Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Note
- Introduction
- 1 Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts
- 2 Middle English Lyrics: Metre and Editorial Practice
- 3 The Love Lyric before Chaucer
- 4 Moral and Penitential Lyrics
- 5 Middle English Religious Lyrics
- 6 Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII
- 7 The Middle English Carol
- 8 Political Lyrics
- 9 The Lyric in the Sermon
- 10 ‘Cuius Contrarium’: Middle English Popular Lyrics
- 11 Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics
- 12 Lyrics in Middle Scots
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index of Manuscripts Cited
- General Index
- Index of Lyrics
3 - The Love Lyric before Chaucer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Note
- Introduction
- 1 Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts
- 2 Middle English Lyrics: Metre and Editorial Practice
- 3 The Love Lyric before Chaucer
- 4 Moral and Penitential Lyrics
- 5 Middle English Religious Lyrics
- 6 Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII
- 7 The Middle English Carol
- 8 Political Lyrics
- 9 The Lyric in the Sermon
- 10 ‘Cuius Contrarium’: Middle English Popular Lyrics
- 11 Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics
- 12 Lyrics in Middle Scots
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index of Manuscripts Cited
- General Index
- Index of Lyrics
Summary
In the late thirteenth century an anonymous English poet closes his poem on the problematic nature of love with the following lines:
Love is wele, love is wo, happiness; woe
love is gladhede, gladness
Love is lif, love is deth, life; death
love mai us fede. feed
Were love also longdrei as long-lasting
as he is first kene, eager
Hit were the wordlokste thing it would be the most precious thing
in world were, Ich wene. in the world that might be, I suppose
Hit is y-said in an song,
soth is y-sene, the truth is evident
Love comseth with care begins
and endeth with tene, suffering
Mid lady, mid wive, with lady, with woman
mid maide, mid quene. with queen (or harlot)
(Duncan MEL, No. 6, 22–8)It is not clear to what ‘song’ the poet refers, but it is obvious that he is conscious that he is writing in what is an already well-established tradition of love poetry. The importance given to the sentiment of what is variously known as fin amor, amour par amour, or in English fyn lovynge, however, is notable, particularly since, in the view of most scholars, it was a fairly recent development in European culture, though Peter Dronke has argued strongly that it was of much more ancient provenance. The conception of an ideal and exalted relationship between men and women may have drawn ideas from sources as diverse as Plato's Phaedrus, Ovid's Amores, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, but its earliest, most complete and most significant articulation was in eleventh- and twelfth-century texts such as the troubadour poetry of Provence, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and Andreas Capellanus's De Amore. Here appears, time after time, in text after text, the idea that love is the most important aspect of life, the conception of the idealised lady, worshipped or deferred to in an almost feudal manner by her devoted and obedient lover who believes that in her lies all the happiness that life can give if he can win her love, and all the despair and suffering if he fails to attain it: as this English poem affirms, love is lif, love is deth.
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- Information
- A Companion to the Middle English Lyric , pp. 39 - 67Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005
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