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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- The Early History of the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called ‘Oaths’
- Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 and its Copy of Piers Plowman
- Did John Gower Rededicate his Confessio Amantis before Henry IV’s Usurpation?
- Le Songe Vert, BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower
- Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33: Thoughts on Reading a Work in Progress
- The Rawlinson Lyrics: Context, Memory and Performance
- Linguistic Boundaries in Multilingual Miscellanies: The Case of Middle English Romance
- What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout
- Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell
- Bishops, Patrons, Mystics and Manuscripts: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love and the Arundel and Holland Connections
- The Choice and Arrangement of Texts in Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125: A Tentative Narrative about its Material History
- ‘Thys moche more ys oure lady mary longe’: Takamiya MS 56 and the English Birth Girdle Tradition
- Bookish Types: Some Post-Medieval Owners, Borrowers and Lenders of the Manuscripts of The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy
- Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud Lat. 61
- The Travels of a Quire from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First: The Case of Rawlinson B 484, fols. 1–6
- William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection
- Gutenberg Meets Digitization: The Path of a Digital Ambassador
- A Bibliography of Toshiyuki Takamiya
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- The Early History of the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called ‘Oaths’
- Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 and its Copy of Piers Plowman
- Did John Gower Rededicate his Confessio Amantis before Henry IV’s Usurpation?
- Le Songe Vert, BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower
- Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33: Thoughts on Reading a Work in Progress
- The Rawlinson Lyrics: Context, Memory and Performance
- Linguistic Boundaries in Multilingual Miscellanies: The Case of Middle English Romance
- What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout
- Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell
- Bishops, Patrons, Mystics and Manuscripts: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love and the Arundel and Holland Connections
- The Choice and Arrangement of Texts in Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125: A Tentative Narrative about its Material History
- ‘Thys moche more ys oure lady mary longe’: Takamiya MS 56 and the English Birth Girdle Tradition
- Bookish Types: Some Post-Medieval Owners, Borrowers and Lenders of the Manuscripts of The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy
- Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud Lat. 61
- The Travels of a Quire from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First: The Case of Rawlinson B 484, fols. 1–6
- William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection
- Gutenberg Meets Digitization: The Path of a Digital Ambassador
- A Bibliography of Toshiyuki Takamiya
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Summary
The most celebrated early Middle English collection of lyrics is in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253. A recent bibliography by Susanna Fein shows how much has been written about these poems. A convenient edition is that by G. L. Brook (1968), whose view of what a lyric is made him exclude some longer poems and the political poems, all of which are available in the edition by K. Böddeker (1878); and the political poems are also in R. H. Robbins’ Historical Poems (1959). The manuscript has been compiled without thought of what genres of poem in length or subject matter should be included, or whether English or Anglo-Norman. In all just over forty poems may be considered English: short poems of various verse forms and metres.
This paper is about the six short poems in this manuscript written in continuous lines as if prose, and I wonder why they are so written, a question to which I have found no truly convincing answer. The first in the manuscript, at fol. 63v, is Brook’s No. 5, given by him the title ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, NIMEV No. 4194, Wanley’s catalogue entry ‘30. Another Love-Song, written as Prose’; at fol. 66v, Brook’s No. 7, ‘The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale, NIMEV No. 2207, Wanley ‘34. An ingenious Description of the Authors Mistress; written as Prose’; at fol. 67r, Brook’s No. 9, ‘A wayle whyt ase whalles bon’, NIMEV No. 105, Wanley ‘36. Another [Love-Song] whose Author complains of his Mistresses Cruelty (written as Prose)’; at fol. 76r, Brook’s No. 18, ‘A Spring Song of the Passion’, NIMEV No. 3963, Wanley ‘53. A Ditty upon our Lords crucifixion; written as Prose’, the first stanza is fortuitously fitted into three manuscript lines leaving on him is al ylong to begin what is written continuously without regard to the poetic lineation, though that is well articulated by punctuation (also in British Library, Royal MS 2 F.viii); at fol. 76r, Brook’s No. 19, the macaronic ‘Dum Ludis Floribus’, NIMEV No. 694.5, Wanley ‘55. A Song, partly Latin & partly French; as it seems, of an English man desiring the Fruition of his Parisian Mistress. ibid. [fol. 76] (still written as Prose)’; at fols. 114v–115r, Brook’s No. 30, ‘The Man in the Moon’, NIMEV No. 2066, Wanley ‘81.
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- Middle English Texts in TransitionA Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th birthday, pp. 125 - 133Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014