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“And I Mon Waxe Wod”: The Middle English “Foweles in the Frith”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Thomas C. Moser Jr
Thomas C. Moser Jr*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, California
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Abstract

The tiny lyric “Foweles in the Frith” may be the oldest surviving love song written in English. Endlessly anthologized, this late thirteenth-century poem has in recent years become the object of intermittent academic debate between an old school that views it as a secular love song and some later critics who see it as some sort of religious complaint. Actually, it could have been understood variously by a medieval audience. It works well as a simple spring love poem sung by a man about a woman, but there is also evidence for reading it as a lament for postlapsarian humanity or as a specifically Christological complaint. As one critic has noted, for a medieval exegete the precise relation between a text's littera and sensus was far from “automatic”; barring the discovery of an original poetic context for “Foweles,” any unitary solution to the lyric's meaning will probably remain elusive.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 3 , May 1987 , pp. 326 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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