John Audelay and James Ryman are linked in literary history by virtue of the circumstance that each has his name attached to a large fifteenth-century collection of religious lyrics. Collections ascribed to an author are quite rare for the period. Additionally, both Audelay's and Ryman's anthologies contain many carols, a fashionable form of lyric from the late fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. The two are therefore frequently paired as named authors with large corpuses of similar kind, each preserved primarily by means of a single manuscript: the Audelay manuscript (Bodl., MS Douce 302) and the Ryman manuscript (CUL, MS Ee.1.12). Each book is thought to have been made in the writer's lifetime in a religious house and in direct contact with him. Such commonalities separate Audelay and Ryman from other English writers who attracted anthologised treatments in the late Middle Ages, such as Minot, Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Charles d'Orléans, and Bokenham (Edwards 2000); the earlier writer most like Audelay and Ryman in these shared ways is the Oxford Franciscan William Herebert (d.1333), whose holograph Latin sermons and English lyrics appear in BL, Add. MS 46919 (Herebert, ed. Reimer 1987). In the survival of English lyrics, the more usual circumstance is blank anonymity, with the making of a collection best explained as the action of a compiler who selected texts to suit the tastes or needs of specific readers.