Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson

work. And while it is outside of the scope of this book to explore fully the implications of the model of medieval lyric tactics for the long history of the genre, it is my hope that this study will provide an entry point for thinking about the place of the medieval insular corpus in this history. It is for this reason that, in this book, I call these poems “lyrics” despite the lack of historical justification for the term, in order to assert that this corpus deserves a place within the broader history of this English genre. It is precisely the lack of generic definition that allows the cultural object we now call “medieval lyric” to work tactically on institutional forms of textuality and, conversely, to define itself as the genre that does this tactical work. The very looseness of this medieval corpus suggests its extension to postmedieval poetry within and outside of traditional definitions of “lyric.”

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      Tactics are above all modes of relation. Thus, this book focuses on lyrics in contexts where their relations—to the manuscript page, to a compilation, to longer or distinct literary forms—help to define the genre’s practices. Of particular interest are those poems and contexts that emphasize and theorize lyric practice, especially when it encounters more standardized or normative forms. Taken together, these textual relationships suggest an implicit lyric theory centered on tactical practice and demonstrate particular aspects of lyrics that facilitate these practices. Each chapter of this study thus considers a larger structure that contains lyrics, whether a manuscript compilation or a long literary work, and each begins with a lyric from its text or manuscript that exemplifies its implicit lyric theory. Although it is not comprehensive, this study attempts to be expansive in its corpus, including sacred and secular, anonymous and authored, compiled and interpolated lyrics. By integrating poetry that is usually separated by theme or context in critical discourse, I seek to demonstrate the persistence of tactics across the significant formal changes to the lyric during the later Middle Ages in England. If tactics define the practices of a genre, then they should flexibly adapt to new forms the genre takes. Thus, conceiving broadly of lyrics in relation to other textual forms (within miscellanies as well as in longer poetic works) demonstrates how tactics persist as lyric forms change.

      The core chapters of the book focus on compilations and literary texts of the fourteenth century (although their lyrics, in many cases, record or adapt earlier compositions), while this introduction and the conclusion extend my findings to the longer later medieval period. I have chosen this temporal frame for a few reasons. First, the textual cultures I discussed earlier were still taking shape during the fourteenth century, inviting a sense of freedom and experimentation with their conventions. Second, many lyrics survive in fourteenth-century texts and manuscripts (even when they were composed earlier), offering a significant corpus that is unavailable in earlier post-Conquest England. My final reason is literary-historical. The fourteenth century, once central to Middle English literary criticism, is now rarely considered in its entirety: the newly vital rubric “early Middle English,” the significant cultural changes of post-Plague England, and the sense that a disproportionate focus on what were once called the “Ricardian poets” led to overlooking important medieval literature and culture, especially in the fifteenth century, have all served to expand medieval literary studies in productive ways.¹¹⁸ In this study, though, I suggest that the fourteenth century is an identifiable and distinct epoch in the history of English lyric, whose tactics bear on earlier and later lyrics. Examining this century in its entirety additionally suggests a new reading of a primarily narrative poet who was deeply interested in lyrics and lyricism: Geoffrey Chaucer. Rather than an originary figure who transforms Continental lyrics into a new English form, Chaucer emerges in this study as a transitional figure in the history of English lyric with ties to an existing insular genre based not on influence or sources but on practice.

      This book falls roughly into two parts that both show how lyric tactics emerge in and as relations to established medieval forms. The first two chapters focus on manuscript compilations containing significant groups of lyrics. My decision to emphasize the material contexts of lyrics in the first half of this book has to do, in part, with the lack of a comprehensive critical edition of medieval English lyric poetry. Anthologies of Middle English lyrics have long been available, but these largely neglect the multilingual and multigeneric contexts in which these poems tend to survive. As I was completing this book, Susanna Fein and David Raybin’s enormously helpful edition of the complete manuscript of British Library MS Harley 2253 became available, as did the digital edition of the Vernon manuscript. Such manuscript editions promise to illuminate the contexts of English lyrics; my own chapter on Harley 2253 contributes, I hope, to an understanding of the place of lyrics in medieval English books. Yet any single compilation is also necessarily idiosyncratic; thus, I have chosen to examine two very different, near-contemporary books containing lyrics. My final reason for emphasizing material contexts in the first part of this book has to do with understanding medieval written texts as a kind of practice. Like lyric poems, medieval English manuscripts are governed by conventional forms that their creators, transmitters, and audiences improvise on, elaborate, and modify. The manuscript compilations discussed in the next two chapters navigate such forms tactically in order to render and theorize the performative and textual practices of lyrics.

      Chapter 1, “The Voices of Harley 2253,” focuses on the Herefordshire household book containing the well-known “Harley lyrics,” British Library MS Harley 2253 (1330–40). The compilation and layout of this lyric’s texts demonstrate an attention to a concept of voice that can productively replace our modern idea of a lyric “speaker.” Medieval scholastic philosophy, grammatical and rhetorical theory, and the Derridean phenomenology of voice all theorize it as a tactical practice. The Harley manuscript’s inclusion of lyric dialogues, poems with nested speakers, and even the scribe’s deployment of parchment holes to influence the voices that might perform his texts suggest that lyric voices are important tactics for a diverse range of writing and performance practices.

      A tactical lyric voice probably seemed productive and inclusive to the secular household that produced Harley 2253. Yet its moral implications could be troubling for the major producers and disseminators of liturgical or sacred lyrics: friars. To understand how friars relied on lyric tactics for what are ultimately strategic ends, Chapter 2 studies William Herebert’s commonplace book (1314–33), a collection of practical and preaching texts that includes the friar’s own English hymn translations. This chapter demonstrates that for Herebert, the tactical practices encouraged by lyric language, with its tendency to adopt different meaning according to circumstances, pose a doctrinal problem. How can the popularity of lyrics be deployed in the service of pastoral care while preserving their doctrinal consistency, especially in a literary form whose tactics make it morally ambiguous? A little known Anglo-French lyric in Herebert’s compilation, “Amours m’ount si enchanté,” poses (and resolves) this problem thematically and formally. Herebert’s hymn translations draw on the tactics suggested by this poem to separate song’s affective power in performance from its doctrinal regulation in written texts. Lyric tactics thus permit Herebert to reconcile its performance practices with the more strategic forms of scholastic textual conventions.

      Whereas manuscript miscellanies use tactics to navigate between the performative and the written aspects of lyric practice, later insular lyrics increasingly explore relationships among literary forms. The second half of this book thus considers how these tactical relationships continue to inform the development of the medieval English lyric. Putting the lyrics in Geoffrey Chaucer’s longer works in dialogue with their literary and practical contexts, I demonstrate how later fourteenth-century lyrics continue the tactical practices that shaped earlier lyrics. This is not an argument for direct influence. Rather, my claim is that tactical practice continues to define the insular lyric even as new lyric forms and lyric theories, chiefly those of Continental poetry, influence English literature. Recalling that tactics are modes of relation to existing structures, we can see that these later English lyrics define themselves tactically in relation to other literary forms.

      In Chapter 3, “Lyric Negotiations: Continental Forms and Troilus and Criseyde,” I focus on the relationships between insular lyric practices, new