. See, for instance, Gillespie, “Medieval Hypertext,” in Of the Making of Books, and Ruth Evans, “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and the House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 43–69. Somewhat tellingly, the Derridean theoretical foundations on which this study relies have been characterized as endemic to a culture that has moved beyond print, that is something other than print culture (Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, p. 88). And this idea of an electronic alternative to print culture carries, as the two essays cited suggest, many analogies to the information culture that existed before print. I have, however, been interested less in methods of categorizing and communicating information than in finding new languages for describing medieval representational practices themselves. Thus while thinking of Derrida’s work as applicable to an information culture similar to that of the Middle Ages might motivate certain connections and relevances, I have wished
to focus more upon ways of describing the medieval mind’s approach to artistic creation.
See for instance, the 2008 New Chaucer Society Congress session on “Form,” as well as a 2008 symposium in honor of Anne Middleton at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled “The State of the Literary: Form after Historicism.”
Greer, “Ideology and Theory,” 342.
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© 2008 Seeta Chaganti
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Chaganti, S. (2008). Conclusion. In: The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_7
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