Julia Boffey

Manuscripts of English courtly love lyrics in the later Middle Ages

Julia Boffey investigates the original context of over six hundred 15th- and early 16th-century English courtly lyrics.

Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon

rT v he history of the Chaucer canon begins with fifteenth-century manuscripts and the variety of ways in which they have preserved information about Chaucers authorship of particular texts. Most obviously, this information takes the form of scribal attribution, although it also includes testimony offered by other authors (Lydgate and Gower, for example), or internal evidence such as the eagles identification of Chaucer in The House of Fame, or the revealing biographical details of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women.1 These categories of information are not wholly unproblematical: considerable skepticism has been expressed, for example, about the validity of the scribal notes that attach Chaucers name to the short poems Womanly Noblesse and To Rosemounde2 and about the nature of Chaucers connection with the various fragments of The Romaunt of the Rose;3 and recent studies have begun to demonstrate that a variety of powerful factors were at work on even the very early processes of canon formation.4 The influential roles of early Chaucer promoters such as the fifteenth-century scribe John Shirley or the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow are also currently under investigation that seems likely to question or at least to expose for consideration the weight of their authority.5 The construction, over

Middle English literary writings, 1150–1400

Any attempt to give a concise account of the history of early Middle English literature, and of the material aspects of its production and transmission, faces both quantitative and qualitative difficulties. The relative paucity of surviving materials from the earlier part of the period is striking when compared with that from the later fourteenth century during Richard II’s reign; and the extraordinary efflorescence of what has come to be termed ‘Ricardian poetry’ (to which could be added ‘Ricardian prose’) constitutes a sudden richness against which the achievement of much earlier literature looks fragmented and relatively undistinguished. To these disproportions must be added an organizational one: a significant number of works for which distinctive ‘literary’ claims have been made, most famously the Ancrene wisse, have equal reason to figure among ‘non-literary’ materials and, categorized as religious or devotional items, are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The cultural situation of English in the post-Conquest period was an extremely marginalized one that stands in contrast to the increasingly dominant status of Norman French. Throughout this period the evidence of book ownership from surviving wills and inventories indicates that cultivated readers who wanted ‘literary’ texts were likely to own these works in languages other than Middle English: that is, in French or Latin. The low status of the native tongue is a recurrent topos in writings in Middle English between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries.