Harley manuscript geographies: Literary history and the medieval miscellany (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture) 9781526140401, 1526140403

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Acknowledgements
A note on the presentation of texts
List of abbreviations
Introduction Harley manuscript geographies
Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics: the implications of mobility
Captives among us: Harley 2253 and the Jews of medieval Hereford
Histoire imparfaite: the counterfactual lessons of Gilote et Johane
Dying with Harley 2253: last lyric things
Epilogue Ye goon to … Hereford? Regional devotion and England’s other St Thomas
Appendix Harley manuscript contents
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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HARLEY MANUSCRIPT GEOGRAPHIES

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Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz

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Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-​medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-​Norman, Anglo-​Latin and Celtic writings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. Titles available in the series 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice Mary Raschko 24. Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (eds) 25. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry: Spolia in Old English verse Denis Ferhatović 26. Rebel angels: Space and sovereignty in Anglo-​Saxon England Jill Fitzgerald 27. A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–​1250 Amy Mulligan 28. Household knowledges in late-​medieval England and France Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten (eds) 29. Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England Mary C. Flannery 30. Dating Beowulf: Studies in intimacy Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (eds) 31. Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama Eva von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt (eds) 32. Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: Words, ideas, interactions Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville (eds) 33. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason (eds) 34. Northern memories and the English Middle Ages Tim William Machan 35. Harley manuscript geographies: Literary history and the medieval miscellany Daniel Birkholz

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Harley manuscript geographies

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Literary history and the medieval miscellany

DANIEL BIRKHOLZ

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Daniel Birkholz 2020

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The right of Daniel Birkholz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk The publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from the University of Texas at Austin Subvention Grant, awarded by the Office of the President. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4040 1 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: © British Library Board (Harley MS 273, f.70r)

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

Acknowledgements A note on the presentation of texts Abbreviations

vi x xi

Introduction: Harley manuscript geographies

1

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Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics: the implications of mobility Captives among us: Harley 2253 and the Jews of medieval Hereford Histoire imparfaite: the counterfactual lessons of Gilote et Johane Dying with Harley 2253: last lyric things

151 199

Epilogue: Ye goon to … Hereford? Regional devotion and England’s other St Thomas

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Appendix: Harley manuscript contents Bibliography Index

281 285 307

2 3 4

51 94

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Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank the institutions, and some of the people, who have helped bring Harley Manuscript Geographies to fruition. The Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin has been an excellent place at which to develop and complete this project. In practical terms, UT provided a semester-​ long Faculty Research Assignment, which I  used to draft the Introduction; granted me three years of research funds through its College of Liberal Arts Humanities Research Award programme; subsidized travel to professional meetings; and helped defray publication costs, with a timely subvention grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, plus Index funding from the Chair of the Department of English. More nebulously but just as importantly, my home institution has furnished me with a host of generous and brilliant fellow travellers. I  have been enriched by more UT-​Austin colleagues than can be listed, but prominent among those who have influenced this volume, whether with content feedback, publication advice, or other orders of professional support, are: Samuel Baker, Phil Barrish, Douglas Bruster, Tom Cable, Mia Carter, Larry Carver, James Cox, Elizabeth Cullingford, Yoav Di-​ Capua, Brian Doherty, Alan Friedman, Andrea Golden, Melissa Heide, Geraldine Heng, Zachary Hines, Steven Hoelscher, Brad Humphries, Coleman Hutchison, Martin Kevorkian, Mark Longaker, Roger Louis, Allen MacDuffie, Julia Mickenberg, Lisa Moore, Domino Perez, Wayne Rebhorn, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth Scala, Cecilia Smith-​ Morris, Christopher Taylor, Joseph Taylor, Jennifer Wilks, Hannah Wojciehowski, and Marjorie Curry Woods. I  have also benefited from working with many excellent graduate and undergraduate students, who are too numerous to list but deserve mention for their collective knack of giving back more than they receive, in terms intellectual and otherwise.

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Acknowledgements

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Colleagues from other universities have also provided crucial support, by extending invitations to conferences, symposia, and workshops; by sponsoring fellowship and grant applications; and by offering transformative feedback upon work-​in-​progress. My thanks for their collegiality, in all cases conspicuous and in some cases extending over many years, to Jenny Adams, Elizabeth Allen, Christopher Baswell, Heather Blurton, Martin Camargo, Lisa Cooper, Rita Copeland, Matthew Fisher, John Ganim, Alfred Hiatt, Patricia Clare Ingham, Erin Felicia Labbie, Kathy Lavezzo, David Lawton, Keith Lilley, David Matthews, Asa Simon Mittman, Jessica Rosenfeld, Catherine Sanok, Sylvia Tomasch, David Wallace, and Gary Wilder. Early in my work on the material that would become this book, I had the honour of holding a Solmsen Post-​Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-​ Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. Ensuring my family and me a warm welcome in Madison were Susan Stanford Friedman; fellow Solmsen Fellows Brian Sandberg and David Goldstein; and two unusually hospitable UW local medievalists, Kellie Robertson and Lisa Cooper. Much of Harley Manuscript Geographies began in presentation form. Sections of Chapter 1 were delivered at the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and the University of Texas at Austin. Chapter 2 received its first airing at the New Chaucer Society (Reykjavík)—​special thanks to Kathy Lavezzo and Asa Mittman—​ with important follow-​ up at the Medieval Writing Workshop, convened by William Kuskin and Tiffany Beechy at the University of Colorado Boulder. Chapter  3 had its debut at an Ahmanson Foundation Conference sponsored jointly by UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Getty Center (thank you Matthew Fisher, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Heather Blurton). Portions of Chapter  4 were delivered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (thank you Martin Camargo and Robert W.  Barrett, Jr.) and at Washington University St Louis (thank you Jessica Rosenfeld and David Lawton). Material that would grow into this book’s Epilogue was delivered at the New Chaucer Society’s Swansea meeting (thank you Patricia Clare Ingham). Other material related to the Harley manuscript and/​or Hereford Cathedral was presented at UMass Amherst (thank you Jenny Adams), the University of Michigan (thank you Catherine Sanok and Peggy McCracken), and the University of Wisconsin-​ Madison (as above). Space prohibits a full listing of all those

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Acknowledgements

whose engaged response, at these and other venues, has improved my work, but I offer my humble appreciation nonetheless. Chapter 1 was published in earlier form, by Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2009), as was a previous version of Chapter  3, by Exemplaria (2015). Deep thanks for their reserves of editorial deftness, and good-​humoured patience, to David Matthews at SAC and to Patricia Clare Ingham and Noah Guynn at EXM, as well as to the excellent reviewers they procured. Two paragraphs of my Epilogue have been adapted from an article (‘Mapping Medieval Utopia’) that appeared originally in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2006), under the guest editorship of Patricia C. Ingham and Karma Lochrie. I am grateful to these journals for their permission to use revised versions of that earlier work. The archival research underlying Harley Manuscript Geographies was conducted at Hereford Cathedral Library, Worcester Cathedral Library, the Hereford and Worcester County Record Office, Shropshire Record Office, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library. My thanks to curatorial staff at these institutions for their helpful expertise, and for granting access to original materials. Preparation of my draft manuscript for submission to press was aided and abetted by Melissa Heide, who brought admirable order to a diffuse mass of material. It has been a pleasure to interact with editors Meredith Carroll and Alun Richards at Manchester University Press, while especially warm appreciations are due to David Matthews and his fellow series editors, Anke Bernau and James Paz. I cannot thank the anonymous reviewers arranged by the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture series enough, for their insightful readings, sensible suggestions, and disciplinary balance. Christopher Cannon offered wise feedback at an important moment, while Wayne Rebhorn helped with early project formulation, and Sam Baker, Hannah Wojciehowski, and Jorie Woods improved specific chapters substantially. Liz Scala provided invaluable subfield support and practical aid throughout; I  especially appreciate her help in conceptualizing my Introduction. In addition to serving as a general sounding board and writing consultant, Coleman Hutchison did heroic work at extremely short notice, in coaxing the Introduction and Epilogue into final shape. The staunch friendship of colleagues, it turns out, is an indispensable factor at every stage in the scholarly process. A number of family members—including Janet Birkholz, Dean Birkholz, Yvette Mickenberg, Ira Mickenberg, Patricia Fahey, Risa Mickenberg, Becky Birkholz, Wendy Birkholz, and Christopher

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Birkholz (plus spouses and children)—deserve deep thanks for helping to make this book possible through their steady love and generous hospitality. Last in this litany of thanks, but first in importance, come my own three levedis:  Middle English for ‘beloved ladies’:  Lena Birkholz, Edie Birkholz, and Julia Mickenberg. Not even in the elegant phrasings of the heartfelt Harley Lyrics are there words fit to express the depth of my gratitude. If love takes us places, as the vernacular lyric poems in the Harley manuscript assert, thank you Lena, Edie, and Julia, for every day bringing me home.

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A note on the presentation of texts

In order to differentiate Harley manuscript quotations immediately from modern ones, and to underline the otherness of the medieval sources under study, I  have placed all Middle English, Anglo-​Norman, and Latin material in italics. Harley item numbers and folio locations are provided for each text discussed, as per N.R. Ker’s 1965 Facsimile of British Museum Ms Harley 2253, with supplementation and lineation (item numbers and line numbers are given in square brackets […]), from Susanna Fein et  al.’s 2014–​ 2015 Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript [abbreviated as CH]. See Introduction for discussion of these and other foundational works. For further help in orientation, see the Appendix, which provides a full listing of Harley manuscript contents, organized by booklet, quire, folio, and Ker/​Fein item number, with accepted modern titles (per Complete Harley) and language/​textual format (e.g., Middle English verse, Latin prose). Scholarly sources appear in short title form in the Notes, with full citation in the Bibliography. See the List of abbreviations for frequently cited sources and short forms of academic journals and reference series. Date of access for internet sources has not been provided, except when such information has seemed interpretively substantive.

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List of abbreviations

ALH AN AND CH ChauR CHMEL CT DNB ELH FMLS HL HRO HRS JEBS JEGP JHS JMEMS LeedsSE MÆ ME MED MFF MLQ MLR

American Literary History Anglo-​Norman Anglo-​Norman Dictionary Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Fein Chaucer Review Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson Dictionary of National Biography English Literary History Forum for Modern Language Studies The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of Ms Harley 2253, ed. Brook Registrum Ade de Orleton, Episcopi Herefordensis [Register of Adam Orleton, Bishop of Hereford (1317–​1327)], ed. Bannister Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, Episcopi Herefordensis [Register of Richard Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford (1283–​1317)], ed. Capes Journal of the Early Book Society Journal of English and Germanic Philology Jewish Historical Society Journey of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Leeds Studies in English Medium Ævum Middle English Middle English Dictionary Medieval Feminist Forum Modern Language Quarterly Modern Language Review

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MP Neophil. NLH NML PMLA

List of abbreviations

Modern Philology Neophilologus New Literary History New Medieval Literatures Publications of the Modern Language Association of America PQ Philological Quarterly REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature RES Review of English Studies SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer SP Studies in Philology Statutes Statutes of the Realm TJHSE Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society TWArchSoc  Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society TWNFC Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists Field Club YES Yearbook of English Studies YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies

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Introduction

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Harley manuscript geographies

If you had to choose just one codex with which to encapsulate English literary culture during the century prior to the Black Death (1348–​1351), odds are it would be this one: that is, the 1330s Ludlow-​area miscellany known, from its shelf-​mark, as London, British Library (BL) MS Harley 2253.1 Considering that ‘[its] loss would wipe out our knowledge of whole areas’ of literary history, in 1977 Derek Pearsall ranked Harley 2253 (‘with BL Cotton Nero A.x’, the Gawain manuscript) as our ‘most important single manuscript of Middle English poetry’.2 Twenty-​three years later, curators at the British Library—​very much the ‘new’ British Library right about then—​ confirmed Pearsall’s assessment by selecting the Harley manuscript for inclusion in an ad hoc entryway exhibit presenting ‘A History of English Literature in Twelve Books’. Eventually expanded (by Chris Fletcher, with Roger Evans and Sally Brown) to embrace seventy-​seven items—​all but five attached to named authors—​ this millennial initiative saw print as 1000 Years of English Literature:  A Treasury of Literary Manuscripts (2003).3 Expansive gestures have their limitations, but the judgements of Pearsall and Fletcher show that, for literary scholars and book historians alike, Harley 2253 provides coverage of a troublesome early era. This study explores the implications of the Harley manuscript’s ongoing service as a device of cultural-​historical surveying: how it provides a ‘unique record’ of an expired literary moment and superseded codicological form.4 But Harley Manuscript Geographies also attends to how surveying functions in a cross-​disciplinary sense. To that end, it asks how approaching this codex from the perspective of ‘literary geography’ helps reveal the dynamics by which literary history, codicological form, and cultural geography intertwine. Recent work across a number of disciplines has established that the concept of space plays a key role in determining social

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Harley manuscript geographies

relations. Edward Soja, a political geographer and urban theorist whose work treats contemporary Los Angeles, has emphasized the benefits of observing ‘human beings making their own geographies, and being constrained by what they have made’.5 Despite the distance between urban studies and literary medievalism, Soja and I  share an essential point of departure:  that any community or culture’s geographies—​that is, its constructions of space, or attempts to order the physical and the imaginative world—​need to be analysed above all in their multiplicity. Geography is not something stable and singular, neither a bedrock upon which to build nor an inert backdrop against which to read. Geography is, rather, plural; and geographies are subject to contestation. One corollary to Soja’s argument is that different social groups structure space differently, according to their interest. A second is that social structurings of space are not contextual to, but constitutive of, texts, and participate actively in their production of meaning. ‘This curious Harleian volume’ The Harley manuscript employs three languages—​ Anglo-​ Norman, Middle English, and Latin—​and preserves upwards of 120 texts, drawn from a range of medieval genres. Compiled here are social complaints and political songs, religious and secular lyrics, devotional texts and courtesy literature. There are local and foreign saints’ lives, scurrilous fabliaux, and an ancestral romance; anti-​ feminist tracts, biblical paraphrases, and pilgrim topographies; prophecies, recipes, debates, prayers, and more—​including some repurposed household accounts and cathedral service-​book extracts (formerly, the book’s wrapper) which provenance hunters use to locate this manuscript historically. By any measure Harley 2253’s textual range is extraordinary. The book’s fame, though, rests chiefly on its collection of Middle English lyrics, more than thirty in all. Many of these ‘Harley Lyrics’ are amorous in theme, most are preserved here uniquely, and together they comprise ‘most of the best’ English lyrics from before the age of Chaucer.6 During the twentieth century, scholarship on Harley 2253 directed itself chiefly towards these exceptional poems. But in more recent years, coinciding with ‘the move of book history to centre stage in literary studies’, the Harley manuscript’s ‘shape and nature’ as a literary artefact has taken on increasing importance.7 In due course we will address matters of taxonomy: should this codex be classified as an anthology (‘a collection of texts within

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Introduction

3

which some organizational principle can be observed’) or as a miscellany (‘a manuscript that brings together texts which do not present a coherent set of organizational principles’)?8 Is it a fully fledged compilation (a literary object that ‘adds up to more than the sum of its parts’) or a ‘mere’ collection (which ‘[presents] textual items in a form that does not readily yield some larger meaning or effect’)?9 Given that a ‘lack of adequate terminology’ has produced ‘looseness of categorization’ among scholars, is it safest to refer simply to ‘assemblages’ or ‘multi-​text manuscripts’?10 Harley 2253 is incontrovertibly a composite (‘a volume assembled from initially separate codicological units or booklets’), but it also qualifies as a ‘family’ or ‘household book’ (‘a local accretive collection’, ‘created in a particular place over time to reflect the literary tastes and literary activities of individuals in a shared environment’), no matter how haphazard (or alternately, ‘subject to a controlling design’) one may determine its prevailing practices to be.11 To engage with medieval texts in materialist terms means ‘bring[ing] comparative interpretive strategies to bear on the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works’, exploring thereby how the two ‘inform and constitute one another’.12 But to engage the literary along with the codicological is also, frequently, to foreground matters of geography. As Margaret Connolly observes, the ‘mobility of the medieval household’, in its various forms, ‘can cast light upon manuscript production, allowing us to see how a single book may have been … born in more than one location’.13 Harley Manuscript Geographies proposes that it is at the intersection of multiple subfields—​literary history, manuscript philology, and the burgeoning realm I shall call literary geography—​that an inquiry into Harley 2253 and its texts, in their richness and diversity, has most to offer. The Harley manuscript was assembled, and the latter two-​thirds of it copied, by a scribe who is said to have possessed a ‘genius’ for compilation approaching that of Chaucer,14 and who also had a coordinating hand in two other multilingual manuscript compendia.15 According to Carter Revard, this main ‘Harley scribe’ spent a career (1314–​1349) copying land charters in the vicinity of Ludlow, a town halfway between Hereford and Shrewsbury on England’s Welsh March.16 Beyond his periodic work as legal scrivener and literary copyist, the Harley scribe’s professional employment appears to have been as a parish or household chaplain, and/​or tutor, in which capacity he will have been affiliated with one or another prominent local family.17 Strong ties also appear to have obtained

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Harley manuscript geographies

between this Ludlow-​based copyist and Hereford Cathedral, specifically its bishops and certain canons, although provenance specialists disagree about the precise nature of the Harley scribe’s attachment to diocesan leadership.18 It is not only the emplacement of this codex, topographically and socially, that determines what interpretive communities may be relevant for Harley manuscript texts. Equally decisive, I will argue, are issues such as the physical geographical mobility and imaginative geographical experience of those involved in the composition, circulation, and compilation of Harley items. The diversity of materials gathered in Harley 2253 indicates that this compilation’s audiences, like its geographies, require treatment in their multiplicity. Compared with other medieval material, Harley 2253 has underperformed as an academic property in the forty years since Pearsall could describe it as ‘a manuscript which needs no preamble’ and which ‘demands consideration’ as witness to a departed literary era.19 Strangely, there are almost no books about this book. Despite its array of languages and fund of literary-​ historical treasures, the past three and a half decades have produced no academic monograph on the collection. Indeed, holding aside Daniel Ransom’s elegant but narrow Poets at Play (1985), which treats a handful of ‘secular’ English lyrics more or less in isolation, there has never been a single-​author study published on Harley 2253. Dissertations featuring texts from Harley have occasionally been undertaken, but they tend to founder before reaching print.20 The difficulty in getting volumes between covers extends even to edited collections.21 Still, the compilation retains high-​ceiling potential for impact—​and not only because it preserves textual exemplars ranking among ‘the very best of [their] kind’.22 In addition to being literary-​historical, the factors underlying this potential are literary-​geographical and especially literary-​materialist. This present dearth of books on the Harley manuscript should not suggest that research on Harley texts is non-​existent. Certain of its vernacular poems have earned an appreciative audience, and recent trends (for example, in lyric studies, gender studies, devotional culture, and multilingualism) point upward. Essays and book chapters treating Harley 2253 have sometimes broken through to generalist audiences. Still, it must be admitted that relatively little Harley scholarship has made a bona fide mark, either upon literary studies writ large or within medieval studies. It will be the business of Harley Manuscript Geographies to show that an under-​leveraged document from the provincial fringe of medieval culture can offer

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Introduction

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grounds from which to interrogate long-​prevailing assumptions about the meaning of the literary past. As my literary-​geographical case studies shall illustrate, over and over again the book we call Harley 2253 proves well-​positioned to intervene, sometimes powerfully, in the ongoing processes whereby our under-​threat subfield and discipline struggle to remake themselves for traction in a changing world. The stretch of years during which Harley manuscript texts were being composed, copied, and read—​England’s late thirteenth to early fourteenth century—​was, rather like our present, an era of political instability, ecological trauma, and massive social change. Yet this was also a period when the verbal practices and associated products we term literature mattered a great deal, even though—​ or perhaps partly because—​literary expression’s ways, means, and accepted forms were so intensely in flux. One recurrent concern of this study shall be to attend to what miscellany scholar Arthur Bahr describes as the ‘vexed concept of literariness: what it is and how to recognize it in particular textual and physical forms’.23 Appreciation of geographical factors in social interaction may be on the rise across the academy, but belief in the special value of literary expression has been in retreat for decades. No textual capsule from the Middle Ages may be able, these days, to inspire either the ‘total moral engagement’ literary criticism used to seek, or the ethically generative touching of the past that contemporary medievalists desire.24 Still, Harley manuscript studies can hope for a future of improved critical traction. It helps that most medievalists possess passing familiarity with the manuscript, while even generalists know Harley 2253, vaguely, as containing that excellent set of early Middle English lyrics: poems highly prized so far as post-​ Anglo-​Saxon, pre-​Chaucerian years go. Traditional paradigms have begun to show signs of weakening, but two book-​end periods continue to define medieval English literary studies: the Anglo-​Saxon (or Old English) era, as represented by codices from the late tenth century, and the late fourteenth-​ century (or Ricardian) era, epitomized in the rampant Middle English of Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain-​poet. Secluded in the bracken between these highlands of vernacular flourishing, the era made accessible via the Harley manuscript remains—​as, in truth, do all post-​Conquest/​pre-​pestilence subperiods—​less than well-​illuminated. Fletcher, Evans, and Brown show a strong preference in their British Library Treasury for canonical figures, as well as for ‘manuscripts [that] provide a direct link … to the actual

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Harley manuscript geographies

creative force behind the work’. But whereas some segments of English literature’s first thousand years present ‘an embarrassment of riches’, the medieval period’s own middle-​lying centuries prove poorly supplied with native-​tongue masterworks, especially autograph ones.25 Occluded because under-​resourced, Anglo-​Norman years like these comprise English literary medievalism’s own degraded and abject moyen âge. What survives from c.1250–​1350 attests to a textual culture misaligned with the rest: diffuse, decentralized, anonymous, largely devotional, and, worst of all, multilingual. To judge by teaching anthologies, course syllabi, conference programmes, and university press catalogues, those invested in ‘the story of the English literary tradition’ may pass over these years quickly.26 In a survey of the territory known as ‘early Middle English’, Thomas Hahn characterizes this era as, ‘on consensus’, ‘an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights’.27 Christopher Cannon writes of ‘literary history’s general sense that there is nothing there’ in these years, leaving such texts as survive doomed to reproduce their own marginality.28 Facing an inverse situation was Anglo-​Norman, whose ‘most substantial and wide-​ranging corpus’, Susan Crane notes, ‘comes from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’, although its ‘expanded domain’ becomes ‘bound up with the resurgence of English’. England’s two vernaculars maintain ‘pervasive interrelations’ and a ‘fruitful dialogue’. But ‘the validity of writing in English’ rests ‘on grounds quite different from Anglo-​Norman’s claim to exclusivity and refinement’.29 We shall return later to Crane’s metaphor (‘grounds’); for there exists a foundational bond between language, text, and territory in a medieval insular context. Leading scholars have routinely hailed Harley 2253 as an exception to the prevailing un-​brilliance of its literary era—​precisely the sort of ‘redeeming highlight’ Hahn has in mind. Inspired by similar factors, a string of prominent eighteenth-​, nineteenth-​, and twentieth-​century medievalists vouched for the Harley manuscript’s importance to the literary-​historical record. Thomas Percy opened the second volume of his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) with two poems from Harley 2253 which he adjudged ‘too curious to be assigned to oblivion’.30 Impressed by their ‘artless graces’, Thomas Warton, who from 1785 was Poet Laureate and Camden Professor of History, similarly enthused over ‘this curious Harleian volume, to which we are so largely indebted’.31 A half-​century later, Thomas Wright immersed readers in Harley

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Introduction

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manuscript material, featuring fifteen of its main scribe’s poems as ‘historical documents’ deserving general circulation in his Political Songs of England (1839), an early title of the Camden Society (est. 1838), and then devoting Specimens of Lyric Poetry (1842), published by the Percy Society (1840–​1852), to transcription of ‘all the lyric poetry in this manuscript’.32 Between them, Wright’s Camden and Percy Society volumes put great swaths of Harley 2253 into circulation. But more than the brute number of lines they print, it is their inclusivity—​Wright samples multiple genres and all three languages—​that makes these paired works the first abiding publication landmark in Harley studies. During the middle twentieth century, Carleton Brown and R.H. Robbins lobbied effectively on Harley 2253’s behalf, reserving special praise for selections from this ‘most famous’ of vernacular lyric manuscripts, in a series of genre-​defining volumes.33 For several decades leading journals in literary studies (PMLA) and medieval studies (Speculum) published regularly on medieval lyric. G.L. Brook’s The Harley Lyrics, reprinted four times by Manchester University Press (1948, 1956, 1964, 1968) and an edition still prized for its sleekness, ‘gracefully supplie[d]‌a long-​felt want’ among students of early literature, and resulted in several generations of canonical standing for thirty-​two English poems.34 The ‘vivid and homely’ ‘light-​heartedness’ of these lyrics, along with their ‘ease and sureness of touch’,35 helped galvanize support for N.R. Ker’s Facsimile of British Museum Ms Harley 2253 (1965). It is symptomatic, however, that the Early English Text Society (EETS), as distinct from its Anglo-​Norman counterpart (ANTS), compromised on its investment in Harley 2253 by declining to include the book’s opening forty-​eight folios. Only fols. 49–​140, produced by the ‘main’ Harley scribe, preserve English materials, though even here French and Latin items outnumber English ones.36 Despite the possibilities for examination of vernacular gems in situ that Ker’s facsimile plus Brook’s edition enabled, there ensued decades of critical stasis. For Susanna Fein, what the twentieth century’s major Harley publications offered was ‘still not nearly enough … just tantalizing glimmers and shadows’. Because each was ‘limited in its purpose’, Ker and Brook served mostly to ‘illustrate how Harley scholarship continue[d] to be compartmentalized’.37 Despite increasing the manuscript’s profile, in Fein’s view both contributed to its eventual marginalization, insofar as they provided incomplete pictures of the multilingual, multi-​ generic compilation as a whole. Their obstructed views left Harley

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Harley manuscript geographies

manuscript materials poorly situated for participation in medieval literary studies’ evolving methodological arena. The editorial and critical work of Fein herself has done much to counteract this situation. First came Studies in the Harley Manuscript (2000), a multi-​scholar inquiry into the book’s ‘scribes, contents and social contexts’ that no serious work on the codex can do without. Fifteen years later (with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski), Fein published The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript in three volumes (2014–​2015), the comprehensive edition—​with translation, commentary, and cross-​referencing—​so long and desperately needed. If the former publication provided a critical baseline, serving as a stop-​gap measure for those grappling with the complexity of an unedited miscellany, the latter inaugurates a new era in Harley manuscript studies. My own work on Harley 2253 commenced in the late 1990s, years when all who tried to write on this book encountered a legion of practical difficulties. Harley manuscript texts—​ that portion which had been transcribed—​ lay scattered across a slew of anthologies, journals, Text Society volumes, and dissertations, published in different decades and countries, with variation in editorial conventions to match. This piecemeal, partial, and uneven publication history meant that synthetic interpretation of Harley 2253 faced a host of impediments. At present, the ‘interrelated matters of terminology and taxonomy together constitute the most fundamental issue connected with the comprehension of medieval miscellaneous manuscripts’—​but until recently the greatest challenge in Harley studies lay in the ‘provision of materials for research’.38 If Complete Harley’s importance deserves underlining, the essence of Fein’s interpretive contribution has been to sharpen the thrust of her editorial work, by demonstrating how attention to material-​ codicological questions can affect literary analysis. The scholarly debts owed by Harley Manuscript Geographies will become clear as its arguments unfold, but Fein’s efforts underlie certain sections in particular, especially Chapters 2 and 4, which explore byways of the codex, traversing quires seldom examined, but now (with Complete Harley) made a practical possibility. All who write on Harley 2253 remain similarly indebted to Carter Revard. Revard’s researches on ‘Scribe and Provenance’ (2000)—​especially his analysis of the book’s coordinating main hand (Scribe B) as it evolved paleographically—​have produced a detailed picture of the Harley manuscript’s composition process, contextual setting, and likely patronal connections. Revard’s ‘very

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Introduction

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interesting scribe’, Fein reports, is ‘usually credited with being the agent behind the way the texts are compiled’ (making him ‘responsible for the selection and … order of items drawn from various exemplars’)—​although his codex is also ‘likely tailored … to the needs and desires of a patron’.39 Extending his documentary work, Revard has promulgated a series of essays that describe Harley 2253 as ruled by text-​by-​text counterpoint, a design feature he terms ‘oppositional thematics’. In his view the Harley manuscript exhibits not merely tonal and thematic mixedness, but adherence to a ruling commitment: the proposition that everything is ‘[known] by its contrary’. Revard sees this (‘sic-​et-​non’) notion as ‘the scribe’s central ordering principle for his anthology’; the key to Harley 2253, in this vision, is how its maker ‘unrolls’ a consciously integrative ‘metanarrative’.40 Revard’s version of the Harley manuscript is not quite mine. Yet, as with Fein, my next-​ generation perspectives are unimaginable without Revard’s foundational efforts. Who compiled the Harley manuscript? One area in which I simultaneously depend upon and depart from Revard’s work is in my position on Harley 2253’s textual acquisition dynamics. Accounts of exemplar circulation tend towards generalization, while provenance arguments can become pointillist in method. But the Harley manuscript production picture I espouse can be distilled to a handful of points. The first is that the main scribe of Harley 2253, as noted above, has been traced by Revard to the environs of Ludlow, where from 1314 to 1349 he wrote charters for local tradesfolk and minor leaseholders (forty-​one are extant), probably while serving as chaplain or tutor for a gentle household. This firm localization of the Harley manuscript, with precise dating for the copying of many texts, is established through palaeographical and contextual documentary analysis. It is buttressed on the social-​historical side by a plethora of vernacular contents—​devotional material, debate and courtesy texts, social complaints—​that bespeak a secular household context for the book, apparently one with a strong female patron.41 The second point is that, in commentary on this manuscript over the past few decades, the distinction between medieval author functions has collapsed. Almost uniformly nowadays, scholars posit a Harley ‘scribe/​compiler’;42 and where credentialled readers previously found an overriding miscellaneity in this scribe’s handiwork,

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Harley manuscript geographies

‘a variety of texts in no order’ with ‘no discernible relationship between them’, contemporary critics find ‘principled’ selection and arrangement, a placement of diverse texts in subtle, even ‘dialectical’ counterpoint.43 Arguments concerning the Harley scribe’s ingenious thematic planning can become unwieldy, but by no means do I  dissent from appreciative assessments of the manuscript’s sophisticated literary ordinatio. Still, from the perspective of certain textual groupings—​the book’s Middle English lyrics among them—​there is a problem in the emerging consensus that attributes to the copyist of Harley 2253 an authorial presence and compilatory agency so full and developed. Patronal connections such as Revard proposes may have carried the scribe beyond the area (about six miles in diameter) of his known activity. But so far as extant documentation goes, the Ludlow scribe’s immobility and modest social positioning limit his personal ability to procure texts, especially of such variety and cosmopolitan reach. Thus, my third point: while I agree that Revard’s legal scrivener (Scribe B) should be conceded full and intelligent input concerning manuscript ordinatio (layout, arrangement, and selection of received texts), we should assign the bulk of the exemplar procuring and transmission activity (that is, the practicalities of compilatio) elsewhere.44 Recent scholarly trends have inclined away from sharp divisions of labour, towards recognition of the overlap among the functions that together constitute medieval ‘authorship’: patron, auctor, compilator, redactor, scriptor, annotating lector, and—​not least—​operative textual community. Such erosion in distinction between medieval authorial roles bears keeping in mind. But in the case of Harley 2253, there are good, overriding reasons to re-​divide ‘scribe’ from ‘compiler’. An active commissioning, procuring, or transmitting role may have been played by someone resident in the Harley scribe’s sponsoring household, which ‘must have [included]’ patrons of ‘sophisticated’ literary tastes (who also retained a fondness for popular burlesque, didactic débat, and factional doggerel).45 ‘Patron-​compiler’, for this reason, seems a more appropriate place for collapse in distinction between Harley manuscript compilation roles and author functions, than ‘scribe-​compiler’. The latter usage, more common for Harley 2253’s copyist than any other, seems to have developed as a consequence of mid-​to late twentieth-​century desires to assign Scribe B a fuller share of ‘literariness’ than book-​ making activities tend otherwise to be accorded. Especially persuasive in this regard has been the Harley scribe’s purposeful layout

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Introduction

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of some but by no means all of the texts he copied—​whether or not he brought them to Ludlow himself. In Chapter 1, I will forward a group-​biographical and literary-​geographical case for viewing Harley 2253 as a production that depends upon the efforts of agents operating beyond those home localities within which Revard’s legal scrivener can be ascertained to have moved. For now, it is worth noting that in the earliest of three codices connected to our scribe, there survives the sketched model for another, perhaps more compelling picture of Harley 2253’s production dynamics. The fourth point in my Harley compilation argument emerges from a single manuscript page. On fol. 70 of BL MS Harley 273 (c.1314–​1328)—​a composite volume consisting of Anglo-​Norman devotional, instructive, and ‘professional administrative’ texts, long held by the Harley scribe and copied partially in his hand—​there appears a multi-​image sequence, drawn in pen. In the first drawing (upper left), we see an aristocratic lady speaking with a mature priest, tonsured and amply robed; second (bottom left), we see this ecclesiastical protagonist convening with some fellow clerks; third (upper right), we see a younger clerk, slender and curly-​haired, copying out a codex; and finally (bottom right), this scribe presents his finished volume to the lady of the first scene, with the more established, procuring clerk no longer present. All figures in this visual sequence deserve attention with respect to the production dynamics they embody, and the interpretive possibilities they raise. Others have adopted the Harley scribe as their protagonist—​and so too will Harley Manuscript Geographies often feature this book-​ making agent. But here my interest centres on another figure: that of the busy priestly go-​between, who, integral to the initial panels but absent thereafter, acts as mobile intermediary between all other members of the production cast. Friend to ladies and clerks alike, this facilitator links the patroness of the first and last scenes to the junior scribal functionary of the third and fourth. He connects these high and low (local?) figures, moreover, to the second scene’s implied crowd of clerkly associates—​his several sources, presumably, for the textual matter copied in the third scene. The two scenes that begin the compilation process envisioned in Harley 273 do not include the young copyist (whose dashing portrait is accorded frontispiece status by Fein’s Studies in the Harley Manuscript). Yet it remains unclear whether initiative for the compilatory work at hand resides ultimately with the lady-​patron or with the senior clerk. Literary authority appears shared, in this quadripartite vision, not simply among the three principals—​patroness, scribe,

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Harley manuscript geographies

and go-​between priest, each of whom figures in two scenes—​but also, radiating outward, with a wider community of ecclesiastical contacts. I do not suggest that these drawings in Harley 273, penned years prior to our Ludlow scribe’s mature work and by another hand, to accompany a popular courtly treatise,46 should be understood as literally documenting the events surrounding Harley 2253’s eventual compilation. Whereas the latter constitutes a ‘carefully selected and structured’ or at least ‘[somewhat] principled’ codex miscellany, manuscript philologists describe the former in ad hoc, neutrally accretive terms. Revard characterizes Harley 273 as not a volume executed for gentle patrons so much as an aspiring priest-​ administrator’s personal commonplace book.47 However, even if imported from this earlier volume, the production picture I propose for Harley 2253 has interpretive advantages. It reconciles Revard’s documentary discoveries, which describe a Ludlow scribe possessing basic legal/​ecclesiastical training and nursing aspirations of benefice preferment, with other critics’ suspicion that the book has connection with nearby Hereford Cathedral.48 This, in essence, is my fifth point. In what follows I shall look to demonstrate that Harley 2253 possesses a ‘doubled’ affiliation, insofar as the copying of texts it preserves in one institutional and geographical locale in no way precludes the possibility of concurrent affiliation with other community settings. What I  am specifically not proposing here is a Harley manuscript copyist who is attached to the retinue of one or another Hereford bishop.49 Instead, my proposition is that Harley 2253’s lay owners or Revard’s legal scrivener—​perhaps both—​had an abiding contact in Hereford’s episcopal familia [mobile household] or cathedral administration. Ludlow-​area gentry families contributed younger sons to both of these institutions. Biographical construction and documentary animation of any proposed individual transmitter of Harley texts lies beyond this book’s purview.50 My operative point is that we have at minimum two interpretive communities in play. Primary is the Ludlow-​vicinity lay household of the codex in which Harley items are preserved. But flickering behind this is a dynamic ecclesiastical household—​and wider network of affiliates—​within which such items gestate and previously circulate. The vision of Harley 2253’s compilation I  outline above has special purchase for our book’s most famous texts, the Harley Lyrics. But the literary-​geographical implications of the manuscript’s doubled community affiliation are not exclusive to these

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poems. Almost all the book’s items have extra-​Ludlow dimensions, be they regional, metropolitan, national, or international. The Harley manuscript as physical object Before turning to conditions prevailing in the study of multi-​text manuscripts, we need a working sense of Harley 2253 as a physical object, especially the sections into which it divides and related divisions in scribal labour. Four medieval hands contribute to Harley, in disproportionate degrees. The constitution of the book as book, and the relationship of its scribes to one another, sheds light on the collective nature of this compilational project. These issues have consequences for the reception of Harley texts by medieval and post-​medieval readers alike. British Library curators didn’t exhibit the Harley manuscript in their entrance foyer for any arresting physical attributes. Indeed it is so visually unprepossessing—​‘Despite its great literary significance’, Fletcher admits, ‘the vellum volume is fairly unexceptional in appearance’—​that London heritage tourists must have wondered how it made the cut.51 Modern readers will experience Harley as outsized, since in page proportions (293 x 188  mm) it occupies nearly twice the area of the book in your hands. Lying flat, it is several times as thick. Despite this bulk, and despite generous margins (78 x 58 mm) and competent drafting, Harley 2253 is modest as artefacts of its genus and species go. It has no illustrations, diagrams, or drawings (except an ink cross near the back of the book [fol. 132v]); no illumination (discounting an ‘artful’ red-​and-​blue ‘puzzle-​initial’ at the head of Item #1, fol. 1); and no decorative marginalia (aside from elongated ‘tall letters’ on some pages’ top lines).52 Readerly apparatus is limited, apart from enlarged initials (at incipits or section breaks) and minor rubrication (paragraph marks) throughout. Titles appear only occasionally. Finally, the codex bears scant annotation (mostly self-​corrections by Scribe B). Taken overall, specialists describe Harley 2253 as a well-​executed, though by no means deluxe volume. Compared with its scribe’s two other books, which are less polished and more miscellaneous, the Harley manuscript is careful in its presentation of the texts it gathers—​though how controlled it is in this undertaking, how designed in its codicological ordering, remains to be seen. For centuries Harley 2253 has been regarded as a sovereign single book, but technically speaking it is a composite:  a volume assembled from ‘formerly independent codicological units’.53 As

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Harley manuscript geographies

for foliation, the manuscript’s 141 leaves are divided into fifteen quires, all but the last comprising bifolio gatherings. Quires range from four to twelve leaves, and contain from one to twenty items. More important organizationally is that Harley’s fifteen quires separate into seven booklets, or ‘independent blocks’. As Ker observes, the present volume’s sections ‘need not be in their original order, since in five places a new text begins on a new quire’.54 Quires 1–​4 form Independent Blocks 1–​2 of the manuscript. Copied in ‘a professional textura of the late thirteenth century’, these initial forty-​ eight folios are the work of Scribe A, and together ‘constitute the volume that [Scribe B] had in hand when he commenced his own copying endeavor’ around 1330.55 They contain saints’ lives and other religious items in verse and prose (#1–​7), written in Anglo-​Norman. Quires 5–​14 form Independent Blocks 3–​6 of Harley 2253. For literary historians, fols. 49–​133v are the de facto core of the collection, because they contain virtually all of the vernacular poems (lyrics, fabliaux, political songs, the romance King Horn) upon which the book’s reputation rests. But there is also much of a less literary sort:  devotional and instructional texts, geographical itineraries, biblical apocrypha, and more. Quires 5–​14 were copied (per Revard and Ker) over about a decade: c.1330–​1341. A half-​page of added paint recipes aside, these folios are written in Scribe B’s distinctive Anglicana,56 in a layout apparently ‘dictated by the format’ of the earlier booklets.57 Sometime after 1342, Scribe B also copied out the sixteen texts of Quire 15 (Block 7), but these seven singletons (fols. 134–​140) were written under conditions and/​or with goals unlike those that had obtained during production of Quires 5–​14. The texts comprising Harley 2253’s final booklet (as Chapter  4 will explore) differ from the texts compiled earlier in multiple ways. Content differences (genre, language, theme, tone) work in tandem with codicological differences (mise-​en-​page, foliation, orthography, date of completion) to establish the baseline otherness of this concluding block of the manuscript. Executed separately, Quire 15 may have been added later to the rest of what is now Harley 2253—​ perhaps by Scribe B (the volume’s production overseer and, many presume, guiding intelligence), or perhaps by someone else. Two other hands contribute to the Harley manuscript in slighter ways, one of them, Scribe D, prior to Scribe B’s (c.1330–​1341) production of Quires 5–​14; the other, Scribe C, afterwards. ‘Early in the fourteenth century’ (c.1308–​1314), Scribe D wrote the Irish household accounts roll that later served as the volume’s wrapper

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Introduction

15

(now fols. 1/​142v).58 On this roll’s dorse (fols. 1v/​142), there are extracts, likewise fragmentary and in Latin, copied from the ordinal of Hereford Cathedral by Scribe B (c.1314–​1315). Although made at Ardmulghan, in the liberty of Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland, these accounts pertain to a household ‘from the west of England’, judging by family names such as Talbot and Chaundos. They are likely connected with Herefordshire-​based Marcher Baron Roger Mortimer, in these years Justiciar of Ireland—​since Trim was ‘Mortimer property from 1308 to 1330’.59 Fein has discovered that Scribe D (of the Irish accounts) also contributed to Harley 273, the commonplace book treated as his own by the maker of Harley 2253. The ‘unusually close proximity’ of the two hands ‘in each manuscript’ leads her to suggest that early in his career, ‘Scribe D worked beside Scribe B as his colleague in literary scrivening’.60 Scribe C, whose contributions date ‘not much later than the main hand’, is chiefly responsible for eight English paint recipes added to a blank space (fol. 52v) that ends Booklet 3 (Quire 5). This hand also adds minor ‘finishing details’ to Quire 15’s late-​copied concluding item (#116, fol. 140v; c.1347–​1348), which Scribe B included as a ‘final thought’ but never got around to rubricating.61 Fein suggests—​plausibly, I believe—​that Scribe C ‘may have been a participant in the book’s final execution’.62 We have seen how for early commentators, Harley 2253’s value resided in its textual resources—​specifically, their status as uncommon. Consciously or not, Wright echoes Percy’s and Warton’s diction exactly in calling Harley ‘curious as illustrating the language of the period’. But it is important to recognize the basis of these items’ ‘curious’-​ness.63 Some portion of the Harley manuscript’s appeal is intrinsic—​masterful poems, with distinctive voices, in provocative juxtaposition—​but much must be attributed to scarcity. We recognize its literary treasures as treasures because they are so lacking of kindred in the bibliographic record. Such is always part of what it means to be a medievalist, but the condition characterizes some artefacts, genres, and eras more than others. Considerations of quality raise thorny questions about literary meaning. Productive precisely because they are difficult, these questions in turn govern how we approach interpretation of a book the perceived character of which has come to lie not just in the heterogeneity of its contents, but in what scholars increasingly regard as design, even authorial intentionality, in their selection and arrangement. If for antiquarians of previous centuries Harley 2253’s value lay in the substance of the texts it preserved, for

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Harley manuscript geographies

recent critics, especially those committed to methodologies associated with the New Philology, the Harley manuscript’s value has come to reside—​just as self-​evidently—​in its character as a literary compilation. The one mode of reading (Victorian antiquarian, ethnic nationalist) seems hopelessly outmoded, whereas the other (literary materialist, with elements of New Formalism) hews closely to contemporary disciplinary standards. Yet in each case, a medieval miscellany’s value relates intrinsically to the kind of book its readers adjudge it to be. In 2000 Fein attributed the ‘startling’ lack of scholarship on the Harley manuscript’s ‘general character and features’ chiefly to the parlous state of research materials—​a situation her Complete Harley shows every sign of rectifying.64 But the under-​examination of this collection, relative to its accepted significance, may not only be a question of textual accessibility. There appears to be something elusive about the Harley miscellany in and of itself, an engrained disinclination to be neatly packaged—​compounding which are certain abiding unknowns about the book’s socio-​literary ecosystem. Together these intrinsic and extrinsic factors have resulted in a slow-​growing critical portfolio. The disaggregated state in which readers encountered items before Complete Harley led to little publication on the subject of Harley 2253 as a compilation. For generations, Harley scholarship has tended to be narrow in purview, self-​curtailing in scope. Short philological notices and contained close readings account for much of the output, while theoretically inflected essays have been scarce. Even when expansive, successful Harley endeavours have attuned themselves to bite-​sized bits of the codex—​a single folio or set of poems; an isolatable genre or topical strain—​as manageable features that stand in for larger compilatory truths. ‘Most of the contributors’ to Fein’s edited collection ‘wisely confine themselves to parts of it’; and yet their convener provides assurances that ‘[her] authors are unified by a desire to see the manuscript whole’.65 To confine ourselves remains prevailing practice; but recent years have seen increasing deployment of such micro-​critical methods in a macro-​codicological, ‘whole book’ direction. The above paragraphs provide an orientation to Harley 2253 in materialist terms: its textual and physical make-​up; its provenance, contexts, and scribes. In critical terms, the upshot is that Harley studies’ default mode—​one genre, language, or codicological feature handled at a time—​no longer obtains. Instead, the pendulum has swung towards celebration of juxtaposition and emphasis on

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textual-​interactive dynamics. If to embrace either methodological extreme too exclusively seems inadvisable, the lesson to be gleaned may be that the Harley manuscript itself contributes to its crabbed critical situation by encouraging multiple possibilities. To investigate how such a situation has developed, we turn now to the peculiar nature of Harley 2253 as a literary compilation. Compilation, anthologization, miscellaneity What exactly is the phenomenon that the Harley manuscript serves to exemplify? What is a book about the Harley manuscript itself necessarily about? And what literary-​historical conditions does it need to confront? As we have begun to see, this early fourteenth-​ century collection proves exceptional as a case study—​even controlling for the idiosyncrasy of medieval books. So few English literary manuscripts survive from our period that any individual artefact takes on qualities of the one-​off, the feral exception to which taxonomic rules little apply. To derive broader insight from such a document can be a tenuous process. As Cannon observes, literary objects from this period tend to be ‘so strange, and produced under such anomalous conditions, that they differ, not only from what came before (what we now call “Old English”), but from all that came after (what we otherwise call “English literature”)’. Consequently ‘the [most] startling general condition of these texts is their profound isolation’.66 But books blessed with literary riches make their own critical luck. What scholars of Harley 2253 are chiefly resourced with is a curious, composite manuscript—​ no longer quite so intractable—​together with the extraordinary textual inventory it houses. Still, there are other codices with comparable profiles. And it is from this slight haul of remainder traces—​a physical book, its gathered texts, and some analogues—​that we must extrapolate a vision of whatever phenomenon it is we wish to treat. My decision to focus on the Harley manuscript, instead of co-​ featuring several codices, means that this inquiry’s historical perimeters are unusually circumscribed. As noted, Harley Manuscript Geographies spans the century prior to the Black Death, that is, the mid-​thirteenth to the mid-​fourteenth century. Scholars have seldom packaged these years as a unit of English cultural history.67 They do not collate well with regnal eras (Henry III 1216–​1272; Edward I  1272–​1307; Edward II 1307–​1327; Edward III 1327–​ 1377); but such eras tend to offer limited purchase in literary study

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Harley manuscript geographies

anyway. Traditional historiography, as Hahn and Cannon testify, has been inclined to conflate everything from the cessation of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle forward into one long, cipher-​like anti-​period, against which loom the traumas of the Conquest and the abyss of the pestilence. What recommends c.1250–​1350 as a period term is that the items the Harley manuscript preserves—​to say nothing of the settings it evokes and events it cites—​fall overwhelmingly within this range. A handful of Harley texts date prior but most were composed not earlier than the second half of the thirteenth century. Almost all achieved whatever circulation they would achieve before, as opposed to after, the Black Death. Another way in which the years between 1250 and 1350 unite to form a discrete literary conglomerate, within the larger entity of English medieval culture, is by hosting the development of a particular kind of book, one otherwise little known. As Marilyn Corrie observes, Harley 2253  ‘as a codicological phenomenon’ turns out to be ‘not [entirely] unique’, since its essential practices and baseline features are ‘matched by a number of codices compiled in England’ during the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century.68 That is, there survives a discernible group of South-​ West Midlands books analogous to Harley 2253 in codicological structure and textual content, likewise dating to 1250–​1350, before and after which English literary culture takes different shape. Most medievalists do not choose to parcel these years together, but those who do tend to be those who study the multilingual miscellany. Specialists continue to spar over the ability of this term—​ against others—​ to describe the elusory artefacts under study. I  don’t wish to contribute to the terminological proliferation. More important is to recognize that the codicological unit known alternately as the miscellany or anthology constitutes a technology ‘basic to medieval literary circulation’. As Seth Lerer asserts, ‘no line can be drawn between the literary artifacts that we imagine circulating in particular past periods and the media that circulated them’.69 Harley 2253 helps us understand the period-​specific dynamics of how ‘literature becomes bibliography’, that is, how meaning is constituted by the very forms that disseminate it. For Lerer, ‘the idea of the anthology controls much of the English medieval notion of the literary’.70 Others select different terms, but whichever is chosen, compilation as a material-​textual process (Bahr suggests) can be taken as ‘an invitation to literary analysis’. The interpretive issues that ‘multi-​text manuscripts’ raise with unusual insistence—​‘[how] work and text inform and constitute

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Introduction

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one another’ in specific codices, for example—​cannot fail to be pressing to all literary medievalists, and not just those few who specialize in books of ‘this particular type’.71 As Raluca Radulescu points out, how exactly we think about text/​book interaction ‘[ties] in ultimately with the shaping of the literary canon’—​if for no other reason than that ‘[medieval] anthologies that display both order and a certain aesthetic set of values in tune with modern sensibilities carry [special] weight in the scholarly debate’. Harley 2253 is one such ‘totemic volume’.72 Among the comparables routinely cited for the Harley manuscript, the standout is Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86 (Worcestershire, c.1271–​1286).73 This book shares several texts and so many features with Harley 2253 that many judge it to have served as a ‘compilatory model’ for its younger neighbour.74 Other codices in Harley’s affinity are three from the same period (late thirteenth century) and geographical area (SW Midlands, esp. Worcester and Hereford dioceses) as Digby 86. These include Oxford, Jesus College 29; Cambridge, Trinity College 323; and BL Cotton Caligula A.ix—​books that correspond in social-​institutional profile and exhibit ‘common features’, including shared items, comparable genre rosters, and similar physical qualities.75 Digby 86, Harley 2253, and the Jesus/​Trinity/​Caligula trio all display features suggesting production contexts in which secular clerical and lay household elements overlap. Unlike these in institutional orientation are two volumes from the early fourteenth century, BL MSS Harley 913 (Kildare, Ireland, 1330s) and Additional 46919 (Oxford and Hereford, before 1337). These books share with Harley 2253 multiple items and a propensity for certain vernacular genres, yet qualify as ‘authentic Franciscan miscellanies’ (unlike the five above, which long held that designation spuriously).76 Other partial analogues can be found in certain monolingual anthologies from the period, such as Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 108 (SW Midlands, c.1300), which (in addition to sharing items with Harley 2253) contains the earliest surviving version of the South English Legendary,77 and the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) (London, c.1340), with its wealth of Middle English romances and saints’ lives.78 Harley 978 (Oxford/​Reading, c.1261–​1265), famous as a musical miscellany (and for containing work by Marie de France and Walter Map), occupies an earlier, more Latinate end of the spectrum, although like Harley 2253 and other later, more vernacular books, it is inclined to mix genres and juxtapose themes aggressively.79 Further afield (in date,

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provenance, contents, or features) lie various compendia for which cases of relevance to Harley 2253 might be made: for example, the Vernon manuscript (c.1390–​ 1400) and the Audelay manuscript (c.1426–​1431)—​both of West Midlands provenance—​given their importance as repositories for vernacular lyric and lay pastoralia.80 These books’ divergences in codicological nature, textual blend, linguistic choice, and social context compound rapidly the further we travel from the pre-​plague, South-​West Midlands milieu of Harley 2253, Digby 86, and associates. Still, as related manifestations of Harley’s physical form and compilatory practice, these manuscripts remain relevant. Before moving on to enumerate the operative features that the Harley manuscript shares with others of its codicological type—​ those thirteen ‘Aspects of the miscellany’ that give my next section its title—​it is important to hone our central category. Lerer features the term ‘anthology’ in his discussion of Harley 2253. The ‘highly individualistic’, multilingual, multi-​text productions that together constitute the literary-​historical phenomenon Harley 2253 exemplifies, however, traditionally have been referenced under the catch-​ all rubric ‘miscellany’. Time-​honoured and flexible, miscellany is also a term that drives manuscript philologists, genre taxonomists, and archive cataloguers to distraction.81 Part of the problem lies in ‘the medieval book’s fundamentally miscellaneous character’.82 But precisely ‘because so many different kinds of manuscripts seem to fall within [its] purview’, Stephen Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel declare miscellany to be an ‘inadequate and finally enigmatic (or at least [overly] vague) term’, for specialist purposes.83 Rather than isolate for analysis a single ‘type of book’ (as Connolly and Radulescu do84), the contributors to Nichols and Wenzel’s The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (1996) eschew so tight a taxonomic focus, embracing instead ‘as large a variety’ of medieval codices as possible. Although diversely located in literary history, many ‘different kinds of books’, the editors emphasize, reward examination ‘from the standpoint of their miscellaneity’.85 Consequently, despite programmatic sensitivity to how ‘the codex can have a typological identity that affects the way we read and understand the texts it presents’, Nichols and Wenzel’s Whole Book offers limited traction on the phenomenon of the miscellany qua miscellany.86 As James J. O’Donnell reflects, ‘ “miscellaneity” as a defining characteristic’ of so large a swath of materials becomes ‘a palpably false unity that covers what we perceive to be disorder’.87

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To the extent that that which is miscellaneous ‘arises as a class of the unclassed’, it becomes ‘a scandal to our attempts to wrestle the past into an order and shape comfortable to ourselves’, O’Donnell suggests. A common response to the challenge posed by medieval codicological disorder is to argue that what appears to be incoherence, or a disunified jumble, really isn’t. The lack lies in our modern-​day ignorance as to original actors’ ‘context and purpose’, ‘intentionality’, or differing senses of discursive ‘unity’.88 For Nichols and Wenzel, an ascription of miscellaneity may well ‘be misleading, suggesting, as it does, an arbitrary principle of organization for manuscripts in which there may be a perfectly clear organizing principle’.89 Materialist philologists often seek to ‘dissolve the perceived miscellaneity of their targets’.90 Miscellaneity in this respect becomes a condition to be banished, an accusation demeaning to the integrity of medieval people and books. Harley manuscript scholarship provides a case in point. Some oppose all uses of ‘miscellany’ in the context of this and similar codices, advocating instead for ‘anthology’, ‘compilation’, or ‘assemblage’, as fitter terms for describing a production possessed of such high-​minded literary credentials. Around the turn of the century discussion became barbed, with Theo Stemmler (‘Anthology or Miscellany?’) trying but failing to resolve the matter, with follow-​up by Pearsall, Revard, Scahill, Corrie, Lerer, Fein, Bahr, and more. Other bids to end the terminological impasse include Jason O’Rourke, who ‘regard[s]‌the term “collection” as particularly useful [to Harley 2253], since it [avoids] the baggage that the terms “anthology” and “miscellany” have picked up’,91 and Keith Busby, who adds the French term ‘recueil’ to the mix, though without seeking to enforce a potentially ‘undesirable’ consensus.92 The ‘notion of a recueil’, explains Ardis Butterfield, ‘leads to the supposition that a manuscript has some kind of controlling intelligence in charge’.93 In brief, the extent to which the Harley manuscript should be regarded as haphazard or deliberate has become a driving question. Much of profit has emerged from these debates, but Ralph Hanna III offers a means by which to bracket the definitional bind facing scholars of manuscript miscellaneity, in observing how the ‘difficulties of textual supply’ so common in the medieval era ‘contribute to the miscellaneous nature’ of all the books we encounter. For Hanna, ‘exemplar poverty motivates much of the literary record’, such that ‘typical for a large range’ of insular codices is ‘a combination of happenstance acquisition and variously motivated

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selection’.94 Logistics are accorded priority over intentions in such a view, but neither displace nor (as in some formulations) get trumped by them. Miscellaneity comes to seem less a dirty word, a state of false historical consciousness to explain away whenever possible, than a feature of the medieval bibliographic landscape. Hanna regards it as not just a material, but a literary condition always to be considered. Lerer, similarly, postulates an ‘anthologistic impulse’ as the key element in medieval literary practice. If Hanna and Lerer differ in emphasis, their accounts of a mutually constitutive relationship between literary study and manuscript study nonetheless coalesce.95 Inevitably, the terms in play—​‘miscellaneity’, ‘anthologistic’—​reprise longstanding debates in Harley criticism itself. Not just various genres of medieval codex, then, but nearly all individual volumes partake of miscellaneity: so much does specialist opinion attest. But some books, and some kinds of book, are more heavily marked by this quality than others. It is no accident that Lerer chose the Harley manuscript when he went looking for evidence. Similarly, it is no surprise that in wrestling with Harley 2253, literary historians return compulsively to the parsing of codicological terms:  miscellany, anthology, compilation, assemblage, and the rest. Individually and collectively, we remain desperate for taxonomical grounding, for some ‘immediately graspable’ understanding of the phenomenon, however provisional, upon which to rely as we journey forward through the quires.96 What makes a medieval miscellany? It is no easy thing to theorize manuscript miscellaneity. Rather than expect certainty, better to delineate that roster of features, qualities, and conditions which together imply the form, as Harley and its cohort manifest it. Aspects of the miscellany First, books of Harley 2253’s sort are deeply marked by multilinguality. As John Scahill observes, the ‘structural patterns’ that shape trilingual insular miscellanies tend to arise from their ‘combination of languages’.97 A volume’s linguistic arrangement, John Frankis adds, may be block-​like and orderly, with folio runs or whole fascicles given over to one language and then another, as in ‘the neat anthology for churchman that we have in Jesus 29’.98 Conversely, as in ‘extravagantly heterogeneous’ Digby 86, language alternation can occur incessantly, text by text or even line by line (macaronic poems being not uncommon).99 As to how tongues

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interact in the medieval miscellany, typical of such compilations is for language choice to follow social function, linguistic coding being part and parcel of generic meaning. Thorlac Turville-​Petre finds three languages ‘perceived as different in function and character’ by the copyist of Harley 2253, who deploys them, Fein concurs, in generic manners ‘deemed appropriate for each linguistic medium’.100 Anglo-​ Norman operates as a normative default in these books, with Latin and Middle English items constituting departures from this baseline.101 In structural terms, the Harley manuscript occupies a middle ground between autonomous blocks and linguistic commingling, with some sections containing texts entirely (Quires 1–​4) or chiefly (Quires 12–​13) in French, others largely in English (Quires 7–​8) or with a slim majority in Latin (Quire 15), but most switching tongues regularly. Just as important as the Harley manuscript’s trilingual complexion are several other orders of miscellaneity. To say so sounds banal, but crucial is brute quantity. A  second defining aspect of the insular miscellany as encountered c.1250–​1350 is that there are many, even a multitude of texts captured between such an artefact’s covers. To copy only a few items or one long work—​however shaggy, diverse, and multipartite—​ means a qualitatively different kind of volume. Typically in this family of codices, texts are short, yet items retain a sense of their own sovereignty. As Boffey and Edwards point out, ‘the notion of a “book” as a framework or repository for a group of works … has special resonance in relation to short texts’, insofar as ‘few short pieces can have any longevity’ without at least booklet compilation. An impetus for assemblage can be sought in ‘efforts to gather such works together for presentation in more durable forms’. The miscellany’s foundational essence as a literary-​codicological form, therefore, lies to some degree in its service as a ‘programmed framework’ designed to ‘[hold] short works together’—​especially those ‘otherwise too short to be easily stored for retrieval’.102 If the presence of short texts helps determine book character, even more determinative is how a codex blends textual types, which is to say, how it serves as a repository for multiple genres. This forms aspect three of the Harley-​type miscellany. In her recent wide-​frame taxonomy of the form, Connolly allows for miscellanies in which ‘mixture of contents might include [only] material of the same type’, with variation coming exclusively in language and/​or medium. Alternately, miscellany contents ‘might be written in a single language’ with ‘texts themselves … of a mixed

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nature’.103 But, just as multilingualism constitutes an essential feature of codices in Harley 2253’s affinity, so too are such books marked by significant mixing of genre as well as of textual medium. Such hybridity is frequent, more so than in other classes of codex. Depending on factors ranging from exemplar availability to the proclivities of a patron, miscellanies may display strong or weak degrees of linguistic or generic clumping, and slight or pronounced thematic organization. Compared with their continental counterparts, insular multi-​text manuscripts present a less than orderly mélange. Harley scholars have dwelt much on the distortions produced by compartmentalization, for even by period standards, our feature manuscript is unusually variegated in its arrangement of genres. A fourth defining aspect of miscellany form as embodied by Harley 2253 and its compeers is such books’ inclination towards literariness. For if pre-​plague miscellanies include a variety of texts, it is also the case that they are ‘essentially concerned’ with literary materials.104 In recent years the category of literature has been contested, with some preferring ‘medieval writing’ as an umbrella term, the better to embrace genres and modes (devotional texts, courtesy literature, administrative documents, craft manuals, religious apocrypha) marginalized by traditional terminology.105 Put another way, manuscripts like ours preserve practical and institutional materials alongside what are, patently, more aesthetic or imaginative ones, with a certain preference—​but not necessarily ideological priority—​towards the latter. Such categories collapse under critical pressure. And yet the greater a collection’s felt literariness or seeming concern for formal artistry (whether at the level of verbal craft or codicological unity), the likelier that volume is to have been accorded preservationist treatment by custodians of the English nation’s cultural inheritance. It is for precisely this reason that the Harley manuscript has attracted consistent attention over the centuries. Bahr has recently proposed how ‘literary form and materialist history might be brought into more fruitful collaboration’ in study of the medieval miscellany.106 Bahr is unusual in interrogating ‘the lexicon of intentionality’ that continues to inform materialist inquiry, underlying as it does ‘many of the binary oppositions used to describe [literary] manuscripts’.107 His genial allowance of the subjective dimension to reading compilationally—​that ‘each reader must determine … whether such an object adds up to more than the sum of its parts’—​is salutary, but so too is Connolly’s reminder

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that ‘[our] modern insistence on coherence and clear organizational principles … is not necessarily paralleled in medieval books’.108 A fifth defining feature of the insular miscellany before the Black Death concerns how the manuscripts most like Harley 2253 share certain physical qualities. Size is the most obvious—​for much as commonplace books of the Tudor era incline towards a (narrow) format befitting their (mercantile) functions and milieu, the provincial anthologies of c.1250–​ 1350 possess a common tendency towards capacious, though not massive, proportions. The Harley comparables listed above are mostly medium to large bifolio volumes: smaller than ecclesiastical service-​books, administrative registers, and monumental display-​folios, but larger and/​or thicker (and thus less easily portable) than quarto-​and octavo-​sized devotional aids, scholars’ notebooks, and the like. Their dimensions roughly correspond, if not always their bulk. In number of leaves they range between 64 (Harley 913) and 261 (Cotton Caligula A.ix), with Harley 2253—​at 141—​towards the middle. Given binding vagaries in medieval and modern times alike, it seems unwise to trust in any manuscript’s present-​day extent. Better to rely on Alexandra Gillespie’s observation that fascicular production appears to be a feature common to medieval miscellanies.109 Insular miscellanies also tend to possess few deluxe features. Typically, illustration is infrequent, and inexpertly done—​even if a book’s layout and scribal execution are professionally competent. Decoration tends to be modest. Diagrams and tables appear when intrinsic to a copied text. Collectively, the upshot of these shared physical features has been to reconfirm the conclusions of provenance scholars concerning miscellany milieux. The question of their perceived literary nature, when combined with physical make-​up, introduces a sixth signature aspect of the medieval miscellany: how, via their archiving of disparate texts and genres, these books enact a commingling of sacred and secular modes. Frankis has noted how Digby 86, Harley 2253, and related manuscripts collude with one another by being ‘in some sense religious’ in content.110 Yet even if books of this sort must be distinguished from categorically religious collections (such as Laud 108, and later, Vernon and Audelay), Frankis’ observation can be extended much further. For late thirteenth-​and early fourteenth-​century miscellanies go to extremes in their capacity for accommodating worldviews that are at once robustly secular and, simultaneously, committed to sacred outcomes. In a word, they display what Barbara Newman has termed a ‘crossover’ spirit. Although sacred and secular ‘confront each other in multifarious ways’ throughout

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the Middle Ages, crucial for Newman is that ‘the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche’. Even ‘to parody the sacred is emphatically to engage with it’: the latter ‘might be viewed with skeptical, profane, or jaded eyes, but it was still the sacred’.111 Medieval crossover’s ‘aesthetic of inclusiveness’ makes this pervasive phenomenon an exceptionally good fit with the codicological form at hand. For as Newman notes, ‘the mingling of genres is endemic to crossover [productions]’, both via genre hybridity and in mixing of textual types. Harley 2253 exhibits crossover tendencies almost everywhere, but certain sections instantiate the ‘dialectical relationship’ Newman identifies with particular intensity (Quires #7–​9, for example, which highlight poetic interplay ‘between courtly and spiritual discourses on love’).112 A book like Harley 2253 requires audiences who are flexible enough to countenance its unspooling of counterpoised visions. Put another way:  its commingled sacred/​ secular hermeneutics ‘likely taught readers to appreciate moral ambiguity’, insofar as the ‘best reading strategy’ in such cases involves ‘the cultivation of double judgment’.113 Recognition of the Harley manuscript’s crossover nature leads to our seventh and eighth aspects of the pre-​plague miscellany: the connected matters of such books’ production contexts and early interpretive communities. With regard to aspect seven, a manuscript’s copying and compilation dynamics, one characteristic that sets these household compendia apart from other orders of miscellaneous codex (the scholar’s notebook, the preacher’s handbook, the merchant’s commonplace book) is that, typically, collections like ours take the form they do as a result of coordination between lay patrons and ‘clerics in partly secular environments’.114 Such appears to have been the case in the Ludlow-​ area production of the Harley manuscript during the 1330s, though it applies differently at Redmarley d’Abitot, 35 miles south-​east in Worcestershire, where a generation or two earlier (c.1271–​1283) Digby 86 was compiled by a layman less clearly connected to clerical circles.115 Other Harley comparables show pronounced lay/​ clerical mixing.116 One or other of these aligned parties will have operated as procurer, maintaining relations with outside producers, owners, and/​or transmitters of texts. Clerks in a client position (household chaplains, vicars, canons, beneficed priests) may also act as ‘literary’ or ‘authorial scribes’, whether in an editorial capacity or as textual producers of near-​ authorial dimension, by exerting influence over layout, selection,

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and arrangement; translation, redaction, or dilation of items; and so on.117 Such actors together put literary principles into physical practice, via compilation, at the level of the codicological artefact. Harley 2253’s main scribe has become known as a copyist of zestful personality, and much detail been collected concerning the gentry or lesser baronial households likely to have hosted production of the book. Nonetheless, the ways and means of textual transmission (how items made their way to Ludlow) and of codicological assembly (who bound the quires in their present order, and under what conditions) remain open questions. Various implications flow from trilingual insular miscellanies’ production ‘in and for’ lay households and other ‘mixed and marginal milieus’, chief among them the principle that any item preserved in such a volume possesses meanings pertaining to not just one, but multiple and proliferating textual communities.118 The eighth operative aspect of this kind of book is that miscellany audiences are nothing if not blended. The communities that produce and encounter them tend to be significantly mixed in composition. Men and women; lay and clerical; the provincial and the travelled; gentle-​born, retainers, and servant classes: all number among the heterogeneous body of potential listeners for assemblages like these. Any text copied into Harley 2553 retains the trace of audience-​ functions pertaining to earlier, later, or otherwise located copyings. That is, a poem emanating from a cathedral school, curial, or university setting (or deriving from a metropolitan London, continental French, Norman-​Hibernian, or other regional milieu) does not shed such affiliations simply because it accrues a new listenership in a Ludlow-​area gentle household. At the centre of all provenance inquiries lie unique literary-​ documentary items, which is to say, medieval texts, in the specific forms they take in extant manuscripts. Flowing in opposite directions from such textualized grounding points are two affiliated systems, which Radulescu terms ‘back-​ processes’ and ‘forward-​ processes’ of manuscript codicology. Both bear upon miscellany interpretation crucially.119 Above we addressed the back-​processes, or conditions of production, that appear standard for books of Harley 2253’s sort. The forward-​processes of post-​copying circulation and consumption relevant for miscellanies, however, affect their literary-​historical assessment even more profoundly. Included here are the various means by which initial audiences, other period readers, intervening antiquarians, and modern scholars, in turn, affix meaning to the items they encounter in multi-​text manuscripts.

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A ninth definitive feature of the c.1250–​ 1350 miscellany is that even a famous one like the Harley manuscript exerts negligible impact on ensuing literary culture. Insular society re-​ boots itself after the Black Death, such that the influence of collections like these proves minimal in years to follow, notwithstanding the efforts of periodic recovery projects to tell another story. The treasures of pre-​plague multilingual miscellanies, productions by and large provincial, weren’t much known to later medieval and early modern audiences, with their metropolitan and increasingly pronounced Chaucerian proclivities. When—​not long after completion, it would seem—​Harley 2253 stops serving its patron household as a live-​access repository for practical edification and literary entertainment, and becomes instead an antiquarian curiosity, it functions chiefly as a representative of vanished folkways, linguistic traits, and ethnic-​nationalist virtues. Despite advocacy from some quarters, modern tastes also play a part in miscellanies’ less than robust reputation, and their texts’ ‘[relegation] to the margins of scholarly inquiry’.120 If ‘compilations shake up [inherited] narratives’, their potential for disruption derives chiefly from how accredited readers have discounted them.121 The flatness of their literary-​historical stock, whatever intrinsic merits or historical value they may possess, also ties into miscellany texts’ propensity towards anonymity: the tenth aspect of the form as Harley and its cohort represent it. Yet ‘poems without names’—​or historicizable author profiles to attach to them—​need not be forgotten poems. In certain contexts, anonymity and impersonality may be embraced as positively ‘distinctive qualities’ of literary production.122 Print-​and digital-​era literary anonymity has come increasingly to be examined, but little work theorizes medieval anonymity as such—​despite the period’s sheer ubiquity of unattributed texts. Although native throughout medieval textual culture, anonymity occurs more often in some genres than others—​with miscellany staples like lyric, social complaint, and devotions prominent among them. For Robert J. Griffin, an underappreciated facet of print culture lies in how tactical withholding of the authorial name provides cover, enabling an extension of literary discourse into realms otherwise prohibited. The Middle Ages, employed as primordial bedrock against which the sophistications of modern print anonymity may be discerned, demonstrate more conversance with such a paradigm than Griffin allows; yet even so medieval miscellanies present another kind of case.123 A handful of authorial names attach to Harley manuscript texts, owing usually to attribution

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elsewhere. But the vast majority of Harley items—​including all its famous ones—​elude ascription. As Radulescu observes, the typically ‘anonymous status’ of the miscellany ‘[poses] problems’; for if ‘canonical authors … raise the status of a multi-​text manuscript in modern scholarship’, the absence of famous names lowers it.124 Rather than regretting how anonymity constrains interpretation, better to recognize that the pre-​Chaucerian disinclination to belabour authorship constitutes a feature rather than a bug in the system: that is, another aspect of the c.1250–​1350 miscellany, intrinsic to the form’s leveraging of meaning. An eleventh hallmark of the miscellany as found in the century before plague involves another kind of obscurity—​for books in Harley’s class share a prevailing regional orientation. Some scholars regard the trilingual miscellany as a phenomenon specific to England’s South-​West Midlands, as a result of the clumped provenance of surviving exemplars.125 But whether or not one commits to such exclusivity, the commitment of these compilations to social aggregation at a regional scale is unmistakable—​a sensibility often aligned with a taste for pro-​baronial politics. The generosity of embrace that characterizes the miscellany makes hard and fast claims (as to audience positionality and social ideology) unwise. Yet at base, extant artefacts in this line tend to array themselves against metropolitan interests and royalist projects in favour of deregulatory protocols, local administration, and shire-​based, gentry-​led commissions. In a word, miscellanies like Harley 2253 are not—​ contrary to 1990s arguments—​prevailingly ‘nationalist’ in social-​ political orientation.126 Later we will examine literary regionality in the context of territorial categories like nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and localism conjoined to it. For now, it is enough to register Boffey and Edwards’ point that ‘distinct regional factors’ play an ‘[essential] role’ in the production of books like Harley 2253—​and so too in assessment of their literary-​historical implications.127 The importance to miscellanies of regional perspectives does not mean that collections like ours reject the overarching claims of feudal internationalism or Christian universalism, those mentalité foundations which, per consensus view, experience a fatal fracturing with the arrival of pestilence and its apocalyptic challenge. When confronting the ideological dynamics of medieval ‘crossover’, we noted the privileged, definitively prior position of the sacred in medieval literary culture. Another way to distil the matter, as Eva von Contzen and Anke Bernau have done, is to conceptualize ‘sanctity [itself] as literature’ in medieval Britain. For

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Harley Manuscript Geographies, the next step is to press further upon the eschatological and cosmographical dimensions of the sacred as a category.128 Here we encounter our penultimate aspect of the pre-​plague literary miscellany: the form’s subscription, if by reflex more than policy, to a belief-​system suffused by the prospect of redemption. Compilations like these don’t simply ‘include’ a spiritual dimension, as one stray strand among others; it is something more than that ‘all are in some sense religious’. Ad hoc in execution yet marked by ‘cohesion of some kind’,129 insular miscellanies like Harley 2253 build sanctified worlds upon incarnate ground. Von Contzen and Bernau’s consideration of sanctity from the perspective of its ‘literariness’ and literary potential, when brought to bear upon the phenomenon of the multi-​text codex, sheds necessary light upon Harley texts’ persistent appeals to some realm other than the mundane—​to that experiential precinct which lies beyond the material. My diction above (‘sanctified worlds’, ‘incarnate ground’) recalls Cannon, who employs the term ‘grounds’ as his title keyword, to highlight how the ‘land of Britain’ resides ‘at the foundations of … early Middle English’, comprising ‘a common ground in the most basic sense of that phrase’.130 That it is the ‘peculiar topography’ of the South-​West Midlands and the Welsh Marches which tends to serve as the inaugurating ‘grounds of English Literature’ has special resonance for Harley 2253 and other collections from these regions.131 Scahill’s principle that miscellanies are ‘more than simply a repository of a variety of items’ means that such productions rely heavily upon certain roster selections in their hermeneutic undertakings.132 As we shall find, especially active in producing meaning within the Harley manuscript are certain keystone texts which demonstrate a shared desire to locate the holy, and thus make eternity proximate. If, as per von Contzen and Bernau, sanctity may be said to function as literature in late medieval Britain, Harley 2253 effects such a process by means of geographical place. There aren’t always lyrics in collections like these—​or romances, political songs, or debates. But invariably there are saints: shrines to them, relics of them, routes towards them, prayers for them, oaths by them, and lives narrating them. Simply put, saints constitute a feature of the form—​and here we reach the thirteenth and final aspect of the medieval miscellany, in the c.1250–​1350 variant to which Harley bears witness. This manuscript is no legendary (unlike Laud 108)  and, despite a lot of death and dying (see Chapter  4), no martyrology. Nor, unlike more fully religious

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miscellanies (Vernon, Audelay), does it so enthusiastically privilege devotional performance and penitential modelling as to drown out other modes of expression. Still, saints play a crucial role in the book’s construction of meaning, and in communicating whatever cultural stance, existential position, or community vision one may assert it to possess. Miscellany saints run the gamut: Latin and vernacular; foreign and domestic; national and local; canonical and popular; biblical and medieval; religious and political; male and female; plus Harley’s speciality, spiritual and carnal. Our codex contains multiple hagiography variants, but beyond even these, saints can be found throughout. Harley texts that aren’t themselves vitae [lives] invoke, swear by, describe, and otherwise reference saintly bodies and relics, in terms devotional, political, parodic, erotic, geographical, economic, calendrical, and otherwise. Variety is paramount, yet the selection of vitae gathered into Harley 2253 confirms the insular miscellany’s prevailing geographical orientation. As my Epilogue will show, the Harley scribe’s tactical inscription into his books of regionally identified saints—​figures possessing an inherent geopolitical valence—​serves to sanctify his literary-​codicological endeavours, as well as impart local-​communal sanction to them. As we shall discover, sanctified bodies (those of factional rebels, downtrodden labourers, and absent lovers included) and the holy places they inhabit (lyric bowers and pilgrimage sites not least) lend cohesion to a form that is always being pulled apart. The centrality of saints to the insular miscellany is particularly evident in Laud Misc. 108, a late thirteenth-​century manuscript of South-​West Midlands (Worcestershire/​Gloucestershire) provenance that, as noted above, contains an early version of the South English Legendary (SEL). While Laud 108 is not the collection most proximate to Harley 2253 in all respects, this codex preserves the only other copy of the Middle English romance King Horn (Harley item #70) among other shared features. Catherine Sanok has shown that while the figure of the saint bears a variable relation to the South English Legendary’s structure as a ‘multi-​part narrative’, such figures consistently authorize these collections, insofar as SEL localizations of bodily sanctity help establish vernacular ‘forms of community’.133 Saints also serve as binding agents (in a territorial more than formal sense) for Kimberly Bell, who proposes that Laud 108’s gathering together of ‘holie mannes liues’ [holy men’s lives] characterizes the emergent entity of ‘England’ as, effectively, a conglomeration of ‘its saints’.134 Sanctified thereby,

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the realm becomes a social/​topographical collectivity that is textually conveyed and codicologically bound: whole as well as holy. Sarah Breckenridge pushes further upon literary geography’s connection to community formation by examining the importance of ‘cartographic language’ to the SEL, especially the ‘authorizing function’ of its grounded references to ‘place’. The Diocese of Worcester emerges as an ecclesiastical and social epicentre in Laud 108’s codicological ‘mapping [of] identity’.135 But Breckenridge’s proposition has arguably greater purchase a province further west, where in the early fourteenth century the Harley manuscript enacts an associative relationship with the overlapping ecclesiastical and local governmental units of Hereford Diocese and Herefordshire. Geographical factors As Julia Boffey and Tony Edwards observe, the ‘role of distinct regional factors’ in their production makes it ‘unhelpful to think of’ multi-​text manuscripts in overly ‘purposive’ terms. Since they are ‘shaped by forms of local availability’, ‘doubtless geography was a factor in a number of miscellanies’.136 This section builds on Boffey and Edwards to suggest how geography as a literary-​ historical category proves crucial to appraisal of an artefact like Harley 2253. Geography not only factors into production decisively, but also influences period reception and modern valuation. Interpretive propositions originating in the borderlands between cultural geography and literary history provide a means by which to perceive the hermeneutic processes that insular miscellanies enact. Above I cited Cannon on the ‘role of place in … early Middle English’. But if literary form in this ‘anomalous’ period develops partly as ‘a function of geography’, literary place ‘also has its own form: it is not simply the shape of the individual objects it locates, but of the idea of so placing them’. Matters of topography, location, and territoriality—​the material and epistemological ‘grounds that early Middle English texts drew upon’—​consequently drive Cannon’s account of how ‘English Literature’ did not, contrary to traditional perceptions, ‘for all intents and purposes [cease] to exist’ after 1066.137 If Cannon seeks to suggest how ‘such equations are more parochial than the texts they dismiss’,138 Hanna agitates against the status quo more openly—​objecting outright to that most engrained of phrases, ‘English Literature’. ‘Better’, he suggests, would be the term ‘literature in England’.139 Employing ‘English’ as a boundary

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term, Hanna uses geography to legitimize multilinguality, ‘since [English Literature] might be written in any of three languages’ during the Middle Ages.140 Hanna’s position has appeal for certain (reformist) strains of medievalist, because it contravenes the institutional gatekeeping of those who, throughout the history of the discipline, have tended to disenfranchise texts not written in English, along the way to suppressing geography as a category of analysis altogether. Nicholas Howe, whose Writing the Map of Anglo-​ Saxon England (2007) helped establish ‘mapping’ as an accepted literary-​ medievalist practice, stands at an opposite extreme to any denial of geographical difference. Because ‘a sense of place was far more likely to have been created, transmitted, and preserved in Anglo-​ Saxon England through the use of language than through any type of visual representation’, Howe maintains that his period’s ‘sense of cartography’ was ‘textual rather than visual’: ‘it wrote maps far more often than it drew them’.141 The era’s most ‘complex and multivalent visions of place’ appear in ‘the great Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts’ Howe calls ‘books of elsewhere’, multi-​text collections of which the topical range, generic diversity, literary orientation, and sacred/​secular intercalation strongly resemble the insular miscellanies discussed above.142 If Howe’s cultural geography amounts to ‘looking for Anglo-​Saxon England’,143 it is symptomatic that he ‘[writes] his map’ using miscellanies as cartographic stand-​ins. To the extent that scholars address geography as a factor in study of the later miscellany, they have done so chiefly as a matter conditioning provenance and text selection.144 Wendy Scase advocates for a more explicitly geographical approach to literary-​ codicological study. In launching a project she describes as ‘an experiment in manuscript geography’, Scase argues that ‘[no] history of the manuscript book [can] be told without thick description of its geographies’. For Scase, ‘each aspect of manuscript materiality has both geographical and historical coordinates:  the manuscript book is the product of a multitude of processes whose practice always has its own geographical as well as historical individuality’.145 Contributors to her enterprise ‘do not adopt any single model of manuscript geography’, yet operate ‘in a tradition’ of medievalist scholarship committed to the ‘idea of literary geography’.146 Scase sketches a subfield genealogy of such practice. Elizabeth Salter’s pioneering 1970s work on late medieval literary ‘mappings’ (including ‘the geographical distribution of literary activity’) and

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on ‘internationalism’ as a force in insular culture (before and after the Black Death) forms one important strand.147 Comprising another is work on dialectology, as epitomized in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (1986–​) and Richard Beadle’s accompanying ‘Literary Geography of Later Medieval Norfolk’. Beadle argues that vernacular literary production displays a systematically demonstrable geographical ‘character’: features ‘characteristic of’ one or another ‘area’ that is linguistically and culturally distinct. Beadle and LALME’s ‘concept of literary geography’ as regionalism is embodied in ‘surviving manuscripts’ and their ‘written forms’, as these ‘mesh with’ an area’s ‘[institutional and] economic history’; ‘prevailing social systems’; demography; ‘historical geography’; and ‘growth of literary patronage’.148 A generation ago this concept of ‘regional cultural identity’—​ especially as suggested by England’s West Midlands and Welsh Marches—​‘exercised a powerful attraction to scholars as a potential counterpoise to the dominant culture of the metropolis’.149 More recent efforts deploy geography ‘in new ways as a principle of analysis’. One way they do so—​as in the work of John J. Thompson—​ is by ‘mapping the networks within which the manuscripts were produced and read’, thus prioritizing ‘traffic and transition over location’ and emphasizing ‘cross-​border [dynamics]’ and ‘relations between regions’.150 Efforts like these supplement the work medievalists have done on literary representation (geographies of genre, allusion, and narrative structure) and on historical-​ contextual matters (aristocratic family-​networks, institutional patronage, and documentary provenance). More might be said in surveying our subfield’s ‘cartographic turn’.151 But to name-​check all possibilities in a kaleidoscope of work falling under the Library of Congress rubric ‘geography in literature’152 is less useful than to flag the notion that practices in manuscript philology, medieval literary studies, and miscellany studies all generate increased traction when ‘informed by geographical parameters’.153 Pre-​ plague miscellanies’ similarity to one another in provenance and orientation requires that we attend further to regionality. Seeking to interrogate ‘[literary-​ historical] accounts that reflexively treat the nation as the default unit of analysis’, and noting the ‘elisions of the regional’ in postcolonial medievalism, in 2009 Robert W.  Barrett, Jr. championed a return to ‘analysis of regional culture’, in an updated ‘dialogic’ form. To examine medieval England ‘from the vantage point of an explicitly regional literature’ offers an ‘opportunity for revisionary critique of English

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national identity’, Barrett argues, since ‘provincial texts … complicate persistent academic binaries of metropole and margin, centre and periphery, and nation and region’.154 In delineating thirteen aspects of the insular miscellany, I  described the Harley manuscript as being, on the whole, something other than ‘nationalist’ in its geopolitical positioning. But such is true of the book’s readers and texts even if their ‘sense of regional distinction’ does not rise to the ‘fully developed’ level that characterizes Cheshire writing—​a consequence of that palatinate’s ‘[pronounced] awareness of itself as a community separate’.155 Whereas ‘regions willingly subordinate themselves to the needs of the nation’ in work by 1990s scholars, Barrett’s study highlights ‘contestation, instances in which the interests of region oppose those of nation’, as well as regional texts’ ‘simultaneous awareness’ of local and international contexts.156 This ‘emphasis on the multiform character of regional identification’ connects Barrett’s focalized work with the transnational approaches of Kathy Lavezzo and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, both of whom stress ‘the variety of nationalisms present in medieval England’ while seeking ‘to emplace the insular Middle Ages within more capacious analytical frames’.157 Lavezzo’s collection (2004) bears witness to the Middle Ages’ ‘construction of multiple, contingent and conflicting “Englands”, each geared toward the needs of different social groups’, while Cohen’s (2008) reimagines medieval literary regionality by ‘resisting the impulse to language separation’, producing thereby ‘a wider, pan-​ insular perspective’ that ‘[restores] multiplicity to the island’. Such perspectives enable critics ‘to map’ how insular texts ‘[challenge] the wholeness, autonomy, insularity and inevitability’ both of ‘the political entity we now call the British Isles’ and of its implicated domestic partner, English Literature.158 My book bears a portmanteau title in order to marshal the keywords of Fein’s edition (Complete Harley Manuscript) and Scase’s collection (Essays in Manuscript Geography). I mention my study’s grounding-​points—​one prong textual, the other methodological—​ because before proceeding to the geographical and literary-​ historical implications of Harley 2253’s compilation, we must first confront cartography. As any heritage tourist knows, early fourteenth-​century Hereford is more famous for its Cathedral Map than for any surviving literary manuscript, even one of Harley’s standing. Yet Harley Manuscript Geographies foregoes analysis of graphic cartography. In previous publications I have examined visual mapping at length.159 But as geographer Keith Lilley affirms,

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‘mapping through texts’, no less than through images, ‘reflects … a “spatial sensibility” permeating medieval lives and cultures’. For Lilley, there is ‘no neat line separating’ one from the other: ‘textual geographies’ and ‘visual geographies’ get assimilated by medieval audiences as ‘mutually constitutive ways through which the world is understood and perceived’.160 In line with Lilley, Sylvia Tomasch highlights ‘the reciprocal interaction of two associate processes’ in late medieval culture: ‘the textualization of territories and the territorialization of texts’. Parallel yet intertwined, these literary-​cartographical processes help establish ‘the inscriptive foundation of all geographic endeavor’.161 Yet for all their interaction, graphic maps and literary mappings remain theoretically distinct. As Harley 2253’s exclusion of illustrative and diagrammatic material underscores, the schematic and the discursive are separable modes of representing geography, and may or may not mingle in a given artefact. Most medieval maps accompany or are adjoined by written texts. However, the opposite is by no means the case. Later miscellanies sometimes include maps,162 but the volumes we have surveyed do not. My Epilogue will trace how Harley 2253’s codicological mapping of sanctity invokes mappamundi cartography as a mode of regional devotion, but it doesn’t do so pictorially. Harley Manuscript Geographies is, finally, a book about a book. It is to that foundational particularity—​Harley 2253’s configuration as a manuscript miscellany—​that we must return. Part and whole It is no longer credible to dismiss Harley 2253 as ‘haphazard’, ‘nothing more or less than’ a chance amalgam of ‘whatever interested’ its producer.163 Consensus now lauds the compilation as ‘unusually deliberative in its … organization’, in ‘ways both local and large’, with implications for medieval compilatory practice overall.164 ‘The most extraordinary aspect of this literary artefact’, for Fein, ‘rests not in its individual items’, ‘but rather in … how the scribe selected and arranged [those] items’.165 There are good reasons to acquiesce to such urgings. And yet, like others of its sort, the book is fascicular: constituted by independent blocks and modular quires as much as by the binding leaves (early fourteenth century) and leather-​bound boards (1963) that now define its extent. As O’Rourke observes, the variegated booklets that comprise its main scribe’s output across three manuscripts ‘do not necessarily

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appear in the order in which he copied or obtained them’.166 Even within each codex, the Harley scribe’s local tactics vary, with ‘textual clusters’ following different organizing principles in different quires.167 Nor, despite carry-​over between some blocks, do layout decisions (columns, ruling, rubrication, lineation, verse refrains) remain consistent. All told, his variety of page solutions suggests he ‘collected and copied booklets while exemplars were available’, assembling ‘codices when there was sufficient material [for] a decent-​sized book’.168 Harley manuscript interpretation remains at a point ‘where we know the parts better than the whole’, to the extent that insights into its ‘codicological nature’ tend to ‘arise in investigations of either a specific topic or a local effect’.169 Material philologists privilege codex-​level inquiry, as may be seen in (editor) Fein’s views on (editorial qualities like) selection and arrangement being Harley 2253’s ‘most extraordinary’ features, not, as an antiquarian, poet, or cultural historian might maintain, ‘its individual items’.170 Perspectives on the Harley miscellany espoused by those less invested in ‘whole’ books, by contrast, might foreground the recalcitrant energies of its diverse texts. ‘He is quite right to point out that to read Harley 2253 properly is to read layout with content’: thus does one book historian co-​sponsor another’s approach.171 It would be foolhardy to disagree. And yet, there are dangers in reading any miscellany too properly—​especially if a mood of congratulation as to methodological rightness requires that we devalue Harley’s trove of individual works, and encroach thereby upon their claims to textual sovereignty. To read the Harley manuscript ‘properly’—​with a privileging of the material book container and with heightened sensitivity to layout—​would appear to require not reading its constituent items with similarly heightened attunement to how these texts might wriggle free from the interpretive frame that an act of compilation works to impose. Surely reasonable parties can agree that there must be more than one ‘right’ and proper way to read medieval material (including the decision, regnant for decades, to ignore the codices within which items of interest were preserved, along with their social/​historical contexts). It doesn’t take a New Critic to observe that texts, even short anonymous ones, aren’t obliged to be tractable. Fein lays her methodological cards on the table: ‘The assumption I make is that the compiler laboured as an artistic arranger of whole texts, a managing editor who sought to control how specific

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pieces were presented in sequence and by visual layout.’172 I largely agree; such is one way I approach Harley texts. But to seek after a ‘comprehensive understanding of the whole book’—​to read, as Bahr recommends, compilationally—​is not the only interpretive goal possible; nor is a producer’s ‘plan’ or ‘purpose’ the only story to be told for any literary artefact, least of all a miscellany along the fascicular lines I’ve described.173 My chapters’ tracing of multiple, overlapping, sometimes conflicting Harley geographies will tack between miscellany-​attuned inquiry (wherein we labour to discern the ‘working principles’ of the compilation)174 and approaches from other domains (wherein we will triangulate among text, genre, historical context, critical theory, cultural geography, literary historiography, and more). Harley’s collected texts activate a plethora of meanings beyond those purposed by their Ludlow copyist. But such proliferations are never not inclusive of those falling within his scribal purview, so I don’t propose to dispense with attention to this agent’s materialized efforts. The plurality of approach characterizing work in literary geography parallels the situation in manuscript studies. And certainly, there can be ‘no settled pursuit of a single trajectory of interpretation or ideology’ when it comes to assessing the miscellany.175 The disaggregated fascicles that underpin codices like Harley (and other genres heavily marked by miscellaneity) show how ‘even our idea that a physical book should be a closed, fixed artifact is an artificial one’.176 One way to challenge the supremacy of the unitary ‘whole book’ is to recognize how, just as the ‘boundary between “collection” and “notebook” ’ is not fixed but fluid in medieval settings,177 so may distinctions between the extremes of literary-​historical repository and period-​bound household book be unsustainable. Early functions must be granted their due. But they needn’t unduly constrain critical undertakings, and ought not dictate what readings of the past are deemed permissible. Even if we grant the importance of selection and arrangement as such, audiences don’t have to choose between competing visions as to the nature of the artefacts under study. Much as with sacred/​secular ‘crossover’, individual parties may sample possibilities—​reading by item, booklet, textual cluster, generic type, or topical thread, or reading in terms of a codicological whole, as situations and proclivities dictate.178 Likeliest of all are readers able to hold multiple perspectives in mind simultaneously. Harley 2253 can be a compilation of uncommonly intelligent crafting, while also serving, more prosaically, as a repository of literary treasures and historical curiosities. Less

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prescriptively still, the manuscript’s (incompletely filled) pages can offer themselves as empty territory—​as with Scribe B’s ‘tendency to use up’ his inherited quires’ ‘blank space’.179 So too did Scribe C utilize an empty column and a half (on the dorse of Quire 5) for paint recipes in English prose.180 However ambitious Scribe B’s literary/​devotional programme may have been, and however deliberate his exercise of editorial control, the subtleties of the project fail to resonate for this earliest documented user, who, in line with later though not recent readers, sees Harley 2253 as simply a place to store data: in this case, techniques for decoration of other, fancier books. The evidence is slender (some finishing touches in his hand upon Scribe B’s latest items), but Scribe C ‘might [even] have taken a role in the compilation of Harley 2253 in its present form, collecting it from booklets, or sets of booklets, that existed among Scribe B’s effects after his death’.181 The Harley manuscript stands out as a literary manuscript for the essential constructedness of its identity. This holds true whether it be judged an anthology of rare crafting, or dismissed as a ‘chaotic’ storehouse, precious only to the extent that it preserves rare documents.182 If its reception history teaches anything, it is that Harley 2253’s meaning—​like that of the miscellany as a form—​changes over time, in step with shifting perceptions about its ‘nature’ and ‘character’ as a codex. The phenomenon in our sights, many would now hold, is less a document of single-​minded purpose than an assemblage of semi-​connected parts, alternately ‘purposive’ and ‘accretive’ in its construction.183 Put more functionally, it is a gathering of curious, sometimes excellent items—​devotional, poetic, political, instructional, and otherwise—​available for ex post facto shaping. Physically as well as metaphorically speaking, the Harley manuscript gets sutured together by those who read it. This suturing process starts with the Harley scribe himself, in conjunction with others involved in its conception, resourcing, and fashioning: patrons, literary contacts, textual transmitters. But the process never ends. It would be a missed opportunity not to trade on the material-​ formal tension that is thus constitutive of Harley 2253. Any inquiry into the nature of the book must sooner or later take account of how the codex’s sections stand frequently at odds with one another. For every generic strand, linguistic cluster, or thematic juxtaposition that draws a quire together, or ingeniously bridges a pair of them, there is another piece of evidence (or alternate reading of the same) that shifts the perspective, recalibrating our focus

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and forcing the jaws of unity apart. Textual coherence, as generations of deconstructive technique have shown, always undoes itself, revealing interpretive stability to be a fond perception. The very features chosen to exemplify one understanding of the collection, seen as pointing inexorably to this or that conclusion—​it is an ad hoc miscellany; it is an intentional anthology; it embodies native Anglo-​Germanic spirit; its essence lies in Francophone cosmopolitanism—​can be recast as evidence corresponding with another, competing vision of the Harley manuscript. In response to the tendency of such an assemblage to pull itself apart, generations of commentators have sought to impart unto Harley a sense of unity; to replace its anarchic miscellaneity with codicological cohesion; to compose from its divergent strands a woven composite. Readers don’t always admit that they’re searching, but they seem always to find what they’re looking for in Harley 2253. What we see in the Harley manuscript, and value in it, is a function of the vantage point from which we regard it. Of course, so has it always been in medieval literary studies, whether during establishment of the discipline or in contemporary popular medievalism.184 Ways and means Early antiquarian and modern academic exertions, alike, reveal how sutured together is the ‘whole book’ we have become accustomed to calling London, British Library MS Harley 2253—​an artefact which never, to judge by lack of wear, saw much service as a working codex.185 Still, recent work on Harley offers a collective case study in book history’s reinvigorated role within literary studies. Remaining mindful of such dimensions, the chapters to follow track how literary geography, as informed by genre study and philology, by institutional context, and by historiography, can help us apprehend this book of parts. It has become customary to seek in paratextual features and bound-​up matter ‘some larger meaning’,186 to the extent that ‘these days a miscellany volume whose contents seem unrelated to each other’ seems a volume in need of fixing.187 It is ‘all too possible’, Pearsall warns—​in remarks made thirty years on from the Harley assessment with which we began—​ ‘to overestimate the activity of the controlling or guiding intelligence of the scribe-​compiler in the making of [miscellanies]’.188 What drives such overestimation? Commentators have for centuries noted the affinity between compilation and cartography,

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between book-​making and map-​making. As we’ll explore further at book’s end, what the imbrication of text and territory in the Middle Ages illustrates above all is ‘the pervasiveness and potency of geographical desire’—​a force that ‘encompasses an extraordinary array of notions’ but ‘can never be completely or finally gratified’.189 Just as ‘the totalization or wholeness’ to which graphic maps like mappaemundi gesture is ‘necessarily fundamentally flawed’, so too do medieval texts and books engaged in ‘writing the world’ fail to enforce any seamlessly unified vision.190 The miscellany Harley 2253, this book asserts, produces its literary-​ cartographic effect via the constitutive tensions it harnesses: between part and whole; between home and away; and especially between carnal and spiritual, between this-​world and next. Just as literary geography is marked by its diversity of approach, so too are the destinations of Harley Manuscript Geographies multiple. Its four chapters and Epilogue all feature textual geographies, those spatial arguments and interpretive structures that are introduced by genre, by intertextual allusion, and by historical context.191 But each inquiry is also influenced by factors internal to (or activated by) its topic: whether love, death, Jewishness, femaleness, or sainthood. Since one of my points is that such perspectives throw other categories of analysis into relief, the spatial readings in Harley Manuscript Geographies interrelate along multiple axes. Different chapters isolate different social groups for consideration: Hereford clergy, especially bishop’s clerks and diocesan administrators, in Chapter  1; Hereford Jews and their citizen/​ clerk neighbours in Chapter 2, but also their royal and ecclesiastical antagonists; and in Chapter  3, spiralling outward from the woods beside Winchester, young women on the move, plus the men who pursue and seek to contain them—​in medieval conclaves and literary history alike. Chapter  4 addresses those facing death, or with pressing need to prepare for it: anyone who might be aided by manual advice—​ or lyric reflection—​ on proper dying. The Epilogue examines regional saints and how a textual marshalling and framing placement of their Herefordshire habitation provides a sanctified geography that underpins the Harley scribe’s literary-​ codicological pursuits. Exploration of these matters is pursued along overlapping generic routes. The book’s first and fourth chapters, which treat love (familial, erotic, spiritual) and death (an intimacy closely related), both feature ‘Harley Lyrics’. But supporting roles are played by factional political songs (in Chaper 1), which complement them

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semantically and socially; and by instructional death-​culture texts (in Chapter 4), which prepare the ever-​expiring Christian subject for a rendezvous with eternity. Chapter 3 concerns a hybrid poem that combines lyric pastourelle, anti-​feminist debate, fabliau, and travelogue. Chapter 2 surveys Harley items that bear on Jews and their place in a Christian world, finding its focus in a set of biblical paraphrases and Holy Land descriptions to which literary critics rarely attend. The Epilogue treats saints’ vitae and related items, in the context of a more famous later pilgrimage narrative: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Literary genre, in this way, takes shifting form in Harley Manuscript Geographies. So too do my expeditions move between languages—​necessarily so, given the aspects of the miscellany we’ve explored. Chapters 1 and 4 engage the Middle English poems for which Harley is most celebrated, but also enlist their non-​English neighbours and affiliates. Chapters 2 and 3 spotlight lesser-​known materials from the book’s Anglo-​Norman majority, with reflection on language interaction and the reassessment of linguistic-​nationalist cultural history this invites. The Epilogue pursues insular saints and places sanctified, but shows how the Harley scribe begins and ends his compilational project with the authority of ecclesiastical Latin. All told, if Harley 2253 as a miscellany proves ‘macaronic’, individual booklets contribute to this effect in uneven ways.192 Since multilingualism plays out by genre while also influencing codex organization, my chapters touch down at multiple quire landing points. Chapter  1 (‘Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics: the implications of mobility’) pursues poems that cluster in Quires 7–​8. Chapter 2 (‘Captives among us: Harley 2253 and the Jews of medieval Hereford’) has centres of gravity in Quires 10–​11 and 14, the habitat of biblical narratives and topographical descriptions. Chapter 3 (‘Histoire imparfaite: the counterfactual lessons of Gilote et Johane’) concentrates on the last folios of Quire 7, but calls across to Quires 12–​13, which blend kindred materials (lyric, fabliau, débat, conduct literature). Chapter 4 (‘Dying with Harley 2253: last lyric things’) opens with Quire 6’s early existential lyrics; jumps to Quire 15, the book’s penitential closing booklet, with its surge of eschatological anxieties; then culminates in Quire 8–​ 9’s less orthodox lyric devotions. The Epilogue (‘Ye goon to … Hereford? Regional devotion and England’s other St Thomas’) examines the manuscript-​ framing locations that Herefordshire saints inhabit: for Scribe B copies local vitae both at the inauguration of his project (Quire 5) and when, twice (the end of Quire 14,

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the end of Quire 15), he attempts to conclude it. My study’s material and textual sites do not cover Harley 2253 comprehensively, but do range widely across it. To what literary-​historical arrival point does Harley Manuscript Geographies finally deliver us? If the world-​making project of our miscellany begins and ends with saints’ lives, the quires that lie between revel similarly in eroticized bodies and sanctified places, both vernacular and ecclesiastical. Harley 2253’s insistent featuring of crossover between the secular and the sacred, of interchange between the local and the universal, lends cohesion to a codicological form that is always pulling itself  apart. My argument doesn’t build towards its literary-​geographical destination inexorably, as if towards an expository summation. Like the multi-​part document to which it responds, Harley Manuscript Geographies eschews a strict cumulative progression through the materials it treats, in favour of episodic forays which—​ like the quires of a miscellany—​abjure consecutive sequencing. Still, its chapters do work together, affiliating with one another textually and topographically to produce a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. In its refusal to lay out a direct route through the variegated landscape that is Harley 2253, my study resembles the 15-​quire, 7-​block, 120+-​item artefact upon which it is based. It also confirms an insight generated repeatedly by those grappling with miscellany form: that in examining such codices there can be no exclusivity of approach. The take-​away from this book’s journey through Harley 2253, indeed of any encounter with manuscript miscellaneity, is that there can be no ‘clear and coherent’ conclusion. In searching for ‘the key to [its] metanarrative’ we inevitably discover ourselves.193 Connolly and Radulescu describe their volume Insular Books as ‘itself a miscellany of sorts’, while O’Donnell knits together Nichols and Wenzel’s collection by revealing it as ‘a self-​exemplifying artifact. It is a codex miscellany devoted to the study of the codex miscellany.’194 Bahr’s position deserves enshrining: he sees compilation ‘not as an objective codicological quality, but rather as a mode of perceiving such forms so as to discern a meaningful arrangement’.195 I hope that the interpretations offered by Harley Manuscript Geographies can both extend and begin to undo our settled ways of proceeding. To assert that there are any number of new Harley manuscripts out there to discover—​each one meaningfully arranged—​may sound like tired sentiment, stale methodological news. But literary-​ geographical method offers a way to move forward while looking back. To re-​chart Harley

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2253’s mappings of its world—​and of English literary history—​is an exercise long overdue.

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Notes 1 For early description, see Wanley et  al., Catalogue of Harleian Manuscripts, II.585–​591. 2 Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 120. 3 Fletcher et al., 1000 Years. 4 Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 120. 5 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 87. 6 Revard, ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 270. Such assessments have long been standard; Brook, Harley Lyrics (hereafter HL), vii; Fein, Studies,  4–​5. 7 Scase, Manuscript Geography, 1; Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 14. 8 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books,  4–​5. 9 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 11. 10 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 264–​265; Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books,  15–​16. 11 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 5; Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 267. 12 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 1. 13 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 12. 14 Hathaway et al., Fouke, xliv; Revard, ‘Gilote et Johane’, 138–​142. 15 These earlier compilations are London, British Library MS Royal 12.c.xii (c.1320–​ 1340) and MS Harley 273 (c.1314–​1328). Royal 12.c.xii’s major items include redactions (probably by the Harley scribe himself) of the Anglo-​Norman (AN) romance Fouke le Fitz-​Waryn and the Middle English (ME) Short Metrical Chronicle, but is overall ‘even more of a miscellany than Harley [2253]’ (Ker, Facsimile, xx). For description, see Hathaway et al., Fouke. Harley 273 is an administrative and devotional compendium that the main Harley scribe came to treat ‘as his book’, though it was ‘more gathered than copied by him’; Revard, ‘Scribe’, 67–​73. Cf. O’Rourke, ‘Problems of Patronage’, 216–​226. 16 Revard (‘Scribe’) has displaced Ker and Hathaway as the definitive voice on the Harley scribe and his context. 17 Ker and Hathaway regard a secular-​ household context as ‘only [partly] applicable for the Harley/​Royal compiler, who seems to have moved in an episcopal milieu, though his parents may have belonged to the baronial world’; Hathaway et al., Fouke, xl–​xliv; Ker, Facsimile, xx–​xxiii. 18 Revard (‘Scribe’, 26–​28) dismisses the ‘romantic speculation’ linking Harley to episcopal circles, but allows that its copyist ‘had reason to copy seal-​mottoes of Hereford bishops Swinfield and Orleton into a book of his [Royal 12.c.xii] during the 1320s’. 19 Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 120.

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20 For example, Maulsby, ‘Harley Lyrics Revisited’; Duncan, ‘ME Poems in Harley’; Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’; Dove, ‘Lesser-​ Known Poems’; Rock, ‘Romances by the Ludlow Scribe’; Hogan, ‘Critical Study’. 21 Fein, Studies, 10, notes how a collection planned by Robbins (entitled ‘Essays on Harley 2253’) collapsed before publication. 22 Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 120 23 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 2. 24 Fiedler, Love and Death, 17; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 206. 25 Fletcher et al., 1000 Years,  6–​7. 26 Ibid., 6. 27 Hahn, ‘Early Middle English’, 61. 28 Cannon, Grounds, 3. 29 Crane, ‘AN Cultures’, 49–​51. 30 Percy, Reliques, I.ix, II.3–​13. Emphasizing the Harley manuscript’s ‘peculiarities of writing and orthography’ (II.10), Percy further describes A Song of Lewes (#23) as ‘a curious specimen of ancient satire’ (II.3; emphasis added) and introduces The Death of Edward I (#47) (‘[an] antique elegy’) by highlighting the political and devotional ‘modes of thinking peculiar to those times’ (II.10; emphasis added). 31 Percy, Reliques, I.x; Warton, qtd. in Fein, Studies, 3. 32 Wright, Specimens, lxix; Political Songs of England, vii. Three of Wright’s political songs are drawn from Royal 12.c.xii, Harley’s sibling manuscript. 33 Robbins, Historical Poems, xxxiii; see also his Secular Lyrics and Brown’s English Lyrics, Religious Lyrics XIV, and Religious Lyrics XV. 34 White, Review of Brook, HL, 158. 35 Brook, HL,  21–​22. 36 Ker, Facsimile. Some take Ker to task, but this decision fit mid-​century practices. As Fein notes, EETS’s ‘prompt selection … testified to [Harley’s] preeminence’ (Studies, 5). 37 Fein, Studies, 5. 38 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 5, 13. 39 Fein, Studies, 8. 40 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 95, 107–​108. Fein distances herself from Revard’s fervency, while highlighting the ‘potential for instructive linkage’ between ‘often quite contrastive texts’ (‘Compilation’ 69, 92). 41 Revard, ‘Scribe’, 22; ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 271, 277. 42 Ker, Facsimile, xxiii, Revard, ‘Oppositonal Thematics’, 97, Hathaway et al., Fouke, and Stemmler, ‘Miscellany or Anthology?’, agree on this point. Resisting such conflation are McSparran, ‘English Poems’, and Fein, who sees ‘supreme scribal ability’ in our copyist’s textual layouts and manipulation of opening lines, but offers salutary warnings about ‘when scribal agency becomes confused with authorship’ (‘Compilation’, 93–​94).

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43 Ker, Facsimile, xx; Revard, ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’ (among others). 44 Parkes, ‘Ordinatio and Compilatio’. 45 Revard, ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 261. 46 Fol. 70’s drawings illustrate Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour (c.1250–​1259), ‘an important statement on the poetics of lyrical writing’; Huot, Song to Book, 135–​174. Revard details our scribe’s contributions to Harley 273; ‘Scribe’, 67–​69. 47 Revard, ‘Scribe’, 65; O’Rourke, ‘Problems of Patronage’, 216–​226. 48 Most pre-​ 1980s critics presume a Hereford link; see Aspin, AN Political Songs, 24–​26; Revard’s own ‘The Lecher’, 71; Hathaway et  al., Fouke, xxxvii, xli–​ xliii; and latterly, Jeffrey, ‘Franciscan Spirituality’, 268–​ 269. McSparran posits ‘some kind of off-​ and-​ on relationship’ between the Harley scribe and Hereford (‘English Poems’, 392–​395, 411). 49 Some have regarded him as ‘an entertainer in the household of Thomas Charlton [Bp.  1327–​1344]’, others as ‘probably a canon of Hereford [and] follower of Adam Orleton’; Hogan, ‘Critical Study’, i–​v; cf. Ker, Facsimile, xxiii. 50 For gestures towards such a project, see Birkholz, ‘Biography after Historicism’. 51 Fletcher et al., 1000 Years, 20. 52 Ker, Facsimile, xvi–​xx; Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 32–​33. 53 Friedrich and Schwarke, One-​Volume Libraries. 54 Ker, Facsimile, xvi. 55 Ker, Facsimile, xvi; Fein, Complete Harley (hereafter CH), I.5. 56 Ker, Facsimile, xviii; Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands, 1. 57 Writing space in fols. 1–​48 (Scribe A) is divided into two columns, whereas Scribe B (fols. 49–​140) varies between one, two, and (occasionally) three columns. 58 Ker, Facsimile, ix. 59 Ibid., xxii–​xxiii. 60 Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 37–​38. 61 Ker, Facsimile, x; Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 35–​36. 62 Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 39. 63 Wright, Specimens, vii. See Matthews, Making of ME, 9, 12, 30, 43, for this term’s currency in antiquarian discourse. For Percy and Warton, see above. 64 Fein, Studies, 10. 65 Pearsall, review of Fein, Studies, 403; Fein, Studies, 10. 66 Cannon, Grounds, 2, 143. 67 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 18; Corrie, ‘Circulation’, 427, 441–​ 442; Taylor, ‘Manual to Miscellany’, 8–​ 9. Turville-​ Petre (England the Nation) isolates fifty years of this stretch, while Hanna describes a ‘broad cultural continuum covering the reigns of three Edwards and about a century, 1270–​1370’ (London Literature, 4).

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68 Corrie, ‘Circulation’, 427; cf. Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 94–​102, 120–​121; Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 26–​32; Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 72. 69 Lerer, ‘Idea of the Anthology’, 1253. 70 Ibid., 1253, 1261. 71 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 11. 72 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 21 73 Tschann and Parkes, Facsimile of Digby 86. 74 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 26; Corrie, ‘Circulation’, 438–​441. 75 Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 72; cf. Corrie, ‘Circulation’, 441; Turville-​ Petre, England the Nation, 182. 76 Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 70–​71; cf. Taylor, ‘Manual to Miscellany’, 8; Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 28. For Harley 913, see Cartlidge (‘Festivity’) and Turville-​Petre (England the Nation, 155–​175), who also examines Additional 46919 (185–​ 192); cf. Reimer, Works of Herebert, 7–​11; Nelson, Lyric Tactics,  59–​87. 77 Bell and Couch, Texts and Contexts. 78 Fein, Auchinleck Manuscript. 79 Taylor, Textual Situations, 76–​136. 80 Scase, Making of Vernon; Fein, Essays on Audelay. 81 Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book, 1, 5–​6; Hanna, ‘Miscellaneity’, 47. 82 Lerer’s ‘Idea of the Anthology’ (1253) references Wogan-​Browne et. al.’s Idea of the Vernacular on this point. 83 Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book, 3. 84 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books. 85 Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book,  4–​5. 86 Ibid., 2. 87 O’Donnell, ‘Retractations’, 169. 88 Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book, 6; O’Donnell, ‘Retractations’, 170, 172. 89 Nichols and Wenzel, Whole Book, 3. 90 O’Donnell, ‘Retractations’, 171. 91 O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 60. 92 Busby, ‘Multilingualism’, 50–​53. 93 Butterfield, ‘Afterword’, 303. 94 Hanna, ‘Miscellaneity’, 47, 50, 47. 95 Lerer, ‘Idea of the Anthology’, 1259. 96 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 14. 97 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 18. 98 Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 74. 99 Ibid., 74. 100 Turville-​Petre, England the Nation, 198; Fein, Studies, 9. 101 Busby, ‘Multilingualism’, 54–​55. 102 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 276–​277. 103 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 3.

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104 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 264. 105 Wallace, CHMEL, xvi. 106 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 10. 107 Ibid., 2. 108 Ibid., 264; Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 3 109 Gillespie, ‘Booklet Theory’. Recent research on Digby, Vernon, Auchinleck, and Harley 978 confirms as much. 110 Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 72. 111 Newman, Crossover, 257, viii. 112 Ibid., 11, 37, ix, 111. 113 Ibid., 257–​258. 114 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 28. 115 Tschann and Parkes, Facsimile of Digby 86, xi, lvi–​lix. 116 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 19, 28; Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 182. 117 Fein, ‘Literary Scribes’; Fisher, Scribal Authorship. 118 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 19. 119 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 16. 120 Ibid., 1. 121 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 5. 122 For anonymity and impersonality as ‘distinctive qualities’ (8), see Oliver, Poems without Names, 3, 11–​40. 123 Griffin, ‘Anonymity and Authorship’; Scase, ‘Bill-​Casting’, explores an earlier mode of anonymous publication. 124 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books,  19–​20. 125 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 18, 31; Turville-​Petre, England the Nation, 182; Corrie, ‘Circulation’, 441–​442; Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 72. 126 Turville-​Petre, England the Nation. 127 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 266. 128 Von Contzen and Bernau, Sanctity as Literature; von Contzen, ‘Introduction’, 10. 129 Frankis, ‘Social Context’, 72 130 Cannon, Grounds,  11–​12. 131 Ibid. 132 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 18. 133 Sanok, ‘Forms of Community’, 212–​217. 134 Bell, ‘England and its Saints’. 135 Breckenridge, ‘Mapping Identity’, 330. 136 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 266–​268. 137 Cannon, Grounds, 143, 156, 11–​12. 138 Ibid., 11. 139 Hanna, ‘ME Books’, 174. 140 Ibid. 141 Howe, Writing the Map, x, 3, 16. 142 Ibid., ix–​x,  4–​5. 143 Ibid., 20. 144 Boffey and Thompson, ‘Choice of Texts’.

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145 Scase, Manuscript Geography, 1. 146 Ibid., 3, 10, 2. 147 Salter, Fourteenth-​Century Poetry, 52–​85 (‘Mappings’). 148 Beadle, ‘Prolegomena’, 89–​92; Riddy, Essays Celebrating LALME. 149 Pearsall, ‘Epilogue’, 273. 150 Scase, Manuscript Geography, 2–​ 3, 6; Thompson, ‘West of West Midlands’. 151 Lawton, ‘Mapping Performance’, 2. 152 The subject heading ‘geography in literature’ (‘medieval’ is one of three variants) was introduced in 1994: http://​id.loc.gov/​authorities/​ subjects/​sh94005295.html, accessed 14 January 2020. Prominent subfield works so classified include Lynch, Chaucer’s Cultural Geography; Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge; and Wallace, Premodern Places. 153 Scase, Manuscript Geography, 1. 154 Barrett, Against All England, 14, xii, 17, 1. 155 Ibid., 1. 156 Ibid.,  16–​17. 157 Ibid., 17; Lavezzo, ‘Introduction’, xix; Cohen, ‘Infinite Realms’, 5. 158 Lavezzo, ‘Introduction’, xix; Cohen, ‘Infinite Realms’, 4; Cohen, Cultural Diversity, back cover. 159 Birkholz, King’s Two Maps; Birkholz, ‘Mapping Medieval Utopia’; etc. 160 Lilley, Mapping Medieval Geographies, 4, 8, 13. 161 Tomasch, ‘Geographic Desire’, 5. 162 See Birkholz, ‘The Vernacular Map’. 163 Edward Reed (1912), qtd. in Fein, ‘Compilation’, 67. 164 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69, 68. 165 Ibid., 68. 166 O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 54; cf. Ker, Facsimile, xvi. 167 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69–​70; cf. O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 57. 168 O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 54. 169 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69. 170 Ibid., 68. 171 Ibid., 72 (emphasis added), commenting on Dane, ‘Textual Autonomy’. 172 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69 (emphasis added). 173 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 70, 68. 174 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69. 175 O’Donnell, ‘Retractations’, 172. 176 Ibid., 171. 177 Ibid., 171–​72. 178 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 264. 179 O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 55. 180 Ker, Facsimile, x.  The recipes detail ‘Vorte make cynople’ [How to make Red Vermillion] (#10), ‘Vorte temprene asure’ [How to Temper Azure] (#11), etc. 181 Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 33–​36.

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182 O’Rourke, ‘Imagining’, 60. 183 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Taxonomy’, 277. 184 Matthews, Making of ME; Matthews, Medievalism. 185 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 93. 186 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 11. 187 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 11; Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 3. 188 Pearsall, ‘Whole Book’, 27. 189 Tomasch, ‘Geographic Desire’, 5, 10. 190 Ibid., 2, 10, 5. 191 Lilley, Mapping Medieval Geographies, 4, 13. For this term’s centrality to ‘spatial literary studies’, see Tally, ‘Textual Geographies’. 192 Putter, ‘Organisation’, 84, 100. 193 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, 3; Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 95. 194 Connolly and Radulescu, Insular Books, iv; O’Donnell, ‘Retractations’, 169. 195 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 3.

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1 Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics: the implications of mobility

With longyng Y am lad; On molde Y waxe mad; A maide marreth me. Y grede, Y grone, unglad, For selden Y am sad That semly forte se. Levedi, thou rewe me! To routhe thou havest me rad! Be bote of that Y bad: My lyf is long on the!

With longing I am afflicted; on the ground I go mad; [for] a maiden afflicts me. I complain, I groan, unsatisfied, for seldom am I sad {unmoved} to see that fair one. Beloved, have pity on me! To sorrow you have reduced me! Grant the remedy that I require: my life depends on you! [#30.1–​10]1 The Lover’s Complaint (fol. 63v)

This chapter is about poetry, community, and medieval literary history. To be more precise, it is about the poetry of community, and how communities (past and present) shape and locate themselves through the medium of poetry. Such group articulation involves more than just the composition of text. At least as important are the circulation, grounding, and evaluation of poetry, which is to say, its incorporation by authorized social bodies. It is by no means incidental that the poems these pages treat are on their way to being forgotten. Chapter 1 thus also concerns how, under the pressure of historicist methodological tastes (New and old), one kind of literary anonymity, the anonymity of unestablished authorship, can breed another: the anonymity of provincial inconsequence. Below we will examine how the cultural meanings and artistic valuation of some reportedly slight medieval poems have been affected by trends in post-​medieval literary study. All texts are subject to the vagaries of reception, but the Harley items analysed here have found themselves unusually susceptible to changes in historiographical fashion.

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To assert that literary history helps constitute the object of its own study is a nod towards recent academic trends. Where this chapter’s argument departs from previous work is in the connections it traces between movements in critical taste (instituted diachronically, across generations of scholarly readers) and movement in the material geographical sense (articulated horizontally, across expanses of topographical space). Key manifestations of the latter include the travel of human bodies as well as the circulation of textual artefacts, modes, and effects, while comprising the former are more nebulous and historically contingent forms of literary spatialization. As recent work in theoretical geography has demonstrated, all human cultures engage perennially in the construction, organization, and representation of space. Geography is one of the basic categories through which social power is negotiated. Operating dialectically with any society’s material geographies are a multitude of imaginative geographies, prominent among which are those encoded or produced in literary discourse.2 Anchored in the first half of the fourteenth century but extended over time, this chapter, like each of those following, offers a Harley manuscript case study in the intersection of geography and literature, or what my Introduction termed ‘literary geography’. Patterns of medieval mobility—​human, textual, and imaginative—​will be shown, in their interlocked dynamics, to offer new perspectives on the geographical assumptions (what is ‘cosmopolitan’? what is ‘provincial’?) that have helped drive modern assessments of premodern poetic achievement. This assertion contains a certain amount of protestation, one lover’s special pleading on behalf of a beloved corpus of texts and the codex containing them. But Chapter  1’s argument has broader purchase insofar as this case demonstrates how judgements of literary merit can become caught up within an evolutionary model of cultural history, one that privileges metropolitan notions of development. Above I chose the term ‘forgotten’ to describe one possible fate awaiting the Harley poems to be examined here. The fond hope or ‘longyng’ [#30.1] of my undertaking is that such a future might be averted. To embark on any project of literary-​historical recovery is both to commit an act of conspicuous love (‘my love is on the liht’ [my love has alighted on you, 22]) and to seek redress for past wrongs of devaluation. As the complaining lover of my epigraph pleads, ‘Be bote of that Y bad’ [grant the remedy that I require, 9].3 This chapter itself amounts to a lover’s complaint, the particular species of whose desire is to impose its own, remapped version of

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the literary past. Previous scholarship has established the seminal role that pleasure plays in medievalist inquiry, our collective desire for the emotional matter of the past.4 ‘Love’ as shorthand for the antiquarian drive, meanwhile, holds the status of cultural convention. ‘Love’ also serves as a vehicle by which medieval texts themselves (literary, philosophical, theological, political) give expression to their most cherished ethical propositions. In short, ‘love’ in a medieval context seems always to represent something else. Delightful promise Community, mobility, love: the following pages track the interaction of these abstractions in the celebrated but understudied Harley Lyrics, a set of poems (as we have seen) that leading subfield venues now rarely feature. The body of poems regarded as ‘Harley Lyrics’ is conventionally numbered at thirty-​two: fifteen secular, seventeen religious. Some scholars include nine political or satirical pieces, for which there are good semantic and codicological grounds. Yet as a literary-​historical phenomenon the phrase remains synonymous with Brook, whose ‘slim, definitive edition’—​The Harley Lyrics (1948)—​has become ‘something of a classic’.5 Distributed across seven quires (#6–​9, #12–​14) but concentrating in Quires 7–​9 (fols. 63–​89)—​where items printed by Brook comprise twenty-​ six of forty-​one items (four others are ME political songs)—​the Harley Lyrics dominate a portion of the codex that is notable for language mixture and intergeneric play: key aspects of miscellany form, as argued in my Introduction. The Harley manuscript, overall, bespeaks a textual community, or implied readership, that is likewise multiple. Such a community embraces the main copyist’s (Ludlow area) gentry household audience, while also possessing an episcopal-​clerical overlay—​a source network with discernible affiliation to Hereford Cathedral. Examining Harley manuscript items along with contextual documentation, Chapter  1 will detail how the pronounced geographical mobility of those involved in our lyrics’ compilation—​a process that includes their transmission to a Ludlow copying—​has implications for what manner of interpretive community may be imagined via these poems, as well as for their embedded literary-​geographical meanings. As if to confirm their host manuscript’s hybrid provenance, the Harley Lyrics operate in a register that is at once secular and religious. Not only overall, but within numerous individual poems, we witness an intermingling of the two realms, much as medieval lay

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and clerical audiences tend to be blended. Sometimes this occurs in a single breath. The Quire 7 lyric whose opening provides my chapter epigraph, for example, concludes with the assertion that ‘Hevene Y tolde al his /​That o nyht were hire gest’ [heaven, I am certain {told/​assured}, would be all his, who for a single night were her guest, #30.39–​40; cf. #34.82–​84]. Lyric taxonomists class The Lover’s Complaint as secular—​safely so, it would seem, given its speaker’s ‘longyng’, ‘grone’-​ing, and brazen substitution of a carnal ‘hevene’ for a spiritual one. It may be debatable just how sustainable such division is, but certainly the classification of some lyrics as ‘secular’ and others as ‘religious’—​so too for the categories ‘popular’, ‘courtly’, and ‘learned’—​ has figured prominently in editorial initiatives and the accounts of literary history that derive from them.6 ‘Religious’ lyrics far outnumber their ‘secular’ counterparts in the early Middle English corpus, to the extent that the secular lyrics preserved in Harley 2253 account for some half of those extant. The Harley Lyrics are also unusual for their French influence, but these are not limp derivatives. Better to speak of cultural alloy:  the Harley Lyrics recast continental conventions and generic models into an insular, alliterative, colloquial, even ‘homey’ mode.7 Like so much early vernacular writing, the Harley Lyrics are indebted to ecclesiastical learning and Latin rhetoric; hence their staple passages of point-​ by-​ point bodily description and their ‘touches of pedantic symbolism’. Such formal and hermeneutic details provide ‘evidence of clerical authorship’,8 notwithstanding the lay-​household orientation of the book they inhabit. Similarly, notwithstanding their grounding in a Welsh Marcher locale, their cosmopolitan poetics call into question these lyrics’ traditional characterization along provincial lines—​that is, as verses of a ‘serene western type’, coaxed into expression by continental impetus, perhaps, but ‘[written] down amongst the apple-​ blossoms’ of Herefordshire.9 The manifest ‘excellence’ of the Harley Lyrics, according to Brook, is ‘largely due to the fitness of Middle English to be a lyrical language’; it has a sound landscape ‘more sonorous than modern English’.10 This is why I  began this chapter with a poetic invocation rather than a theoretical or literary-​historical proposition. The historicist portion of this chapter will argue that the textual phenomenon of the Harley Lyrics—​their unique currency ‘by west’ [#30.37]—​may be regarded as a consequence of the geographical mobility that marks the careers of certain West Midlands secular clerks c.1275–​1350. I intend this claim as a critical contribution in

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its own right, but seen in functional terms, it is merely incidental. For the historicist manoeuvre of tying Harley Lyrics to Hereford clerics enables another, less circumscribed intervention. The larger goal of Chapter 1 will be to account for the ambivalent place of the Harley Lyrics in English literary history, the way they defy location in the grand narrative of vernacular development that finds its self-​evident turning point in the late fourteenth century, in and around an increasingly hegemonic metropolis. Still—​ somewhat counterintuitively—​the Harley Lyrics retain canonical status, or at least its vestiges. They may not figure much in recent journals, or press catalogues, or conference programmes, but they have had their champions, as seen in Pearsall’s and Fletcher’s assessments (see Introduction).11 R.H. Robbins calls the Harley Lyrics ‘the greatest achievement of all Middle English poetry’.12 This overstates the case, but the provincialism of Robbins’ notion may be something less than self-​evident, and his intervention more than merely partisan. The present chapter maintains (as will Chapter 4, its companion piece) that the persistent critical marginality of the Harley Lyrics is less a function of pre-​plague spatial relations and their attendant literary realities than a result of the changed cultural configurations—​geopolitical, linguistic, and scholarly—​that would prevail subsequently.13 It is probably not coincidental that most of those sharing Robbins’ taste for medieval lyric came of age in the wake of the New Criticism. The early to mid-​twentieth century saw publication of thick anthologies in which individual lyrics, grouped by type, appear all but untethered from manuscript setting and historical context. Such editions remain standard for many of the poems they compile. Certain assumptions about the transhistorical essentials of a ‘lyric mode’ continue to influence the scholarly reading of medieval lyric poetry. Moreover, the unitary coherence, brevity, and ‘non-​referential quality’ of lyric poems (their apparent ‘non-​engagement with an outside world’) have seemed to invite the application of myopic ‘close reading’ practices while discouraging other approaches.14 It is precisely the appropriateness of lyric genres to New Critical methodologies, therefore, that may best account for the Harley poems’ conspicuous absence from the projects of more recently minted critics—​those weaned on Stephen Greenblatt instead of Cleanth Brooks, as it were. The Harley Lyrics have slipped in disciplinary standing for reasons that are essentially methodological. But the profession-​wide

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dynamics of canon realignment during the past few decades (that is, the jettisoning of early texts from the canonical fringe) do not play so crucial a role here as might be expected. That the Harley Lyrics no longer enjoy landmark status has more to do with their degree of susceptibility (low, it is supposed) to regnant practices in literary interpretation—​specifically, the historicist methods that (until recently) have dominated medievalist research. The increasing marginality of these poems relates directly to their once-​ opportune but now ‘frustrating’ ahistoricity.15 What began as a dilemma of diachronic genealogy has become transmuted into a problem of synchronic contextualization. The precarious hold the Harley Lyrics have on a place in the medieval canon thus appears, early and late, to be a function of their elusiveness: first in developmental and then in social-​material terms. Literary historiography has never known quite what to do with them—​or more to the point, how to place them. Fortunately, these poems grapple with matters of geographical ambivalence themselves. Addressing such moments may teach us how to bridge the fault lines upon which Harley criticism is built. The Harley Lyrics remain disconcerting to literary historians owing to their ‘sudden’ appearance out in the provincial ‘backwater’ of Herefordshire. Even more troubling, they are ‘[not] enduring’ in formal or aesthetic influence.16 Robbins outlines the conundrum:  the strain of vernacular lyric preserved in Harley ‘comes without warning and leaves as suddenly’, such that ‘after the Black Death, Middle English lyric seems to start out afresh’. As E.K. Chambers laments, ‘the delightful promise of the [Harley] manuscript is, alas! not maintained’.17 The ‘old historicist’ misgivings of mid-​twentieth-​century scholars, concerning the obscure origins and negligible influence of the Harley Lyrics, have their New Historicist counterpart in the unconsummated documentary desires of late-​century critics. Where vertical formal linkages preoccupied the former, the latter unite in their yearning for horizontal contextual certainty—​that is, for secure placement of Harley 2253 in some tangible, animating milieu. The seeming resistance of the Harley Lyrics to historicism has much to do with the fraught history of lyric as a genre. But the crux of the matter involves what might be called these poems’ ‘Age of Chaucer’ problem. Despite the efforts of those who agitate on their behalf, the Harley Lyrics do not lay demonstrable groundwork for late fourteenth-​century metropolitan literary English,18 or even, to any significant degree, for the alliterative verse that would flourish

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along the Welsh Marches.19 This lack of party affiliation with the period’s major literary properties leaves the poems in Harley 2253 historiographically unprotected, especially as lobbying interests are pooled under ‘a loose rubric of [Ricardian] periodization’.20 From the perspective of texts outside this economy, medieval England’s leading literary brands blend into a corporate conglomerate whose market share threatens to choke out competition. The inability of mid-​century lyric partisans to secure the Harley Lyrics a definitive place in the master narrative of national vernacular development—​that tenacious account in which Chaucer serves alternately as culmination and progenitor—​has left them with uncertain standing in the field. Obscured by the logic of epochal divide, the lyrics preserved in Harley 2253 come to be associated not with the kind of headwater vitality their supporters might desire, but instead with a side-​pool stagnancy, or at best a tributary evanescence. The elegiac tone of much writing on the Harley Lyrics (‘alas!’) speaks to the ingrained habit of reading these poems in terms of formal impact, or rather their lack thereof. The failure of the Harley Lyrics to consolidate a position of literary-​ historical relevance—​to translate ‘delightful’ promise into ‘enduring’ influence—​relegates them to the cultural periphery. But then it is precisely our presumption of their displacement from the sites of medieval literary urbanity that has convinced us of the outland nature of these texts to begin with. Community, mobility, love—​and peripheral status. How, without resorting to apple-​blossom nostalgia, can we account for the literary-​historical anomaly that is the Harley Lyrics? Any articulation of community requires that body’s placement in a wider social and spatial field. If geographic commonalities and differences—​ matters of origin, residence, travel, topophilia—​serve as a prime axis along which human identity is expressed, how, then, do dynamics of spatiality affect the poetics of community? What would it mean to recover the Harley Lyrics? The fundamental geographical orientation of these poems may be seen in their activation of two touchstone categories: first, that of an abstracted western ‘lond’ [country, landscape], to which Harley narrators frequently express their longing to return; and second, the fetishized figure of the embowered lyric maiden, or local ‘levedi’ [lady, beloved], who is anxiously placed within, even collapsed into, that ‘lond’. The community brought into being through such declamatory magic is mobile yet rooted: widely perambulating, but circumscribed in membership; textually anonymous, but located

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institutionally. In essence, my method in this chapter is to place the surprising lyrics of Harley 2253 beside some of their era’s more agile clerical lives. This biographical gesture offers to resolve a longstanding literary-​historical dilemma: Where did the Harley Lyrics come from, before going where they went? In less parochial terms, less narrowly medievalist and historicist, my hope is that such a move will help us better perceive how cultural products, like cultural agents, defy assignment to any singular, static location and instead attenuate across space—​and for that matter, time. We shall find that in geographical character and hermeneutic mooring the Harley Lyrics are fundamentally regionalist but also intrinsically cosmopolitan. What is unusual is that they manage to strike both regional and cosmopolitan identities while being little concerned with the form of geographical community usually imagined as negotiating between these poles:  that is, ‘England the nation’ (to cite the title of one study that has sought, via this master category, to characterize vernacular production in these years).21 This chapter argues that the Harley Lyrics embody not a proto-​‘national’ vernacularity, predictive of later English literary character, but rather a hybrid cosmopolitan/​regional vernacularity. In this they differ from accepted English medieval literary norms—​which tend to derive from the triumphant late fourteenth century—​as well as from prevailing post-​medieval paradigms of literary cosmopolitanism. Familial sense and regional sensibility The ‘literary worth’ of the Harley Lyrics has been said to ‘arise from qualities which are independent of the time when they were written’.22 My own Harley encounters are backdropped by the careers of a group of secular clerks from western England in the half-​century prior to the Black Death (1348–​1351). These bureaucrats have left substantial documentary trace, but their identities emerge for us mostly through their official relationships: to home diocese, cathedral chapter, and especially patron-​bishop. Exactly where and when the lyrics in Harley 2253 were composed remains unclear. What is certain is that they circulated in the region—​ although not as a body—​during the early fourteenth century.23 This period of gestation and transmission coincides with the eventful episcopates of two Hereford bishops:  Richard Swinfield (1283–​ 1317) and Adam Orleton (1317–​1327), later Bishop of Worcester (1327–​1333), then Winchester (1333–​1345).

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Richard Swinfield was a ‘bountiful patron of learning’, who was friendly with minstrels and Franciscans, two early orders of mobile vernacular poet. But he was himself a ‘stay-​at-​home prelate’, more concerned with pastoral care than with national politics or church councils.24 Still, Swinfield did not hole up at his cathedral palace: both his Register and an extant household roll have him seldom at Hereford.25 ‘Stay-​at-​home’ indicates that his mobility had a local, or more precisely, a diocesan scale. In his disinclination to fare beyond his home region, this bishop differs from many of his own officials. Swinfield promoted Hereford interests by pressing for the canonization of his predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe:  died 1282, canonized 1320, translated 1349, and obscure ever since. The fortunes of Cantilupe’s shrine will concern us in this book’s Epilogue, but need not be rehearsed here except in two essentials. First, pilgrim traffic to Hereford waxed and waned roughly in step with the region’s advent and decline on the national political stage.26 Second, Hereford officials spent long stretches lobbying at the Papal Curia and elsewhere. Swinfield was prime mover, but Cantilupe’s eventual canonization owed more to the influential Adam Orleton, who would parlay his position as leader of the English delegation into election as Swinfield’s successor. If Swinfield’s sphere of activity was circumscribed, ‘there is no [such] lack of mobility discernible in Orleton’s career’, nor for those in his orbit.27 A favourite of Pope John XXII (1316–​1334), Orleton made his mark at Avignon but became notorious during the baronial rebellions of the 1320s. Along with Queen Isabella and the Marcher lord, Roger Mortimer, he was a key player in the deposition of Edward II (January 1327). The tireless clerks who belonged to Bishop Adam’s circle of intimates alternated between accompanying him on his domestic and foreign travels and operating on his behalf, whether as diplomatic proxies, administrative stewards, or (so the rumours went) nefarious political agents.28 This frenetic activity would in time be quelled. Yet the first half of the century presented Hereford and Worcester ecclesiastics, from notaries to canons, with unprecedented opportunity for travel, plus access to international literati. Meanwhile, these cathedral cities and their environs—​village byways, urban centres, gentry manors, religious houses—​saw a heightened flow of visitors and returned natives. Thus did a wide cross-​section of western clerks experience an enriched cultural traffic. Hereford bishops enjoyed unusually good relations with their cathedral chapter during the early fourteenth century. Orleton’s

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‘group of faithful clerks’ proved an ‘exceptionally stable familia’; many served with him under Swinfield and/​or followed him to Worcester in 1327, but would return to Hereford positions upon their patron’s 1333 move to Winchester.29 My topic in this chapter is ‘love’, less in the carnal than in a familial sense, but beyond even their cohort loyalty and political instrumentality what is exceptional about the clerks under study is their degree of mobility, pronounced both for their day and by comparison with local officials earlier and later. ‘Frequent missions abroad’ (to Avignon, then the French court) and perpetual administrative travel (on circuit with the consistory court or on visitation across the diocese) connected this species of clerk to cosmopolitan cultural centres, to a wide scattering of towns and courts, and, at home in the west, to every level of household, from the highest lay magnate’s to that of the most land-​tied village priest.30 Any sketch of a region’s standing over a stretch of decades must remain partial in its data and provisional in its claims. Still, the altered cultural geographics that post-​ plague conditions represent—​compared with the years of thronged pilgrims at Hereford and the canonization push at Avignon (1280s–​1320), followed by prominence for the region and diplomatic trips by Orleton protégés (1320s–​1330s)—​can only be described as dramatic. First, the disproportionate influence of western interests on national affairs waned; then came demographic collapse. In the wake of the Black Death, Orleton’s nephew John Trillek (Bishop of Hereford, 1344–​1360) instituted strict new policies designed to refocus the attention of Hereford’s (surviving) priests on pastoral care. Leaves for study became far less common, dispensations for non-​residence were curtailed, and close involvement in international affairs came to an end.31 Hereford returned to backwater status. To account for love in its pre-​Chaucerian, west of England lyric inflection, we must pay attention to travel. During the first half of the fourteenth century, Hereford-​bred clerics experienced a marked spike in mobility. The usual temptation with anonymous work is to press on ‘authorship’ and/​or ‘original context’, but to link the phenomenon of the Harley Lyrics to the mobility of Hereford clerics foregrounds more tractable issues: transmission, for example; reception; implied audience. Whatever textual dynamics and material conditions may be in play, these poems resonate with such a group’s biographical experience. When they talk about love, the lyrics of Harley 2253 engage with geography, in its various narrative and metaphorical incarnations.

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‘Longyng’, ‘suffering’ [tholien], and other tribulations conventionally associated with ‘derne love’ [secret affairs] supply their chief themes, but woven into their projects of praise, lament, and sexual-​ devotional adventuring are topographical subthemes.32 Most of these lyric articulations of space amount to variations on the experience of erotic dislocation: a vernacular lover’s departure or removal, his suffering in exile or anticipated coital homecoming. Contemporary literary-​historicist undertakings promise, and soon, to ground the Harley manuscript once and for all, cordoning it off, as at an archaeological dig, upon the static site of this or that Marcher household.33 But desire as the Harley Lyrics express it is anything but excavatable. Rather, these poems present a love that is mobile. The main Harley scribe may himself spend three dozen years in a single, provincial lay milieu,34 but his lyric poems and their cultured narrators—​not to mention their transmitting agents, generic affiliates, and embedded audiences—​ range considerably further afield. In documenting Adam Orleton’s career, R.M. Haines returns repeatedly to this embattled bishop’s familia, which institution he treats as his subject’s executive arm and basic social unit.35 By the thirteenth century the episcopal familia was common across England and had analogues in other aristocratic and bureaucratic groupings. Hereford’s version distinguished itself in its vanguard position with respect to the burgeoning documentary practices that were beginning to transform vernacular literary culture.36 If imaginative literature is a by-​product of expanding literate proficiency in a functional bureaucratic sense, then the Diocese of Hereford’s progressive documentary practice during the century prior to the Black Death—​especially when coupled with Hereford Cathedral’s reputation as a scholarly centre37—​predicts a climate unusually conducive to vernacular poetic development. Social-​institutional structures and their unique quotidian pressures help determine what form new literary expression takes. In characterizing the relationship between Orleton and familia, Haines gravitates towards terms that are restrained and professional, yet certain documentary moments attest to ‘an intense personal attachment’ between this bishop-​patron and his household clerks. Orleton had—​indeed continues to have—​copious detractors, but he displayed a ‘kindly concern for his clerks’ welfare—​a sentiment which they reciprocated’.38 Durable bonds also developed between familial clerks themselves. Medieval amorous poems often contain homoerotic undercurrents, but such desires remain

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latent in Harley 2253. Whether despite this or because of it, these ‘familial love’ lyrics have unmistakable homosocial tendencies.39 As other period documents and they themselves show, the Harley Lyrics are performative products, keyed to a male-​coterie milieu. It is not historically incidental, I think, that this is an interpretive community from which they have yet to emerge. What we talk about when we talk about love During the Swinfield and Orleton years, Hereford and Worcester appear to have been known nationally for their production of vernacular love poetry. As we shall see, the Harley Lyrics themselves help produce such an identity, but independent evidence for this reputation is found in an early fourteenth-​century Anglo-​ Norman survey poem known as The List of 108 English Towns. This text’s conceit is as simple as its syntax: insular place-​names are enrolled with their signature product or attribute:  ‘Escole [School] de Oxenford’ [9]‌, ‘Vend’ de q’ts [Wine sellers] de Bristowe’ [88], ‘Bayn [Waters] de Baa[th]’ [28], ‘Furur [Furriers] de Cestre’ [59], ‘Seyntuarie de Canterburg’ [3], and so on.40 Most entries are economic, institutional, or topographical; some reprise local sayings or reputations. One attribute is explicitly literary: the ‘Verse-​ makers’ or ‘Rhymers of Worcester’ [Rhymeour de Wyrcestre, 58].41 Others may be implicitly so, such as the ‘Boues [Longbows] de Notyngham’ [53], made famous through the Robin Hood ballads. Another of this sort may be the ‘Maidens [Demayseles] of Hereford’ [89].42 Critics envision Harley verses blossoming suddenly, then rotting in sweet obscurity. But these allusions suggest the non-​parochialism of lyrics like ours. The fame of ‘Worcester’s Poets’ and ‘Hereford’s Damsels’ speaks to the regional modality of such poems, but also to their wider currency. A disproportionate amount of early Middle English survives from the South-​West Midlands. There have come to be competing perspectives on the relationship between this material and late-​ century literary material in the north-​western dialect exemplified in the ‘regional’ romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,43 but it is clear that vernacular poetry, especially of the alliterative variety, had special currency along England’s western fringe. Old English, as Seth Lerer has argued, had a vibrant ‘afterlife as a literary language’ in the region—​especially at Worcester.44 Elizabeth Salter, meanwhile, emphasizes the ‘decisively international’ character of pre-​ plague English culture, and proposes an analogue for the production

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of sophisticated west-​country lyric in the ‘complex European affiliations of Hereford art during the [previous] century’.45 Whatever the genealogical details, it is in the wake of such combined factors that insular lyric begins to develop. Numerous early lyrics link to Worcester or Hereford, and, though the phenomenon is not exclusively regional, the extant material has a western inclination.46 In England, the earliest shards of vernacular lyric survive either as sermon tags or in the margins and flyleaves of ecclesiastical codices. Extant manuscripts, Julia Boffey has observed, provide our most reliable ‘means of access’ into lyric audiences and production milieux.47 Later manuscripts have aristocratic contexts, but in its years of coalescence vernacular lyric is affiliated with the institution of the church. Relevant in this vein is a snatch of early Middle English prose that appears in Worcester Cathedral Library MS F.61, a fourteenth-​century manuscript otherwise devoted to Latin grammatical texts. In the bottom margins of fols. 283 and 285v, a contemporary Anglicana hand has spelled out a set of conjugations for the verb ‘loue’ [love] in English, providing grammatical case in Latin: indicatius modus amo i loue i louede ich haue iloued ich hadde iloued i schal loue imperatiuus loue þu loue þu or he optatiuuus modus ich wolde loue or scholde loue ich hadde loue or scholde ha loued at mi wille loue i coniuctiuus modus whenne i loue whenne i louede whenne ich haue iloued … [fol. 285v] me loueit me louede me hat ilouet me wol loueme louit me alleluya.48

This Middle English conjugation of ‘love’ reinforces the Latinate context within which early insular love poetry is produced and received. This point is important not because a link between ‘secular’ lyric and clerical figures comes as a surprise, but because this Worcester pedagogue’s grammatical invocation—​amo, amas, amat—​conjures up that most foundational of communal masculine experiences, the ecclesiastical schoolroom. Having delivered his breathless declination of vernacular ‘love’, our western grammarian concludes with a spiritual ejaculation: ‘alleluya’. Such a chaste exclamation point upon love’s grammar helps characterize this incidental bit of prose as a ‘derne’ act of love: ‘hidden’ in the sense of being obscured from general view (as per the Harley Lyric Annot and John [#28.25]). The (holy?) fervency of this (erotic?) performance, moreover, encapsulates the difficulty of determining where lines are to be drawn between structures of religion and regimes of sexual desire: where spiritual

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begins and carnal ends (see also Chapter 4). Similarly troubled are any distinctions we might be inclined to make between modern notions of ‘individual’ subjectivity, with its ‘private’ sensibilities, and premodern experiences of an institutional (not to say public) communal nature.49 Does ‘alleluya’ render harmless the egocentric dangers of this-​worldly desire, ‘loue’ that is ‘derne’ (‘hidden’ in the sense of illicit [#27.8; Three Foes of Man]) and therefore damning? Can a bit of devotional punctuation (‘God be praised’) neuter the implicit eroticism of love in a vernacular idiom? Grafted on to that most basic of classroom practices, this is ‘love’ as academic exercise, cribbed for translation and fully declined. The shared quality of these grammatical erotics defines vernacular desire as an experience that is recoverable for sacred communal ends. The most common path into the Hereford bishop’s familia ran through the Hereford Cathedral School. Here training in basic Latin literacy (‘song’) and in the bureaucratic practices necessary for an ecclesiastical career occurred simultaneously with students’ inculcation with a professional clerical ethos.50 Primary values included loyalty to cohort and devotion to home church.51 Considering the Cantilupe canonization push (1287–​ 1320), followed by Edward II’s persecution of Orleton and despoiling of his diocese (1323–​ 1325), then the city’s subsequent role as ‘insurgent headquarters’ (1326–​1327),52 such socialization programmes may have taken on special intensity at Hereford. Most students were drawn from gentry households in the vicinity, or from artisan families attached to the cathedral’s own estates; others, placed by prominent families, came from further afield but still chiefly from the region.53 On top of their formative school bond and intertwined careers, the shared roots of those who comprised the episcopal familia under Swinfield and Orleton help explain the remarkable commitment of such men to the person of their bishop, to the diocesan enterprise, and—​not least—​to one another. Read in this institutional light, the lyrics of Harley 2253 attest to the continuing pressure exerted by local moorings, even (especially?) for men whose careers have carried them into realms of international consequence. Lyric has grounding in collective identity formation. In reminding himself how English ‘loue’ is conjugated, our Worcester grammarian reminds us that vernacular lyric is more rhetorical than ‘rustic’, its eloquence more acquired than ‘natural’, and its dynamics more communal than ‘personal’—​whatever ‘hawthorn name[s]‌’ the Harley Lyrics assign to their ‘Demayseles’, as they plant them in verdant bowers across the region.54 ‘From Weye [s]he is wisist

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into Wyrhale’ [#28.27]: if anyone can say who is ‘most desirable’ from the River Wye (south along the Welsh border) to the Wirral peninsula (in Cheshire),55 it ought to be the Marcher clerics of Hereford Diocese, having been drawn from across the region themselves, into the Cathedral School and thence diocesan administration, with its duties of parish oversight and visitation. Yet despite citation of local geographical markers—​ ‘Weye’, ‘Wyrhale’; the western streams ‘Lyne’ and ‘Lone’ [#28.33]; a ride ‘by Rybbesdale’ [#34.1]56—​there is no dwelling at ‘home’ in these poems, no inhabitation of a grounded locale, so much as perennial homecoming. The Harley Lyrics present a veritable feedback loop of poignant departure and compulsively detailed bodily reunion. Still, they produce an alluringly landed sense of community. Contour lines are difficult to trace, but the Harley manuscript’s vague regionalism correlates well, paradoxically, with the distended, cross-​jurisdictional geographical experience of area ecclesiastics. Transformation in the Harley Lyrics is repeatedly figured through a nostalgic return to ‘lond’, a proud but plaintive lover’s journey back to the fecund bower of his local ‘levedi’, or lyric beloved, a fair maid who ‘woneth by west’ [dwells in the west]. In narrating such geographies, the Harley Lyrics partake of a growing regional boosterism during the fourteenth century, a ‘local patriotism’ that Nigel Saul finds especially prevalent among the knights and esquires (or lesser gentry) of the South-​West Midlands: a group with increasing social and political self-​consciousness although ‘remarkably narrow horizons’.57 The Hereford clerics of my chapter title were neither so neatly located nor so parochial as this provincial esquire class—​from which, as promising youths, many of them had been drawn. Their hallmark travels brought them much and, enriched by contact with Europe’s cosmopolitan elite, they brought much back with them. But travel has its costs. With such profound itinerancy came ambivalence about their own placement. The lives that appear to us in the laconic, ‘seemingly unrevealing’ sources of medieval ecclesiastical administration tend to have an evacuated feel.58 But documentary lives, which furnish the shells of social experience, can be animated via creative application of cultural evidence—​that embodied, say, in circulating poems. Any leap from antiquated literary form to localized social interpretation requires an intrepid scholarly spirit. Yet to judge by the extant documentary and literary data, these men had geographical contradictions to resolve. Love poetry provides a medium for this work of resolution. The Harley Lyrics invite projection, each auditor’s placement within the

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husk of a narrating (or narrated) lyric persona.59 Dislocation is a feature common to the medieval ecclesiastical career; the more successful the clerk, the more travelled—​and so too the more socially distended, the more removed from local community. Owing to an ever-​expanding pilgrimage network’s ‘localization of the holy in [scattered] sacred places’, medieval Christian institutional geography came to have a complex pattern, one that ‘transcended while affirming local allegiances’.60 As a counterbalance to metropolitan distemper, there develops an eroticized longing for home, an attempt to recapture the authenticity of once having felt emplaced. The amorous lyrics preserved in Harley 2253 resolve their speakers’ geographical and social contradictions through fetishism. In them we see a recurrent manipulation, in painstakingly crafted poetic form, of the ‘wel mad’ body of the conjured beloved; its relentless division into ‘hendy’ [gracious] parts; the blending of mundane and exotic qualities that allow the local body to outmatch the ‘wonder’ of the world; and especially its insistent placement ‘in lond’: the lyric maiden’s confinement within a fecund ‘bour’ of delight to which an itinerant lover may return ‘by west’, to spend a heavenly night as ‘hire gest’.61 Not all poems in the corpus participate equally in this narrative project. But in their intertwined semantics and complementary thematics, the Harley Lyrics, as a literary conglomerate, express the shared experience of being world-​weary and down-​home both. My Introduction described the textual-​geographical conundrum raised by Revard’s localization of Harley 2253 to a Ludlow-​area secular household context; for as Fein comments, whatever palaeographical certainty may attend its inscription, ‘We still have little sense of how [this scribe] came across’ the disparate materials he copied into this book: ‘Whether he did it by travelling about or whether the manuscripts and single sheets were transported to [him] seems impossible to determine.’62 Sonorous poems like Harley’s flow easily across medieval social boundaries and geographical stretches, if less readily across wide gulfs of time and taste. But it is to an episcopal familial grouping—​transmitting if not originary, and grounded ‘out west’ though perpetually in motion—​that the love-​lyrics preserved in this manuscript most cogently speak. ‘Men have anger with me’ Despite their love-​struck clerical narrators, less jarring to medieval than to modern audiences, the Harley Lyrics possess ‘cross­ over’ secular appeal—​one of the pre-​plague miscellany’s defining

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‘Aspects’, as my Introduction discussed. But how do these poems demonstrate that their initial textual community is to be found in a mobile episcopal milieu, rather than in the more circumscribed lay-​ household context suggested by their Ludlow scribe and manuscript? The Quire 7 lyric known as The Lover’s Complaint is representative of the corpus in terms of the audience it creates. The poem’s opening lines (see epigraph) present a familiar conceit: ‘With longyng Y am lad, /​On molde Y waxe mad’ [with longing I  am beset, on the earth {ground} I  go mad], for ‘A maide marreth me’ [a maiden injures {is aggrieving} me, #30.1–​3]. Like other Harley narrators who ‘libbe [linger {dwell}] in love-​longinge’ [#29.5], our speaker yearns for ‘bote’ [healing {remedy}, #30.9], a time when ‘[S]‌he may me blisse bringe’ [#29.7]. ‘Beloved’, he pleads, ‘have pity on me!’ [Levedi, thou rewe me!]. Our conventional lover is ‘sad’, ‘unglad’; ‘Y grede’ [I lament], ‘Y grone’, for ‘resting’ [peace] is impossible: ‘my reste is with the ro’ [I’m skittish as a deer {or, I won’t be at peace until I track down my quarry} [#30.4–​7, 14, 17; cf. #41.50]. This lyric most resembles its companions in that the speaker’s beloved deprives him of his rest (‘[she] reveth me mi rest’ [#30.33]), but another way The Lover’s Complaint affiliates itself with other Harley poems is in its speaker’s placement of his ‘levedi’ in emphatic geographical terms. He himself may dwell in an abstract state—​one of delicious, borderless desire—​but ‘This wommon woneth by west’: she ‘dwells in the west country’ [37]. To be sure, the demands of Middle English rhyming provide semantic impetus here. It has been suggested that the Harley Lyrics’ intermittent place-​names and alliterative geographical sweeps—​ one ‘lemmon’ [lover] ensconced ‘bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndeseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde’ [#65.17–​19], another who spreads her healing ‘from Lyne to Lone’ [#28.33]—​provide clues as to compositional provenance or even authorial identity, after the manner of coterie masquerading conventions.63 This speaker’s location of his beloved ‘by west’, however, works less by way of coy riddling—​‘out west’ being about as helpful to identification as ‘From Irlond into Ynde’ [#44.12]—​than to correlate with his previous assertion of this lady’s standing ‘[among] the best’ [#30.36–​37]. ‘West’ and ‘best’ pair recurrently in the Harley corpus [#50.45–​47, #44.10–​11]. The poem begins as a complaint about [#30.1–​6], then becomes a complaint to [7–​30], ‘a maide [that] marreth me’; but by the final stanza [31–​40], the speaker’s project has evolved again, from supplication to boast, as if his lamentation itself produces the ‘bote’

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[remedy,  9] required. His ‘healing’ would seem to be poetic, not sexual. Ultimately what drives the speaker is a need to establish the public value of his ‘levedi’. His initial request had been that his beloved should ‘Les me out of bonde’ [release me from my bondage], for ‘Broht Ich am in wo’ [I am driven into woe, 12–​13]—​ sentiments conventional in a courtly context, but no less resonant of a Christian, specifically Marian salvation economy (as we’ll see further in Chapter  4). His confidence in eventual bodily favours being implicit, our speaker’s early suffering gives way to the higher-​ priority issue of his beloved’s standing in an imagined, maybe wholly imaginary, market of local fair maids. Like others assembled body part by body part in the lyrics of the Harley manuscript, ‘this wommon’ is placed, as noted, vaguely ‘out west’. One might think it more important that, among women ‘war ant wys’ [discreet and discerning], ‘she bears away the prize’ [hue bereth the pris] [34–​38]. Yet ours is a lover not unwilling to equivocate. Precisely speaking, his beloved is a ‘Burde, on of the best’, a catch who is ‘one of’ or ‘among the best’ [36; emphasis added]—​charming accommodation as to the equivalence of all our embowered ‘birds’, as if to acknowledge that participation in weaving lines of ‘love-​longinge’ [#29.5], being heard to lament over some ‘lef in lond’ [#34.50], is more important than quibbling over precedence. There are prizes enough for everyone’s ‘love in land’, for all the ‘worly [splendid] wymmen’ we can plant ‘by west’ [#44.10]. One latter-​day reader—​a cloistered mid-​westerner, as it happens—​admits to being ‘intrigued by the constant reference to beautiful women who live in the west’.64 Critics have remarked upon the ‘good-​natured’ spirit of the Harley Lyrics. Such tonal observations fit well with what Boffey has described as late medieval lyric’s ‘convivial purposes’.65 But more important to in-​group conviviality than there being erotic laurels enough for all, surely, is that—​in a perennially tight ecclesiastical job market—​there be benefices enough for all. Critical admonitions that we not expect lyric narrative conditions to represent ‘actual personal relations’ are salutary.66 Yet few episcopal patrons provided for their clerks so effectively as did Adam Orleton—​to the extent that charges of pluralism would catch up with some of them.67 As in any retinue, a certain jockeying for position complicated familial affairs, but for Orleton’s household (and Swinfield’s), vitriolic internal competition appears to have been muted. It may be that questions of precedence were contested along a performative poetic axis, although with what mixture of collegial love and careerist animosity is impossible to say.

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The Lover’s Complaint indulges in a rash of first-​and second-​ person pronouns. But though it is addressed to the poet’s ‘levedi’ [#30.7, 11, 21] and claims as its subject ‘My love’, which ‘is on the liht’ [has alighted on you, 22], this poem is more concerned with two groups of men: first, the implied masculine audience with whom the speaker is pleased to share his ‘grede’-​ing, ‘grone’-​ing, and expectation of future sexual healing (a male-​bonded cohort that includes most modern critics); and second, a group of ‘men’, alluded to with offhand familiarity, that ‘to me han onde’ [are angry with me; or, literally, have anger {enmity} towards me, 18]. Our speaker will not waver in his ‘love’: he will ‘Ne lete for non of tho’, will ‘not let up’ in his loving ‘for any of them’, whatever they say [19–​20]. And he is confident too of his reward: his ‘burde’ is ‘Brihtest under bys’ [radiant when out of her clothing {beneath the covers}, 38].68 Scholars interested in tracing Harley derivations have observed that an openness about sex marks the northern French lyric tradition through which Provençal conventions are speculated to have travelled on their way to the English west country.69 Still, the goal of this lover’s rhetorical performance is not the ‘bote’ to be received in ‘bour’, his anticipated postcoital ‘reste’, so much as his need to allay the ‘onde’ or men’s ‘anger’ he has generated. He must prove himself equal in stubborn potency to the dour critique of such men. Either way, the intercourse this lyric desires (and continues to facilitate) is not genital but social. More precisely, it is homosocial, meaning it has its base in relations of power, privilege, and affiliation between men, while yet being functionally concerned—​ not just ostensibly so—​ with matters of heterosexual coupling. As expounded by Eve Sedgwick, homosocial patriarchy’s basic paradigm does not exclude the feminine but requires it: throughout English literary history, women’s bodies serve as the vehicle through which men interact with one another (a topic we’ll explore further in Chapter 3).70 It is the courtly affair’s constituting paradox that it be constructed as ‘secret’ [derne] only in order that it may, in poetic discourse, be revealed. The rhetoric may be boastful or self-​deprecating, admonitory or philosophical, but whatever the mode, courtly poetics have their foundation in a circulation, among the members of a competing or consoling masculine audience, of the joys and travails endemic to an amorous condition. The temptation may be to declare the voyeuristic content in poems like these a red herring, mere cover for competitive professional erotics. But as a generation of work in the vein of Sedgwick insists, the sexual is an integral part of the social, into which it is perennially folded.

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Why do men have ‘onde’ [anger] with our speaker? At poem’s opening we found him going mad on the ground:  ‘On molde Y waxe mad’ [#30.2]. If desire—​even whipped-​up fictional desire, a displacement of homosocial anxiety on to the body of a lyric maiden—​be a species of madness, then what the angry men at the fringes of this lyric embody is a concern that ‘love’, excessive passion for some ‘burde in boure’ [#46.1, #28.1], not interfere with masculine affairs. If misdirected, ‘love-​longing’ threatens to incapacitate a man, to have a negative impact on his performance of vocational—​and affiliational—​duty. A vernacular affair does preoccupy our speaker. Even so, the bawdy currency of the great body of his outland ‘burde’ (recall her radiance ‘when undressed’) underscores the extent to which the reproduction at issue here is public, masculine, and institutional, as opposed to hidden (provincially ‘derne’) and embowered. In being surveyed and evaluated, compared and circulated, the body of the lyric beloved reveals the competitive heterosexual dynamics—​ and cosmopolitan homosocial circuitry—​within which poems like these have their conception, as well as continuing erotic resonance. Love in land, men upon molde The theme of poetic competition, with its implications for male group bonding, sees elaboration in The Poet’s Repentance or (as its first line runs) ‘Wepying haveth myn wonges wet’ [#33.1]. The ‘weeping’ that has ‘wet’ this narrator’s ‘cheeks’ [wonges] is a result not of the usual lover’s complaint, but of his own ‘wikked werk ant wone of wyt’ [wicked work and lack of tact {want of wisdom}, 2]. Specifically, the poet repents of his anti-​feminist slander: ‘Ofte in song Y have hem set, /​That is unsemly ther hit syt’ [often in songs I have placed them {women} where it is unseemly that they appear, 7–​8]. He now declares ‘al wrong’ what he has ‘seid in song’ [10–​12]. In his defence, he has only stirred up wrong because of a certain ‘wyf’—​not some fickle former love but rather she ‘that made us wo in world’ [13–​14]. Talk of Eve begets talk of Mary. Fortunately, ‘there have been no wicked women since He was born [of her]’ [Wommon nes wicked non /​Seththe he ybore was, 23–​24]. The overwrought nature of this assertion (an example of the Harley manuscript’s ‘cheerful cynicism’)71 betrays itself in the poet’s ensuing (and potentially mysterious) claim that ‘all [women] are as courteous as hawks in a chamber’ [are al hende ase hake in chete, 28]. Whether we see irony here depends on what valence we assign to a

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conventional phrase: ‘hende ase hake in chete’ may signify women’s inherent nobility (or grace), the appropriately ‘courteous’ cast of female character.72 Our poet’s repentance (he is ‘mot’ [sorry, #33.29]) feels disingenuous because his relationship with women is not his song’s primary concern. This does not stop him from dramatic enactment of penance: ‘Y falle to fete’ [I fall at their feet], he declares twice in two lines [32–​33]. It requires a stretch of lines to illustrate this poem’s concatenated quality, its suffusion with the techniques of alliteration and rhyme, syntactic inversion and semantic repetition: Forthi on molde Y waxe mot Thus in the dirt I must writhe, That Y sawes have seid unsete—​ because I have told unseemly  tales—​ My fykel fleishe, mi falsly blod!—​ O my fickle flesh, my most   false blood—​ On feld hem feole Y falle to fete: on the ground before them I fall   at their feet. To fet Y falle hem feole At their feet I fall before them For falsleke fifti-​folde, because of falsehoods fifty-​fold, Of alle untrewe on tele all of them untrue in the telling With tonge ase Y her tolde! as with tongue I have here told!              [29–​ 36]

‘Forthi on molde Y waxe mot’: ‘therefore {for my transgressions}, upon the earth’—​abject ‘on molde’—​‘I must wax repentant, must here waste away’ [29]. The word ‘molde’ has powerful valence in the Harley manuscript.73 In our last poem (three folios prior in Quire 7), a lover ‘waxes mad’, and does so, definitively as it were, on the earth or ground:  ‘on molde Y waxe mad’ [#30.2; emphasis added]. But far more affecting is the overheard lamentation of ‘men upo mold’, ‘men of the earth’ in the sense of men who work the earth [#31.1], encountered in a Middle English social complaint set between these two lyrics. The downtrodden farmers of the Song of the Husbandman (fol. 64) do not wax with love-​longing ‘upo[n]‌ mold’, but instead waste away on unplanted furrows—​even their seed-​corn has been sold to pay the king’s tax [63–​64]. The combination of unforgiving weather, manorial graft, and feudal exploitation has driven them to starvation—​ and, worse, suicidal despair: ‘Ase god is swynden anon, as so forte swynke’ [it would be as good to die at once, as to labour so {in such hopelessness}, 72].

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Another nearby political song—​ a caustic tale decrying outside authority’s encroachment within a village community—​ is set into motion when its speaker happens to ‘[go] with a mai’ ‘on molde’: that is, ‘has a go on the ground with a maiden’ [Yef Ich on molde mote with a mai, #40.4]. As in Husbandman, ‘molde’ carries strong association with (and may literally denote) the furrow, characterizing this earthy sexual act—​in its speaker’s eyes at least—​as an expression of agrarian connectedness. To say that two kinds of ploughing are going on captures my double meaning, but cheapens the poem’s blending of ‘molde’ as place of rural work and of vernacular passion alike. The usual modern title of this Quire 8 complaint is A Satire on the Consistory Courts (fol. 70v). It culminates with the speaker, humiliated before an itinerant ecclesiastical court, declaring his refusal to fall at his judges’ feet—​‘Shal Y to fote falle for mi fo?’ [Shall I fall at the foot of my foe?, #40.67]—​ when ordered to take the ‘mai’ he has impregnated (?)74 officially to wife. Unsympathetic scholars have regarded the tale of this ‘rascal’ as self-​incriminating: ‘if he is such a nice guy, what is he doing in a satire?’75 Yet, however canonical the court’s justice (‘huere lay’ [their teaching, 5] or ‘lawe’ [legal interpretation, 65]), this visiting body has disrupted village affairs. ‘Ne mai no lewed lued libben in londe’ [unlettered folk can hardly live in this country, 1], the poem begins, ‘So lerede vs biledes’ [since learned men give us the run-​ around, 3].76 The speaker is driven to ‘fleo [flee] from my fere’, in the doubled sense of ‘fere’ as ‘companion/​sexual partner’ and as ‘community’ or ‘set of companions’ [16].77 Outside inter-​fere-​ence has resulted in rupture to local community and of the lovers’ bond (if it was a bond) alike. The terms used to convey a sense of community in Satire are precisely those used to describe ‘love-​longing’ in neighbouring lyrics. Abjection, political or passionate, takes place ‘on molde’; social standing is expressed in falling ‘to fete’; and community, felt or fractured, lies embodied ‘in londe’. The manuscript proximity, stylistic similarity, and semantic borrowing between Harley political songs and love lyrics indicates that overlap also existed between these texts’ interpretive communities—​ if not at composition, then through subsequent circulation. Hereford and Worcester secular clergy knew and copied (if they did not also generate) both sets of texts, even if the primary audiences for each type were dissimilar in institutional placement and patronal loyalties. To be sure, there are differences in tone, genre, and social orientation:  the anti-​clerical snarl of Satire and anti-​establishment bitterness of Husbandman correlate

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imperfectly with the light and learned sophistication of the best lyrics. Scholars have found affiliation between Harley political complaints and provincial gentry landholders, whose interests these poems tend implicitly to promote (more than those of subaltern labourers, whose ventriloquized laments are put to partisan use).78 Such social positioning fits better with the secular Marcher milieu tagged by Revard (and contextualized by Saul) than it does with the mobile ecclesiastics that form this chapter’s subject community. As with blended lay and clerical audiences, however, manuscripts harbouring texts of mixed allegiance should not surprise, and need not invalidate a prior episcopal context—​transmitting if not authorial—​for the lyrics preserved in Harley 2253. It is precisely the burgeoning class activated by Harley’s vernacular complaints, after all—​ rural gentry families whose allegiances came increasingly, during this period and for this region, to centre upon provincial political institutions like the shire—​from which the bulk of Hereford secular clergy were drawn.79 The nostalgic, lyrical localism of these cosmopolitan clerks takes a form unlike, but does not conflict with, the functional, jurisdictional localism that was taking root in their birth families (with whom, as patronage and visitation patterns make clear, mature ecclesiastics remained interconnected). Quire 7–​8 political songs like Husbandman and Satire do more than just share a semantic terrain with nearby lyrics such as The Lover’s Complaint and The Poet’s Repentance; they return us to lyric’s tumultuous land of love-​longing with an enriched sense of these genres’ complementary yet distinct geographical thematics. In place of a speaker who has spread evil tales about women around town (‘told beon tales untoun in toune’ [#33.37]), and who is now, however disingenuously, languishing ‘on molde’, The Poet’s Repentance offers the admirable example of one ‘Richard’ [60–​ 61]. ‘[R]ote of resoun ryht, /​Rykening of rym ant ron’ [61–​62], this Richard has been taken to be a ‘rival poet’;80 he is ‘well-​versed in right reasoning’ and in ‘reckoning {estimation} of rhyme and rune’—​that is, the clerical mystery of writing, with the added sense of invocational potency that ‘rune’ conveys. The speaker’s self-​deprecation with regard to Richard has a quality dissimilar to his performance of abjection before the nameless women he has defamed. If any rivalry is present, it is of the affectionate variety. The tone bespeaks sardonic intimacy, compounded in that the poet’s praise of Richard (straight compared with his apologia to ‘[all] wymmen’ [53]) amounts to an assertion of his right to grace by association. Women rightly prefer Richard to the speaker:  he

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is ‘Cunde comely ase a knyht’ [well-​bred {shaped as nobly} as a knight, 65], while at the same time ‘Clerk ycud, that craftes con’ [a clerk well-​known for mastery of his craft, 66]. No mention is made of any ‘song[es]’ or ‘tales’ by Richard—​curious if he is a rival—​but much is made of Richard’s ‘red[e]’:  his ‘counsel’ or kindly intervention [7, 37, 60].81 With his aristocratic breeding and clerical craft, his standing among noble women and sponsorship of an abject poet—​plus the praise of his metrical judgement—​‘Richard’ comes across more like an episcopal mandarin than some fellow clericus vagans [wandering clerk] envied, as the implication tends to run, for his sexual prowess. An earlier reference to ‘kyng, cayser’ [king, kaiser], and ‘clerk with croune’ [#33.43] is activated in the final stanza’s apostrophe to Richard as ‘clerk most famous’ [Clerk ycud]: ‘In uch an hyrd thyn athel ys hyht’ [in every household, your nobility {worth} is declared,  67].82 The term ‘hyrd’ [household] had appeared in the speaker’s earlier promise:  ‘From now on I  will always praise women, and always holde with them [speak well of them] in hyrd [among the household]’ [53–​54]. Gentle households like the one that owned Harley 2253 are home to just the sort of women among whom Richard’s reputation shines; but Middle English ‘hyrd’ retains remnants of its Anglo-​Saxon sense as ‘warrior band’, a lord’s cadre of loyal retainers.83 Through Richard’s intercession a disgraced clerk has risen from contemplation of ‘cares colde’ [52], a state of ‘wo’ figured in terms of his disfavour with local women, into universal social investment: ‘Nou wo in world ys went away, /​Ant weole is come, ase we wolde’ [now suffering is gone from the world, and reward has come, as we wished, 49–​50]. The poet acknowledges that his elevation from ‘woe’ into ‘weal’ has been conferred by patronage:  ‘thourh a mihti, methful mai’ [through a mighty, temperate {gracious} maid, 51]. Among earthly intercessors, however, credit for his transformation adheres not to Mary’s lineage, that is, any of the ‘brudes bryht’ [radiant birds, 39] he has defamed; it is just that I am finally listening to Richard: ‘Soth is that Y of hem ha wroht, /​As Richard erst con red’ [the truth is that I’ve begun treating them as Richard has always advised, 59–​60]. The poem announces its topic as ‘levedis loue’ [ladies’ love {or, love of ladies}, 5], but presses its praise on Richard. What women provide is occasion—​and means. Richard has worldly ‘myht’ [influence] specifically in consequence of his good standing among ‘gentle maidens’ [of maidnes meke thou hast myht, 63]. Thus invested, he effects a transformation upon poet—​and audience. Secular ‘levedis’,

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female patrons of the sort who might commission manuscripts or control advowson (right of appointment) for some plump church benefice, may flutter in the wings,84 but ultimately it is an institutional masculine relationship that The Poet’s Repentance works to promote. ‘Weole’ [reward] has come, not as ‘I’ but ‘as all of us wished’ [ase we wolde] [#33.49–​50; emphasis added]. Commentators have found it surprising that early lyrics seldom address matters of real importance to their clerical authors, such as the ‘difficulty of finding preferment’.85 These may well be the worries that animate the Repentant Poet, his ‘cares colde’ [52], but what patterns of ecclesiastical promotion at Hereford and Worcester demonstrate, during the early fourteenth century, is the opposite of zero-​sum competition. When the affairs of bishop and diocese thrive, Adam Orleton’s household clerks are rewarded with additional or more lucrative benefices. Like the spoils of battle to Anglo-​Saxon hiredmenn (ME hyrdmen), promotions to office do not come singly but are distributed to many at a time.86 This reality of ecclesiastical life helps reinforce the collective nature of administrative undertaking, but a corollary is that such esprit de corps may characterize social and cultural undertakings as well. Well-​recompensed pluralists, as Orleton’s key clerks were to become, might be especially given to commemorating their advancement through poetic conviviality. Combined with his deference to Richard, the perseverance of the poet’s mischievous tone towards women—​‘I won’t disagree with anything they tell me’ [Y ner nemnede that heo nolde, #33.56]—​suggests that what some Harley Lyrics are talking about, when they talk about ‘love’ [5]‌, is their speakers’ sense of gratitude to the (masculine) familia that sustains them, and especially to the ‘clerk with croune’, present, desired, or fondly remembered, at its head. An aristocratic Norman counterpart to the generic priestly ‘John’ of a neighbouring lyric [#28.50], ‘Richard’ is probably a throwaway name, chosen to alliterate with ‘red[e]’, ‘rykening’, ‘rym ant ron’ [#33.60–​62].87 Perceived to be ‘bearers of introspective insight’, lyric poems are especially subject to critical-​biographical desire.88 Considering, however, that there are intriguing visits and gift exchanges plus patronal ties and family connections between Hereford episcopal clerks and various Ludlow households proposed as home to Harley 2253, we are obliged to consider that ‘Richard’ could be allusion to a specific ‘clerk with crown’ (or ‘mitre’). It can be dangerous to read too much into lyric narratives, let alone character names, since only rarely can they be shown to document

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historical relationships. But certainly, Richard Swinfield was fondly remembered by his familia. Presumably, Bishop Richard was also beloved of the Mortimer-​Talbot family of Richard’s Castle (near Ludlow), who had entertained him on visitation in May 1290, who later placed a son in the Hereford episcopal entourage, and whom Revard regards as leading candidates to have been Harley 2253’s patrons (see Introduction, Epilogue).89 Another Ludlow domina with ties to the manuscript, Katherine de Geneville—​an accounts roll for her father Geoffrey’s household served as its wrapper—​ also connects to Hereford’s episcopal milieu and larger ecclesiastical network:  in 1287 Swinfield risked censure by collating her brother Nicholas, then underage, to a valuable cathedral prebend, and years later (in 1317) his executors presented Katherine with a silver chalice, as a mark of friendship with the family.90 The Poet’s Repentance reaches climax when it declares to Richard, ‘On molde Y holde the murgest mon’ [I consider you the most pleasant {bountiful} man on earth, #33.64]. In being ‘murgest’ [most pleasing], Richard is the very thing that other Quire 7–​8 speakers declare their beloved ladies (‘levedis’) to be [#46.53, #34.37]. Richard’s description as ‘murgest’ man ‘on molde’ [in the land {throughout the country}], in addition to his fame ‘in uch an hyrd’ [in every household, #33.67] across the region, helps indicate what is at stake for the Harley Lyrics in imaginative geographical terms. The Repentant Poet’s self-​deprecation contains a healthy dose of anti-​feminist irony, even if the misogyny rides more lightly here than in the book’s fabliaux and other ‘poems about love, women, and sex’, some of them saccharine encomium, but the balance invective in the mode known as blasme des femmes [reproach of women] (see Chapter  3).91 The political geography charted by the Harley manuscript has a sharp regionalist slant, but its gender-​ambiguous amatory landscaping begins to come into view when we place temperate, bountiful Richard beside a lyric opening appropriate almost anywhere in the collection. ‘In May hit murgeth when hit dawes’ [In May it is pleasing when it dawns] and ‘Blosmes bredeth on the bowes’ [blossoms breed on the boughs]; yet ‘Y not non so freoli flour’ [I know no flower as beautiful {excellent}] as the ‘splendid women who dwell out west’ [So worly wymmen are by west] [#44.1, 4, 7, 10]. Love of ‘lef’ [beloved figure] and love of ‘lond’ [land {the countryside}] conjoin throughout the Harley corpus. But if, as critics often conclude, the lyric ‘lady’ is ultimately a fiction, are we then left with something so banal as hymns to a landscape,

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garden-​ variety praise of the ‘west country’ as region? I  don’t believe so. ‘Lef in lond’, ‘Lussomore in londe’ [#46.8], ‘Levedy, of alle londe’ [#30.11]: the phrases alliterate, indeed proliferate, but they are not—​ as idiomatic translations tend to render them—​ interpretively empty.92 There are figures in this landscape and topographies mapped on to these figures. The effect is that of still-​life portraiture, yet the view is a sheltered one, as in the erotic dawn of the aubade, when lingering lovers lie encased by flowering boughs. Indeed this ‘agreeable’ [mury], reclined perspective is so prevalent that the Harley lyric landscape (or ‘londe’) consists of little in itself, exists mostly as ‘bour’ or sequence of bowers. The final benediction of the praise-​poem to Richard is that he ‘be … sent /​In londe of levedis alle!’ [#33.71–​72]: that he be received—​how to parse this?—​‘into the land of all ladies’? ‘into the bowers [i.e., sexual graces] of all ladies in the land’? Does Richard inherit some kind of acoustic ladyland? ‘Murgest’ [most pleasing] he becomes indeed, seems to be the poet’s sly insinuation. The expressions of land-​‘longyng’ that appear in the Harley Lyrics amount not to district advocacy, but to nostalgia. We are met not with sacralized dwelling in the west, but with periodic return; a riding out, not inhabitation. ‘Most Y ryden by Rybbesdale, /​Wilde wymmen forte wale, /​Ant welde wuch Ich wolde’ [I’d like to ride out through Ribblesdale, to choose among the wanton women there, and possess the one I would, #34.1–​3]: this is not the song of a resident, though it canonizes the figure of the ‘wilde’, potentially ‘unruly’ local beloved. Like The Lover’s Complaint copied overleaf, The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale is the account of a traveller returning. The difference is that between occupation of a local chaplaincy or parish cure and the blur of diplomatic delegation and episcopal visitation. Playboys of the west of England Harley lyric narrators tend to be men of ‘hyrd’ who move ‘in world’ and ‘in toune’. They themselves are cosmopolitan, by and large—​ urbanely prone, as in the disingenuous Advice to Women (Quire 8), to a casual ‘tricherie’ in matters of amorous ‘trouthe’ [#44.20–​ 22]. But as seen in our Ribblesdale Rider’s preference for ‘wilde’ [uncultivated] women, they require their vernacular maidens to be otherwise. At once predatory and paternalistic, the narrator of Advice embraces, as his ostensible rhetorical project, the need to warn hinterland women against the subtle likes of himself: ‘So

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wyde in world ys huere won [dwelling], /​In uch a toune untrewe is on /​From Leycestre to Lounde’ [unfaithful men are spread so wide across the world that you’ll find one in every town, from {the city of} Leicester to {the village of} Lound, 28–​30]. So impassioned is our speaker that some see him as ‘penitential’; credible or not, his admonitory performance acts as a hinge between the carnal sensibilities of preceding lyrics and the devotional mode of those that follow.93 Advice to Women oscillates between an anxiety to preserve female bodily purity and its corollary: desire for bower penetration, for erotic access to that same salvific body. In line with neighbouring lyrics, Advice clings to the prospect of a ‘hevene’ to be ‘hevede here’ [#34.84], where local transmutes unto universal, carnal unto spiritual. Our speaker equivocates charismatically, but his ambivalence maps clearly. Outland bodies possess a redemptive innocence, while erotic ‘tricherie’ is a symptom of worldliness. What ‘worly’ western ‘wymmen’ must ‘be onwar’ of [#44.10, 34] is not the callow ‘wowyng’ [lovemaking] of a narrator like Alysoun’s [#29.37], but clerkly urbanity: ‘When me ou woweth, beth war bifore /​Whuch is worldes ahte’ [when someone like me woos you, beware of that which is the world’s peril, #44.41–​42]. ‘Worldes ahte’ denotes both a naturalized sexual ‘peril that is in the world’ and a more generalized ‘risk of being worldly’. Only men—​certain men—​are equipped to navigate the complications of a cosmopolitan condition. For women so unfortunate as to miss this Advice, merely to fare out ‘in world’ [28] is to court bodily compromise, hence social and spiritual disaster: in the groves and ‘dounes’ [downs] of May-​time ‘stevenyng’ [meetings] [1–​2, 33], when ‘lef is lyht on lynde’ [love flits lightly on the bough, 3], ‘Ys fare is o to founde’ [his behaviour is always put to the test, 27]. From the embrace of the ‘trichour’ [31], there is no return: ‘To late cometh the yeynchar’ [too late comes any means of escape, 35]. Smooth clerks are ubiquitous—​ scattered ‘wyde in world’ [#44.28; cf. #64.9]—​but ‘[un]trouthe’ [#44.20, 22, 31; cf. #33.35] resides especially ‘in toune’ [#33.37, #44.29].94 That the collection’s favoured terms for ‘beloved’ (‘levedy’, ‘lef’) are persistently collocated with ‘lond’, whose associations include both ‘landscape’ and ‘community’, helps characterize male falseness as a plague upon the countryside. And when it comes to country matters, ‘Lut in londe are to leve’ [few {men} in the land can be believed, #44.19].95 We have the finest women in the world ‘by west’, and ‘one of hem

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Ich herie [praise as] best’; but beware, good ladies, the ways of the world [10–​11, 34]. The mobile terms of Harley love affairs—​embowered vernac­ ular ‘levedi’, itinerant clerical lover—​may be a consequence of genre (that is, inherited from continental models). Still, movement away from and back to the local—​the local ‘lef’, the local ‘lond’—​ is endemic to this collection. One Quire 8 sophisticate languishes in the metropole, composing macaronic complaint ‘enmi la vile de Paris’ [in the middle of the city of Paris], until, overcome with native longing, he drops Latin and French to conclude with English resignation: ‘Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit ys’ [it would be a grievous thing if I died for love of her, #55.17–​20]. Another ‘clerc’ promises (in Quire 9) that ‘Thou art ever in my thoht in londe wher Ich am’ [you are always in my thoughts, no matter where in the country I  am],96 but complains of suffering ‘fer from [hom]’ [far from {home}] [#64.9, 14,  31].97 In Quire 12’s Urbain le courtois [Urbain the Courteous]—​an Anglo-​Norman conduct poem that follows debate pieces ‘in praise [or ‘dispraise’] of the fair Sex’98—​a wise and worldly father (‘Un sage honme’) exhorts his ‘chere fitz’ [dear son] to act responsibly ‘when you pass through the country’ [Quant vous passez par le pais] [#79.1, 13, 179]. This applies especially ‘if you become a cleric, as may be’ [Si clerc seize, com bien puet ester], in which case there follow more directives on familial love: ‘avoid whores’ [Lessez puteynz] and ‘always love your master’ [Totdis amez vostre mestre] [286–​288].99 Coterie obligations are standard for narrators across Harley 2253, but so too are careers of itinerancy. The passions and/​or obligations of these men have taken them elsewhere. If a speaker is afflicted by love, as in Quire 7’s rollicking Alysoun, he must languish apart from the ‘blisse’ of his ‘owen make’ [mate {partner}] [#29.7, 18]. If he offends authority, he shall be expelled from the local community. Such was the future envisioned by Satire’s protagonist: bitter reward for one who ‘in hyrt’ had proven ‘haver of honde’ [clever {handy}] [#40.2]. This exilic condition comes full course in Trailbaston (#80, fol. 113v), an Anglo-​Norman outlaw’s song set between bourgeois Urbain (#79) and the outlying ‘village’ lyric The Man in the Moon (#81).100 Trailbaston describes the dystopian consequences of itinerant justice: having fled false accusation ‘to the greenwood’ [Al vert bois], the poem’s speaker laments that ‘This is what the bad laws do to me … that I dare not come into peace among my kinsfolk’; ‘pray for me that I may go riding to

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my country’, for as it stands, ‘I will not come within ten leagues or two of home’ [#80.54, 70–​71, 91–​94].101 Virtually by definition, Harley speakers are away, ‘fer from’ (or soon to depart), the places that matter to them.102 Yet it is not an easy thing to establish where exactly ‘hom’ lies for Harley lyric protagonists, or, for that matter, where may lie the redolent ‘bours’ dear to the erotic imaginations of these poems’ initial, secondary, and ancillary audiences, down even to the present voyeuristic moment. One suspects that home for the Repentant Poet, while it may lie in a generalized way ‘by west’, is most viscerally experienced ‘in hyrd’:  among fellow poet-​ administrators and in the memorialized presence of Richard, fount of ‘rede’. So too the Complaining Lover, who worried what his friends might think. (Our Adviser to Women frets about what they’re doing.) Even courteous Urbain, though neither lyric nor English, directs the young careerist not to take (‘ne pernez’) a woman ‘Santz consail de vos amys’ [against the advice of your friends] [#79.80–​82].103 The Harley Lyrics’ allusions to clerical ‘hyrd’, western ‘lond’, and familial ‘love’ will have struck a chord with, if they do not constitute a response to, the biographical experience of Hereford and Worcester secular clerks in these same years:  their sojourning ‘fer from’ home and bower; their ‘longyng’ for coterie proximity; their profound dependence upon patronal ‘rede’. The social conditions that animate such men have a material geographical base, in the reality of their perennial travel, on administrative circuit across and on diplomatic jags away from the diocese. Spatial displacement became a communal experience for ambitious western clerks in these years. In collision with the logic of incarnate geography (explored further in Chapter 4), this professional experience produces a desire for vernacular grounding, for social and topographical integration. The figure of the vernacular maiden embodies geographical contradictions that the professional lives of these men have generated but that they cannot, it would seem, otherwise resolve. Through performative manipulation of a poetic fetish-​object—​the ‘lef in lond’ who remains securely ‘in bour’ (in her locality, in her place)—​the Harley Lyrics dispel mobility’s tensions. Formally speaking, these poems have their genesis in cross-​vernacular literary exchange—​as occurs at papal Avignon, for example, where in the years of the Hereford delegation there moved the likes of Dante and Petrarch,104 and where a growing emphasis on ‘lyric genres [and] vernacular poetics’ helped produce ‘a literary culture that extend[ed] across boundaries of dialect and

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idiom’.105 Avignon’s clerical elite was differentiated by national origin, but integrated by Latinity and diplomatic professionalism. ‘In all its proverbial forms’, ‘the city continues to be’, as Vinay Dharwadker has said, ‘very much the archetypal geopolitical unit of cosmopolitanism’. The obvious concourse at Avignon between matters spiritual and temporal emphasized the papal city’s paradigmatic standing as a ‘site where power is concentrated and capital is accumulated and deployed’—​patronal power and poetic capital not least.106 Vernacular lyric’s beginnings are urban and internationalist, but the end result of Harleian love-​lament is the production of ‘bote’, an erotic local balm that works as resolution to the profound dislocation brought on by travel. The circulation, ‘by west’, of Middle English poems that give voice to this experience helps bind together an ambitious, distinctive, and unusually mobile interpretive community: one whose underpinnings are ecclesiastical, whose contours are familial, and whose poetics are cosmopolitan, yet that finds its umbilicus in the radiant figure of the embowered regional beloved. Medieval allegiances, cosmopolitan dispositions In 1999, Ralph Hanna endorsed the notion—​ promulgated by Brook in 1933—​ that despite being ‘recorded in Hereford’, the lyrics preserved in Harley 2253  ‘represent [the] activities of many poets in diverse dialect regions’.107 The Harley Lyrics, I have argued, possess a regionalist and episcopal orientation that becomes heightened when their literary evidence is read against a biographical backdrop, but these poems were not all composed by West Midlands secular clergy. Hanna’s mention comes during his reassessment of alliterative poetry’s fraught place in English literary history. He challenges the ‘triumph inherent in’ the traditional narrative ‘whereby alliterative poetry was always conceived as the Other of Chaucerian verse and the assertion of a provincial baronial self-​consciousness opposed to central hegemony’. The terms Hanna contests are spatial (‘provincial’, ‘central’, ‘anti-​London’), so much so that his irritation with ‘the conventional history’ seems a function of its propensity for ‘vague gestures towards the north and the west’. Naive codicologically and geographically, such moves made a previous generation of medievalists ‘far too prone to construct originary arguments and to generalize these as totalizing narrative’. Hanna’s foregrounding of manuscript materiality and the story of ‘interregional penetration’ it tells serves as empirical

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corrective to the easy oppositionality long prevailing in literary historiography: our habitual recourse, inherited along with canonical reading lists, to the shop-​worn binaries of centre/​periphery thinking.108 If many Harley texts are ‘western’ merely in scribal overlay while deep linguistic strata reveal an ‘original’ regional identity for each, to plot Brook’s findings—​so many lyrics that ‘belong to’ one or another dialect—​is to map a demographic spread of Harley origins, against which the fact of their unique compilation ‘out west’ discordantly grates.109 Many travellers to the past are finding it necessary, as Robert R. Edwards has said, ‘to revisit the literary and cultural geography that earlier medieval scholars could largely take for granted’.110 The Quire 7–​8 Harley voices we have encountered in this chapter indulge in just the sort of sloppy nostalgic mapping for which Hanna chastens his scholarly forebears: they make ‘vague gestures to’ an ‘originary’ ‘lond’ ‘by west’—​a space that is equal parts regional political community, sexual/​textual fantasyland, and transubstantiated spiritual destination. Yet must the Harley Lyrics be therefore said to collude with those very Old Historicists whose reductive binaries have compromised them in the first place? Premature and provincial with respect to accepted English paradigms, the eruption of vernacular poetics represented by the Harley Lyrics has yet to be accounted for. But in being internationally sown and regionally grown, do these poems help produce their own marginality? Hanna reveals what may be at stake: ‘Just as Chaucerian verse emanated from London to inspire writers in far-​removed provincial settings, so alliterative poetry—​although with considerably less success—​developed as one competing form of a national, not regional, literature.’111 In a stocktaking essay that introduces the expansive Cosmopolitan Geographies (2001), Dharwadker describes modern geopolitical theory as preoccupied with the ‘multifarious interdependencies and tensions between nations and nationalism, on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism and internationalism, on the other’. But cosmopolitanism ‘in its historically variable time and place’, Dharwadker insists, ‘frequently differentiates itself from more than nationalism’. Modern Indian cosmopolitanism ‘emerges from a dynamic rectangulation of empire, village, nation, and city’ in which subjects might commit themselves to ‘[several] rather different objects of allegiance’. These options for imagining community ‘were never mutually exclusive because they defined themselves in multiple, simultaneous relations of coordination and conflict. Thus, for instance, the Indian village and the Indian city both opposed

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the empire, but they deployed distinct anti-​metropolitan strategies and also opposed each other intransigently.’112 Our present case study lies some half a world and half a millennium away; germane to this territory, the forgotten ‘lond’ of Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics, is that just as modern Indian cosmopolitanism is a complex ‘not reducible to a simple nationalism–​internationalism binary’,113 so may medieval English social relations not be reduced to either a nationalism–​ internationalism or a nationalism–​ regionalism binary—​not, at least, without literary-​historical ramifications. In line with longstanding disciplinary inclinations and recent theoretical trends, Harley scholarship, as my Introduction reported, has come to gather at the point where vernacular literary production meets the category, likewise incipient, of the territorially conceived English nation. In surveying this ‘political’ terrain for Fein’s Studies in the Harley Manuscript (2000), John Scattergood concedes Thorlac Turville-​ Petre’s 1996 argument that Harley 2253  ‘sets forth a generally nationalist set of ideas, a sense of England the nation’. Yet many items, Scattergood notes, ‘express resistance to royal authority’ and other ‘encroachments of centrality’, such that the book may also be said to archive a ‘regionalism that cuts across the broader nationalist attitudes of the poems’.114 In an essay likely to frame future discussions of medieval cosmopolitanism, Edwards describes a situation even more crosshatched, where ‘in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English literature stands at the intersection of cultural forces: cosmopolitan culture meets national and regional practices, and it exists simultaneously within and apart from a courtly social base’. Edwards finds literary cosmopolitanism in medieval England to be ‘inseparable from the question of language and particularly the role of the vernacular’, on which point he cites none other than Turville-​Petre. In dovetailing arguments that lead ultimately back to Harley 2253, these scholars judge that ‘language, territory and people are the criteria for defining national identity’.115 This specialist medievalist claim helps generate a theoretical proposition with far-​reaching implications for cosmopolitanism. As Dharwadker (who in turn deploys Edwards) asserts: ‘The vernacular is a nationalist creature.’116 The Harley Lyrics are vernacular, but by no means are they nationalist creatures. They are cosmopolitan, but their cosmopolitanism does not configure itself, as later, more consequential English texts do, against the category of national identity so beloved of vernacular historiography. The Harley Lyrics are also regional, but their regionalism does not depend upon a relationship

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of competitive opposition—​ literary or otherwise—​ with respect to metropolitan, royal, or national interests. If anything, Harley lyric dialectics ignore these traditionally privileged scales of aggregation.117 Edwards describes a ‘common political geography’ that distinguishes the literary cosmopolitanism of late medieval England from the curial and vernacular cosmopolitanism that developed in Dante’s wake (not least at Avignon), as well as from ‘Augustine’s geography’, in which worldly and heavenly cities ‘coexist and overlap’ despite their ‘stark dichotomy’.118 ‘From the standpoint of literary history’, argues Edwards, the decisive element for ‘the English situation’ is ‘the pervasive yet disjunct presence of the English court’, which as an interpretive factor is ‘as important as the dialectic between cosmopolitanism and national or regional claims’.119 Edwards is justified in emphasizing the courtly here (better, though, to avoid blanket terms like ‘late medieval’ or ‘English’), just as Hanna is persuasive in characterizing late alliterative poetry as a ‘national, not regional’ phenomenon. (So too are Turville-​Petre’s and Scattergood’s readings of Harley political verse reasonable in themselves, while Revard is not to be contravened on scribal milieu, nor Fein on manuscript ordinatio.) And yet, as so often, the best insights of literary history and critical philology either decline to account for, or offer limited purchase upon, the unusual collectivity of lyrics preserved in Harley 2253. Edwards’ case-​studies are canonical, coeval, and thematically convergent: each turns upon an engagement with ‘the Troy story’, a flexible myth of national translation that serves, ‘for the late Middle Ages’, as ‘a paradigmatic cosmopolitan narrative’. The alliterative Saint Erkenwald, for example—​by joining ‘the Trojan origins of England to the Roman mission of Augustine of Canterbury’—​ establishes Britain’s ‘founding culture’ as one in which ‘national identity is already doubly cosmopolitan’. Set ‘At London in Englond’, yet written in a north-​western dialect, Erkenwald ‘balances regional and metropolitan interests’ with configurations that are, by turns, ‘at once regional and cosmopolitan’ and ‘at once cosmopolitan and national’.120 Such readings combine well with those underlying Harley Manuscript Geographies, not least for their plurality. Still, medieval English literary culture as Edwards describes it remains oriented towards ‘political’ community at the regnal level. By foregrounding ‘language, territory and people’, Ricardian texts produce subjects whose ‘objects of allegiance’ may be multiple (courtly and ecclesiastical; metropolitan and regional; feudal and mercantile; genealogical and associational), yet whose

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‘common’ affiliations are always already ‘national’ in inflection. Medieval allegiances are thus made to resemble our own. In the worlds they sketch themselves, the Harley lyricists allude to a sacral western ‘lond’, a ‘hom’ that is emblematized in the figure of the vernacular beloved (whether ecclesiastical patron or linden maiden), whose favour the poet desires to secure (through ‘herian’ [praise]) or displeasure to mitigate (via ‘mon’ [complaint]), and with reference to whom an interpretive community’s claims to allegiance are shaped and activated. My attention to the institution of the bishop’s household or familia episcopalis, with its keen local clerks, its panoply of commitments, and its bodily focal point, has analogy in the dynamic mediating role assigned by Edwards to the English court, an institution whose epicentre lay in the peripatetic royal household or familia regis.121 If the cosmopolitan (or universal) and the regional (or local) may be said to occupy poles along a spectrum of medieval geographical dispositions, and if Edwards finds his mediating factor in the body of that Richard who wears England’s crown, my argument finds its fulcrum in that pleasant ‘clerk with croune’ of our own outland ‘hyrd’: mitred, ‘murgest’ Richard, so endowed of ‘crafte’ and ‘rede’. For the Harley Lyrics and the mobile clerks who knew them, what intervenes between cosmopolitan ‘world’ and regional ‘hom’ is not ‘England the nation’, as for modern geopolitical theorists and literary medievalists; it is not ‘the English court’, however fluid a king’s affinities (and Affinity) may be; and it is not ‘London in Englond’, where ‘regional and metropolitan’ are enfolded, where aspirations to national literary status are contested, and where journeys to distinction abroad or recuperation back home are channelled. The social entity and textual community that is the bishop’s household is narrower of parameter and more flexible in application than these other bodies, but it is no less ‘essentially’ geographical in nature (and no less spatially multiple, considering its territorial jurisdiction, coterie mobility, and far-​flung influence). To adapt Edwards, we might say that from the standpoint of vernacular lyric history, the pervasive yet disjunct presence of the episcopal familia is as important as the dialectic between cosmopolitanism (or universalism) and diocesan or regional claims. Edwards’ profoundest observation is that ‘in late medieval England, cosmopolitanism occupies a shifting rather than fixed geography’.122 How can we account for the Harley Lyrics? Only by bracketing, however temporarily, the calcified paradigms within which approaches to their interpretation have long been

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set—​literary-​critical and social-​ geographical. The Otherness of the Harley Lyrics with respect to mainstream English literary history is a result of the latter’s overdeveloped allegiance to the concept of national vernacular development. Their provincial identity, though deriving partly from their own outland desires, is a consequence of historical-​geographical valuations that become naturalized when we pay disproportionate attention to later (more metropolitan and ‘national’) texts and milieux. If ‘the disposition of cosmopolitanism’, as per Dharwadker, ‘is at once causal and structural, historical and geographical’,123 this chapter’s contribution has been to present a literary-​geographical case-​study that is distinctly non-​national in its pre-​dispositions. The archetypal geopolitical unit for this social and textual milieu is not, in fact, the city. The professionalist ethics and familial poetics, the ambivalent erotics and regional nostalgia we have encountered in one poet’s Repentance, another’s Complaint, a third’s calculated Advice, and the wanton local Ride of a fourth, argue that Harley Lyric imaginations, while informed by an international urban experience, remain otherwise attuned. These speakers’ amatory comforts and spiritual aspirations reside not ‘in toune’, but ‘in bour’, ‘in hyrd’, somewhere vaguely ‘in londe’. And whatever their origins, these lyrics congregate ‘by west’. ‘Levedi, thou rewe me!’:  this plea from my chapter’s epigraph may pertain, as it has been euphemized, to ‘the natural end of unsophisticated love’,124 but it is echoed in penitential lyrics coming shortly after (‘Marie, reweth the’ [#62.10]; ‘Lord, merci! Rewe me now’ [#73.31; cf. #60.19, 43, #64.13, 32]). Against every swain keen for the restorative ‘hom’ of a country ‘bour’, there is arrayed another voice eager to censure erotic trysting. As The Three Foes of Man promises, at the close of Quire 6: ‘Of sunful sauhting sone be sad /​That derne doth this derne dede’ [he who secretly commits this secret deed will soon regret his sinful covenant, #27.7–​8].125 Just as do ‘worldly riches’ [this Worldes won, 49], ‘carnal pleasures pass away’ [This wilde wille went awai,  16]. Far from being the place of ‘blisse’ that cohabiting lovers imagine [#29.7, #28.19, #36.68, #43.3, etc.], our ‘home here’, warns Three Foes, ‘is a disastrous one, surpassed only by hell’ [Hom unholdest her is on—​/​Withouten helle, #27.45–​46].126 In such a cosmography, the local beloved is not the means to salvation; instead, ‘That hath to fere is meste fo’ [the one you take as lover is your greatest foe, 40]. Erotic consummation, however devoutly wished, does not commute humanity’s sentence of exile; it intensifies bodily displacement.

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The ‘delightful promise’ of the Harley Lyrics is not that they document, for our aficionado prurience, a displaced mode of medieval longing, nor yet that they enact an immolation of desire. Instead, it is that they reconcile the realms of carnal and incarnate, providing a model for how to blend our competing desires for this-​ worldly and next-​worldly ‘bours’ of bliss. In their lyric ‘evasiveness of being’, the Harley Lyrics communicate an ecstatic worldview: a quality of being sensually in this world (‘Y grone’) while remaining oriented towards a next (‘rewe me’).127 Chapter  4 will extend this point further. But if with a certain coy equivocation—​one might say, a vernacular cosmopolitanism of the spirit—​the poems featured here flicker between ways of institutional being, this enables them to embrace loves both orthodox and transgressive. The rhetorics of seduction, salvation, and literary canonization intertwine. To voice Harley 2253’s erotic and devotional hymns, in the scholarly here and now, evokes a fabulist’s landscape, an impossible ‘lond’ of fond opposites. If the peripheral status that has been visited upon these poems by literary history is a function of their assigned geographical character, it may not be too much to say that the Harley Lyrics’ future critical vitality depends on—​their ‘lyf is long on’ [#30.10]—​our ability to relocate them. ‘Love’, after all, is where you find it. Notes 1 Transcriptions (as well as translations of Latin and Anglo-​Norman, unless noted) are from Fein, Complete Harley. In my renderings of Harley 2253’s concentrated, sometimes ‘obscure’ early Middle English (Brook, HL, 7), I  have mixed the literal and the idiomatic, at times providing multiple translations to communicate tonal or semantic alternatives. 2 As a starting point, see Lefebvre, Production of Space. Williams’ The Country and the City provides an excellent introduction to literature and geography in the context of English history. 3 Or, to retain the alliteration: ‘Be the balm I have bidden you to be’. 4 Fradenburg, ‘Simply Marvelous’; Watson, ‘Desire for the Past’. 5 Fein, Studies, 6, 7, 10, 5. 6 Fein, Studies,  5–​7. 7 Dronke, Medieval Latin, 112–​125; Brook, HL, 7–​8, 18–​21; Robbins, Secular Lyrics, xviii, lii; Chambers, ‘Aspects’. 8 Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 277–​278; Brook, HL, 19–​20, 25–​26. Early lyric provenances are ‘predominantly clerical’ (Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 95, 127).

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9 In their ‘sincerity and wholesome conviction’, Harley poems strike ‘a distinctively English note’—​ thankfully free of ‘Gallic irony’ (Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 275–​279). 10 Brook, HL, 20. 11 Fein observes that the Harley Lyrics ‘have provided steady grist for generations of [scholars]’ (‘Lyrics of Harley’, 4168), but her bibliographical overview (4311–​4361) reveals a declining incidence of treatment. 12 Robbins, Secular Lyrics, xvii. 13 For the Harley Lyrics as ‘extra-​ canonical’—​ the ‘dearth of critical responses’ bespeaking their ‘[exclusion] from the canon’—​ see Margherita, Romance of Origins, 8–​12,  64–​72. 14 Albright, Lyricality, ix, 27; Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 3. 15 Albright, Lyricality, ix. 16 Robbins, Secular Lyrics, lii, and Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 273, both choose the term ‘sudden’, but cf. Robbins, Historical Poems, xxxiii (‘conventions such as these did not grow up overnight’). Scholars from Hilton (Medieval Society, 168) to Williams (The Country and the City) reference the region’s ‘backwater’ status. 17 Robbins, Secular Lyrics, lii, liv; Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 278. 18 Donaldson believes Chaucer knew Harley’s ‘idiom of popular poetry’ (Speaking of Chaucer, 13–​29), but ‘not a single later lyric’, per Robbins, ‘shows any influence’ (Secular Lyrics, lii). 19 Salter, Fourteenth-​Century Poetry, 70. 20 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 42–​43, 59; cf. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry. 21 Turville-​Petre’s study of ‘language, literature, and national identity’ concludes with Harley 2253, which ‘point[s]‌the way’ to Chaucer’s ‘status as a national poet’; England the Nation, 206–​207. 22 Brook, HL, 23; Duncan, ‘ME Poems’, 13–​17. 23 McSparran, ‘English Poems’. 24 DNB 55.232–​234. 25 Capes, Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield (hereafter HRS); Webb, Household Expenses. 26 Jancey, St Thomas of Hereford, 10–​16. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 173–​188, provides demographic analysis. 27 Haines, Career, 100; Bannister, Registrum Ade de Orleton (hereafter HRO). 28 Haines, Career, 81–​96, 100, 206; Haines, Administration,  90–​98. 29 Haines, Career, 97–​100, 205–​206. 30 Haines, Career, 206, 100; Haines, Administration, 46–​62. Senior administrative positions included oversight of priests across the diocese. 31 Dohar, Black Death, 71–​72, 58, 64, 79. See Bannister, HRO, 390–​392, for the high incidence of leaves previously. 32 E.g., #29.41:  ‘Betere is tholien whyle sore /​Then mournen evermore’ [It is better to suffer grievously for a while than to mourn forever];

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cf. #64.30. For ‘derne’ in a moralizing context [#27.8–​9, #93.2], see Brook, HL, 11–​12; Fein, ‘Geynest under Gore’, 351–​352, treats lyrics more enthusiastic about ‘derne’ erotics [#28.36, #36.5]. 33 Hines, Voices in the Past, 71–​104. 34 Revard proposes a degree of mobility for the Harley scribe, based on potential affiliation with various patrons, but his documentary discoveries (‘Scribe’, 26–​28) carry this working scrivener no further than a few miles from Ludlow, during a career spanning thirty-​six years and forty-​one charters. 35 Haines, Administration, 92–​97; Haines, Career, 81–​100, 205–​206. 36 Smith, Guide to Registers, 95–​104. Clanchy, Memory, 16–​17, describes Hereford as one of literacy’s ‘[frontier] growing points’, where innovation occurs because ‘cross-​ fertilization makes adaptation more necessary’. 37 Barrow, ‘Aethelstan’, 42–​43; Orme, ‘Cathedral School’, 565–​567. 38 Haines, Career, 102–​116, 205–​206, 97–​100; Haines, Administration, 92–​97. 39 Sedgwick, Between Men. 40 Rothwell, English Historical Documents, 881–​884. The List of Towns appears in an AN administrative compendium (Statutes of the Realm; Walter Henley’s Husbandry; Grosseteste’s household Rules), the likeliest users of which were royal clerks; Birkholz, King’s Two Maps, 125–​129. 41 Presumably for this reason, Worcester’s is the only entry mentioned by Hartung, Manual of ME, 2238. 42 Gilote et Johane, an AN pastourelle/​ fabliau/​ débat hybrid set amid Quire 7–​8’s ME lyrics, introduces its protagonists with precisely this descriptor [#37.5]. See Chapter 3. 43 Knight, ‘All Dressed Up’, 278. Cable (Alliterative Tradition, 3)  provides a metrical perspective: ‘ME poetry does not show the continuity of tradition that [authorities] assert.’ 44 Lerer, ‘Afterlife’, 24–​25, 31–​32. Hilton describes Worcester Cathedral as ‘a great centre of native English culture’ (Medieval Society, 25–​26). 45 Salter, English and International, 5–​8, 67–​71, 83. 46 Wenzel, Verses in Sermons, 40–​41. The Welsh Marches were also ‘unusually fertile areas for Anglo-​Norman literature’; Barrow, ‘Aethelstan’, 42–​43. 47 Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 61. 48 Edden, Index of ME Prose, 59. Ker, Medieval Libraries, 211, notes Worcester Cathedral Library MS F.61’s Worcester provenance. 49 Terms like ‘individual’, ‘private’, and ‘personal’ have a vexed history with regard to early lyric (Albright, Lyricality, 11–​12; Boffey, MSS of Lyrics). 50 Attendance at a ‘song’ school also ‘contribut[ed] to culture and literacy among’—​ and patronage by—​ ‘the laity’; Orme, ‘Cathedral School’, 568–​572.

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51 Edwards, Secular Cathedrals, 323–​325. 52 Usher, ‘Political Bishop’, 46. 53 Orme, ‘Cathedral School’, 568–​ 569; Swanson and Lepine, ‘Later Middle Ages’, 56–​67; Barrow, ‘Aethelstan’, 38. 54 See Brook, HL, 7, 21–​22, 25, and Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 274–​279, for attribution to the Harley Lyrics of these and similar terms (‘primal’, ‘homely’, ‘wholesome’). 55 ‘Wisist’ means ‘most intelligent’, but here suggests ‘most discerning’ (in her tastes) or ‘most discreet’ (in conducting her affairs). 56 Lyn and Lune are western rivers; Brook, HL, 75. Both Herefordshire and Lancashire have rivers named Ribble. 57 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 168, 255–​ 257; cf. Hilton, Medieval Society,  59–​61. 58 Haines, Career,  97–​98. 59 Albright, Lyricality, 12, 22; Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 62. 60 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 191. 61 For ‘wel mad’, see #34.74. The other terms proliferate. 62 Fein, ‘Compilation’, 74–​77. 63 Hogan, ‘Critical Study’, 43; Brook, ‘Original Dialects’, 55–​57. Dialect assignments tend to agree with provenances suggested by place-​names. 64 Hogan, ‘Critical Study’, 76, ii. 65 Brook, HL, 22; Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 140, 96. 66 Brook, HL, 10, 20; Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 4–​5,  61–​63. 67 Haines, Career, 91, 97. 68 Activated here is the trope [#33.19–​22] of Mary’s womb as a lantern containing ‘light of all the world’; Fein, ‘Geynest under Gore’, 358. 69 Brook, HL; Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 274–​276. 70 Sedgwick, Between Men,  21–​27. 71 Brook, HL, 22. For the collection’s tendency towards irony, see Ransom, Poets at Play. Fein believes this text’s ‘complex tone … cannot be entirely serious’; ‘Geynest under Gore’, 358. 72 This collocation also appears in Pearl [184]. ‘Hendy’ as deployed in Harley [#28.49, #29.9, 21, #33.28, #34.42, #35.9, #46.75] is not so double-​edged as in Chaucer, even if the ‘derne love’ that animates certain lyrics ‘is deftly illustrated by’ the Miller’s Tale’s ‘hende Nicholas’ (Fein, ‘Geynest under Gore’, 353–​354). Canterbury Tales citations (hereafter CT) are from Benson, Riverside Chaucer; for phrases above, see I.3199–​3200. 73 Fein argues that recurrent words (like ‘molde’) link Harley contents thematically (‘Compilation’, 78–​88). 74 After their copulation, she comes to court ‘bymodered ase a morhen’ [58]. Commentators have glossed this as ‘covered with mud like a moorhen’, but further association seems likely with moder (‘mother’ or ‘woman’, sometimes ‘a derogatory term for a young woman, wench’; ‘also used of animals and birds’: MED).

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75 Hogan, ‘Critical Study’, 173; Revard, ‘The Lecher’, 62. 76 Robbins, Historical Poems, 396, glosses ‘biledes’ as ‘lead astray’. Whoever wrote Satire was ‘lerede’, of course, even if its protagonist is ‘lewed’. 77 Brook, HL, 97. Mitchell and Robinson, Guide to OE, 320, gloss (ge) fera as ‘companion, comrade’. The noun derives from feran [set out, proceed] but in cognates (ge)ferscipe [fellowship, community] and gode geferan [good companions], a sense of group comes to take precedence over a sense of travel. 78 Aspin, AN Political Songs, xiv, 107. 79 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 30, 82, 258; Swanson and Lepine, ‘Later Middle Ages’, 56–​62. 80 Brook, HL, 23; cf. Ransom, Poets at Play, 24; Margherita, Romance of Origins,  71–​75. 81 Compare this supportive clerical ‘rede’ to the oppressive ‘redes’ [legal judgements] distributed by the pitiless black robes of Satire [#40.6]. 82 Richard’s credentials as a networked aristocrat militate against the ‘poor clerk on the make’ readings that are the norm for this poem (Fein, ‘Lyrics of Harley’, 4177; Ransom, Poets at Play, 18–​28; Brook, HL, 23; Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 273–​276). 83 See Mitchell and Robinson, Guide to OE, 330–​333, for hiredmann as ‘retainer, warrior’. Brook, HL, 102, glosses hyrd as ‘household’ or ‘family’. MED quotations describe hyrd as a term specific to the ecclesiastical household. 84 Each Hereford Register benefice collation names a patron, clerk presented, and reason for vacancy:  Capes, HRS, 524–​ 544; Bannister, HRO, 385–​389. 85 Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 4; Brook, HL, 10–​11; Albright, Lyricality,  ix–​x. 86 Haines, Career,  96–​97. 87 But see Revard for possible historical Richards and Johns (‘Richard Hurd’, 199–​200). 88 Boffey, MSS of Lyrics, 62, 66. In later manuscripts, ‘record of authorship was felt [necessary]’ (2), but ‘no two lyrics’ in Harley ‘can with certainty [be] assign[ed] to the same poet’ (Brook, HL, 26). It is not for lack of trying: see, in Fein, Studies, alone, groupings suggested by Revard, Stemmler, Fein, McSparran, Jeffrey, etc. 89 Webb, Household Expenses, II.ccix–​ ccx, I:176; Revard, ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 271, 278; Revard, ‘Scribe’, 22. 90 Ker, Facsimile, ix, xxii–​xxiii; Revard, ‘Scribe’, 24; Capes, HRS, vii, 195; Charles and Emanuel, Earlier HCM, 774 (#1046), 61 (#478). 91 For ‘the propretés des femmes (… “what women are like”) discourse’, see Dove, ‘Textual Intimacy’, 344–​345. Harley examples include #8, #76–​78,  #83. 92 Stone’s six renderings of ME londe [#30.11, #33.72, #34.8, #34.50, #44.19, #64.14], for example, produce only one usage of Mod.E ‘land’ or its cognates; Medieval English Verse.

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93 Hogan finds a ‘teasing sense of ambiguity’: the speaker displays ‘gentle concern for deceived women’, yet seems ‘personally implicated’; ‘Critical Study’, 76–​78. Advice (early in Quire 8)  follows fols. 63–​ 71v’s run of amorous lyrics (#28–​30, #33–​36, #41, #43; other texts interspersed); most of the rest are religious (especially in Quires 8–​9). The outliers #24b, #73, #81, and #92–​93—​in Quires 6, 12, 13, and 14—​have less in common with the core lyrics of 62v–​83. 94 Williams, The Country and the City, tracks this resilient literary trope. 95 Recall the rutting ‘on molde’ in Satire (#40), whose abandoned ‘mai’ comes to court ‘bymodered ase a morhen’: dirt-​covered and debauched, perhaps pregnant. Quire 6’s Three Foes of Man predicts hellfire for lovers ‘founden under felde’ [#27.39]. 96 ‘Wher’ he is, is ‘under the wode-​gore’ [under the covering of the woods]; he flees to hide himself ‘from men’, in particular his ‘lemman’’s angry ‘kynne’ [#64.16–​18, 31]. A lover in The Meeting in the Wood imagines he will ‘In uch an hyrd ben hated ant forhaht’ [be hated and despised in every household, #35.34]. 97 ‘Some word has clearly been omitted’ from line 31 of De Clerico et Puella (#64). Brook supplies ‘hom’ (HL, 63); Brown uses ‘bour’ (English Lyrics, 85); and Fein chooses ‘the’ [you] (CH, II.476). 98 Wanley et al., Catalogue of Harleian MSS, II.590. For Quire 12–​13’s anti-​feminist texts (#75a–​79, 82–​84), see Chapter 3. 99 Urbain survives in nine manuscripts (Cambridge UL Gg.i.1 has other Harley items), although only half include l.286 (‘if you become a clerk …’); one replaces l.288’s ‘puteynz’ [whores] with ‘pucels’ [girls]. 100 Quire 13’s Man in the Moon (fol. 114v) appears thirty-​one folios after the core lyrics of Quires 7–​9 (#27–​30, 33–​36, 41, 43–​46, 50–​53, 55, 60–​67, 69; fols. 62v–​83) and a dozen before the contrafacta capping the collection, Quire 14’s The Way of Christ’s Love and The Way of Woman’s Love (#92–​93, fol. 128rv). Like Harley’s first ME lyric, Quire 6’s Earth upon Earth (#24b, fol. 59v; see Chapter 4), Moon is neither devotional nor amorous. 101 ‘Ce me fount les male leis par mout grant outrage /​Qe n’os a la pes veynr entre mon lignage’ [#80.70–​71]; ‘pur moi vueillent prier /​Qe je pus a mon pais aler e chyvaucher’ [93–​94]; ‘E le heyre n’aprocheroy de x lywes ou deus’ [91]. Translation from Aspin, AN Political Songs,  67–​78. 102 This is true of lyric and complaint alike: Satire’s protagonist will suffer ‘er Ich hom go’ [#40.72], while Husbandman’s labourers wait to depart the misery of this world [#31.72]. 103 Also relevant to a regional episcopal milieu is #79.306–​309: ‘Pur vostre pais combatez /​En tous lyws ou vous serrez. /​N’oiez de ly si bien noun, /​Que tu ne le defendez par resound.’ [Fight for your country {homeland} in every place where you might be. Don’t hear anything about it that is not good without defending it with reason.] Translation from Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’, 24–​53. 104 Bannister, HRO, vii.

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105 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 39, 43. Haveley (‘Avignon’, 655)  discusses ‘foundations’ laid by John XXII (1316–​1334), who ‘contributed significantly to the literary culture of Avignon’. 106 Dharwadker, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 10. 107 Hanna, ‘Alliterative Poetry’, 509. Brook assigns the following regional identities:  North (11), Midlands (5), North Midlands (2), North-​West Midlands (3), North-​East Midlands (3), West Midlands (2), East Midlands (1), South or South-​East Midlands (7). Six elude identification; ‘Original Dialects’, 38–​40, 55–​57. 108 Hanna, ‘Alliterative Poetry’, 508–​510; cf. 488–​498 for ‘Old Historicist’ concepts of ‘regional’ alliterative ‘revival’. 109 That the Harley scribe’s dialect is itself an uncertain amalgam of forms (Ludlow-​ based but Leominster-​and Hereford-​ inflected?) illustrates the unreliability of such features as evidence of provenance; McSparran, ‘English Poems’, 393. 110 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 34. 111 Hanna, ‘Alliterative Poetry’, 509. 112 Dharwadker, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 5–​8. 113 Ibid., 9. 114 Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance’, 168, 185. 115 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 38. 116 Dharwadker, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 5. 117 Dimock, ‘Scales of Aggregation’. 118 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 34–​39. 119 Edwards critiques the term ‘Ricardian’ but deploys its canonized texts as paradigmatic nonetheless; ibid., 42. 120 Edwards, ‘Metropol’, 43–​44, 47–​51. 121 Edwards describes the royal court as ‘a matrix for [literary] cosmopolitanism’; ibid., 43. 122 Ibid., 38. 123 Dharwadker, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 10. 124 Chambers, ‘Aspects’, 274. 125 Since Three Foes is among Harley’s earliest lyrics in date (late thirteenth century) and placement (fol. 62v), its claim that ‘Middelerd for mon wes mad’ [This earthly life was made for lamentation, #27.1] sets terms for the poetic disputation to follow, in erotic point and religious counterpoint. 126 A Wayle Whyt ase Whalles Bon (fol. 67)  makes the contrary assertion: that ‘Nys no fur so hot in helle’ [there’s no fire in hell so hot] as that burning a man ‘That loveth derne ant dar nout telle’ [who loves secretly and dares not tell, #36.33–​35]. 127 Albright, Lyricality, viii.

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2 Captives among us: Harley 2253 and the Jews of medieval Hereford

In August 1286, Richard Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, denounced ‘certain sons of iniquity and rebellion’ among the citizens and clerks of his cathedral city, who ‘not secretly, but quite openly’ had accepted invitations to a Jewish wedding feast [nupcialia communia]. ‘Some of our Christians’ attended anyway, so for holding intercourse with the enemies of the cross, ‘eating and drinking, playing and jesting’, the bishop threatened excommunication.1 Little more is known of the incident—​just that its principals, Jewish and Christian, were residents alike of a Marcher town relatively low in importance among Anglo-​Jewish communities, though Hereford was not, like places north and west, wholly devoid of Jewish residence.2 Not for a few more years. As noted in the last chapter, Richard Swinfield was a ‘stay-​at-​home prelate’ mostly uninvolved in national affairs, but he made certain exceptions to this policy. Mindful of pastoral obligations, he helped persuade Edward I  to order the expulsion of all the realm’s Jewish population, during a January 1290 visit to Westminster to promote the canonization of his predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe (d.1282).3 Swinfield’s promotion of Cantilupe’s cult matters from a geographical standpoint because, perhaps in association with that trip, he procured—​ as adornment for the latter’s shrine—​the monumental treasure known as the Hereford Cathedral mappamundi [map of the world] (c.1290–​ 1300).4 A university theologian and political bishop who sat on the king’s council in the 1270s despite prior involvement (mid-​1260s) in baronial rebellion, Thomas Cantilupe distinguished himself throughout his career for being an ‘inveterate enemy of the Jews’.5 He was canonized in 1320. The Epilogue to this book will explore the relationship between regional devotion (as located in Cantilupe’s Hereford Cathedral shrine) and the literary-​compilational project of the Harley manuscript (as described in my Introduction). Chapter  1 featured the

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mobile lives of Hereford Diocese clerks during the early fourteenth century, in the context of the group solidarity and regional-​ cosmopolitan geographies that the love lyrics of Harley 2253 make manifest. The present chapter, like these others, builds upon the tension between ecclesiastical regionality and that larger amalgam of English political/​devotional identity with which it interfaces. But Chapter  2 will also interrogate the ‘textual mappings’ we have so far encountered, in order to account for—​and take literary-​geographical stock of—​the traumatic expulsion of 1290. Those whom King Edward and Bishop Swinfield expel as threats to Christian community, produce in others—​who dwelt in closer congress with Anglo-​Jews—​responses to difference that are, if not benign, at least less uniformly intolerant. A generation after the forced departure of Herefordshire’s Jewish community, there was produced, further north in the diocese, the trilingual miscellany (with links to Hereford bishops) that is the subject of this book. Specialists regard Harley 2253 as an important witness to early English literary history. The chief purpose of Chapter 2 is to discover, within its rich diversity of texts, such trace as Hereford’s departed but remembered Jewish minority may have left in the cultural imaginary of this borderlands diocese. But another is to determine how well the Harley manuscript’s handling, indeed mapping of Jews, aligns with literary and geographical treatments encountered elsewhere in the period. No scholarship on Harley 2253 has featured a Jewish studies line of inquiry, probably because, despite preserving upwards of 120 items, the book offers few obvious candidates for treatment. There are no miracles of the boy singer à la Chaucer’s Prioress or host-​desecration dramas à la the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; no blood-​accusation hagiography or theological debate between Christian and Jew; no marginal sketches of caricatured bodies or suggestively Hebrew names among the fly-​leaf household accounts. This apparent absence of suitable content makes it difficult to predict what insights—​literary and geographical—​any pursuit of the book’s figuration of the Jewish is likely to yield. Considering how much is in Harley 2253, and how understudied much of that material remains, it may seem critically perverse to seek after what is not manifestly present in the book—​or at least, in the compilation as most have come to know it, from its scattering of anthologized pieces. As my Introduction discussed, Fein et  al.’s Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript (2014–​ 2015) has begun to transform Harley

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studies—​and it may be, post-​Anglo-​Saxon/​pre-​Ricardian literary studies generally—​by making newly available dozens of heretofore unedited texts, many unique. Among Complete Harley’s recoveries are many practical devotional and instructional materials—​ including some biblical paraphrases redacted into Anglo-​Norman prose by the main Harley scribe, which pay special attention to the Levites, or designated priestly class of the Hebrews (#71; Quires 10–​11). Other Anglo-​Norman treatises, not far off in the manuscript, describe Near East (especially Holy Land) topography. Exploration of these pilgrim geographies, Old Testament Stories, and other items in which, it turns out, ancient Hebreus figure decisively, will provide a textual basis and literary-​cartographic arrival point for our inquiry. Notwithstanding these finds, the balance of the collection—​ Harley’s semi-​ canonical core—​ has precious few Jews, especially of the post-​biblical variety. But whether constituted by its known vernacular literary items (chiefly lyrics, fabliaux, and political songs), or by its largely unread devotional and instructional fare, Harley 2253 proves useful as an outlying data-​point, in the intersection of literary Jewish studies with medieval manuscript geography. Because the Harley manuscript departs from the norm as regards both its provenance (or historical/​institutional location) and its textual line-​up (the genres it includes, and what they do or don’t treat), this persistently overlooked codex allows us to test the regional extension and generic variation of prevailing takes on post-​expulsion Jewish presence and absence. Harley 2253’s Jewish placements and figurations also teach us to see how differently oriented texts in this compilation construct geography differently—​whether universal, national, or regional in scope, and whether in terms theological, economic, or political—​with different implications for conceptions of an interpretive community that is, crucially for my purposes, Herefordshire-​based. A relative success story Bishop Richard Swinfield’s anxiety about Christians gathering in connubial celebration with their Jewish neighbours, within hailing distance of Hereford Cathedral Close, owes much to the symbolic stakes attached to occasions like these in both wings of Judeo-​ Christian culture. The wedding feast’s claim to be an institutional embodiment of Jewish identity makes it a particular threat to competing communitarian ideologies—​for example, to late medieval ecclesiastical formulations in which the construction of the ‘good

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[Christian] society’ requires Jewish absence from it.6 Indeed the infamous yellow tabula, the prominence of which on medieval Jewish costume grew in proportion to anti-​Judaic animus, was designed ‘ostensibly to prevent the scandal of unwitting sexual intimacy’.7 The importance of weddings for affirming the health and resilience of Jewish community may be seen via another period example, at Lincoln in 1275, whose documentation, architectural setting, and historical context Cecil Roth has famously explicated. More germane to my inquiry than the magnificence of the gifts, illustriousness of the family, or distance travelled by wedding attendees, however, is that there is no documentary suggestion of non-​Jewish guests at Lincoln. Instead there was the ‘nervousness’ of a ‘tragic precedent’—​the father of the bride’s own wedding, in 1255, the ‘unwonted assembly of guests’ for which had ‘given rise to’ an especially harrowing case of blood accusation, with a hundred householders from the East Midlands ‘carted to London for trial, and many … put to death’.8 Where Anglo-​Jewish weddings elsewhere had uninvited guests who brought religious violence, the invitation-​list for Hereford 1286—​on the eve of expulsion—​has inspired generations of jaded historians to ecumenical optimism. That some Hereford residents chose to ignore the prohibition of their bishop suggests the possibility of a less unremittingly ‘nasty’ dynamic in Jewish–​ Christian relations than medievalists have become accustomed to.9 But absence is difficult to read—​and historical exculpation a dangerous business. It remains to be seen whether England’s post-​expulsion literary record sustains such speculation as historians have expressed about neighbourly relations having once obtained, along the provincial Welsh Marches.10 Even more unclear is what might be made, critically, of such a tenuous, gropingly pluralistic literary-​historical phenomenon, were it shown to exist. Here is not the place for full review of work on the ‘paradox of Jewish absent presence’ that undergirds so much recent scholarship in literary medievalist Jewish studies, but certain points of subfield consensus are foundational to what follows.11 Denise Despres notes the variability in period representations of a ‘protean Jew’ whose danger inheres in the ‘variety of roles’ he or she plays ‘in a wide-​ranging literature’ that is finally about ‘Christian identity’.12 But Elisa Narin van Court advises caution about ‘readings of displacement’ wherein ‘Jews are read as figurative references to other groups’—​for such practice ‘elides the very real issue’ of continuing ‘Jewish presence in Christendom’.13 Finally, Sylvia

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Tomasch observes that ‘the virtual Jew’—​a sign continually reiterated in literature of the period—​proves ‘central not only to medieval English Christian devotion’ but to ‘national identity’: that is, ‘to the constitution of Englishness itself’.14 Some macro-​level observation about materials of record may be necessary to help situate these subfield principles in their proper discursive frame. Commentators tend to speak of the literary representation of Jews in the English Middle Ages as a coherent whole, but the canon that has coalesced in this area tends to bifurcate sharply. On one hand, scholars examine Anglo-​Latin ecclesiastical histories and institutionally sponsored hagiographies that are (in the main) substantially pre-​expulsion; and on the other, their analyses attend to vernacular literary-​ imaginative and/​ or devotional texts that are well post-​expulsion (typically late fourteenth or fifteenth century, even Tudor/​Elizabethan). Overgeneralization is a risk, for exceptions exist. Still, there are good evidentiary reasons for this peaks-​and-​valley contouring of the critical landscape. Early and late, but not so much in the (late thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century) middle, is where medieval English literary Jews—​or rather, scare-​quoted ‘Jews’—​reside. Scholars disagree on semantics, but tend to agree (again, at risk of oversimplification) on there being a definitive fault line between Jews who are historical (actual, documentary, living, ‘real’) and those who are textual (spectral, virtual, phantasmic, hermeneutic, typological).15 However it parses terminologically, one insight produced by recent criticism is that ‘absent’ Jews turn out to be not just marginally present but core, conceptually central to medieval imaginations—​especially of devotional culture and Englishness. What, then, to make of the apparent inapplicability of this rule—​ or baseline discursive principle—​to a compilation so encyclopaedic and literary as Harley 2253:  a book with its share of devotional material and one that plays a purportedly foundational role (but cf. Chapter 1) in figuring England as a nation? Anthony Bale has noted his surprise in discovering that ‘the punctum of 1290 [holds] little importance in terms of representation’ for insular ‘narratives [explicitly] concerned with Judaism’.16 Harley 2253, this chapter will suggest, presents an alternate case, in which the traumatic upheaval of English Jews’ expulsion from their community and realm, though referenced only obliquely, appears nonetheless to make a discernible, moderating difference to a later (Christian) clerk’s treatment of Hebrew subjectivity. If the Harley manuscript as represented by the usual anthologized pieces can be characterized

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chiefly by its lack of Jewish reference, in other texts now available, the book builds its vernacular Christian worldview upon clearly visible Hebrew foundations. Its Ludlow compiler may not be a fully fledged ‘Judaizer’, like the Paris-​trained, Wigmore Abbey (North Herefordshire) Canon Andrew of Saint-​Victor a century previous,17 but neither does he wallow in the inflammatory spirit of blood accusation mongers before and after his time. Beyond sheer range, our compilation has two advantages as a witness to perceptions of the Judaic. First is that Harley 2253 straddles the continental divide of 1290—​not in the sense that the book was being produced just then (it was chiefly copied c.1330–​1340), but because many texts date from the mid-​to late thirteenth century. Others date to the early fourteenth, with the effect that the book’s conglomerated audience blends those listening before the expulsion, those coming afterward, and those with personal memory of when Jews were a living neighbourly presence in Anglo-​Welsh Marcher community, not only figured representationally. This historical situation produces a substantive critical difference. My research into the cosmopolitan lives of Hereford episcopal clerks c.1275 and following suggests routine contact with Jews at such international milieux as Avignon, the French court, and the University of Paris, not to mention London/​Westminster, and closer to home in Bristol, Gloucester, Worcester, Oxford, and across Herefordshire.18 In the cathedral city, Hereford canons reside around the corner from Jewish merchants.19 The interest displayed by the main scribe of Harley 2253 in biblical Hebrews, especially of the dream-​interpreting, pilgrim-​landmark generating, and proto-​priestly varieties, suggests another sort of professional engagement. My larger point is that Harley 2253’s mixed temporality gives the ‘event’ that its production represents20 a heightened insight into the representational matters at hand, coming as it does neither exactly before nor wholly after the watershed of the expulsion, and in a liminal provincial setting. The systematic removal of Jews from the Diocese of Hereford coincides exactly—​a convergence anything but incidental—​with the bishop and chapter’s aggressive promotion, and cartographic adornment, of sanctified Jew-​baiter Thomas Cantilupe’s shrine. Miracles attributed to the former bishop proliferated in concordance with King Edward’s 1288 Eastertide visit to Hereford Cathedral, a year after the future saint’s remains were relocated to a new spot in the north transept. Subsequent pilgrim traffic had occasional national spikes (as a conjunct or alternative to royal-​associated St Thomas of Canterbury;

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see Epilogue) but was predominantly regional in nature, rising and falling with western baronial political fortunes during its half-​ century of prominence.21 The Harley manuscript’s second virtue as a source for literary medieval Jewish studies, correspondingly, lies in the book’s provincial Herefordshire provenance—​its habitation, as certain lyrics discussed in Chapter  1 put it, ‘by west’ [out west].22 Figural ‘Jews’ may have been central to English devotional and incipient national identity, but ‘anti-​Jewish sentiment was by no means universal’ in intensity,23 nor do expressions of hostility—​textual or social—​have an even geographical distribution. Some areas were especially marked. For Ralph Hanna, Yorkshire ranks as ‘one particularly noxious locale’; the fraught cases of Lincoln and London many have noted; and so too were tensions high and events grim in Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, and perhaps East Anglia generally. Especially given to hostility were communities with strong Benedictine presence, which helps explain blood accusation cases at south-​ western towns including Gloucester, Worcester, and Bristol.24 Feudal geographies also play a part; Jews were expelled from lands and towns of pious aristocrats like Eleanor of Provence, queen to Henry III, her son, Edward I, and his baronial opponent, Simon de Montfort, years in advance of the general expulsion.25 By contrast, Hereford—​which took in refugees from Worcester, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, and North Wales—​is routinely cited, chiefly on the strength of our wedding anecdote, as host to confraternal regard between Christian and Jew. Summarizing from his work on financial records but mindful of 1286 and its feast, Joe Hillaby calls the town, from the standpoint of its Jewish community, ‘a relative success story after 1265’.26 Lest the prospect sound unduly rosy it should be noted that the chief archaeological trace left by the community in question was not an impressive stone-​built ‘Jews’ Court’ as at Lincoln, but the ‘Jews’ Gaol’ built into a rampart of Hereford Castle.27 Here, among whole families, Bristol financier Aaron of Ireland was incarcerated 1279–​ 1283, on a coin-​ clipping accusation—​ and so too the town’s entire Jewish population in 1287.28 Robin Mundill notes the close connection between medieval Jewries and Norman castles, which tended to affiliate for the former’s ‘protection’ and the latter’s seigneurial convenience. Imprisonment was a constant threat, one that grows under Edward I.29 Situated below the castle ring wall, well away from the town’s market but adjacent to cathedral property, Hereford’s Jews’ prison was substantially renovated

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in mid-​century—​just prior to a downturn in conditions for English Jews that began about 1259. Compared with other communities, Hereford had an unusual dynamic to its geography of lending. As a toponymic plotting of the case of imprisoned Bristol financier Aaron of Ireland (son of Benjamin of Colchester) helps illustrate, central to the experience of local Jews was Hereford’s identity as a frontier base for operations further west.30 Early in the thirteenth century, Walter de Lacy—​Lord of Ludlow and of Trim, in Co. Meath, Ireland—​had invited the settlement of a Jewish magnate later known as Hamo de Hereford (d.1234).31 De Lacy’s Ludlow-​area descendants have been tipped as patrons of Harley 2253; figuring heavily in provenance arguments are certain fly-​leaf names, plus a Marcher Baron romance connected to the family and to Ludlow Castle (Royal 12.c.xii’s Fouke le Fitz-​Waryn), which Harley’s main scribe himself redacts into Anglo-​Norman prose.32 In years that saw provincial centres become newly ripe for enterprise, economic growth was driven by Anglo-​ Jewry’s ‘new men’—​ second-​ generation immigrants whose financial activities, while retaining a reliance on large loans (to the likes of De Lacy), were increasingly characterized by a preponderance of small loans, to clients in village, townhouse, and gentry manor, not just baronial or episcopal palace.33 While Jewish lending extended its demographic reach, magnates like Hamo’s eventual successor, Aaron le Blund (fl.1260–​1290), exerted dominance within Jewish communities. But Hereford sources also document the rise of small-​time lenders, who had resources to underwrite one or two minor loans.34 This signature feature in the profile of Jewish–​Christian business interactions at and around Hereford may have consequences in literary-​cultural terms. Further distinguishing Hereford’s regional profile as an Anglo-​ Jewish community was 1275’s omnibus Statutum de Judeismo [Statute of Jewry], which among other restrictions limited Jewish habitation to towns possessing licensed archae [chests].35 Communal documentary repositories within which loan receipts were stored, archae were routinely targeted by official scrutiny (during increasingly frequent royal tallages)—​as well as by mob aggression.36 Satellite Marcher towns like Bridgnorth (19 miles north-​east of Ludlow) or Leominster (10 miles north of Hereford/​ 10 miles south of Ludlow) were no longer permitted as sites of permanent dwelling. Such legislation produced greater itinerancy for Anglo-​Norman Jewish merchants who must conduct provincial transactions upon two or three days per month. A  further factor

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was their forced diversification into grain and wool—​moneylending after 1275 being necessarily folded in with, though not fully concealed by, commodity trading.37 Such demographic and business-​history matters—​higher concentration of Jewish settlement at Hereford but greater circulation in areas surrounding; increased contact of mobile lenders with a variety of Christian classes—​provide a backdrop to Bishop Swinfield’s peremptory directive that Hereford clerks and citizens avoid that mixed-​faith gathering with its processions, stage-​ playing, sports, and minstrelsy, a prohibition some of his flock duly ignored, at pain—​the wordplay is apt—​of excommunication: formal expulsion from Christian c​ ommunity themselves.38 Not that the endgame—​Edward I’s final ‘solution’ for the longstanding social and spiritual problem posed by Anglo-​ Jewry—​ would play out differently here. But just as not all mid-​century towns had wanted Jews expelled, ‘some Englishmen’ after 1290, Mundill stresses, ‘genuinely regretted the loss of capital which Jewish credit agents had provided’.39 This may be so. And Hereford Christians may have feasted and played, viewed processions and listened to minstrels alongside Hereford Jews in 1286—​ before positioning themselves (alongside church and crown) to acquire their stock-​in-​trade and transferred property a few years later.40 Little qualitative and no narrative evidence is available to describe how the expulsion played out locally. However it went, Herefordshire was not an area to which Jews returned, either upon seventeenth-​century Readmission or (in any substantial numbers) during centuries to follow. Lincoln’s medieval Jews left behind abiding material trace, along with harrowing textual and later imaginative witness to their persecution, and so too for London, Yorkshire, East Anglia, and elsewhere. For their part, Hereford’s medieval Jews slip away into history—​though just how quietly, and with what degree of acquiescence by the citizen-​clerk neighbours who had celebrated with them months previous, the documentary record doesn’t show. The Harley manuscript’s Jewish figurations—​ when they appear—​take shape during the first generations after the departure of Hereford Diocese Jews for Royal France. From whence, tentatively in 1306, more firmly in 1322, and conclusively in 1394, Jews would be expelled in turn. Susan Einbinder’s haunting No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (2008) notes how later Jewish sources look back upon the expulsion from France only seldom, and obliquely. Einbinder

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declines to speculate as to why such reticence obtained, but trauma clearly looms. Subsequent expulsions were even more dislocating for culturally Norman Jews than 1290 had been. My experiment in seeking out remainder traces of a Jewish presence in western England via the rich and heterogeneous Harley manuscript diverges in copious respects from Einbinder’s undertaking. ‘How’, she asks, ‘did fourteenth-​century Jews remember their own past, and what happens to this story later?’ Materials surviving after ‘a century of dislocation’, it transpires, ‘[yield] little to a critical lens posed frontally, but [speak more] eloquently when viewed from other angles’; hence her tactic of ‘sidewise reading’.41 Where Einbinder’s goal is ‘to recuperate [a lost] piece of the Jewish past’,42 the slice of the English Middle Ages this chapter of Harley Manuscript Geographies seeks to recuperate is, for better and worse, a conglomerate Jewish–​Christian one. The past it pursues emerges in negotiation between two communities, though it is not for that shared quality any less barbed. Like Einbinder’s, my inquiry remains compromised by reticence—​ for Jews are scarce in the lyrics, romance, fabliaux, and political songs through which literary scholarship has believed itself to know Harley 2253. Once we consider a fuller complement of its texts—​reading them, it may be, somewhat sidewise—​our manuscript’s engagement with matters Judaic is revealed to be, not so much absent as a historical phenomenon, as absent from literary-​historical  view. Viler than Different medieval literary genres produce different representations of the Jew. But Harley 2253’s social complaints and political songs, its conduct literature, anti-​feminist treatises, and fabliaux, even its saints’ lives and solitary romance, mostly archive not Judaic representation so much as its absence. Jews tend not to appear in Harley texts, even when audiences might expect them to—​ for example, in connection with crusade, taxation, and finance,43 royal–​ baronial conflict,44 urban mercantilism (see below), or martyrology.45 Even in items that pre-​date 1290, Anglo-​Jews were routinely imagined out of Norman England’s political community, it would seem. Thanks to their leveraged capital and religious otherness, Jewish subjects became accessory factors in the factional struggles definitive of the 1260s—​unrest much recollected in the 1320s—​ but this only contributes to the paradoxical necessity of refusing to

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acknowledge their role in helping forge a concept of the corporeal Christian realm. The Harley manuscript’s conduct literature, given the genre’s goal of audience socialization, is especially conspicuous for its disinclination to treat Jews. Quire 12’s Urbain the Courteous (#79, fol. 112) presents a savvy Norman every-​pere who has no qualms about discussing money or the ethics of commerce (‘Don’t forget what one gives you [vous doine], but plan on repaying it’ [le rendre, 129–​130]), nor does Urbain shy away from orthodox directives concerning devotion. But despite plentiful details keyed to social advancement in years straddling the expulsion, this late thirteenth-​century collection of precepts (extant in eight manuscripts) hazards not a word with respect to Jews. Another gnomic item is Quire 14’s Hending (#89, fol. 125), a compendium of homespun English proverbs, each ending with the tag ‘Quoth Hendyng’ [so says Hending, 15]. Certain moments treat Jewish-​coded topics, like moneylending (‘Selde cometh lone /​Lahynde hom’ [seldom does a loan come laughing home, 213–​215]) or merchandising (‘Lytht chep /​Luthere yeldes’ [cheap bargain yields poorly, 258–​259]). But the vernacular community amalgamated via Hending’s sayings stays monoculturally Christian, owing partly to a pious frame.46 Among ten extant manuscripts, Harley 2253’s version alone specifies that ‘wyse Hendyng’ [2]‌—​literally, ‘skilful’ or ‘clever one’—​is ‘Marcolves sone’ [Marcolf’s son,  3]:  grandson to King Solomon. Our ‘rustic’, ‘native’ wisdom-​speaker47 is thus woven, uniquely in Harley, into a royal, biblical, and typological genealogy. That this interpolated lineage makes Hending Hebrew, however—​not merely like a Jew, but actively, ethnically Jewish—​remains unsayable. Quire 13’s A Bok of Swevenyng [A Book of Dreaming] (#85, fol. 119) offers even more promising terrain within which to search for Judaic representation. This text’s relevance lies in its implicit connection to an Old Testament figure, Daniel, whose standing as a paragon of interpretation—​and thereby of the priestly vocation—​ qualifies him for conscription under Harley 2253’s programme of establishing biblical Hebrew precedent for contemporary clerical privilege.48 But whatever interest in Jews a translation of the Somnium Danielis [Dream of Daniel] would represent drains away when our scribe-​redactor rechristens his source, without attribution to any named auctorite. An added prologue gestures towards a biblical basis for A Bok of Swevenyng. But in doing so, the Harley manuscript substitutes ‘David’ [3]‌for what should be ‘Daniel’. The Jew in Harley 2253’s source text has been so superseded, so

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evacuated of Hebraic specificity, that it hardly matters whether Daniel and David are distinguishable. Our scribe’s inattention—​a copying slip in a text he translates himself, apparently49—​underlines how thoroughly Daniel’s interpretive capital has been typologized. Hebrew prophecy not only prefigures, but enables assumption of, the Harley scribe’s own professional identity. Though he dwells in exile, our dream-​prophet’s Jewishness—​ a definitive otherness vis-​à-​vis his ‘pagan Babylonian’ clients50—​ goes entirely unremarked. That David/​ Daniel’s insights arise in Harley 2253  ‘Thurh the Holi Gostes myht’ [through the Holy Ghost’s power, 12] renders them a vaguely New Testament force. But to the extent that they unroll as so many curiosities, the knowing glosses of princes’ dreams by the ‘prophete’ [4]‌have the banal, finally circular purpose of demonstrating his exegetical prowess. It doesn’t matter, to A Bok of Swevenyng’s Babylonian Captivity narrative, of what the Hebrew clerk’s interpretations consist, only that they are ‘ariht’ [correct,  11]—​and publicly credited as such. What matters is his sacred clerical privilege. Its ‘Christian frame’ (as in Hendyng) imparts an ‘air of unity’, but the Harley manuscript’s English dreambook does not, like the biblical account it (mis-​)invokes, present Daniel’s exegetical skills as ‘gifts of the true God’.51 Conventional Hebrew underpinnings of medieval dream-​ lore, in short, fail fully to materialize in Swevenyng. The question of how to interact with those whom Richard Swinfield called ‘enemies of the cross’ [HRS, 121] but whom cash-​ poor aristocrat and gentry, clerk and lay, urbanite and villager alike recognized as integral to their economic functioning, was indisputably a relevant one for Anglo-​Norman families and institutions. Yet Harley 2253’s variegated body of ‘advice literature’ and ‘proverbial lore’ declines to address Jews—​despite the propensity of conduct texts to treat matters like finance, religious observance, and national identity. We will have to look elsewhere. To judge by recent scholarship, the prime place of habitation for Harley Jews ought to be in the book’s devotional material. So it proves, though Jews appear less often in Harley’s practical religious matter than in its biblical paraphrases and apocryphal narratives, such as Quire 6’s Harrowing of Hell (#21, fol. 55v), which dramatizes the risen Christ’s journey to ‘vacche’ [fetch back] from ‘helle’ those that are ‘hys’ [his own] [5]‌. Adam and Eve [15], Abraham [17], David the King [19], John the Baptist [21], and Moses [23]: these ‘virtuous heathen’ forefathers are ‘[to] Jesu Crist so leeve’ [exceedingly dear, 16], so Harrowing undertakes to

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incorporate them within its forward-​looking, New Law community of the saved.52 An incursion into the Enemy’s ‘lay’ [domain, region, 69], the tale amounts to a border skirmish, with show of divine force. Perhaps because he stands above grudges, ‘Jesu Crist’ makes no mention of antagonists while recounting the ‘hard experiences’ [Harde gates, 43] of his life and passion, though he kvetches a bit about Adam’s high price, declaring him and his fellows ‘duere aboht’ [expensively purchased,  59]. Still, Harrowing’s English Christ is unequivocal in claiming hell’s captive Hebrews (they are not named Jews) among his constituents. Enfranchised under his royal-​eternal protection, they are ‘alle myne’ [all mine,  62]—​and being ‘hys’ [his], will inherit ‘parays’ [Paradise, 5–​6]. Harrowing strikes a legalistic tone. Its plot features a struggle over jurisdiction with debate turning on a common-​law technicality concerning ‘marchandise’ [96]:  the established ‘resoun’ [legal fact, 83,  98] that ‘Whose buyth any thyng [whoever buys anything, 85], ‘Hit is hys ant hys ofspryng’ [it and all its offspring belongs to him, 86]. But even though Harrowing is expressly about bartering for the lives of imprisoned Jews—​making its circumscribed, legal-​ commercial tenor redolent of thirteenth-​ century Anglo-​Jewish experience53—​ there is no mention, programmatically it would seem, of these famous, Old Law Jews being, well, Jewish, much as Jesu’s own lineal-​ethnic Jewishness is unmentionable. Nonetheless, there is grim prefigurement of religious division: Joseph of Arimathea’s cohort, with ‘alle the other that mine buen’ [all the others who are mine], ‘Shule to blisse with me tuen’ [shall proceed to bliss with me], whereas ‘They that nolden on me leven’ [they who wouldn’t believe in me] ‘Shule with Sathanas bileven’ [shall remain with Satan, 233–​236]. What Harley 2253’s Harrowing of Hell cannot bring itself to say is that both groups—​ those who will inherit bliss and those who decline to believe—​are equally Hebrew, at the moment of Christ’s underworld raid. Another Harley devotional-​ instructional text, an Anglo-​ Norman verse Sermon on God’s Sacrifice (#59, fol. 78v), exhorts its listener to ‘ensure that you have squared all accounts before the final reckoning’.54 Also known by its first line, ‘Une petite parole, seigneurs, escotez’ [Listen, my lords, to a little advice, 1], this homily fixates upon the dangers of commerce: ‘Ne pas tousjours a gayner’ [don’t always dwell on profit,  59], or on ‘Gaygner par nulle faucine’ [trying to gain by some deceit, 67]. Resist ‘averice’ [avarice, 38, 69], which is a mortal sin [mortel pecchié, 70], and ‘Ne coveitez pas autrui bienz /​A tort aver pur nulle rienz’ [don’t covet to have,

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in any way wrongfully, the goods of others, 80–​81]. The spiritual complications of accruing wealth are stressed so much that reference to Jews seems inevitable, given their officially grasping nature, as codified by church and crown.55 For 107 lines Jews stay absent from the accounting lesson, but eventually they are summoned to judgement. After one final hectoring (‘Narrow indeed will be the reckoning’, ‘when we are held to answer’, 94, 92), Une petite parole reminds us that, come Doomsday, Jesus will appear ‘Trestot come il fust crucifié, /​E come il fust des Gyws pené’ [exactly as he was crucified, and as he was tormented by the Jews, 107–​108]. In the reckoning to which we proceed, Parole’s terms remain commercial: we are rewarded [rewerdoné, 115] and possess [aver, 122] because another gives [doint, 124]. But Doomsday will be no Loveday: ‘There will be no pleading, /​Jour de amour or reconciliation, /​Nor will any be able to render account, /​To profit with silver or with gold’ [101–​104].56 Those who are avaricious—​‘come … des Gyws’ [like Jews, 108]—​will  pay. In the mostly English, mostly religious lyrics (#49–​69, fols. 75–​ 83) that surround Une petite parole in Quires 8–​9, Christ’s Passion plays out in an oddly agentless manner. Harley Lyric crucifixions tend to cut Jews from the scene.57 Parole, by contrast, names the fiduciary parties responsible (the ‘Gyws’ [108]), afterward training its fiscal-​spiritual scrutiny, for a dread moment, on their market-​ calculated results: ‘it will be truly horrible when he judges’ [Molt serra hidous quant jugera, 113]. We also encounter, here at the end of things, a strange grammatical mood. Parole casts its last word of advice in Doomsday’s unique (future-​imperfect meets past-​ perfect) verb-​tense: ‘none will be found laughing who has looked at him’ [Riant ne serra nul trové /​Que ly averount regardé, 111–​112]. When combined with the bracing prospect of ‘that day /​when Jesus will come’ [105–​106], the (normally) stripped-​down scene of the Crucifixion finally does repopulate, as the text pans outward to reveal Golgotha’s menacing Jewish extras. What exactly are ‘Gyws’ doing in Une petite parole’s audit at the end of the world? Expulsions and imprisonments, repossessions and pogroms:  all require rationalization. But references like these appear less in order to justify punishment of Jews, and more because the figure of a hateful, stagnant, unredeemable Judaic subject serves an important nullificative role in Christian penitential trajectories. If Harrowing’s Hebrews were an evacuated presence (‘not really’ Jewish in being poised for redemption), Parole’s ‘Gyws’ are hell-​ bound, decidedly not proto-​Christians. Nor will the Harley Lyric

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‘Jews’ we encounter next be candidates for grace, despite the purpose they serve as incomplete versions of the saved and perfected Christian self. Given their exclusion from the courtly culture underlying fin’ amours, references to Jews in secular lyrics are unsurprisingly scarce. More surprising is that Jews appear but seldom in Harley religious lyrics, even though many focus on Mary or treat the Crucifixion.58 Genre specialists emphasize the role of Franciscan affective piety in the rise of insular vernacular lyric, while Jewish studies scholars point to these same factors in the development and spread of anti-​Judaic ideology.59 Strange, then, that Harley 2253 pays almost no attention to Jews in, for example, Quire 8’s trilingual string of verse devotions (#49–​53, #56–​58, fols. 75–​77v), or in the clump of well-​regarded Middle English lyrics that follow in Quire 9 (#60–​68, fols. 79–​82v), all but two (#64–​65) religious or penitential in tenor. Although a preponderance of these retell or allude to Passion events, typically they employ passive voice when doing so. They are rigged syntactically to emphasize Christ’s paradoxically passive agency, even when he is the grammatical recipient of actions by others. When Suete Jesu, king of blysse (#50, fol. 75) extols the ravishing effects of ‘thi love-​bonde’ [your love-​ bond, 24], it gives a laundry-​list of active verbs: ‘Suete Jesu’ (who begins every stanza [1, 5, 9]) plants roots and grants them to grow [10–​12]; he gives strength [7]‌, makes to hear [16], and causes to understand [22]; he opens, dwells, shields [27–​28], and will finally deliver from longing [bring me of this longing,  55] and  lead us to heaven [to heovene … us led, 60]. But when it comes (ever so briefly) to those who act upon Jesu, the lyric crops away all that is extraneous, in particular his tormentors:  ‘Thou me bohtest with thi blod; /​Out of thin huerte orn the flod; /​ Thi moder hit she, that the by stod’ [You bought me with your blood; out of your heart flowed the flood; your mother saw it, who by you stood, 38–​40]. Like others that more enthusiastically describe how ‘Jesus was hanging’ [Jesu fust pendu, #56.166], how he was ‘pierced in foot and hand’ [thurled fot ant honde, #53.13], how he ‘suffered grievous wounds’ [tholedest … /​Woundes sore, #58.14–15], was ‘cruelly beaten’ [were sore ybeten, 67], and so on, it stages history’s epochal event without antagonists to clutter the scene, but with Christ alone in view. In lyric after Harley Lyric, ‘Jesu, mi lemman’ [Jesus, my lover, #58.25] initiates his foreknown betrayal; enacts his ordained agon; in effect directs his own execution, one-​man-​play style, if with us as audience (via voyeur Mary) there to witness.60 To this most intimate

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of Christian domestic scenes, Jews are not invited—​not even (in Quires 8–​9 at least) as scapegoats. One exception to the Harley Lyric rule of Jewish absence comes in Quire 12’s first item, God that al this myhtes may [God who wields all this might] (#73, fol. 106), a booklet-​opening exercise in self-​excoriation by a speaker eager to stress just how abject a penitent he is: ‘Unworth Ich am to come the to’ [unworthy I am to come to you, 53]. Because he never stood in awe of Christ [‘Crist ne stod me never hawe’, 28], properly able to submit [‘In herte ne myhte Y never bowe’, 25], ‘I consider myself’, he says, ‘viler than a Jew’: ‘Ich holde me vilore then a Gyw’ [29].61 But if for a traumatic half-​line he is structurally comparable to, disconcertingly like unto a Jew, there is one all-​important difference. ‘Boun’ [compelled] now ‘to make my pees’ [to make my peace, 48], ‘Y myself wolde bue knowe’ [I want to expose {this part of} myself,  30]. He yearns to have his stubbornness probed, ‘known’, and so transumed. His Gyw-​ ishness is temporary, a lyric-​performative cloak both he and we (an audience of implied Christians) try on. Formally, it constitutes an identity-​loan.62 The transaction is instrumental to the Harley penitent’s spiritual growth—​speaker and audience need this infusion of abject-​metaphorical capital—​though the exchange remains, as a matter of policy, without profit to the (eternally and categorically) ‘vile’ lender who enables it. The other expressly Judaic reference in the Harley Lyric corpus comes in Quire 9’s macaronic Mayden, moder milde (#69, fol. 83), a Prayer for Deliverance—​so Brook entitles it—​that, by virtue of content and placement, ‘create[s]‌a rounding-​out’ of the lyric-​devotional sequence referenced above. In alternating lines of Middle English and Anglo-​Norman, the poem sets a ‘sequence of passion events’ beside ‘a reiteration of Marian praise’, followed by allusions to Christ’s Harrowing and Resurrection.63 Mayden, moder mixes not only languages, but lyric subgenres—​all the more so in that its religious thematics build (as do Quires 7–​10 writ large) upon a foundation of courtly motifs. ‘Ich wes wod ant wilde’ [I was mad and frantic, 7], its ‘love’-​lorn protagonist complains [5], driven by prospects of ‘shome’ [disgrace, 3], ‘tresoun’ [treachery, 6], and ‘prisoun’ [8] to address a maiden ‘feyr ant fre, /​E plein de douçour’ [fair and generous, and full of sweetness, 10–​11]. Stanzas 1–​2 feature a speaker initially trapped, but who, with Our Lady’s ‘seint socour’ [holy succor, 14], is soon delivered (‘Me menez’ [lead me out, 6], he pleads) through the mechanism of Christ’s sacrifice. The ensuing Crucifixion set-​piece—​how ‘He tholede harde stounde’ [he suffered

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hard pangs, 23]—​occupies another three stanzas, the latter two of which emphasize the ‘Mayde’[13]’s experience of looking:  ‘thou stode, /​Pucele, tot pensaunt, /​Thou restest the under rode: /​Ton fitz veites pendant; /​Thou seye is sides of blode, /​L’alme de ly partaunt’ [you stood, Virgin, all pensive, you pause under cross: you see your son hanging; you see his bloody sides, 25–​29]. Interposed between our model-​penitent speaker and his surrogate looker, Stanza 3 turns on an ambivalent embrace (‘Donque ly beysa’ [then he kissed him, #69.18]) that helps sharpen the resolution of its focus upon Jews as cultural and historical actors. After ‘Judas Jesum founde’ [Judas caused Jesus to be discovered,  17], Christ ‘wes bete ant bounde’ [was beaten and bound, 19]—​violence ‘which has made [formed, delivered] us all’ [Que nous tous fourma, 20]. Judas’ complicated status aside,64 it is here that Jewish content enters:  ‘Wyde were is wounde /​Qe le Gyw ly dona’ [wide was his wound that the Jew gave him, 21–​22]. The epic size of Christ’s ‘wounde’ is fortunate, from a collective salvation perspective.65 ‘Our redemption’ [nostre redempcioun, 46] and Christian procession unto bliss, which in Harley political songs was achieved via royal crusading or cauterizing baronial reform, here requires the affective instrumentality of Jesu’s Jewish wound and its generously gaping embrace.66 ‘Le Gyw’ proves necessary to Christian community—​he gives [‘dona’], as in matters of finance67—​but can have no positive mutualistic valence in the cultural mode taking root with Franciscanism, as expressed (increasingly) via vernacular lyric and its affective devotional subjectivity. Pieces of silver and their disquieting compromises, contemporary as biblical, are never far away. Recent criticism suggests that much as Jewish expulsion from medieval Christian community recurred historically and at various scales (manor, borough, region, kingdom), a metaphorical version of this process is figured repeatedly—​compulsively, even—​in the cultural imaginary. If, as noted above, the ‘good society’ imagined by Christian leadership required that Anglo-​Jews be expelled bodily from the realm to produce a purified corporate England, we should expect to encounter traces of such a project everywhere in insular sources, distributed generally throughout the pre-​and post-​ expulsion record. Medieval mappaemundi, for their part, articulate a double-​movement, wherein Jews are alternately banished (to the pre-​Incarnation edges of medieval society) and erased (from ongoing social, not to mention theological, interaction), no matter the structural necessities and local vagaries of intercultural

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cooperation on the ground.68 By removing non-​Christians from Christian kingdoms, contemporary maps figure the late medieval paradox of Jewish absent presence and, particularly in the case of the c.1290–​1300 Hereford mappamundi, illustrate how ‘arguments for coexistence had lost their cachet in England’.69 As Kathy Lavezzo observes, ‘By erasing Jews from European lands that in fact were occupied by Jews’, maps like the one Richard Swinfield procured for his cathedral peddle a ‘geography of intolerance’, or historically counterfactual ‘cultural fantasy’, in which ‘temporal claims about an outmoded Jewish people … prompted geographic images of containment, exile, and erasure’.70 This chapter’s literary-​geographical business, in sections to follow, shall be to consider what an increased sum of conspicuous absences, parenthetical traces, and transfigured presences—​ the fuller textual-​cartographic world-​picture that is available when we take a less blinkered look at Harley 2253—​may say about Jews’ place in a regionally located, Herefordshire-​specific as opposed to monolithically English devotional community. The Harley manuscript has been known for certain vernacular literary staples: lyric, political song, conduct text, fabliau. But the more we push beyond canonical genres, the less tenable becomes the hypothesis that a scarcity of Jews in fact obtains. The book’s seeming sparseness of Jewish reference is partly a function of miscalibrated looking, even if contemporary medieval Jews—​coexistent human subjects, as opposed to typological biblical characters—​prove as rare in the Harley miscellany as rebellious congregants are absent from Bishop Swinfield’s episcopal register, after he threatens excommunication. Historians of Anglo-​Jewry have chosen to read late thirteenth-​century Hereford as a positive outlier case: refugees from other towns taken in; no blood accusations or known pogroms; episcopal animosity and castle imprisonments soft-​peddled. Search methods that push beyond what twentieth-​ century anthologies made available—​ and that reveal a lingering Jewish presence that royal and ecclesiastical world maps programmatically deny—​may yield less clear-​cut and more ‘entangled’ Harley manuscript Jewish geographies than have been encountered thus far.71 Blood and water ‘Ase fele thede [so many countries], /​Ase fele thewes’ [so many customs], marvels the English sage Hending [#89.31–​32]. Harley 2253

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does not offer a comprehensive vision of world topography, like period mappaemundi do, with their overlay of Christian theological history upon a Hebrew Bible base. But our miscellany codex does subscribe to prevailing geographical systems—​world-​images that regard Jewish expulsion (‘containment, exile, and erasure’, per Lavezzo) as a given. Much as in Mandeville’s Travels (1357–​1371)—​a seminal source in medieval literary geography, often described as a mappamundi in textual form—​any push outward in Harley, to sample the exotic diversity of creation (‘so many countries’), is balanced by reflection inward, either upon English/​Anglo-​Norman vernacularity, or within universal Christian history.72 The Harley manuscript locations in which Jews congregate most are the book’s central-​lying Holy Land itineraries and related texts:  geographically speaking, those in the vicinity of ‘un peroun’ [a rock], near Mount Calvary and not far from the Holy Sepulchre, ‘which God said was la meene du mounde’ [the centre of the world, #38.23–​24]. Travelogues like these ‘realize imaginatively for those who read them a biblical landscape they may never visit’.73 Given increasing interest in Christ’s ‘life on earth’, such materials made possible ‘the meditative process of compositio loci, the mind’s effort to project itself, during prayer, to the scene of particular biblical events’.74 Any Jews we encounter in this codex are necessarily dislocated from the here-​and-​now of its production and reception milieu. Still, Jewish sites, figures, customs, and stories play an essential role in Harley 2253’s Christian devotional programme. Commentators have found Quire 14’s Heraldic Arms of Kings [Les armes des roys] (#96, fol. 131)  an unusual inclusion for a literary/​instructional anthology, but it fits with surrounding geo-​ devotional material (#94–​97).75 In the mnemonic manner of textual ‘list maps’ from the period,76 Armes des roys arrays twenty-​five realms of Christendom, in chivalric formation as it were, against the unrecovered ‘Seinte Terre’ [Holy Land, #38.1] and in-​pressing ‘terre a sarazyns’ [land of the Saracens, #95.1] of Harley items previous. Beginning at the King of Jerusalem’s ‘blue shield with cross and gold crucifix’ [escu d’asure ov crois e crucifix d’or, #96.2], we proceed—​ with a comprehensiveness only a herald could love—​from major Christian sovereigns (Spain, France, Germany, England [3–​6]) to minor ones (Mallorca, Orkney, Isle of Man, Livonia, Estonia [26–​31]). Since Jews are barred from participation in chivalric economies (except by way of capital supply and physician service), their absence from Harley’s virtual tourney-​ lists conforms to expectations. Armes des roys imagines no retrospective insignia for King David, or the Maccabee Warrior-​Kings

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of Judea. Bestiary icons associated with Jews—​such as leopards (a Pentateuch symbol for avariciousness), hyenas, or owls (who ‘showed that they preferred darkness to light when they rejected Christ’)—​either do not appear or do not retain such associations when deployed here.77 Similar to Armes des roys in its list format, proximity to geographical matter, and Christian commitment is Quire 11’s Nomina librorum bibliotece [Names of the Books of the Bible] (#72, fol. 105v), a Latin reference item standard in period bibles.78 This text comes just after the Anglo-​Norman Estoyres de la Bible [Old Testament Stories] (#71, fols. 92–​105) that straddle Quires 10–​11, our destination in this chapter. And it sits just before a Middle English lyric examined above:  God that al this myhtes may (#73, fol. 106), whose sidelong Jewish simile (a penitent ‘vilore then a Gyw’ [29]) helped enable its exploration of stalled Christian devotion. Nomina librorum concludes with St Jerome’s Interpretationes Hebreorum nominatum [Interpretations of Hebrew Names], which proceeds ‘according to the order of the alphabet’ [62–​63]. Afterward come three lines of technical commentary, ‘Of cubits’ [Cubitorum], describing how the ‘usual’ cubit ‘contains one and a half feet’, while the ‘geometric’ has subtypes:  ‘the lesser contains six feet’ but ‘the greater contains nine feet’ [64–​66]. At this point, Harley’s discursive gears shift with a lurch: ‘and Noah’s Ark was made according to them’ [et de illis archa Noe fiebat, 65], our copyist writes. Folio 105v’s odd progression—​from books of the Bible, to exegetics of Hebrew naming, to cubit-​length trivia, to pre-​Diluvian engineering specifications—​locates the interpretive essence of Genesis 6–​10 (The Flood) in historical verisimilitude. The association here of Hebrew obedience (archa Noe; correct interpretation of names) with scholastic practices of textual enrolment (nomina librorum) and technologies of mensuration (cubits usualis and geometricus, major and minor) is less outlandish than it may seem. Thinking about Jews frequently drives exegetes into reflection on measurement: consideration not just ‘of cubits’ and their unit size but of world geography in a scientific-​theological vein. The sign of the Jew, we might say, produces Christian rumination on the created world’s extent, divisions, and topographical features. We shall encounter this tendency towards taking the measure of Jews again, momentarily, in two companion topographies that adjoin Quires 7–​8 (#38–​39, fols. 68v–​70). But as fol. 105v’s gesture to the mnemonic icon of Noah’s Ark helps suggest, the world and the Bible—​the enumerated and described places

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of the one alongside the named and ordered books of the other—​ undergird the same universal-​historical edifice. They are inseparable in the Word–​world theology made incarnate by Creation.79 Jews have a foundational role to play in this vision, both for better (as builders of the Temple and inheritors of God’s covenant) and for worse (as committed rebels—​they would not believe—​to the revealed truth of a Christ whose crucifixion organizes next-​ world and this-​world mappings alike). That medieval Jews have no homeland—​ and no escu- [shield-​ ]bearing sovereign to take his place in Les armes des roys—​is no accident of history but an ineluctable (theo)logical consequence of their ‘vile’, stubborn nature:  the grim wages, as we shall hear shortly, of ‘persevering in their ancient treachery’ [#97.16]. The Harley scribe’s inability to discuss the one—​incarnate Christian geography—​without recourse to the numerical technicalities and nominative mysteries of the Hebrew Other, underlines the integral place of things Judaic (leaders, lineages, places, customs) within the Latin West’s geo-​epistemological  order. If handling and moreover locating Jews—​interpreting Hebrew names, ordering Vulgate books, fixing biblical toponyms—​becomes a means, in central quires of Harley 2253, by which to demonstrate a right relation to universal geo-​history, such a configuration sets the stage for our consideration of texts with more explicit Judaic engagements. Jews and matters Jewish appear frequently in Pilgrimages in the Holy Land [Les pelrinages communes que crestiens fount en la Seinte Terre] (#38, fol. 68v), a minimalist survey that connects pilgrim sites to Bible events—​especially ‘places central to the nativity and passion stories’.80 In accord with thirteenth-​ century prescriptions of affective piety, Pelrinages foregrounds the ‘visual and tactile icons of Christ’s existence’ but also highlights ‘locations associated with the prophet Elijah and his New Testament counterpart John the Baptist’.81 Built into Harley holy geography is a typological approach to both demarcation of territory and passage of time, with implications for the ebb and flow of nations’ fortunes. We hear early on of a ‘cave [near Tantura] where Our Lady hid herself with her son for fear of the Jews’ [pur doute des Gyws, 8–​9], and later, near Nazareth, of ‘the leap where the Jews [le Gyws] ordered Jesus to leap forth’ [142]. The latter site stands one league from ‘Cane Galylee’ [Cana Galilee], where a certain controversial invitee to a Jewish wedding ‘made wine from water’ [fist vyn de eawe,  148], and so inaugurated an epochal religious reset.82 Sometimes a Jewish site requires no comment (‘Rachel’s

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Tomb’ [105]). Other times—​in a process of nominative translatio we’ll dissect later—​Old Testament Hebrews aren’t Gyws at all. Instead, they occupy a subject category less replete with blame, as at Bethphage, where ‘on that day the greatest honour that God had en terre [on earth] was accorded him by les enfauntz Hebreus’ [the Hebrew children, 90–​91]. For a suspended pilgrim moment, Jews seem eternally chosen. Redeemed by the grace of their less obstinate children, the Hebreu nation proves at once ancient, elemental, and (it may be) abiding.83 The standout passage of Pilgrimages in the Holy Land concerns ‘un ymage de Nostre Seignour’ [an image of Our Lord, #38.169] known popularly as the Bleeding Icon of Beirut. This relic—​which in c.765 ‘began to give forth blood after being subjected … to ritual humiliation by the Jews’84—​also receives mention in two, possibly three other Harley items. The account in Pelrinages proposes some striking congruences between topographical description, devotional culture, and Jewish–​Christian interaction: There was in ancient times an image of Our Lord, and a Jew struck it with a lance in the side, and now blood and water issue from it. And on account of this miracle many Jews converted to God, and some of this blood is in many lands—​in Rome, France, England, and various other places—​by which God performs many miracles. [168–​172]

An inexhaustible fount of ‘blood and water’ [sang e eawe], Beirut’s wondrous icon is enshrined as the final stop on Harley 2253’s pilgrim-​passage through Seinte Terre. Serving as our devotional arrival point, it weaves the biblical Near East of subsequent texts (Pardons of Acre [#39], Land of the Saracens [#95]) together with the crusading monarchies of Western Christendom (‘Rome, France, England’) it name-​checks. As its closing business, however, Pelrinages calls an end to the sacred work of geo-​typological linkage. ‘Many other pilgrimages exist in this land’, our guide cheerily admits, ‘of which I’m either unable, or know not how, to name them all’ [trestouz nomer, 173–​174]. But if the territories wherein God performs his many miracles provide the substance [terre, 173] of our itinerary, the text’s overarching goal—​to enable biblical witness and thereby renew Christian wonderment—​ seems merely an ancillary factor. Temporally, this relic is odd, in being from ‘ancient times’ [temps auncien,  168], though not scriptural ones. The miracle of Beirut is not so much that it establishes a channel for affective connectivity, but that the icon (belated yet antiquated;

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neither biblical nor contemporary) once effected miraculous change in a non-​Christian audience: ‘plusours Gyws se convertyrent’ [many Jews converted, 170]. Typology, as an exegetical practice, links a categorically uncertain present to a secure past and known future. It dances blithely along a universal historical axis. But the Beirut-​ ymage anecdote of Pelrinages creates a similar, no less operative geographical linkage, tying those holy lands (sites of godhead revealed, of divine immanence) to these now-​also-​holy lands (host to emergent theatres of devotion, and to multiplying chantries of perpetual prayer). In a process we might call translatio miraculii, the banner-​carriers of the west (‘France, England’) have inherited God’s miracles along with the sceptre of empire (‘Rome’). The event’s reassuring past-​ness (‘in ancient times’, ‘Jews were converted’) is reaffirmed, but is also made to echo, in the Beirut icon’s subsequent, ongoing circulation: the relic’s blood, gushing in endless supply, ‘is in many lands’ [est en plusours terres, 171; emphasis added]. The future work of this fashioned image lies not in conversion of the contemporary Jewish unbeliever (upon the efficacy of which, theologians like Hereford’s own Thomas Cantilupe had grave misgivings85), but in reaffirmation of ecclesiastical doctrine—​ or more to the point here, reanimation of faith. Since Gyws are no longer convertible, the best they can do is to serve—​in their innate, wretched stubbornness; their parlous, permanently pre-​penitential state—​as negative exempla, cautionary spurs to (‘our’) Christian devotion. If appropriately mortified by the abject likeness, a penitent subject may triumph—​as begins to occur in Mayden, moder milde (#69)—​over those despairing moments in which he or she is (thankfully, temporarily) ‘like’ a Jew. Christian wanhope (depression, acedia, spiritual despair)86 can be beaten; Jewishness, not so easily. Fifty-​nine folios and fifty-​seven texts after Pilgrimages in the Holy Land (six mixed quires, which cross language and genre, addressing topics from love to politics to death), Quire 14’s Land of the Saracens (#95, fol. 129v) begins the process of geographical survey anew. Based on ‘an inquest made by the Patriarch of Jerusalem’ [C’est l’enqueste que le patriarche de Jerusalem fist,  1], in fulfilment of an order ‘to instruct the Christians’ [pur ensenser les chretiens, 2], this Near East guidebook catalogues ‘cities, rulers, territories, distances, topographical features, and occasionally wonders and customs’—​with updates on ‘the status of subject Christian populations’ (for example, ‘two ports [that] distress Christians more than all other pagan lands’ [76–​77]).87 In terms of era, our

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focus has shifted from Christ’s Incarnation to early apostolic years. This enqueste’s conceit is that it was sent to the Pope ‘as a help to Christian crusaders’.88 Insofar as anti-​Jewish violence accompanied each call for crusade in Europe, such eruptions threaten the placid descriptive surface of Land of Saracens, but mostly they do not disturb it. There is little of explicit Jewish note, apart from passing reference to the icon we encountered above:  ‘In Beirut is an image of Jesus Christ crucified, which a Jew [Giw] struck with a lance, and blood flows from it, by which miracle all the land converted to God’ [45–​46]. From who or what ‘all the land’ [tote la terre] converted, Land of Saracens doesn’t say. (Can monotheistic eighth-​ century Iberian Gyws—​ as referenced by Pelrinages [#38.170]—​convert ‘to God’ [a Dieu]?) Nor is this passage quite the verbatim digest of the earlier-​quire version we might expect. Still, Saracens distils the events underlying the Beirut icon into similar essentials: image of Christ, Jewish lance, flowing blood—​ which miracle triggers widespread conversion. Harley items #95–​97 (fols. 129v–​132) form a textual set reminiscent of Quire 7–​8’s pairing of Pilgrimages in the Holy Land and Pardons of Acre (#38–​39, fols. 68v–​70v). That the last of these—​ Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo [Scriptum quod peregrini] (#97, fol. 131v)—​reintroduces the Bleeding Icon of Beirut only deepens the intertextual affiliations between the manuscript’s earlier and later geo-​devotional groupings. But where Pelrinages utilized this relic by way of culmination, the Latin prose Scriptum quod peregrini begins with it. Forming part of the so-​called Corpus Pelagianium (‘a set of elaborate, historical fabrications designed by Pelagius, Bp. of Oviedo [d.1153] to promote and defend the privileges and prestige of [his] diocese’89), this letter describes ‘an ark made or crafted [factem sive fabricatum] of incorruptible wood’, the Arca Santa, which has been ‘filled with countless wondrous objects of God’ [6]‌(for example, ‘one of the six jugs’ from the wedding at Cana [44–​45]). Before proceeding to souvenirs of the Exodus (‘manna that the Lord rained down for the sons of Israel’ [22–​23], ‘some of the rod with which Moses parted the Red Sea’ [32–​33]) and mainstays from the Vita Christi, Bishop Pelagius’ advertisement highlights that very artefact we’ve been tracking. Our vouchsafed glimpse inside the Oviedo ark begins with a detail chosen for maximum awe: Indeed, they found an ampule of crystal with the gore that poured forth from the Lord, which is to say, from the side of the image

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which, in fact, the faithful made in the likeness of Christ and which treacherous Jews [perfidi Iudei], persevering in their ancient treachery [antiqua perfidia obstinati], affixed to wood, the side of which they struck with a lance as if it had been that of the true living Christ. From the image came forth blood and water to add to the faithful recreation of the Passion of Christ. [14–​18]

In this final Harley manuscript rendition of the tale, our now thrice-​ lanced, ever-​bleeding icon is no longer affiliated with Beirut (sound marketing, since the ark’s episcopal sponsors wish to associate it with Oviedo, the better to capitalize on its productive holy gore). Following the above description—​the longest passage in a short text—​the Oviedo Scriptum inventories its reliquary stock-​in-​trade. First come parts ‘of the Lord’s True Cross; of the Lord’s Tomb; [and] of the Crown of Thorns’ [19]. Next, we get bits of Christ’s holy wrappings—​shroud, tunic, swaddling clothes, and onward [20]—​which so proliferate as to amaze the devout hearer, if nothing else, at the marvellous capacity of this holy casket. Trick-​bottomed vessel that it is, the Arca Santa manages to contain within it, like so many mnemonic props, virtually all chapters from the Christian past; history becomes reliquary.90 The geographical dimension of this point is that the relic-​crammed ark, with its far-​flung holy pillage, finds a home only after being ‘transferred over time by God’s plan from Jerusalem to Africa, then to Carthage, Seville, Toledo, and finally Oviedo and the church of the Holy Savior, its ordained resting place’.91 The Oviedo Scriptum’s appropriation of the icon previously known as Beirut’s has several notable features. First of all, it indulges (to the point of overwhelming) in semantic doubling: ‘indeed’ [siquidem,  14]/​‘in fact’ [quidem,  15]; ‘Christi’ [15]/​‘Christi’ [17]; ‘faithful’ [fideles, 15]/​‘faithful’ [ad fidem, 17]; ‘treacherous’ [perfidi, 16]/​ ‘treachery’ [perfidia, 16]; ‘side of the image’ [de latere, 15]/​‘side of which’ [latus, 17]. This pedantry foregrounds a religious parallelism that will evolve into historical sequentiality—​for Scriptum quod peregrini builds Hebrew–​Christian typology92 into its marketing strategy. The passage also stands out for how it attends to the process of assembly: the icon’s material fabrication as a crafted product. The composite, fashioned wholeness of ‘illius ymaginis’ [that image, 15] stands in tension with the disarticulated parts of things that comprise the rest of the Arca Santa haul. Indeed, the formula partem de [a fragment of, 18–​19] modifies more than two dozen entries over fifteen lines [18–​33]—​all ‘wondrous objects of God’ [6, 11–​12].

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Meanwhile, our feature relic’s piecework construction (first, ‘made by the faithful’ [fideles … fecerunt,  15], next ‘affixed to wood’ by Jews [ligno affixerunt, 16], and finally, placed in a container ‘made or crafted’ by the disciples [factam sive fabricatum, 6]) conveys the miraculous efficacy of devotional items that have been faithfully fashioned, as opposed to just found and devoutly retained. The capacity of human-​made ymages to effect Christian change seems to go beyond even the powers of genuine, biblical-​era artefacts. But these lines compel most for how they model—​and potentially, give sanction to—​productive Jewish–​Christian relations in a pluralistic world. Scriptum quod peregrini’s vision is not ecumenical, not co-​productive, in the sense of a mutually enriching commercial enterprise or construction project. Yet despite itself, Oviedo’s self-​aggrandizing Letter helps resolve the then-​and-​now tensions inherent in post-​ biblical Judeo-​ Christian observance. Precisely because Scriptum’s (Beirut) icon is a hybrid devotional prosthetic, forged in fraught commerce between peoples, it makes space for a conception of Hebrew devotional life as ongoing. Judaism continues on—​however fugitive its place in Pelagian Oviedo’s (and the Harley manuscript’s) self-​evidently Christian era. As ever for Christians, Jews are nothing if not persevering [obstinati, 16]. The account regards their treachery as a given. Still, it registers a simple and arresting prospect: that medieval Jews [Iudei, 16] practise a faithful devotion of their own. As if to punctuate the Oviedo ark’s holiness via visual exclamation, the Harley scribe inserts, at the end of Scriptum quod peregrini, his book’s one and only piece of decoration: a pen-​drawn cross (13 x 14 mm), heavily inked and centred on the page.93 Fol. 132’s spare, symmetrical icon grounds the geo-​devotional programme of the items that precede it in the kind of affective materialist practice that the compilation elsewhere describes verbally. The smooth cross that is Harley’s single image also, we might say, amalgamates the spare parts collected by the Arca Santa reliquary into an integrated, unfragmented whole, reinforcing in so doing the miraculous ability of Passion devotions to produce unity of various orders:  aesthetic, spiritual, even national-​communal. Such a process in turn recalls the misdirected religious craft of the ‘Iudei’ [Jews] in the Ovideo Scriptum’s Beirut icon opening, who, like stunted versions of (we) the ‘faithful’ [15–​16], find themselves driven to reinforce, the better to deface, images made ‘in the likeness’ of Christ. The unlikely choreography of this miracle finds Christians and Jews labouring as if in workshop together, when the latter take

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and ‘affix to wood’ the former’s devotional handiwork. Generated (like so many miracle accounts) in interreligious conflict, the passage ends with tacit acknowledgement that the Jews’ contribution to the image-​construction project, though perverse, unwittingly ‘add[s]‌to the faithful recreation of Christ’s passion’ [18]. Oviedo’s biblical-​era artefacts (real ones, apparently) thus interact with a consciously fashioned image, whose own efficacy is ratified by an emulsion of authentic gore [cruore Domini, 14], Christ’s real blood and salvific water [sanguis et aqua, 18]. Jews may be unable to convert, themselves, but prove necessary to the rededication of Christian belief. They do so, as in the lyric encountered above, by embodying recalcitrance—​against which may be perceived the grace that inheres in any Christian’s situation, however seemingly hopeless. Quire 14’s cross-​icon plants before us a reminder of the Passion event into whose ‘[faithful] recreation’—​with Jews and their elemental treachery front and centre—​we and the Harley manuscript are about (finally, decisively) to transition. The gore issuing from Oviedo’s ark, as marked by the pen-​ drawn cross on fol. 132, invites a return to the Harley manuscript’s devotional engagements. It is worth recalling that despite its windfall of secular poems, the book contains, numerically and by folio count, as many or more religious texts. Many of these reference the Crucifixion, but few (so we have seen) bring Jewish actors on to their sacred stage. Where the poems sampled earlier tend to edit Jews out of Christ’s Passion, much as the collection’s conduct literature removes them from its social milieux, one (very) late, (very) zealous Harley item—​ a sermon-​ cum-​ devotion in Anglo-​ Norman prose—​highlights its denigration of Jews. Reporting live from ground zero of medieval anti-​ Judaism, Quire 15’s Seven Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ (#115, fol. 138v) goes out of its way to assign a hateful place for the Judaic subject at each stage in its account.94 Rather than being absent, Jews are woven, stanza by stanza, into every hour of this Passion, as if to showcase their decisive role in the primal scene of Christian history. Seven Hours establishes a porous ethnic-​group baseline by referring to Jesus initially as ‘Roy des Gyus’ [58–​59] but soon after as ‘Rex Iudeorum’ [71–​72]. That is: Harley 2253’s King of the Jews is concurrently Francophone and Latinate. Bequeathed by the Magi, alluded to by synagogue elders, and written in mockery on the cross, Christ’s temporal title is fully scriptural. But its appearance here gives little warning of this text’s viciousness—​as when, shortly in, Jews demonstrate their innate wretchedness by betraying the one ‘roy’

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who is their own. At Compline, when Quire 15’s reader is urged to ‘meditate on how Judas sold Our Lord for 30 deniers’ [16], Seven Hours begins to reveal how its devotional undertaking coils into denunciation of an unredeemable Jewish Other, whose negative trajectory (selling his people’s ‘rex’ [king] is just the start) unfolds in counterpoint to the upward progression of the diligent Christian subject. Each stanza thereafter folds anti-​Judaism into the canonical grain of hourly contemplation. Thus at Matins, we remember how ‘you were bound, stripped, beaten, buffeted, mocked, falsely accused, dirtied with filthy saliva by the Jews [Gyus], insulted by their contemptuous words’ [27–​28]; at Sext, how on the highest part of the cross ‘was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” ’ [71–​72]; earlier at Tierce, how ‘the wicked Jews [les felouns Gyus] cried out against you so hideously, crucify him, crucify him’ [47–​48]; later at that same hour, how Jesus asked God ‘that he pardon the wicked Jews [felouns Gyus] for your death so cruel’ [75]; and at Nones, how ‘the ravenous Jews [les enfruntz Giws] offered you vinegar mixed with gall, of which you did not wish to drink’ [92]. The impotent aggression shown when other generic antagonists (‘les Gews’) come, later that hour, to ‘[break] the legs of the two thieves’ [100], adds gratuitous flourish to the sermon’s portrait of emphatic Jewish hatefulness. So if Seven Hours does pause to register Judas’ ‘despair’ [desperaunce, 36]—​so acute he returned the payment for ‘his treason’ [sa tresoun, 35]—​we should regard this not as empathic mitigation of the Jewish betrayer’s plight, but as a precursor to the lyric wanhope of God that al this myhtes may (#73) and of A Prayer for Deliverance (#69), with its flailing, tresoun-​beset [6]‌penitent. Rich in blessed abjection, such a Christian may be ‘viler than a Jew’, but isn’t damnable like one. At least, he needn’t remain so. Since it focuses on the Crucifixion itself, Seven Hours steers clear of the (auto-​proliferating) Beirut simulacrum. Nonetheless, Hours does recount how ‘at that hour [Nonne] … a knight [un chivaler] who had the name of Longinus happened to strike you with a lance in the side’ [une lance parmi le costie]—​‘and immediately issued from it blood and water [sang e eawe] to redeem us’ [#115.102–​104]. This final Harley rendition of the Wounding differs from others we have seen. In A Prayer for Deliverance, late in Quire 9, Christ’s blessedly gaping wound is one ‘the Jew’ alone gave [#69.22]. History’s agent, per this lyric, is singular but unnamed. More to the point, he’s a Jew. Commentators agree that the (apocryphal, Roman-​sounding) name ‘Longinus’

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[Longeius] is actually rhetorical extrapolation, a nominative metaphorization that essentially means ‘lance-​ wielder’ (from the Greek λόγχη [lónchi]). ‘Longui le chevaler’ [Longinus the soldier, #3.270]—​who accrues a backstory, is conflated with the witness-​ bearing Centurion of Matthew 27:54/​Mark 15:39, converts, and is now venerated as St Longinus—​first appears in The Gospel of Nicodemus, a version of which Harley’s main scribe rubricates and includes (De le Passioun Jhesu [#3, fols. 33–​41]) within the four inherited quires (fols. 1–​48) prefacing the ten he produces himself (fols. 49–​140).95 In Harley’s French prose Nicodemus (and so too, its versified Bible extracts from Herman of Valenciennes; #2.1937–​1938), Longinus is not identified as ‘the leader of the soldiers’ [li maistre des chivalers], or Centurion, who testifies, ‘Truly, this man is the Son of God’ [#3.285–​286]. Still, his ‘chivaler’ status, whether it denotes knight or soldier, militates against his association as a medieval Jew.96 Nor is he agglomerated amid an indistinct, ravenous crowd. Presumably this is because Longinus’ inadvertent act (he ‘happened to strike you with a lance’ [te vint ferir de une lance, #115.102]) has results that are both decreed and fortunate, so manifestly salvific (a flow of ‘blood and water to redeem us’ [103]) that to question why—​or cavil about agency, ethnicity, and character consistency—​seems churlish. The Harley manuscript’s recursive allusions to the Passion, via the mechanism of a latter-​day ‘ymage’ (first crafted by the faithful but remounted for better stabbing by Jews), recast the primal act of Calvary witness, in a world-​geographic mode. It furthers the circulation of Beirut’s signification chain (a spear wound loosing blood and water, whose flow of gore produces conversion across realm and region) while altering one key detail. Here, the wound in Christ’s side—​wondrous, gaping, salvific, collectivist—​is ‘given him’ [ly dona] not by ‘un chivaler’ [a knight], the hapless but vaguely noble Longinus, who ‘happened’ by with a misdirected lance, but by plural, nameless, flash-​mob ‘Gyiws’ (‘treacherous’, ‘wicked’, ‘ravenous’) whose malevolent intentionality is so ‘ancient’ as to be elemental. Multiple Harley texts are keyed back to this apocalyptic gateway moment, in which typology begins and history ends. A cursed few (the unchosen of the chosen) creep forward into ‘the time [of] this writing’ [#71.733] to become ‘enfruntz’ Jews: damnable, unlucky monsters who are now properly, we shall hear in a moment, ‘cheytyves entre nous’ [captives among us,  729].97 Meanwhile, nimbler runners better negotiate the gash along universal history’s

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soteriological continuum. The where of this event is clear:  at Jerusalem, the world’s centre, specifically the hill of Calvary. But exactly when (and how) do we become post-​Jewish? At Vespers [#115.105]—​the seventh hour—​there appears a band of Hebrew-​ Christian in-​ betweeners:  those, led by Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the three Marys, ‘who did not consent to your death’ [107]. Ambivalent ethnically—​ but not institutionally—​ these foundational believers provide an aspirational model for the rest of the Harley miscellany, indeed for English devotional culture overall. It is they who Harley manuscript audiences (should) want to be:  paradigmatic Christian devotees, first-​generation converts, those who believed strongly [bien creauntz, 87], believed truly [fermement crust, 89–​90]. Apart from a local Latin vita (The Martyrdom of Saint Wistan [#116, fol. 140v]) added over an erasure to the last verso of the manuscript, the compilation ends here. We conclude at Vespers, upon Mount Calvary [61], in Anglo-​Norman prose, on the stormy day of Christ’s Passion. Historians of medieval Anglo-​Jewry and of Herefordshire history have been seduced into optimism by a wedding invitation. In chastened hindsight, considering the capstone function of Seven Hours, one appreciates now what has been resisted all along: that a teaching of contempt towards Anglo-​Gyiws proves part and parcel of the Harley compilatory project, as of so many others. Christ’s famous last words are voiced, this sermon-​contemplacioun stresses, ‘en Hebreu’ [in Hebrew, 85], the language of those whose king he is, those by whom he has been betrayed:  ‘God, God, why have you forsaken me?’ [85–​ 86]. That Harley manuscript audiences hear these phrases in England’s French vernacular (‘Dieux, Dieux, purquoi m’as tu guerpy?’) reinforces Jesu’s cultural transposition from biblical Jew into Anglo-​Norman not-​Jew. But the awkwardness of this moment resides less in diegetic frame-​breaking (our eavesdropping upon the complaint of Son to Father) than in its lament for a world that has, once again, fallen away. The bitter fulfilment of God’s plan—​re-​experienced brutally in Seven Hours of the Passion—​was only necessary ‘because you saw so few who truly believed’ [87]. Text, codex, and world, as co-​constitutive figures for a fallen state, thus forward a last argument for conversion, which is to say: our religious rededication, as a Christian but also Anglo-​vernacular reading community. In the wake of this (textual-​ territorial) ambition—​ the same that animates crusade and pogrom—​there surges the bile of expulsion, together with its adjunct: the devotional-​geographic logic of Jewish erasure.

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Captives among us The Harley item most susceptible to Jewish studies analysis is among its most understudied, while yet being the manuscript’s ‘longest and most central text’. Comprising tales drawn from the Latin Vulgate Bible, combined with exegesis from Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica (1173) and bits of unique commentary, Old Testament Stories [Estoyres de la Bible] (#71, fols. 92–​105) covers almost all of Quires 10–​11. Fein regards it, along with a few other texts, as the Harley scribe’s own composition.98 Its ‘somewhat freely adapted’ narrative highlights the ‘God-​ordained exploits of Joseph and Moses’, with emphasis on the ‘Christological allusions found in Old Testament events’ and especially ‘how church has replaced synagogue’ [6, 10, 310]. To his received material our copyist adds red-​ink rubrication and ‘occasional lessons’, such as ‘a mnemonic couplet on the ten plagues, [or] a multi-​lingual explanation of the word manna’ [11]. All told, these augmentations signal his ‘interest in the privileges and responsibilities granted to the priestly class’ of the ancient Hebrews [311, 313]. It transpires, in other words, that Jews—​in the form of Hebrew stories and lineages—​are hiding in plain sight near the middle of our miscellany. If the anthologized poems on which Harley’s reputation rests offer limited purchase, these biblical paraphrases (mostly discounted by literary history) open promising routes into the questions this chapter has raised. To map Harley Jews requires particular attention here. Structurally, the text follows the progression of events in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. We pick up with Jacob’s sale into slavery; continue through captivity, uprising, and flight from Egypt; suffer tribulations in the wilderness; and celebrate our arrival in the Promised Land. Now on-​site, we oversee building of the tabernacle—​and culminate in enrolment within that sanctuary space of the Hebrew lineages. Old Testament Stories (OTS) gives an account, in other words, of the mixed fortunes of the Hebrews as God’s chosen—​we are ‘vostre pueple’ [your people, 576,  578], Moses reminds him—​tracking their progression into and out from captivity; into and out of divine favour; into and out of a realm (and mappable abode) of their own. Even before the watershed of the Incarnation, Harley manuscript Jews are continually exiled anew, as if their natural state were migrancy. Most of the time, Estoyres de la Bible refers to its protagonist nation as ‘Hebrews’ [les Hebreus, 210]. We hear of ‘the Hebrew people’ [le pueple Hebreu,  338], ‘the Hebrew race’ [le lignage

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as Hebreus,  324], or, in God’s voice, ‘mon pueple Hebreu’ [my Hebrew people, 345]. The term occurs, especially, when the text wishes to distinguish its focal minority from the ruling Egyptians (‘they ate by themselves because they were Hebrews’ [155–​156]; Potiphar’s Wife ‘said that this Hebrew slave [cerf Hebreu] would have taken her by force’ [60–​61]). Even more bracing for an account of a nation’s conglomeration are some raw moments of dissension in the pueple’s ranks. The Hebreus’ desert ‘grumbling’ [grundilement, 451], ‘chiding’ [tensoun, 468], and idolatrous backsliding does more than trigger God’s ‘vengaunce’ [468]—​which, post-​Golden Calf, evolves into vengeance killing. ‘Spare no one’, Moses commands, drawing a line before the 23,000  ‘who had worshipped the veel d’or’ [552–​554]: ‘All those who are of God, come right here from over there’ [550]. Most notable, in ethnogenetic terms, is how this episode reveals fault lines within the emergent Hebrew nation—​at this point, a still-​fragile confederation of tribes. For carrying out God’s grim bidding without hesitation, ‘Moses sanctified the people who had done this killing’ [555]. Immediately following this event—​the first in OTS to isolate ‘the sons of Levi’ [ly fitz Levy, 551] for special attention—​we shift from the epochal migrations (of Exodus) to the bureaucratic undertakings (from Numbers) that Moses performs at God’s behest. Primary among these is the ‘command that he should now record his people’ [enbrevast son pueple] by lineage, prescribing their ‘various offices and labours’ [diverse offis e overaignes, 594–​ 596]. ‘The lineage [lygnage] of Levi’, for their loyalty, ‘would not be written down for battle or for labour’ [597]. Helping along this movement (in which disparate tribes unite, before splintering into rival subgroups) is an internal gloss explaining how Jacob and his lineage in the land of Egypt were called Israel by the Egyptians. And Israel is such as to say ‘he who sees God’ [cely qe vist Dieu], because is means ‘man’, ra means ‘seeing’, el means ‘God’.99

This scholarly etymology (drawn from Comestor)100 links the Harley scribe’s interests in dream interpretation and priestly vocation directly to the Levites, and the sacred offices they provide on behalf of the Hebrew nation. And yet OTS almost never refers to its protagonist ‘pueple’ by this appellation (‘Israel’) alone. They remain ethnic ‘Hebrews’ with, usually, a quasi-​territorial additive (for example, an ablative of place), as when Pharaoh permits ‘the Hebrew women of Israel’ [les femmes Hebreus de Israel,  275] to

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preside at births, despite his decree ordering death for the firstborn. The stakes involved in ethnic-​group naming are raised when death enters the picture. It is because they respond to God’s call for summary execution that Levi’s lineage is invested with religious authority in perpetuity. The act amounts to genocide, inflicted by one Hebrew lygnage upon another—​at God’s behest. After ‘Moses sanctified [seintefia] the people who had done this killing’, it is no longer all Hebrews who are ‘of Israel’ but only the sons of Levi who constitute ‘those who are of God’ [555–​557]. The numbers, duties, and licensed fees of Levi’s (hereafter-​ priestly) lineage receive eleven lines of dilation following this confirmation. Our piqued scribe shows his interest in these Levitical entailments via a rubricated red ‘Levy’ in his margin [628].101 The above discussion prepares us to consider ‘the longest digression’ our scribe inserts into his text102—​a paraph-​marked, ten-​line interpolation one scholar describes as a ‘homily on the superiority of Christianity’:103 ¶ In the Bible you will now find at this point much writing about the sacrifices that pagans [payens], Jews [judeux], and their kind were wont to make of calves, lambs, and other animals. And now [ore] they have given up all that because they are captives among us [cheytyves entre nous].104

The passage’s verb-​tense cries out for notice. Despite being penned in the 1330s, its understanding of the immigration status of contemporary ‘judeux’ [Jews] is that, notwithstanding expulsions from England (1290) and Royal France (1306, 1322), they remain—​that is, still ‘are’ [il sunt]—​a presence ‘among us’. To be sure, Norman Jews qualify as a subject population, a ‘captive’ people who must conform their religious observance to prevailing political realities. They used to make sacrifice one way, but ‘now’ [ore], given present adversity, ‘they have given up all that’ [le ount tot lessé]. Just prior lies another passage in which ‘many Hebrews were killed and many hurt. And thus’—​the text reports dispassionately—​‘did God take vengeance for their misdeeds’ [726–​727]. The one thought (righteous destruction of biblical Hebrews) prompts the next, a scribal ‘digression’ on present-​day conditions (Jews who ‘are’ captive among us) that in fact no longer obtain. The following sentence corkscrews us further into a historical present that is notable for how it occasions narratorial ambivalence:

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And in remembrance of their creator, according to what they say, they make stone sculptures and paintings every day because they do not want to forget him, for painting is a book for those who do not have understanding of letters.105

If the final clause corroborates the Harley scribe’s interest in the proto-​pastoral qualities of certain biblical Hebrews, more surprising is his fascination for Jews in the present tense. This passage’s curious figures are not Old Testament ‘Hebreus’ or fully vernacular ‘Gyiws’ but hybrid ‘judeux’: a transliterated Hebrew–​Norman portmanteau folk. They are at once ancient and specific to our time, however fuzzy such a here-​and-​‘now’ [ore] may be. Stranger yet is the Harley scribe’s apparent respect for the intrinsic substance and ongoing nature of modern Jews’ artistic expression. His ethnographic curiosity eludes, however briefly, the totalizing habits of Christian typological-​eschatological thought. The emphasis rests instead on how things are today for Jewish people—​and pertains to Norman judeux’s own devotional goals (‘they make stone sculptures and paintings every day because they do not want to forget him’). Bracketed for the moment is how such peoples (‘they’) fold into the universal geo-​theology we elsewhere (in Pilgrimages in the Holy Land [#38] and Seven Hours of the Passion [#115], for example) see re-​enacted and ratified. If the creative urges of judeux, nowadays [ore, 727,  729], are expounded with unusual empathy, it is because they resemble the medieval clerkly impetus to pastoral care (‘for painting is a book for those who do not have understanding of letters’). Soon, though, comes a tonal switch:  ‘But now regarding the synagogue which was a temple for the Jews [fust temple as gyus], now it is ordained a church for Christians to make their Christian sacrifice.’106 The repetition here of ‘Mes ore’/​‘ore’ [But now … now] and ‘chretienz’/​ ‘chretiene’ [Christians … Christian] recalls the semantic and syntactic binarism of the Oviedo Letter for Pilgrims passage examined above [#987]. As before, such pedantic doubling calls attention to the temporal-​ theological crux of the situation. When using the word ‘synagoge’, the Harley scribe can have in mind no (officially) active site in post-​expulsion England or France. This banal point of context makes his reference to Jewish devotional practices occurring ‘at the time that this writing was made’ [Al temps que cest escrit fut fet, 733] a textual conundrum. Since synagogue spaces (the ‘temple[s]‌’ of Gyus) have, sometimes literally, been converted into sites for Christian sacrifice [‘ordained an eglise’], Norman

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society has eliminated visible Judaic observance. But still ‘they make’—​and somewhere display—​‘stone sculptures and paintings every day’ [chescun jour,  730]. Despite initially having cast the matter in architectural terms, our ethnocultural guide now renders the history of ‘synagoge’ typologically:  temple becomes eglise [church].107 The homonym latent in ‘temple’ [temple,  732] and ‘temps’ [time,  733] verges into homology—​semantic demonstration of the role temporality (always) plays in concepts of the sacred. Matters dovetail at the end of the passage, when, in relief, we leave behind outmoded Jewish law for the more secure doctrine upon which a sanctified present depends: the ‘sacrifice each day among Christians [which] is made in remembrance of the Creator, and will be until the end of the world’ [le quel sacrifice chescun jour entre chretienz est fet en remenbraunce de lur Creatour, e serra tanque al fyn del mound, 734–​736]. If Jews and Christians both make sacrifice ‘in remembrance of their Creator’ [729, 735] and are further alike in continuing to do so daily [chescun jour, 730, 735], what distinguishes their respective arts of devotion? By passage’s end, a notion properly pertaining to time has been rendered in terms of space. Temporality transmutes into geography: ‘The end of the world’ [fyn del mound, 736; emphasis added] becomes a location: the cosmic stage upon which epochal events unfold. ‘Here’ is where ordained changes to groups, whether anciently chosen or soteriologically harvested, are revealed. We begin to be equipped to dismantle that question which medieval Christian cartographers couldn’t fully determine how to resolve:  where, if anywhere, to locate contemporary Jews when mapping the world? To expel and erase were the preferred tactics, while placing biblical Hebrews—​and the Apocalyptic hordes of Gog and Magog—​posed less of a problem. As Scott Westrem observes, however, some Jewish-​coded cartographic ‘invocations of Gog/​Magog’ identify this entity as ‘[not] remote’ but instead ‘a dangerous element already lurking in the European social fabric’.108 Considering judeux no longer reside in Norman realms, no wonder our scribe wonders at the prospect of them, still captive among us, producing sculptures e peyntures [sculptures and paintings] daily. Among other doublings, four uses apiece of ‘sacrifice’ [727, 733, 734, 735] and ‘now’ [727, 728, 732, 732] tell an unsettled story. So if Hebrew and Christian clauses mirror one another, the underlying anxiety seems to be that we are Jewish—​still Jewish—​ when we sacrifice. Much as conversion doesn’t really work (for suspicious theologians), so does our metaphorical transmogrification

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from Hebrew into Christian not really make us un-​Jewish. The figural or spectral Jew thus lingers, here more than ever, at the centre of medieval Christian identity:  he109 is an accessory factor or larval stage in another’s devotional maturation. Being like a Jew, let alone ‘vilore then’ one, is to inhabit a subject position that (from an ecclesiastical perspective) requires supersession by Christian immanence.110 But no matter one’s prospect of grace, a certain worry resides in the trace element of the Judaic111: a damnable recalcitrance which makes us perennial participants in the scourging, buffeting, and wounding of Christ (at Tierce); earlier, his sale (at Matins); and ultimately his denial (at None). ‘We’ [nous, 729] Christians, not ‘they’ Jews, are the obstinate betrayers, however loudly all claim, on the Easter morning of lyric devotions, to be with Joseph of Arimathea and the others who objected to the Crucifixion [#115.107]. It is this trace of stubborn, originary Hebreu-​ness that produces the chivalric oxymoron of a Jew-​Chivaler, heralded by arrival of a lance-​bearing scapegoat (Longinus among us), with in one tradition his witness bearing, conversion, and sanctification,112 and in another, slow seepage towards a doom of eternal wandering.113 Apocryphal developments aside, the lesson is that affective devotional practice, as disseminated in Franciscanism and popularized in vernacular lyric, harbours a pronounced strain of antisemitism at its performative core. Moreover, since Jews are obliged ‘[to find] lodging in a host country’ hostile to them, medieval English religious geographies entail simultaneously a ‘radical entangling’ of Christian and Jewish subjectivity.114 Immediately following the note on judeux and their devotional art on fol. 101v, there begin to appear divisions within the Hebrews who are (or were) collectively ‘God’s people’ [780]. A sudden desire is conceived—​on exactly whose part, we do not learn—​to repeal Moses’ ‘lordship and governance’ [le seignurie de la mestrie]:  ‘we have no interest in your prelacy’ [vostre prelacioun, 740–​741]. Such divisions intensify during intramural competition, as when spectacular trial is made of God’s lineage preferences, next day via ‘encenser’ [censer] ‘before the tabernacle’ [745–​746]. Where, earlier, Hebrew–​Egyptian conflict was the rule (our redactor alters one case of Hebrew-​on-​Hebrew violence, to make an Egyptian the aggressor [309–​311]), we witness now a fracturing of the Hebreu collective. Existing internal fissures are exacerbated by God’s command that each tribe be paraded before the nation, to be sanctified (for their commitment) or smoked out (for their disloyalty): ‘And

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then it shall be seen which of us God calls’ [747]. Next comes more (and ever more vehement) ‘vengeaunce’ by God [753, 758, 758, 771] against grudging ‘companions of the Hebrews for their misdeeds’ [compaignouns des Hebreus pur lur trespas,  772]. The term ‘compaignouns’ denotes the collected members of a military section, as of a subdivision on array (compaigne = company, band), but also carries a frisson of factionalism, of dissent in the ranks.115 The situation’s potential for discord flares into conflagration when broken pieces of Moses’ censer become ‘fasten[ed] to the altars’ as ‘a sign to the sons of Israel’—​most of them at this moment only precariously ‘people of God’ [pueple Dieu,  780]—​‘that none of them should approach the altar to offer incense if he be not of the lineage of Aaron’ [775–​778]. These lesser, hereafter second-​class lineages do not, apparently, fully vest as members of the Hebrew community; they are not themselves ‘those who see god’ [Is-​Ra-​El, 230–​232] but trespassing ‘sons of’ [fitz de] those who did [776]. By way of elaborating this point, Estoyres de la Bible tracks the enrolment within the tabernacle of ‘rods’ [verges]—​these are both ceremonial props and bureaucratic documents, one per lineage [chesun lygnage une verge]—​which record the names of princes and all their households [786–​788]. After ‘budding and bearing flowers’ [791–​792], Aaron’s rod remains in the tabernacle as a sign to the rebellious [en signe des rebels fitz de Israel] that it is his lineage alone whom God trusts, his descendants alone who are ordained as castigators of a fickle nation (‘they should cease their grumbling and complaints [grondylements e pleyntes], so that they not die’ [794–​795]). As God says in anointing Aaron and ‘the line of Levi’ [le lyn Levy], ‘you and your brothers will be in charge of the priesthood and all that relates to the altar’ [798–​801]. Long paragraphs follow, detailing privileges, offices, and permissible fees: ‘to les fitz Levy I  have given possession of all the tithes of the children of Israel [dismes des fitz Israel] for the service that they perform for me in the tabernacle’ [811–​812]. This narrowed conception of who comprises our protagonist group (or its inner sanctum) inaugurates a new phase for Harley’s Old Testament Stories. With it comes a new practice, in terms of preferred nominative phrase. God refers to ‘the children of Israel’ [812] in confirming the Levites’ tithing claim on the wealth of the nation as a whole. These ‘fitz Israel’ had also appeared in consecutive lines on the verso previous [793,  794]. Now, the phrase is repeated both to start the next paragraph (‘God commanded that les fitz Israel bring a red sow of full age’ [813–​814]) and again

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soon after [820]. In sections following, the locative modifier ‘of Israel’ appears along with or in place of the plural nominative that Estoyres had earlier preferred, which is to say, ‘le pueple Hebreu’ [436] become ‘le pueple de Israel’ [818, 821, 834]. Prior to the Harley scribe’s interpolation concerning judeux/​Gyus ‘among us’ [entre nous], almost no instances of this phrasing had occurred. Instead, passage after passage referenced ‘the Hebrews’ or ‘the Hebrew people’. The former term continues to appear periodically. For example, our protagonists (‘those people’) are decidedly ‘Hebreus’ when God rains fire upon them [E Dieu mist arsoun desus cel pueple], and ‘14,700 of the Hebrews perished’ [782–​785]. The prospect of entry to the Promised Land [La Terre de Promissioun, 841], with attendant need to battle for possession, sees OTS’s focal ‘pueple’ called ‘Hebrews’ again [845]—​at precisely which point they once more ‘grew angry against God and Moses’ [851]. The tribe our narrator now calls ‘Les Hebreus de Israel’ [the Hebrews of Israel,  855], have, by this point (midway through Numbers), become a nation both ethnic and territorial. And to the extent that they are ‘those who see God’, this is a devotional collectivity as well. ‘Israel’ no longer functions as merely a genitive or ablative of place, as previously (‘de Israel’). Instead, as in the sentence ‘Israel sang this song’ [865], it has become a collective noun, but with a difference. Poised on the verge of denoting a nation, it has accrued a territorial dimension. In this, the Seinte Terre [Holy Land] of Harley 2253’s Pilgrimages and the Israel of its Old Testament Stories anticipate the form that ‘England the nation’ has been described as becoming, during precisely this period (1280–​1340) and through precisely the mechanism of vernacular collections such as Harley 2253.116 In truth, the semantic data are mixed: it is after ‘God gathered the people of the Hebrews’ [864] that ‘Israel sang this song’ [865], ‘Israel went’ forward [866], and ‘Israel sent messengers’, asking ‘that it might pass through’ [868–​869; emphasis added]. The mobility, agency, and diplomatic intentionality attached to the term, ‘Israel’, indicates that at this point, there is not yet a stable, wholly attenuated territorial element to the national collective. On the other hand, three consecutive paragraphs [868, 875, 880], each tagged by a red paraph, begin with active-​voice reference to ‘Israel’—​as if to underline how, long before the history of the modern imperial state begins, nation requires narration.117 Simply ‘Hebrew’ when they ‘came from Egypt’ [886], the pueple who are God’s longsuffering chosen hereafter carry multiple nominative designations. Later episodes

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(for example, Balaam’s Ass) see the terms ‘Israel’ [933, 935, 937] and the ‘Hebrew people’ [925,  943] deployed interchangeably, if slanting to the former in frequency. For only the space of a single passage—​and that an authorial-​scribal aside ‘[Not in the Bible]’, as Fein notes [736]—​were these people ‘judeux’. Estoyres de la Bible concludes with one last story of God taking vengeance, this time—​via the incumbent archpriest of the Levites, Phinehas (son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the Priest)—​on ‘24,000 men for their fornications’ [978]. After Phinehas bursts in upon ‘one of the sons of Israel’ in ‘the brothel of the Midianites’ [le bordel de Madyanytes, 973], Harley’s thousand-​line paraphrase reaches climax with ‘a javelin [un dart] … pierced through the middle [tresperça parmy] [of] the man and woman together’ [975–​977]. It isn’t incidental that the coitus which Phinehas’ dart interrupts should take place not merely in the profane space of a crosstown brothel [bordel], but between a Hebrew man (‘Israelite’ per Wilshere and Fein) and a ‘Midianite woman’ [femme Madianyte, 982], one of the ‘daughters of Moab’ [967]. Worries about sexual congress between unwitting cross-​ religionists, we might recall, were the official grounds justifying the legislated yellow tabula on Jewish costumes in Norman England. Two sentences later (after Phinehas became a ‘lord among the Hebrews [seigneur entre les Hebreus], and an intimate and friend of God’ [984–​985]), we come to an appropriate, if abrupt stopping point. Naturally, this fyn-​ishing is doubled: we are ‘almost at the end of’ [apoy al fyn de] the book of Numbers [Nounbre] as well [986–​987]. Before returning to his anthologizing of lyric devotions, however, the Harley scribe concludes his exhaustive biblical lesson [histoyre,  986] with a promise:  that ‘he who has a good end [bon fyn] will not lose the joy of heaven’ [987]. Estoyres thus closes with words which are not only redolent of final sacraments (see Chapter  4) but which gesture to his earlier, ‘digression’-​capping reference to the ‘fyn del mounde’ [end of the world, 736]. Following Estoyres de la Bible (#71), with its rampant Levites, and Nomina librorum bibliotece (#72), with its addenda on cubits and Hebrew names, the Harley manuscript turns back in Quires 12–​14 to assorted vernacular items: conduct literature, a few lyrics, several fabliaux, some satirical/​political fare, then the geo-​ devotional texts examined earlier. First among this varied set comes God that al this mihtes may (#73, fol. 106), as encountered above. This English lyric features, not the wound to history the expulsion gave, but the ‘galle’ [gall, 12] in which all now wallow, on account

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of the wound to Christ the Jew gave [le Gyw ly dona, #69.21–​22].118 Phinehas, grandson to Aaron le chapeleyn, last instrument of God’s abating OTS wrath, provides an intentional spear as counterpoint to the chiualer Longinus’ inadvertent lance. In doing so, this seigneur of the priestly-​caste Levites puts a sharp end to the Harley scribe’s biblical storytelling, and runs his cauterizing dart through the transgressive bodies of a Midianite woman and her Israelite lover into the bargain. God’s friend Phinehas plants a flag marking Hebrew repossession of ‘la Terre du Promissioun’, while prefiguring how New Law eglise (engorged and emergent) will rise above Old Law synagoge (prone, captive, chastised). The shock of the scene works to counteract the dissidence of the brazen entry of ‘Zimri son of mighty Salu’ [981] into the Midianite brothel, in full sight of the Hebrews congregated at the tabernacle door. Apparently, there can be no countenancing of miscegenation, however ancient. Phinehas’ act amounts to cultural impalement: a righteously violent exchange in which the grounded, definitively occupied, doubly penetrated body of the femme Madianyte (a princess, it transpires: ‘Cozbi the daughter of Zur’ [981–​982]) stands surety for the ordained, now achieved territorial covenant between Dieu and le pueple de Dieu. In a circular mode characteristic of history that writes the nation into existence, the repossession that was prophesied in Genesis, initiated in Exodus, consecrated in Leviticus, and bureaucratized in Numbers, comes here to fruition. Resistance will be quelled in bellicose Joshua, and state justice established in Judges, but those are beyond the writ of Old Testament Stories. Even so, by the end of the narrative the Levites ‘excused from battle’ will have inflicted untold thousands of deaths upon the Companions of the Hebrews. Chilling as they are, Norman tactics of dispossession pale by comparison to the Bible’s own lineage pogroms. Harley 2253’s palpable ambivalence with regard to Jews, past and present, and how to think about them in a Christian historical and geographical context, may be distilled down, not just to the extraordinary Estoyres passage we’ve been examining, but to a single phrase within that passage: ‘payens judeux e lur parenté’ [727–​728]. With the help of editorial commas, Fein et al. divide the social collective imagined here into multiple, semi-​discrete ethnic groupings. That is, Complete Harley renders the phrase as ‘pagans, Jews, and their kind’—​whereas John Thompson and A.D. Wilshere, in separate treatments of the same line, refer to ‘pagan Jews and their kin’.119 How one chooses to transcribe and render the phrase payens judeux—​whether as ‘pagan Jews’ (noun

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phrase with attributive adjective) or as ‘pagans, Jews’ (two separate nouns)—​has interpretive consequences, as does one’s precise translation of lur parenté. Wilshere understands the latter phrase (literally, their family, ‘parentage’) to mean kindred: Jews and their relatives. Complete Harley reads it as an idiom denoting communal type or associative temper: pagans, Jews, and their sort (groups like them).120 Neither inquires into the underlying category of the Jew or ties the local translation decision into the Harley manuscript’s larger treatment of the Judaic. Nor, after enacting their thematic coupling (‘pagan Jews’) or editorial decoupling (‘pagans, Jews’), does either party flag our scribe’s anachronistic subsequent reference—​penned forty years post-​expulsion—​to Jews who remain ‘captives among us’. To Thompson’s thinking, in his rubrication and additions we see a copyist ‘keen to maintain some distance between his Christian faith and the parallel but strange religious rites of the children of Israel’.121 Views like Wilshere’s on our redactor’s ‘erratic performance’, ‘unevenness of form’, and ‘insensitivity to poetic imagery’, meanwhile, make it ‘hardly surprising that relatively little modern critical attention has been paid’ to Old Testament Stories.122 Such disparagements, Thompson notes, put the Harley scribe’s decision to include this item ‘at variance’ with his otherwise laudatory work of literary compilation.123 Such evaluations also make us inattentive to his account’s surprising intercultural curiosity. If one desire expressed in the middle parts of Harley (Quires 7–​8 and 10–​11) is to ‘relate the customs and procedures of the … synagogue in Old Testament times to those of the Christian church in the present day’, another is to give textual grounding to meditative, geo-​devotional practices such as imagined pilgrimage and compositio loci.124 Strange in such a context that our guide in these matters, who is otherwise widely informed, should prove so blithely forgetful of medieval Jews’ altered historical conditions. Now, ‘in the present day’, when eglise has displaced synagoge both physically and ritually in England, Jews are not among us—​except as a decimated trace. That was Edward I’s point. To eliminate the perceived threat of Jewish presence, by theologically reconfiguring or geographically displacing it, is similarly a practice enshrined on mappaemundi like that of Hereford Cathedral.125 Harley manuscript scholars treat our digression’s closing mention of Christian sacrifices [sacrifice chretiene, 733] that shall endure ‘from now until the end of time’ [736] as a bland, pious addition.126 But the piety expressed here is neither conventional nor inert. By recalling the

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sacrifices that, formerly, pagans and Jews (or pagan Jews) were wont to make [soleyent fere, 727–​728], the note effects an appropriation of ancient custom, leaving latter-​day Norman ‘gyus’ [Jews, 732]—​ whom the text references as such only in this aside—​lamely to alter their superseded religious practice, into what new form isn’t said. What is not suggested by our self-​annotating copyist is that Jewish sacrifice now [ore] consists of host desecration:  that perverse, elemental, ongoing compulsion to Christ-​wounding to which (in Harley devotions as elsewhere) Christian imaginations frequently turned. The Bleeding Icon of Beirut, whose recurrence in the Harley manuscript (and relocation to Oviedo) we have tracked, indexes a full and bracing measure of this pogrom-​inviting attitude. But as with the massacres and blood-​accusation cases that, to modern knowledge, never quite occurred in medieval Hereford—​unlike at Norwich, Lincoln, Gloucester, Bury St Edmunds, Winchester, York, London, and so on—​there may be solace in the non-​eruption of zealotry that might have been. As for the hectored Hereford citizens and rogue clerks of 1286, their attendance at an interfaith event recalls the Harley scribe’s ‘fascination with cross-​ lingual understanding’ and ‘preoccupation with’ biblical Hebrew lineage distinctions.127 In the case of both city and book there flickers a nagging cognizance of Jews’ continuing—​if captive and transfigured—​presence entre nous:  in our midst.128 That their historical deliverance from subjugation has been wrested from Harley judeux for higher order service within a Christian typological system that assigns them only a recalcitrant, negative identity (but which persists as a productive entanglement nonetheless) is an irony beyond our scribe-​redactor’s capability to perceive. The baronial chaplain or household tutor who assembled Harley 2253 defines himself according to the social and ecclesiastical orthodoxies of his time. As a workaday scrivener and aspiring priest, he further reveals himself by the local benefice ambitions he nurses and the regional political ideologies he promotes. Still, one might discern in his overwrought pedantry, fraught temporality, and compulsively doubled diction on the subject of Jews (ore … ore …; sacrifices Hebrew and chretiene) certain half-​repressed, incompletely transmuted, partial and qualified measures of cross-​ cultural tolerance. Not that there were any Jews remaining in the neighbourhood129 for whom such latent empathy might matter, or to whom an ecumenical fellow-​feeling might be extended. Nor in final assessment, judging by his infatuation with heroic Hereford bishops,130 does this clerk of ours seem made of stern-​enough stuff

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to resist the example, let alone direct prohibition, of his diocesan (on the chance he did not share Swinfield’s and Cantilupe’s anti-​ Judaic fervour). Potential neighbourly gestures between Christian and Jew were long since moot in the Diocese of Hereford. Within the memory of some, however, was a time when plural Anglo-​Marcher peoples—​ the coexistent Hereford populations of Aaron le Blund’s community centred on Jewry Lane and Bye Street, and Richard de Swinfield’s blocks away in the cathedral close—​shared a full complement of cultural tastes, as represented in the games, processions, equestrian displays, silk finery, and feasting delicacies partaken in common by them, one late summer day in 1286. Half of these English Normans risked censure from their bishop, with the threat of expulsion from the ecclesiastical community, to participate in what the other half—​also Anglo-​Normans—​regarded as their pre-​ eminent form of community expression. Joe Hillaby calculates that only Aaron le Blund (community leader 1260–​1290) could have afforded to have hosted the swank event that drove Bishop Swinfield, soon to be brandishing a timely bull of Honorius IV, to distraction. Following the decline of Hamo de Hereford’s line in the 1250s, Aaron, a relocated London financier and patron of rabbinical learning, reprised pioneering Hamo in being a Jewish magnate among the marchers. It was undoubtedly a scion of Aaron’s—​his grandson Bonenfaunt, Hillaby judges—​whose union occasioned the feast.131 Archpriest Phinehas, seigneur of the Levites and licensed avenger of God, seeks to snuff out cross-​faith coupling when he drives his dart through a wayward parishioner and his alien partner. ‘Stringent measures’ against inter-​ creed commingling are likewise threatened by seigneur of the Normans and stout vicar of God, Bishop Richard Swinfield.132 But unlike at Lincoln in 1275, this is not—​with spear and holy bloodshed—​how the story of Hereford’s wedding feast concludes. Not that any ‘bon fyn’ [good ending, #71.987] awaits, for this ecumenical initiative. To trust documentary silence can only be unwise; yet it would appear that—​in this instance—​the insidious yellow tabula failed in its divisive work. We have no drama of faith-​cross’d lovers (Zimri–​ Cozbi; Jessica–​Lorenzo; Rebecca–​Ivanhoe) to conjure with. Just a collective historians’ hunch that, under cover of food, drink, and equestrian display, basic civic decency may (for once) have prevailed. Medievalists otherwise hard-​bitten take turns marvelling about how Hereford 1286 saw cordiality, friendly relations, mutual

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regard.133 How responsible (or alternatively, reckless) is it to forward such hypotheses of co-​celebration (‘intercourse’ is furious Honorius IV’s word [HRS, 139]) between Hereford Christian and Hereford Jew? Much as laws argue the prevalence of the social realities they wish to eradicate, official prohibition and recrimination reveal behaviours taking place on the ground. Maybe it is nothing so dramatic to propose an occasional victory for dull and mundane pluralism. ‘Different cultures, shared places’—​or so might a braver sage than Harley’s Hending have declared. More than just history is at stake; more than medieval studies, Harley studies, literary interpretation. For Colin Richmond, dogged in his historical optimism, medieval anti-​Judaic actions, despite their usual characterization as mob-​borne and popular, are more accurately described as elite-​driven, top-​down initiatives.134 Had fiscal opportunist and devout bigot Edward I—​at the impetus of his bishops and with the collusion of his baronage; for the debt relief of an overtaxed gentry and with an eye towards state consolidation—​not imposed his 1290 expulsion edict, after decades of choking legislation, who is to say whether an increased potential for cross-​cultural empathy might have emerged in late medieval England? Counterfactual propositions, we will find in the next chapter, offer a means by which to interrogate the ethical compromises to which literary history (routinely patriarchal, class-​entitled, and ethnic-​nationalist) has been inclined. Instead, Hereford hosted medieval England’s last documented case—​probably an outlying incident, perhaps fairly common—​of Jewish–​ Christian concordance. Like Richmond, Robert Stacey prefers that we reject prevailing historiographical wisdoms:  the medieval Jewish experience is ‘[not] an unremitting tale of woe’.135 But Aaron le Blund’s games and processions brokered only so much. Within a year, Hereford Jews would again be imprisoned en masse, during a nationwide coin-​clipping witch-​hunt. Within four years, all the community—​along with all the realm’s Jewish subjects—​would be gone. Of course, more even than do the Harley scribe and his fourteenth-​century generation, we stand now, during our own present day, in genocide’s shadow. His idiosyncratic treatment of source material evinces the Harley scribe’s ‘lively interest’ both in ‘ecclesiastical privileges in biblical times’ and in ‘contemporary social and political conditions’.136 Such commitments are by no means in abeyance when he considers the case of Jews—​alternately Hebreus of Israel, treacherous Gyiws, and pagan judeux—​whom he describes, expulsions notwithstanding, as

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still living ‘among us’. If Harley manuscript political songs foster a concept of England as a social and political territory, even more basic to this compilation than such budding forms of nationhood—​ or for that matter, the cosmopolitan–​regionalist identities explored earlier—​are household concerns. These include conduct instruction, religious edification, devotional modelling, lyric reflection, and narrative entertainment. Such discourses do not stand in opposition to one another—​least of all, Englishness and Christian identity. Recent scholarship shows that Jews play a foundational role—​or rather, the sign of the Jew does—​in the fashioning of both these cultural constructs. It can only be called a failure of empathy that, despite his keen interests in historical Jewry and in oppressions faced by other groups, the Harley scribe was unable to object ethically to the plight of the fellow Normans who were—​or had been—​his region’s Gyiws. The most he can muster is to balance the prevailing denigration of crucifixion recounting, wherein Jews are cast as baleful anti-​Christians, with earlier estoyres that remake Pentateuch Hebreus as piously sacrificing proto-​Christians. The irrepressible pedlar of heterogeneity who gives the Harley miscellany shape, in this textual equivocation, confirms Robert Chazan’s ‘[proposition] that medieval western Christendom was highly ambivalent in its attitude to the growing Jewish minority in its midst, with some elements in Christian society accepting this minority, some rejecting it, and yet others accepting it with reservations and limitations’.137 The Harley scribe appears to have been one of the latter sort. Born about the time of the expulsion and resident in the environs of Ludlow, 20 miles north of Hereford, for the duration of his working life (1314–​1349), he never had occasion to brave episcopal denunciation or defy a papal bull. Aaron le Blund’s compaignouns des Hebreus were dispossessed before his time, and didn’t return. Until 1991, no congregation of lasting note re-​assembled in the area—​and even now the project of ‘Jewish community in Hereford’ remains more online ambition than on-​the-​ground reality.138 Historical recovery proves similarly elusive. The profiles of other medieval Anglo-​Jewish communities have risen, sometimes substantially, as a consequence of creative inquiry into their material-​architectural as well as textual remains. But analogous efforts have yielded little at Hereford. City archaeologists and local historians have excavated (or identified via toponymic evidence) a handful of Jewish heritage sites. Beyond the Jews’ Gaol

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at Hereford Castle, and a city wall bastion known as the Jews’ Chimney, just north of Jewry Lane, these include the homes of a daughter of Hamo in Bye (now Commercial) Street, where affluent merchants dwelt, and of his son Moses (community leader 1241–​1253) in High Street.139 The Jewish cemetery, outside the city limits, occupied land that became a Crusaders’ Hospital (the Knights of St John of Jerusalem) in 1290,140 while another sacred site, the community mikveh, or ritual baths, lay at Bewell Spring (later a brewery, afterwards Bowling Green Public House).141 All trace of Hereford’s pre-​expulsion synagogue, however, remains interred. As Hillaby reports, not even its precise location is evident.142 Doubtless, as would be prudent, the town’s ‘temple as gyus’ [temple for the Jews, #71.732] was hidden from street view, like so many spaces of Hebrew assembly, then and now. As with Jewry Lane in its entirety, obliterated by a 1980s shopping development, Hereford’s synagoge is effectively lost to history. Still, if ‘one of the most striking aspects of the Jewish experience in medieval western Christendom’—​so Chazan avers—​‘involves the growing number of Jews who became part of the [majority culture] ambience’ (20), also striking is the possibility that a surreptitiously sympathetic guide to Hebrew stories and customs became, in spite of himself, and his audience through him, ‘part of’ (or entangled within) an undertow, minority Jewish ambience. Just entre nous—​ ‘between us’, as the cosmopolitan (modern French) idiom goes—​I myself happen to be a church-​raised, provincial secular clerk of sorts (Minnesota Lutheran). A full 712 years after Aaron le Blund’s invitations went out, my (Connecticut Reform) Jewish femme and I  co-​hosted a summer harvest wedding feast of our own: an event so hybridly hebreu–​chretiene as to infuriate rabbi and bishop alike. The Harley scribe’s felicitous phrase, ‘entre nous’, might take us places, places where the feast goes on—​if only we can unyoke ourselves from the captivity that ‘cheytyves’, lying just before it, brings. The concept of captivity doesn’t appear in precisely this lexical use [cheytive] in any Harley lyric, sermon, or model prayer. Yet medieval devotional instruments make frequent use of (AN) chaitif-​ or (ME) caitiff-​status as a condition from which the suffering penitent may escape—​or more to the metaphor’s point, be redeemed. Medieval love-​lyric, of course, leverages the blissfully wrecched condition of the abject lover routinely. The more its shades of meaning pile up, the more applicable this term becomes to the medieval Jewish condition, but

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its AND definition speaks as well to the Christian captor’s penitent psychic condition:

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Chaitif: a. 1 captive 2 wretched, unfortunate; wretched, despicable; wretched, poor (quality) 3 feeble, weak; (of land) barren, infertile; s. 1 prisoner 2 wretch; scoundrel 3 sinner.

Wretched Jewish captives in our midst become a Jewish wretchedness trapped within us. Considering the Harley scribe’s clerkly mind-​set, it stands out that the vernacular idiom he selects to describe the state of contemporary Jewry connotes not inert presence, so much as a promise of belonging. ‘Entre nous’ suggests tête-​à-​tête commingling. Back in late antiquity’s originary Christian–​Hebrew contact zone, a once-​Jewish community leader, inviting citizens and clerks to his radically inclusive feast, has this to say on the subject of communal gathering: ‘For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’ [Matthew 18:20; emphasis added]. This same phrase describes the place of Jerusalem, set by God in the midst of nations [Ezekiel 5:5].143 Guyart Desmoulins renders Jerome’s Latin ‘in medio’ as ‘enmi’, in the Old French Bible historiale (1295) that was pre-​ eminent in Norman France and England (hundreds of copies; Vulgate translation plus commentary from Comestor).144 Jesus’ promise to fraternize follows hard upon his grant of apostolic dominion, which is to say, Matthew moves into the language of community from the language of captivity: ‘Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven’ [amen dico vobis quaecumque alligaveritis super terram erunt ligata et in caelo et quaecumque solveritis super terram erunt soluta et in caelo, 18:18].145 Bind and loose, amen. Jesus’ words (in Matthew’s reportage) have obvious soteriological implications. They pertain directly to salvation. But then, so does crusade; so does blood libel; so does expulsion. When Matthew’s Dominus [Lord, 18:21; Sire in Desmoulins (II.57)] speaks of community and feasting, he also speaks of dominion, thus establishing ecclesiastical authority. By doing so—​in a manner as top-​down as may be—​Christ sanctions the violence of captivity and exile:  the binding and loosing, as per Seigneur Phinehas, of the recalcitrant and the Other. We cannot know whether Anglo-​ Norman analogues to ligare and solver (Desmoulins chooses lier and deslier)146 were deployed as exegetical flourishes in Dominus Edward’s 1290 expulsion edict. That text doesn’t survive, and the

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writs to sheriffs that bear witness to it are more executive (‘short, snappy royal orders’) than rhetorical.147 Ironically, this species of temporal authority had its ultimate basis, as so often with matters ecclesiastical, in Hebrew legal-​theological practice.148 Our Harley copyist isn’t a religious pluralist or interfaith champion, any more than the Hereford burghers, who were, like as not, advancing their own position in a town–​mitre feud.149 If for some commentators these are progressives—​medieval Christians ‘accepting’ of Jews—​ neither they nor the Harley scribe tend towards the ‘philosemitic’ end of that spectrum.150 The point is not whether they are Judaizers in the learned mould of Andrew of Saint-​Victor, who despite cosmopolitan training spent much of his career at Wigmore Abbey (north-​west Herefordshire; MSS of his work survive at Hereford Cathedral).151 Instead it is that between them, these inhabitants of early fourteenth-​ century Herefordshire provide insight into how next-​generation Christians remembered the local Jews who had been expelled in what was, for some, living memory. With its impossible chronology but plural conception of religious community, the Harley scribe’s equivocal ‘among us’ has more to offer, both looking back and going forward, than does Vulgate-​Matthew’s stern, fractious apostolicism. Where the latter’s Dominus binds and looses, and late thirteenth-​ century authorities compel conversion and otherwise legislate a Doomsday endgame, Harley 2253’s biblical storyteller envisions Iudei who, though they are cheytyve [captive] and constrained, commit themselves to ongoing devotional and artistic practice. ‘All these dislocations’, remarks Einbinder, because they are ‘characterized by great upheaval’ for Norman Jewry, result in ‘a notable dearth of literary commemoration’, ‘rendering even more tenuous the anchors of communal memory’. In a spirit reminiscent of Estoyres’ captives, ‘Those of us who write attempt our small acts of salvage’.152 The Bible historiale of Victorine-​ associated canon Guyart Desmoulins circulated initially in a 1290s Paris of cross-​ pollinated, religious/​intellectual foment, where intercourse with Jews (including Anglo refugees) was regular.153 A  century earlier Peter Comestor, upon whose literal-​historical commentary vernacular paraphrasers like Desmoulins and the Harley scribe depend, added material to his Bible commentary ‘in consultation with’ Talmudic scholars, whose learning was ‘a profound influence’.154 Comestor, a canon from Troyes, likewise dwelt at the Abbey of Saint-​ Victor when producing his Historia scholastica (1173).

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Medieval Bible specialists agree that ‘the Old Testament and the streets of Troyes’, not to mention those of Paris, may be regarded as ‘a common meeting ground for Christians and Jews’.155 Andrew of Saint-​Victor will have ensured that some of this exegetical sensibility took root in Herefordshire, during his decades at Wigmore Abbey—​eight miles from the Harley scribe’s base at Ludlow.156 Given how thoroughly he digests the narratives, commentary, and Augustinian ethos of these clerkly predecessors, it does not seem overly fanciful to think that the man who produced Harley 2253’s Estoyres de la Bible will have adopted something of Comestor’s, Desmoulins’, and Andrew’s intercultural orientation: one wherein Jewish difference was a resource to incorporate, or alternative perspective upon eternity, not a malignance to expel. These may not be beacons of resistance or exemplars of tolerance, but our Ludlow copyist and his Hereford-​citizen forebears do depart, by perceptible degrees, from the positions taken by the likes of King Edward and Bishop Swinfield, authorities who were only too happy to abrogate unto themselves the temporal sanction Matthew wrested over from the Hebrew. One may wish English medieval Christians to have been more conscientious objectors to the expulsion when that proposed ‘solution’ arose to what needn’t have been formulated as a problem. There can, however, be no re-​binding of this awful historical loosing. It is not enough, but the process of picking at historical documentation, of ruminating upon literary-​geographical representation, may help us at least to recognize the kindred contingencies of all cheytyves entre nous, those multiplying others among us and within us, exiles and immigrants never not in our midst.

Notes 1 Capes, HRS, 120–​121; Dew, Extracts, 26–​27. Capes deplores Swinfield’s ‘religious narrowness’ (xix–​ xx); but cf. Webb, Household Expenses, II.xcix–​ci. 2 Hereford’s ranking among Anglo-​Jewries is difficult to establish, as its fortunes fluctuated. For a comparative context, see Mundill, Solution, 176–​ 184. Hillaby provides local perspectives:  ‘Magnate among the Marchers’; ‘Hereford Jewry’. The community flourished c.1218–​1241, struggled mid-​century, then rose again in prominence beginning c.1265. 3 DNB; Capes, HRS, iii, 234–​235; Webb, Household Expenses, II.xciv–​ xcv, cxxvii–​cxxix, I.39–​42. Webb (II.c) describes Swinfield’s ‘horror’ and ‘zealous’ ‘indignation’ towards Jews.

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4 Flint, ‘Hereford Map’; Terkla, ‘Original Placement’. Strickland’s recent ‘Edward I, Exodus, and England’ analyses the Hereford Map in the context of the 1290 expulsion. 5 Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 466. Overall see Jancey, Essays in his Honour. This 1982 volume hazards no mention of Jews, but in 1909 another Hereford canon could admit to Cantilupe being ‘unattractive to modern tastes’:  ‘We may note with regret that he denounced all intercourse with Jewish neighbours as the enemies of God and man, for whose expulsion from the kingdom he was urgent’; Capes, HRS, lx. The Acta Sanctorum (1765) cites Cantilupe’s antagonism towards Jews as proof of sanctity (49.507–​508), while Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1866) enthuses: ‘He procured the banishment of the obstinate Jews, [who] were a public nuisance to the state’ (4.19). 6 Tomasch, ‘Virtual Jew’, 73 (referencing Michael Camille). 7 Susser, Jews of SW England, 17. 8 Roth, Essays and Portraits,  52–​56. 9 Richmond, ‘Anglo-​Jewry’, 225. 10 The optimism inspired by 1286 informs many surveys. Capes’ belief that Hereford citizens ‘exhibited a wider sympathy’ than their bishop (HRS, xx) was disseminated by Roth (Essays and Portraits, 54), and is now a tenet of faith (Mundill, Solution, 262). For interfaith neighbourliness in medieval Troyes, with implications for biblical commentary and translation, see Smalley, Study of the Bible, 149–​150. 11 Tomasch, ‘Virtual Jew’, 70; cf. Delany, Chaucer and the Jews, ix. Krummel, Crafting Jewishness, and Lampert-​ Weissig, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner’, provide updates. 12 Despres, ‘Protean Jew’, 146; cf. Krummel, Crafting Jewishness, 7–​8,  17. 13 Van Court, ‘Siege of Jerusalem’, 166. 14 Tomasch, ‘Virtual Jew’, 69–​70, 75; cf. Richmond, ‘Anglo-​Jewry’, 216. 15 Johnson and Blurton, ‘Figural Criticism’; cf. Lampert-​ Weissig, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner’, 337–​338. 16 Bale, Medieval Book, 16. 17 Van Liere, ‘Andrew of St Victor’; Nirenberg, ‘Discourses of Judaizing’, traces Christian Judaizing practices to late antiquity. 18 HRS does not record payments, and Swinfield’s Household Roll is post-​expulsion, but see Hillaby (‘Hereford Jewry’) for clerks as debtors. 19 Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 468–​ 475. English Jews did not live in enclosed ‘ghettoes’, but in street-​focused open Jewries. This made interaction and interdependence hallmarks of medieval Jewish urban experience (Roth, qtd. in Bale, Medieval Book, 14). 20 Bale, Medieval Book,  18–​19. 21 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 173–​188. 22 King Horn (#70) also deploys ‘by weste’ repeatedly [5, 775, 1135]. 23 Chazan, Jews of Medieval Christendom, 157.

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24 Hanna, ‘Contextualizing The Siege’, 114. Bale treats Benedictine towns (Medieval Book, 17) and anti-​Judaism as ‘part of a devotional culture specific to Bury’ (‘House Devil’, 201). Much work examines Norwich, Lincoln, and York; start with Lavezzo, ‘Shifting Geographies’. 25 Mundill, ‘Final Phase’, 57; Hillaby, ‘Worcester Jewry’, 122. For Simon de Montfort, whose followers massacred Jews in London, see Richmond, ‘Anglo-​Jewry’, 217–​218 (‘[he] hated Jews’), and Stacey, ‘Henry III’, 52–​53. 26 Hillaby, ‘Colonisation’, 39; Mundill, Solution, 184. 27 Kadish, Jewish Heritage, 104–​106; Roth, Essays and Portraits, 52–​61; Shoesmith, Castle Green, 19. 28 Hillaby, ‘Colonisation’, 39. 29 Mundill, ‘Final Phase’, 61. 30 Birkholz, ‘Hereford Lives’, 230–​231; Hillaby, ‘Colonisation’, 38–​39; Stephenson, ‘Colchester’, 49. 31 Hillaby, ‘Colonisation’, 38; Stacey, ‘Henry III’, 45–​47. 32 Ker, Facsimile, xxii–​xxiii; Revard, ‘Scribe’, passim; Hathaway et  al., Fouke, xxxv, xli. 33 Stacey, ‘Henry III’, 44–​46. 34 Mundill, Solution, 227–​229, 238–​241; Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’. 35 Statutes of the Realm, I.221; Mundill, Solution,  13–​14. 36 Hereford absorbed Worcester’s archa—​and refugees—​ when Jews were expelled in 1275; Hillaby, ‘Worcester Jewry’. Hereford lenders’ normal catchment area extended about 19 miles in radius (Mundill, Solution, 238), but see Hillaby (99–​100) for extension into Shropshire. Mundill includes Ludlow and Shrewsbury as places where ‘Jews lived or conducted business in the mid-​west’ (Solution, 19), but evidence is slender. 37 Stacey, ‘Parliamentary Negotiation’, 97; Mundill, Solution, 111–​116. 38 Swinfield’s threat comes on 6 September (Capes, HRS, 121), after his 26 August prohibition had been disregarded; no follow-​up evidence survives. 39 Mundill, Solution, 15, 265, 247–​248. 40 Abrahams, ‘Debts’. 41 Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 10, 3, 11. 42 Ibid., 4. 43 For example, Quire 8’s The Death of Edward I (#47), Quire 7’s Song of the Husbandman (#31), and Quire 15’s Against the King’s Taxes (#114). 44 Quire 6’s #23 (A Song of Lewes), about Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and #24 (Lament for Simon de Montfort) offer good examples, given Henry III’s detested brother’s ‘close economic links’ and ‘manifold relations with’ English Jewry (Bale, ‘Fictions of Judaism’, 136; Denholm-​ Young, Richard of Cornwall, 68–​69) and the pogroms perpetrated by Simon’s followers. Harley’s hagiographic Lament locates an authorizing sense of Englishness in De Montfort, who was both ‘an English

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popular hero’ (Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance’, 167, 181) and the era’s most fanatical enemy of  Jews. 45 For Harley manuscript saints’ lives, see Epilogue. 46 It begins with a plea (‘Jesu Crist al folkes red’ [may Jesus Christ counsel all people, 7]) and culminates in prayer (‘Jesu Crist, hevene kyng, /​Us to blisse brynge’ [bring us to bliss, 343–​344]). 47 Fein, CH, III.333–​334. 48 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’. 49 Fein, CH, III.329. 50 Phillips, ‘Dream-​Lore’, 245. 51 Ibid. 52 Grady, Righteous Heathens, 123–​132. 53 The term bonde [bound, in bonds] connotes finance, as do yboht [bought, paid, redeemed, 59, 97, 110, 160, 174, 182] and reven [despoil, ruin, rob, 119, 120, 122, 126, 132]. 54 Fein, CH, II.437. Petite Parole is Quire 9’s only non-​ME text and only ‘practical’ item. 55 See the papal bull Contra Judeos, copied into Swinfield’s register in May 1287; Capes, HRS, 139–​140, xix. According to Webb (Household Expenses, II.c–​ci), Honorius IV’s denunciation of Christian–​Jewish familiarity (‘which has encouraged the perverse infidelity of the latter and occasioned grave scandals for the faithful’) ‘seems to have been occasioned by what had occurred at Hereford’. That Roth and others attribute the ensuing expulsion to pressure from Honorius’ bull completes a dizzying historiographical circle. 56 Bennett, ‘Mediaeval Loveday’, 352, 358, notes the term’s ‘association with Christian charity’. 57 For ‘Lyrics on the Passion’ (Jews are never mentioned), see Woolf, Religious Lyric, 19–​66; 57–​58, 63–​66 treat Harley. So too are Jews absent in Whitehead (‘ME Religious Lyrics’) and Kuczynski (‘Religious Contents’). 58 For Mary as a flashpoint, see Despres, ‘Immaculate Flesh’. 59 Jeffrey, Early Lyric; Cohen, Friars and Jews. 60 For the (gendered) role of the visual in Passion meditation, see Stanbury, ‘Virgin’s Gaze’. 61 Critics often treat this lyric (Fein, ‘Lyrics of Harley’, 4356), but seldom mention this half-​line. 62 For devotional lyric performativity, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 121–​166; Whitehead, ‘ME Religious Lyrics’, 113–​119. 63 Fein, CH, II.447. Mayden, moder [#69] is another of Harley’s better-​ known religious lyrics (Fein, ‘Lyrics of Harley’, 4355–​4356), though as with #73, its Jewish dimension is rarely noted. 64 Blurton, ‘Judas/​Quiriac’. 65 McCullough, ‘Wounds of Christ’. Another Harley text featuring this motif is #56, an AN Song on Jesus’ Precious Blood (fol. 76v), which,

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‘looking outward from within Jesus’s wound’, enjoins its reader to empathize with his ‘compassionate companions at the Passion’ (Fein, CH, II.435). This lyric begins a series [#56–​63] on Mary and the Passion, many exhibiting the ‘subtle influence of secular love poetry’ (II.439). 66 For reasons related to Longinus (below) and in light of ethnic-​ stereotyping tropes, I have kept ‘[h] ‌is wounde’ and ‘le gyw’ in the singular; but Fein renders both as plurals: ‘his wounds’ and ‘the Jews’. Both work grammatically, since ‘were’ agrees with either grammatical number and ‘wounde’ can denote one or several (MED). Collectively Jesus’ wounds ‘were often imagined as wells from which the faithful might be sustained or as places of shelter’, but the ‘idea of … refuge came to center around the wound in Christ’s side’ (Shuffleton, Codex Ashmole, 575–​576). 67 Per the AND, the noun doneur can mean lender, while the verb doner’s meanings often correlate with finance (sometimes violently or illegally). 68 Mittman, ‘Blank Space’; cf. Leshock, ‘Religious Geography’, 211–​212. 69 Lavezzo, Accommodated Jew,  11–​12. 70 Ibid. (emphasis original). 71 I derive this term from Lavezzo, Accommodated Jew, 21–22, 32, whose examination of medieval textual ‘mapping of Jew and Christian’ reveals a set of accommodations and entanglements that ‘challenges the opposition on which antisemitism depends’; see below. 72 Lawton, ‘Surveying Subject’. 73 Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 131. 74 Ibid., 132. 75 Fein, CH, III.341. 76 Edson, Mapping Time,  5–​6. 77 Bale, ‘Fictions of Judaism’, 141. Strickland (‘English Bestiaries’, 204) notes the ‘essentially anti-​Jewish character’ of medieval bestiaries. 78 Ker, Facsimile, xiii. 79 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 232, 238, 248. 80 Fein, CH, II.410. 81 Ibid. 82 Most Y ryden by Rybbesdale [The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale] (#34) alludes to this event when describing a beloved’s girdle that has the miraculous property of turning water ‘al to wyn’ [entirely to wine, 71]. 83 Jewish children seldom appear in Christian anti-​Judaic writings, perhaps because ‘Jews and Christians lived in close proximity and, as neighbors, maintained daily contact with each other’ (Baumgarten, Mothers, 1). 84 Fein, CH, II.182–​183. 85 Stacey, ‘Conversion’, 277–​278; Blurton, ‘Judas/​Quiriac’, 314. 86 For medieval acedia (‘a form of spiritual despair’, 24) see Cvetkovich, Depression, 85–​114. The full term wanhope (MED:  despair of salvation; the theological error or sin of insufficient faith in God’s mercy) does not occur in any Harley Lyric, though shorthand ‘wan’ recurs: #61.13 (‘Mi soule is won’), #29.26, #66.9, #46.112. Wanhope’s first extant usage, in the South English Legendary, occurs in Harley

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2253’s historical neighbourhood (Gloucestershire, c.1280–​1325) and with a Jewish referent:  ‘Allas, Iudas, whi noldestou bydde merci? … Goed ensaumple he vs ȝaf aȝen wanhope’ (MED, s.v.). 87 Fein, CH, II.341. 88 Ibid. 89 Fein, CH, II.343. 90 For reliquary materiality and literary form, including how reliquaries figure forth an absent presence, see Chaganti, Poetics of the Reliquary, 15, 17, 65–​66. 91 Fein, CH, III.342. 92 Kruger, Spectral Jew, 1–​22; Krummel, Crafting Jewishness,  1–​21. 93 Fein (following Ker) judges that the cross ‘appears to belong with this text and not the next’ (CH, II.343), but earlier scholars connect it to The Legend of St Etfrid (#98). 94 For anti-​Judaism (‘the definition of Christianity against notions about Jewish beliefs and practices’) as distinct from antisemitism (‘prejudice against Jewish peoples, involving … proto-​racial thought’), see Mittman, ‘Blank Space’, 2. 95 See Peebles, Longinus. In tracking the medieval legend, Evans notes how Hugh of Saint-​Victor’s ‘Augustinian interpretation of Christ’s wound’ developed concomitantly with vernacular literary treatments (‘Longinus’, 272, 282). 96 Like Evans, Doner traces the legend’s relation to chivalric identity, here ‘part Celtic, part Christian’ (‘Knight, Centurion’, 24–​26). 97 Reference to ‘the time this writing was made’ [733] introduces a chronological confusion that multiple critics attempt to resolve (Fein, CH, III.313); better, perhaps, to embrace such temporal ambiguity as indicative of the larger ontological crisis that Jewish devotions raise. 98 CH, III.309. 99 ‘Jacob e son lygnage en la terre de Egipte furent des Egipciens apelé Israel. E Israel est taunt a entendre come “cely qe vist Dieu”, quar is id est “vir”, ra id est “videns”, el id est “Deum” ’ [230–​232]. 100 Wilshere, ‘Bible Stories’, 81–​82; Fein, CH, III.312. 101 For his rubrication of OTS as indicative of the Harley scribe’s purpose in this ‘carefully pointed version of biblical history’, see Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 281–​287. Rubrication in fols. 49–​140 is minimal. 102 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 285. 103 Wilshere, ‘Bible Stories’, 80. 104 ‘En la Byble troverez vous ore en cet pas grant escripture de sacrifices que payens, judeux, e lur parenté soleyent fere de vels, aignels, e autre bestes. E ore le ount tot lessé pur ce qu’il sunt cheytyves entre nous’ [727–​729]. 105 ‘E en remenbraunce de lur Creatour, a ce qu’il dient, fount sculptures en pieres e peyntures chescun jour pur ce que il ne ly vueillent oblier, quar peynture c’est lyvre a ceux qe ne ount conoissaunce de lettre’ [729–​732].

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106 ‘Mes ore de synagoge, que fust temple as gyus, ore est ordyné eglise a chretienz pur fere sacrifice chretiene’ [732–​733]. 107 Rowe, Synagoga and Ecclesia. 108 Westrem, ‘Against Gog’, 55. 109 As Despres writes: ‘The Jewish protagonist in disputation literature, in sermon exempla, and in Marian miracles is always male’ (‘Protean Jew’, 161). 110 Or at least its attempt; see Kruger, Spectral Jew, xvi–​xvii. 111 Stacey, ‘Conversion’, 278. 112 Peebles, Longinus,  5–​43. 113 As Lampert-​Weissig notes, the Wandering Jew ‘clearly signifies the Jewish people, seen by medieval Christians as doomed to wander because of their rejection of Christ’ (‘Chaucer’s Pardoner’, 340–​343). 114 Lavezzo, Accommodated Jew, 21. 115 AND references Edward III’s Order of the Garter (‘noz compaigniouns de la garder’), while another Harley usage occurs in Trailbaston [#80], whose speaker proposes joining a Greenwood outlaw band [‘Si je sei compagnoun e sache de archerye’,  85]. Aspin suggests ‘a special sense [of] one who is a member of a sworn band’ (AN Political Songs, 72). 116 Turville-​Petre, England the Nation. 117 For a medievalist perspective, sensitive to multiple territorial conflicts, see Heng, Empire of Magic, 5–​6, 98–​100, 113. 118 These lyrics (unique in having Jewish content) bookend Harley’s long central narratives (King Horn #70/​ OTS #71). Thematically and stylistically, King Horn’s ‘tale of enforced exile, daring return, and restored inheritance’ has analogues with both OTS (Joseph and Moses are ‘rather like the romance hero Horn’) and Fouke le Fitz-​ Waryn in Royal 12.c.xii (Fein, CH, III.309, 448–​449; Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 280, 286). 119 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 284; Wilshere, ‘Bible Stories’, 80. 120 For parenté’s primary meaning of ‘parentage, family’, AND cites the Romance of Horn (‘quels est sis parenté?’ [2333]). Harley’s ME redaction (adjacent to OTS) renders this term as ‘kenne’ [family, kin: #70.995]. 121 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 284. 122 Wilshere, ‘Bible Stories’, 88; Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 280. 123 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 280. 124 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 285; Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 131–​132. 125 Mittman, ‘Blank Space’, 8; cf. Strickland, ‘Edward I, Exodus, and England’. 126 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 285; Wilshere, ‘Bible Stories’, 80. 127 Fein, CH, III.310; Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 283–​284. 128 Prominent in the AND’s entry for ‘entre’ [amongst] is AN Horn’s friendly ‘entre nus amistez’ [606]; also suggestive is the verb entrenuncier (s.v.): ‘to intimate to each other’.

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129 For lingering Jewish presence at London’s Domus Conversorum [House of Converts], see Mundill, Solution, 100–​101. Such possibilities do not intersect with Harley 2253’s Ludlow-​based scribe directly, but Jewish encounters (at Paris, Avignon, and perhaps London/​ Westminster) are likely for the mobile Hereford clerics of Chapter 1. 130 Ker, Facsimile, xxiii; Hathaway et al., Fouke, xxxviii–​xliii. 131 Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 463; Capes, HRS, 139–​140. 132 Capes, HRS, 121. 133 For a sampling, see Roth, Essays and Portraits, 55; Roth, Jews in England, 77; Bartlett, ‘Women’, 120; Mundill, Solution, 262. 134 Richmond, ‘Anglo-​Jewry’, 215–​218; similarly Bale, Medieval Book, 167; Mundill, Solution, 253, 268. 135 Stacey, ‘Henry III’, 41; also Chazan, Jews of Medieval Christendom, 20. 136 Thompson, ‘Frankis Rimes’, 287. 137 Chazan, Jews of Medieval Christendom, xiv. 138 See www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/​jsource/​judaica/​ejud_​0002_​0009_​0_​ 08785.html; www.herefordshirejc.org/​; both accessed 14 January 2020. 139 Shoesmith, Excavations, 24, 67; Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 468–​470. 140 Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 474–​475. At Widemarsh Street’s Medieval Museum (formerly Blackfriars Monastery, home to crusaders of the Order of St John), pamphlets and signage make no mention of the site’s pre-​expulsion Jewish use. 141 Hillaby, ‘Hereford Jewry’, 473–​474. 142 Ibid., 470–​472. 143 ‘… ubi enim sunt duo vel tres congregati in nomine meo ibi sum in medio eorum’. 144 ‘La ou ii. ou trois sont assemblé en mon non, ge sui iluec enmi els’ [Sneddon, ‘Critical Edition’, II.57]. The transmission of this composite work is breathtakingly complex; Sneddon, ‘OF Bible’, 297–​301. 145 ‘Ge vos di veraiement, que tout ce que vos lieroiz sor terre sera lié el ciel, [et ce que vos deslieroiz sor terre sera deslié el ciel]’ [Sneddon, ‘Critical Edition’, II.57]. 146 Cf. Matthew 16:19: ‘et tout ce que tu lieras sor terre sera lié es ciels, et ce que tu deslieras en terre sera deslié es ciels’ [Sneddon, ‘Critical Edition’, II.52]. 147 Stacey, on H-​Net (networks.h-​net.org/​node/​28655/​discussions/​74283/​ query-​edict-​expulsion-​jews-​england#reply-​74750, accessed 21 January 2020); cf. Mundill, Solution, 254. 148 Kohler, ‘Binding and Loosing’. 149 Webb, Household Expenses, II.ci. 150 Chazan, Jews of Medieval Christendom, xiv; Chazan, ‘Philosemitic Tendencies’. 151 Van Liere, ‘Andrew of St Victor’; McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists,  42–​75. 152 Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 16, 3, 13.

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153 For Paris as host to early copies, see McGerr, ‘Guyart Desmoulins’, 219, 223. See Hillaby (‘Hereford Jewry’, 467)  for Hereford Jews’ post-​1290 relocation to Paris. 154 Morey, ‘Comestor’, 12–​14. 155 Ibid., 13. McGerr regards Desmoulins’ Bible historiale as, similarly, a ‘meeting place for different languages … groups of people, and modes of thinking’ (‘Guyart Desmoulins’, 228), while Edwards notes that in their bureaucratic skillsets, Christendom’s ‘new literary elite’ were ‘very similar to their Jewish counterparts’ (‘Church and Jews’, 89). 156 Wigmore is 19 miles from Hereford Cathedral, whose world map shares a common source with the textual Descriptio mappe mundi [Description of the mappamundi] by Andrew’s mentor, Hugh of Saint-​Victor (Westrem, Hereford Map, xxxiv).

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3 Histoire imparfaite: the counterfactual lessons of Gilote et Johane

In our charting of Harley manuscript geographies, we have examined several kinds of absence: the lamented absence of a beloved western home and/​or lady (Chapter  1); the decreed absence of a once-​captive, now-​exiled population (Chapter 2); and the revelatory absence of academic attention, to certain genres, languages, subperiods, and book types (Introduction). But whether textual in nature or critical—​a medieval phenomenon, or a medievalist one—​ the absence treated has been in each case literary-​historical. What is manifestly present in the Harley miscellany, and what scholars deem worthy of investigation, is not always the same. In addition to registering absence and presence, preceding chapters have foregrounded questions of mobility—​human, artefactual, imaginative—​in seeking to ascertain the workings of literary geography within and with respect to Harley 2253. The professional itinerancy of Chapter 1’s Hereford clerics has sobering contrast in the legal restrictions placed upon the movements of Chapter 2’s Herefordshire Jews, even prior to their 1290 expulsion. Chapter  1’s Middle English love-​lyrics and Chapter  2’s Anglo-​ Norman devotions, meanwhile, demonstrate how metaphorical, toponymic, and narrative geographies play key roles in the articulation of cosmopolitan–​regional clerical identities, and in the system of Jewish denigration that undergirds both Christian piety and the social-​territorial concept of Englishness itself. Mobility in my Introduction figured chiefly in terms of travelling texts, which must themselves move—​as research in manuscript geography has begun to track—​across regional, national, and international communities, in order for miscellanies like Harley 2253 to come into existence. Chapter 3 builds upon these categories, but takes its treatment of absence and mobility in new directions—​inevitably so, because

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it focuses on another social subgroup, engages with another sort of literary text, and does so using an unusual (not to say outlandish) critical methodology. There are risks to the analogy, but the abject position assigned to Jews by Western Christendom has been described as similar, in certain structural respects, to that place which women occupy under medieval patriarchy.1 The terms ‘position’ and ‘place’ in this formulation are crucial. For anti-​feminism as encountered in Harley 2253 has systematic spatial underpinning, much as the codex and period’s anti-​ Judaic ideologies—​ which advocate exile, containment, and erasure, as we’ve seen—​are figured in geographical terms. Chapter  3 further aligns with Chapter  2 insofar as it continues the latter’s recovery of undervalued non-​English Harley manuscript materials. It moves away, however, from the accretive, survey-​style procedure that characterized our pursuits of Harley Lyrics and Hereford Jews. Instead, in pursuing the textualized experience of Harley women, Chapter 3 delves into a single extraordinary item: a unique wildcard of a poem that, in defiance of societal as well as generic protocol, explodes the expectations of medieval and post-​medieval readerships alike. Its argument finds impetus not in any documentary moment (as in Chapter 2 ’s Jewish wedding-​feast invitation) or literary-​formal convention (as in Chapter  1’s trope of the embowered beloved), but instead unfolds in response to a theoretical proposition—​one hailing from the disparaged historiographical discourse known as ‘counterfactualism’. By featuring an obscure poem, a suppressed population, and discredited method, our next Harley manuscript foray encourages contemporary audiences—​ especially credentialled specialists—​to reassess certain valorizing habits and canonical orientations that continue to constrain medieval English literary history, to its detriment. How it might turn out (or, Contingency and the cautionary tale) The common wisdom in literary study, as in many things, is to begin at the beginning, especially when in doubt; and if this chapter is about anything, it is about a methodology of doubt. Going further, one might say it is about the brute necessity of uncertainty in historical inquiry, as well as about the democratic interdisciplinarity of this particular scholarly commodity. A few years ago I attended a conference with a droll title: ‘The Future of the Past’.2 Inspired by the sense of temporal contingency that phrase provokes, but also by developments across literary studies, the

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pages to follow will court a species of ‘historical error’.3 My tack will be to embrace past ‘outcomes’ known to have been wrong—​ histories that did not come to pass, social developments that failed to develop—​rather than seeking to deny this kind of alternative history’s seductive claims and dark force.4 Another way to put it is that Chapter 3’s (extremist) literary-​historical undertaking proposes to begin where ‘responsible’ historical epistemology begs off:  that disorienting realm where overly ‘exuberant’ speculation about people in the past, and their mobility (real or potential), displaces the sense of sober knowability that can only come from reliably arranged constellations of fact.5 Harley manuscript articulations of geography are plural—​often at odds with one another. And of course not all literary spatializations are granted equal legitimacy by those who assess them. But this doesn’t mean medieval geographies that have been foreclosed upon by official history deserve permanent erasure. The better to disorient and destabilize, we begin at the end of the strange, slight, Anglo-​Norman pastourelle–​débat–​fabliau, jest–​ lesson–​prayer, interlude–​travelogue–​cautionary tale6 that shall serve as our textual focus. As literary-​historical artefacts go—​even those drawn from pre-​Chaucerian miscellanies—​Chapter 3’s focal poem is impressively obscure. Since achieving print in Achille Jubinal’s Nouveau recueil des contes, dits, fabliaux, et autres pièces inédites (1839–​1842),7 it has generated a handful of Anglophone mentions, along with three translations and one article treatment.8 Usually entitled Gilote et Johane (#37, fol. 67)  after the two women who star in it, the poem runs to 349 lines, in rhyming, mostly quatrain clusters. Like most (though not all) items treated in Chapters 1 and 2, it survives uniquely in Harley 2253. We will attend later to Gilote et Johane’s codex placement (late in Quire 7, devoted chiefly to sophisticated ME lyrics), to the Harley manuscript’s social-​historical context, and to this text as a literary specimen itself (one of highly singular bent). For all its brevity, the poem has extravagant ambitions. Formally it is a mélange, a heteroglossator’s tour de force. But despite being assembled from the conventional spare parts of half a dozen genres, it is cogent in argument, and more original than any calling of literary banns could suggest. Taxonomic classification and other such matters can wait, however: let’s get to the end already! Lines 1–​341 of the poem have narrated a sequence of events gone increasingly outlandish, after beginning with a scenario (springtime, knight, forest) that is anything but uncommon. Generic in

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multiple senses, Gilote et Johane’s ‘l’autrier’ [the other day] opening features elements that are standard fare both in lyric-​heavy Harley 2253 and as medieval literary premises go generally. Details to follow on this trope, familiar from chivalric erotic adventuring. Suffice it here to say that our girls—​‘deus femmes’ [two women, #37.3] or ‘damoyseles’ [young ladies,  5]—​have by line 341 gone wild. They are, as one says to the other, ‘tot passé le pas’ [‘absolutely beyond the borderline’, 92]. Here is how Gilote et Johane’s worried narrator wraps up—​or rather, closes down—​his account of their adventures: C’est une bourde de reheyter la gent, 

 This is a tale for   entertaining people, A Wyncestre fet, verroiement,   made up at Winchester, in truth, Le mois de septembre le jour quinsyme,  in the month of September,   the fifteenth day, Le an roy Edward vyntenuefyme,  the twenty-​ninth year of   King Edward, Le fitz roy Henry qe ama seinte Eglise.  t he son of King Henry, who   loved holy church; E quant vous avez lu tote ceste aprise,  and when you have read all   this lesson, Priez a Dieu de ciel, roy glorious   pray to God, the glorious   King of Heaven, Qe il eit merci e pieté de nous.   that he may have mercy and   pity for us.           [342–​ 349]9

‘C’est une bourde’: this was only a joke, a diversion or fond deceit, made for entertaining. Its goal was to ‘reheyter’ [gladden, strengthen, refresh] ‘la gent’—​one might say, to get a rise out of people, a double entendre whose lewd propriety will emerge in due course. Our narrator invites us not to inquire too closely into the sexual outrages and ‘women’s “pryvetees” ’10 that he has, with a breezy leer, just now sketched—​so let us take him up on his twinkle, and lavish meaning on a casual term or two. We could do worse in characterizing his implied audience than to combine the passage’s first and final rhymes: ‘la gent’ [342] and ‘nous’ [349], ‘people like us’, or at least, some of us. Establishment men—​married, clerical, and (as we’ll find) literary-​historical—​are this narrator’s preferred auditors. Line 343 is brilliantly throwaway, not quite self-​cancelling: this ‘bourde’ [jest] has been ‘made up at Winchester, in truth’. Functioning as a syntactic hinge in Thomas Kennedy’s 1973

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translation, the prepositional phrase ‘A Wyncestre’ balances a verbal-​adverbial paradox that proves constitutive:  what precedes has, ‘in truth’, been ‘made up’: ‘fet, verroiement’. To help ground the truth value of this late-​breaking narratorial claim (is it an admission or a boast?), we are provided with a clue—​the proverbial smoking gun for historicists among and within us—​whose rhetorical use-​value lies precisely in its supplementarity, its irrelevance to the fabulous ride that has come before. The extended joke we know as Gilote et Johane has been fashioned at Winchester, truth be told, ‘Le mois de septembre le jour quinsyme, /​Le an roy Edward vyntenuefyme’. We seem very near to getting an authorial signature here, a name to conjure with in the vernacular literary marketplace. But in the counter-​conventional performance that is Gilote et Johane, textual authority inheres not in the proprietary identity or exemplary positioning of our Anglo-​Norman author. Nor do we see this text placed in any institutional, patronal, or commercial production context. Instead our narrator grounds, locates, and verifies his bourde—​however ‘made up’ it may be, ‘truth be told’—​by referencing his coordinates in political space and time, in English geography and history, ‘A Wyncestre’ and in King Edward’s twenty-​ninth year. These locations are realm-​oriented and historicized, Winchester having been de facto capital until Westminster’s thirteenth-​century advent, and the documentary convention of regnal-​year dating being, despite its eventual ubiquity, not yet a fully dead metaphor.11 From both compositional and setting standpoints, specificity of this order is unusual in Harley 2253—​wholly unlike the gestural practice of Chapter 1’s lyric collocations (‘From Weye [s]he is wisist into Wyrhale’ [#28.27]), or the vagabonding of Chapter 2’s pilgrim-​travelogues. For some reason, we need to be persuaded of the real-​world basis of this ‘deceit’ made ‘for entertaining people’, admittedly concocted (‘fet, verroiement’), but perhaps not so throwaway after all. The good faith gesture of promulgating precise production coordinates offers surety for—​what, exactly? What argument about geographical placement? What manner of literary-​ ontological framing? To appreciate its utility, we need to know how to read (or hear), how rightly to interpret (and weigh the implications of) that which—​just a bourde, remember—​has come before. A more expansive way of putting this question is to ask: what stands between due respect for the future’s multifold potentiality and overindulgence in speculation, that corrosive (and, as we shall find, literary) threat to responsible historiographical discourse? As it happens, Gilote et

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Johane comes to its own rescue, with instructions meant to control the dynamics of its reception, ‘quant vous avez lu tote ceste aprise’ [once you have read all this lesson]. Though formerly ‘une bourde’, intended merely ‘for entertaining people’, in its third-​to-​last line this text becomes pedagogical: suddenly, unambiguously a ‘lesson’. The narratorial façade slips—​or slips finally into place. In keeping with this new instructional mood (redolent of many another Harley item), ‘Priez a Dieu’ [pray to God] runs the imperative sign-​off—​ He being a regnal authority even more ‘glorious’ and puissant than Kings Edward and Henry—​‘Qe il eit merci e pieté de nous’ [that he may have mercy and pity for us, 349]. Or make that rather, ‘for us’, with emphasis added:  ‘de nous’. There we are again, the punctuating first-​person plural, in no less a position than the poem’s last word. One can’t help but pity the period listener (not to mention eavesdropping medievalist) who has to figure out just who this poem-​closing, prayer-​ending, debate-​ calling ‘nous’—​indirect object ‘us’—​is. And isn’t. To what ‘us’ is the ‘made up’ but desperately prescriptive, documentary-​historical joke-​lesson, bourde-​aprise finally directed? Is it just a then, past, historically expired medieval ‘us’—​applicable only to Winchester 1301, Ludlow 1340, and thereabouts? Or is it also a subsequent ‘us’, even a now ‘us’, an evolving, historically expansive ‘nous’—​ a community that embraces the specialist readerships of Jubinal (Paris 1839), Kennedy (New  York City 1973), and Revard (St Louis 2004), along with commentary as yet unconceived? Can one honestly propose to bridge epochs by means of a single, loose accusative plural? Who are ‘we’ anyway? Are we not, two decades into the twenty-​first century, Gilote et Johane’s addressed listeners, in necessary rhetorical subset if not presumptive social character? Surely every reader, however dimly imagined, must figure among an authority-​abrogating narrator’s licit audiences. Whoever ‘we’ may be, in line 349 and beyond, it is at least clear that many of us get dizzy when faced with the vortex of historiography and reception, genre and destiny—​when thinking about unrealized futures of the literary past. One might note again our narrator’s nervous consciousness of contingency. In closing piously (or was that a wink?), he opens up the possibility that God—​the one who decides how history goes—​‘may have’ mercy and pity on us (‘il eit’ = third-​person present subjunctive). What exact future is any given moment in the past—​an already-​completed plus-​que-​ parfait, like the ‘twenty-​ninth year of King Edward’—​going to have? The question may be less nonsensical than it sounds, even

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within a theological-​ epistemological system famously secure in its Creation-​to-​Doomsday moorings.12 To begin addressing such a question, let us place ourselves ‘A Wyncestre’, telling tales ‘for some kind of household or social evening’13 in ‘Le mois de septembre’, 1301. Or we might pick a June ‘[dinner]-​performance’ ‘about 1340’ (Carter Revard’s best palaeographical bet), with our hosts the Mortimer-​Talbots of Richard’s Castle near Ludlow, leading candidates to have sponsored production of the Harley manuscript, where on fols. 67v–​68v Gilote and Johane still reside.14 God may or he may not avert such a history of ‘daymoyseles’ in revolt as we—​‘nous’—​have just heard described in ‘ceste aprise’: this bracing lesson that one hopes ‘Dieu de ciel, roy glorious’ will avert. If it makes a difference, Harley 2253’s initial audiences were (see Introduction) highly mixed, as appropriate to the provincial pre-​ plague miscellany:  men and women; clerk and lay; lords, retainers, and servants; householders, neighbours, relatives, and guests; Anglophone, Francophone, and Latinophone, with a Hiberno-​ Marcher overlay; by turns regionalist, nationalist, and cosmopolitan in taste and temperament. Digest this lesson aright, learn from it to conduct ‘ta vie’ [‘your life’, 93] properly, and history goes as it should. Then—​and only then: with conditions met—​heaven’s king ‘may have pity on us’. Technically, this is speculation, the future subjunctive, a contingent outcome. Some would call it irresponsible, outright historiographical error. Meanwhile, medieval civilization and patriarchal mores hang in the balance. But so do narrative punchlines. Are those belly laughs? Contemptuous snorts? Or some unholy admixture of the two? The partiality of ‘this textual lesson’ [ceste aprise]—​its status as one possible future, among many—​is underscored in the poem’s innocent final ‘nous’. An indicator in its immediate habitat of a particular localized textual community, the term also operates as a subset of ‘you, them, all of us, people everywhere’ [vous; la gent]—​ that larger audience (from Winchester 1301 to Austin 2019) upon whom God, it is hoped, will have mercy. In line 340—​just prior to the conclusion we’ve been examining—​the term ‘aprise’ also figures. In this case, though, it is not the ‘lesson’ of the overall tale being referenced, but one expounded within the diegetic bounds (or dramatic four walls, or textual-​cartographic expanse) of the bourde. The last we hear of our arch-​damoyseles Gilote and Johane is that ‘a lur aprise plusours tornerent’ [they converted many with their lesson, 341]. ‘Lur aprise’: their lesson (aprise appears several times in this sense [320, 332, 341]), as opposed to ‘ceste aprise’: the

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lesson of this cautionary tale. Different lessons, different futures—​ but diverging from the same ‘past’ (albeit literary) moment. History’s course, from 1301 onward and Winchester outward, is thus posed—​however arched the masculine narratorial eyebrow—​ as an open question. Who knows how it might turn out? Not Gilote and Johane. Not Gilote et Johane. Not even the learned likes of Jubinal, Kennedy, and Revard, with their editorial, philological, and documentary wisdoms. Do we? What are the historiographical, not to mention ontological, implications of fictional provocation? How do literary geography and political territoriality play a part? After prurient outrage, genre-​bending hilarity, and worried closure, what then? ‘History’s course’ towards plural past futures, we agreed, remains open. But what if that course were literary history’s? Where then might it lead? How it shouldn’t be done (or, Counterfactual literary medievalism) The past few decades have seen ‘a minor boom in “counterfactual history” ’, along with increased recourse to counterfactual plots in narrative fiction.15 Epitomizing the academic side of the phenomenon is Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History (1997), the book jacket of which asks: ‘What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if the Russians had won the Cold War?’ and so on. Citing as its legitimating basis ‘our predisposition to think counterfactually’, Ferguson’s collection looks to ‘compare … actual outcomes’ with ‘conceivable outcomes’.16 Yet counterfactual history ‘[tends] to discredit itself’, Ferguson laments, via ‘implausible’ questions or ‘whimsical’ answers, based in ‘frivolous’ scenarios—​thus descending into ‘spoof’ lacking ‘any historical value’.17 As inoculation against this, Ferguson’s brand of muscular counterfactualism requires ‘possibilities which seemed probable in the past’ as opposed to ‘facetious’ or ‘mischievous’ ‘after-​dinner history’. Specifically, ‘we should consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered’.18 Ferguson makes his introductory pitch maximalist—​establishing over ninety pages that his disparaged method is not facetious, specious, or silly, but has sober intellectual credentials—​because historical counterfactuals, however much he promotes their capacity for academic payoff, do not enjoy much intramural validity. (The genre’s popular success counts against it.) Counterfactual history’s

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problems derive from its inhabitation of a disciplinary limbo position, midway between social-​scientific/​philosophical certainty and literary/​humanistic provocation. Ferguson complains that counterfactualism has been the province not of ‘serious historians’ but rather of ‘a motley crew … of novelists and journalists’, whose abiding shortcoming—​a self-​evident ‘defect’—​has been the ‘irredeemably fictional’ nature of their endeavours. The ‘hostile views’ of mainstream academics help explain why counterfactual scenarios ‘have more often been provided by writers of fiction than by historians’. But rather than sift within literary studies for fellow travellers bearing adaptable methodological wisdoms, Ferguson locates his subgenre’s legitimation difficulties squarely within the discipline across the aisle. The loose practices of literary types, especially their penchant for ‘applying literary forms to history’, make them scapegoats in counterfactual history’s decades of disciplinary travail.19 Traditional historians and philosophers of history responded with scepticism.20 Allan Megill concedes that ‘in order to produce any worthy history at all, historians need to speculate’, but charges that Virtual History ‘diverges radically from normal historical research and writing’.21 Such ‘exuberant’ counterfactual history errs because it ‘deals in past historical outcomes that never in fact came to be’ instead of working from uncertainty towards reality: ‘Whereas the virtual historian is forced to move ever further into the imaginary, the speculations of the restrained counterfactualist are pinned down by what actually did happen in the end.’22 By jettisoning actual outcomes in favour of imaginary futures of the past, Fergusonian counterfactualism ‘evokes the world of historically based game-​playing’—​nothing ‘a grown-​up could take seriously’. Such positivist confidence in the stable knowability of the past (‘what actually did happen’) has a certain crusty charm, but less so Megill’s paternalist dismissal of ludic culture: ‘When professional historians write virtual history, we ought to treat their claims concerning “what might have been” with about the same distanced skepticism with which we would treat the playing out of World War II by a group of fifteen-​year-​olds.’23 Exactly what ‘we’ is this? Given the anxious, masculine-​ establishment narrator with which this chapter began, it is difficult not to be sceptical about rhetorical pronouns. Megill’s first-​person plural is not Gilote et Johane’s (or for that matter Ferguson’s), but his breathtakingly prescriptive Historical Knowledge, Historical Error provides a label: ‘True historians have adhered to my view for

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a long time.’ As for exuberant counterfactualism, Megill’s judgement is summary: ‘Although the virtual historian may well try to get away with claiming a normal historian’s authority … he [sic] is better thought of as a writer of imaginative literature. This is not necessarily bad, but it is not history.’24 If Virtual History receives censure for sins of commission—​ what it does and how it does it—​it is worth asking what counterfactual history considers not worth doing. Ferguson’s battery of ‘What ifs’ demonstrates how practitioners focus their attention on recent centuries. Equally striking are the genre’s Euro-​American predilections: ‘What if Germany had won World War II?’ ranks as the ‘most prominent [introductory] illustration’.25 Counterfactual history’s programmatic focus on such settings begs the question of why the Middle Ages, so often cited as the basis for modern Western institutions and ideologies, should have found virtually no foothold in the discourse. But a larger ‘What if?’ might ask, in all innocence:  What if there were women in counterfactual history? Less caustically, what would it mean to consider the distinctive lessons of women’s history and gender studies as, after all, historiographical subfields of no small empirical, intellectual, and institutional standing? All told, counterfactual historians display rigorous indifference to the banalities of social history, artistic expression, and the like. If the scenarios least suited to counterfactual-​historical intentions are those of a cultural bent, worst of all are those of a literary nature, with their arch, satirical proclivities. Ferguson regards their very essence as corrosive. Exacerbating matters is the ‘problem’ of humour: ‘the funnier they are, the less plausible they are’.26 But the supposed fault line between literary counterfactualism and ‘serious’ inquiry into the past runs deeper. Since ‘we can … infer from its genre roughly how it will turn out’, Ferguson reasons, ‘to write history according to the conventions of a novel or play is therefore to impose a new kind of determinism on the past: the teleology of the traditional narrative form’.27 By way of grandstand flourish, he declares, ‘In short, history is not a story.’28 The notion that literary critical insights could have implications for rigorous thinking about the past—​either its manifest events (‘actual outcomes’) or its consideration of futures unrealized—​has routinely been dismissed. Richard Saint-​Gelais strikes a conciliatory tone when he acknowledges, of literary counterfactualism, that ‘whether all these things are done seriously or not, in the pragmatic sense of the word, is [not easy] to answer’.29 Saint-​Gelais

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admits that a ‘tongue-​in-​cheek tone makes it difficult to decide’ whether a given scenario ‘is to be read as an effort [at critique]’ and so ‘be taken seriously, or as a sophisticated literary joke. Maybe this uncertainty is precisely the point.’ The plausible historical ‘scenarios’ Ferguson desires are recast, in such a light, as so many literary ‘possible worlds’, which demand to be treated less as argumentative position statements than as ‘objects of ludic writing practices’.30 Saint-​Gelais invites disciplinary rebuke, as another wry satirist, another role-​playing teenager. But the marginalization of the literary and ludic in discussions of historical contingency has consequences that come into focus when considered alongside counterfactual historiography’s similar treatment of an adjacent critical terrain, namely, utopianism. Utopianism is left mostly unaddressed by those thinking through counterfactualism as a method for understanding the past. Virtual History’s objection is that the term implies pipe-​dream:  utopian as precisely that which is not plausible.31 Another problem is that utopianism has consorted too frequently with radical politics, anti-​ colonialist perspectives, and gender studies. Nevertheless, the two discourses share an ontological dynamic. As in counterfactual history, ‘the reader is struck both by the alterity of the utopian text, its deviation from historical reality, and by its indebtedness and referentiality to its real context’.32 Certain aspects of utopianism correlate with counterfactual history’s premises. But where the latter features diplomatic personalities, ‘the values of the utopian order are materialized through the bodies of its inhabitants’.33 Another divergence is that where historians remonstrate about the need to inoculate counterfactual inquiry against ‘imaginative literature’ and its (unserious) blandishments,34 theorists have proposed to ‘historicize utopian thinking’ in a manner precisely opposite.35 Caitríona Ní Dhúill proposes to relocate the phenomenon of utopian discourse—​a historical event in its own right—​explicitly ‘within [past] literary and imaginative practice’.36 Noting that ‘criticism has only just begun to explore’ literary counterfactualism, organizers of a 2009 conference at Freiburg set out ‘[to bridge] the gap between literary practice and scholarly analysis’: ‘Literature, it might be argued, always already constitutes a counterfactual discourse.’37 Much of Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe’s Counterfactual Thinking—​ Counterfactual Writing (Freiburg 2009’s ‘actual outcome’) performs the foundational labour of literary typology. Andreas Widmann distinguishes between counterfactual historical novels

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in which past events themselves change (Germany wins World War II) and those in which events retain their integrity, but routes leading to them undergo alteration.38 Birte Christ examines how counterfactualism enables social critique, as when feminist fictions project societies that revise traditional gender roles.39 Saint-​ Gelais tracks the interplay between literary counterfactuality, in which the past serves as narrative springboard, and counterfictionality, in which it is not historical sequences that are altered but the plots, characterizations, and events of canonical literature. Robyn Warhol considers the ontological status of fictional discourse—​its tendency, in the normal course of narrative elaboration, to raise for consideration multiple plot-​futures or contingent outcomes, all equally fictional but only one of which can (normally) come to pass.40 Efforts like these demonstrate literature’s unique impingement upon counterfactual discourse. Aggregated, they obliterate historians’ assertions regarding the epistemological unsuitability of literary discourse to study of the past’s unrealized outcomes. Virtual History depends upon an ‘essential difference between history proper and mere stories’.41 But what if, provoked by some demon of contrariness, Ferguson’s sentence ‘had turned out differently’?42 What if stories weren’t ‘mere’ and history were denied its dignity as ‘proper’ and singular, as self-​evidently the habitation of the true and the actual? What if ‘we’—​another loaded nominative plural—​ had spoken of ‘stories proper’ and ‘mere history’? William Galperin does. If Gilote et Johane unfurls a future of possibilities seized, Jane Austen’s novels tilt towards the past, especially its disappointments, to the extent that ‘the missed opportunity in Austen figures an alternative history’.43 Rather than dissect what ‘really happened’, Austen tends to seize on ‘what never happened’, making the past ‘more cherished as a site of possibility than the present’. Austen thus settles ‘[her] focus finally on history’, which Galperin characterizes ‘as a subset (for better or for worse) of the literary per se’.44 Andrew Miller’s discussion of counterfactualism in Dickens likewise emphasizes ‘situation[s]‌of retrospection and regret’ as opposed to forward-​oriented speculation.45 Miller explores a narrative mood he terms ‘the optative’, whose ‘discomfiting’ essence lies in recognizing ‘the immediacy of one’s experience and its thoroughgoing contingency’. ‘At the heart of optative self-​understanding’, he says, ‘is the experience of identity as doubled’—​insofar as internal to the lives we lead are those we do not. Although ‘the optative can be met in any number of genres’,

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Miller insists that such a mode bears ‘privileged’, ‘essential’ relations to realistic narrative, of which it is ‘an intrinsic feature’.46 Far from being ‘distant’ or somehow separable from history,47 it is axiomatic for medievalists that literary endeavours—​particularly those that blend event and invention, imagination and fact—​are as located in their historical moments as any other text, however aggressive one’s rhetoric of facticity.48 The very embodiment of ideas and scenarios ‘that contemporaries actually considered’, stories and poems are fully involved in representing, and fashioning responses to, the ‘empirical’ history that positivist voices would privilege.49 It would take an intrepid scholar of medieval historiography to suggest otherwise. Gabrielle Spiegel stresses that ‘the literary tradition of history in the Middle Ages was penetrated and modified by social change’.50 Hayden White goes further, viewing such forms ‘not as the “imperfect” histories they are conventionally conceived to be but rather as particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality, conceptions that are alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the fully realized historical discourse that the modern history form is supposed to embody’.51 By such lights, medieval historiography proves an ideal site from which to interrogate prevailing assumptions about the workings (not to mention the value) of literary counterfactuality. Our feature text’s displacement from the privileged bourn of realistic fiction does not unfit it for discussions of narrative and reality, contingency and history. Saint-​Gelais observes that recent counterfictional projects ‘show a playful attitude not only towards stories, i.e. characters and their fates … but also towards the world the original author had outlined around them’.52 So too Gilote et Johane. But consciousness of our poem’s ‘playful attitude’ doesn’t make what actually happens there any less legitimate as a species of historiographical intervention. The literary-​geographical world Gilote et Johane’s author ‘outline[s]‌around them’ actually exists in history, notwithstanding the efforts of both ‘true historians’ and Fergusonian counterfactualists to erase it. How it actually happened (or, Playing with the shield in front) ‘Since [medieval men] regarded women by their very nature as unruly’, Barbara Hanawalt has said, ‘[they] consciously strove through a variety of mechanisms to keep [them] within their space … The best way to control them was to enclose them.’53 One way to think about Gilote et Johane and the history that happens therein is

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to recognize this poem as simultaneously a means of and response to enclosure. Such an approach proves particularly apt for a study that foregrounds literary geography. In medieval literary discourse, dynamics of enclosure connect directly to demands made by genre. ‘The construction of gender is a crucial element in any ideology’, meaning ‘the distinct ideologies of medieval genres are predicated in part at least upon distinct constructions of gender’.54 Medieval lines of desire run, like literary-​historical ones, chiefly ‘between men’, who negotiate their relationships to one another by means of the women they enclose: institutionally, architecturally, and ideologically.55 As part of its forum on what women are like, one Harley manuscript diatribe, Quire 12’s Le blasme des femmes [The Blame of Women] (#77, fol. 111), rehearses the evils invited by he ‘who takes a woman for companion’ [quy femme prent a compagnie,  1].56 Responding to preceding items like Quire 5’s ABC a femmes [ABC of Women] (#8, fol. 49), which offers an alphabet for women, ‘should they wish to go to school’ and learn ‘how they are held in honour’ [15, 18], and Quire 12’s Le dit des femmes [The Song on Women] (#76, fol. 110v), which celebrates ‘God’s high regard for woman and woman’s innate courtliness’, Le blasme des femmes builds on the admonition ‘Do not trust your wife’.57 But the poem rises soon to crescendo:  ‘Whoever loves a woman … embraces his death’ [#77.5–​6]; ‘Woman is the root of all evils; woman engenders mortal sorrows. Woman deceives good friends, makes enemies of two brothers. Woman divides the son from the father’ [13–​17], ‘burns castles, captures cities’, and ‘engenders … that for which the whole country weeps’ [25, 35–​36]. Most insidiously, ‘Femme refuse fermetés’ [woman defies control, 26], or literally refuses enclosure. The takeaway is that such agitations are an inevitable function of female mobility. Few figures embody the two-​ pronged assumption Hanawalt describes—​that women are by nature ‘unruly’ and require geographical confinement—​ better than our damoyseles Gilote and Johane: ‘certainly it is true for that is the way I was born’ [#37.30]. From a parodic perspective, Gilote et Johane’s scenarios communicate confidence in the status quo.58 But consider the panic in those preceding lines on enclosure: Le blasme des femmes’s belief in the disastrous consequences to be visited on those who take lightly its maintenance. Whether or not Harley 2253’s copyist has compromised this text’s effect by pairing it with the saccharine Le dit des femmes, its narrator, less sanguine and smirking than Gilote et Johane’s, apparently really does see in female language, assembly,

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and mobility—​not to mention sexual agency—​a serious historical threat.59 Per counterfactual terminology, Le blasme des femmes postulates an all-​ too-​ credible possibility. That its alternative history sounds ridiculous to ‘us’, now, doesn’t change this fact. To apply Ferguson’s litmus test, these are scenarios which ‘contemporaries contemplated’—​patently so, and with orthodox fervour.60 Few Harley items are so ponderous. Yet this is not to say the book’s insouciant love-​lyrics (four of which [#33–​36] immediately precede Gilote et Johane [#37] in Quire 7) participate any less thoroughly in the project of female enclosure. Over and over, the lyric beloved is pinned in place via praise or lament, mapped into or emblazoned on to her landscape, and thereby primed for a poet-​ lover’s entry (real or imagined) into her verdant bower and fecund graces. Such an account, as charted by Chapter  1, implies that genre means destiny. But conventions cut both ways. Sometimes genre prescriptions fail to impose themselves—​a textual crisis situation that may signal (or help effect) a corresponding crisis in the system of gender containment, to which medieval systems of genre are linked. Put another way, historical possibilities open up when literary genre breaks down. So too do unforeseen geographical trajectories. Such is the case in Gilote et Johane—​spectacularly so. In this text and the counterfictional history it charts, we witness how two literary maidens reweave the constricting strands of their inherited lyric bowers into social and spatial, generic and temporal structures altogether less confining, never mind what we know (or think we know) about historical conditions ‘actually’ obtaining. What actually happens—​within this histoire, beyond it, and as a result of it—​becomes a matter of interpretation. Like all such assertions, it is no more and no less than an argument about the (shape of the) past, one perennially subject to contestation. How, then, do medieval historiographical dynamics play out in a literary-​imaginative context? Genre exceeds plot, in that any text has ‘implicit intertexts’, whose conventions may be activated but routed differently.61 So when, ‘En may par une matyné’ [one morning in May], a ‘jeuene chivaler’ [young knight] goes forth into ‘un vert bois ramé’ [a thick green wood] to ‘juer’ [have a good time] [#37.1–​3], Gilote et Johane activates the expectations of the lyric form known as pastourelle. We anticipate an encounter between this knight and some passing pastora [rustic maid]; there will be sexual banter (will she or won’t she?), though this tends to be by way of literary foreplay.

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However resourceful, any ‘burde’ [maiden] caught outside is available.62 The generic logic of pastourelle proves inexorable:  threat of rape is implicit, even when frontal assault is displaced via plot strategies in which the maid acquiesces against her better judgement, sets conditions of exchange, or comically thanks her partner for ravishment.63 That on this Harley morning we find ourselves in the dangerous woods of pastourelle is underlined by the appearance on the preceding folio (66v) of two other poems of sylvan bedding. The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale (#34) features a chanson d’aventure opening (a speaker riding out, to choose the ‘feyrest’ among the district’s ‘Wilde wymmen’ [4, 2]), while The Meeting in the Wood (#35) constitutes one of just three classic Middle English exemplars of the genre.64 Both prove paradigmatic for Harley Lyric poetics in downplaying the prospect of ravishment, modelling female pliancy instead.65 As G.L. Brook reports of Meeting in the Wood, ‘the girl first repels the man and then yields suddenly’,66 declaring ‘Ych am a maide—​that me ofthunche’ [‘I am a maid, a state I loathe’, 47].67 But so much for expectations: by its third line Gilote et Johane begins to defy the very conventions it has activated. Instead of finding in this ‘fryht’ [wood, #35.1], as had speakers in Meeting, ‘a wel feyr fenge to fere’ [a well-​made companion to take, 2]—​that is, a single unchaperoned ‘burde’ [6]‌with whom to struggle for rhetorical and physiological gratification—​our poem’s chevalier finds two ‘damoyseles’ [#37.5], in the throes of academic disputation no less: he ‘oyd deus femmes entremedler’ [heard two women argue, 3]. Gilote et Johane’s literally unconventional young knight has stumbled (out from the pastourelle we thought he was in) into the more starkly lit genre of débat. And as is the case when other birds match wits, there’s a patent silliness to the prospect.68 Adapting quickly to new formal circumstances, our knight hides himself ‘privément pur oyer’ [secretly to listen,  4]—​earpiece of a grinning audience. He hears the women discuss their personal histories:  ‘de lur vies entreparleyent’ [they talked to one another about their lives,  8]. From this point forward, we inhabit the realm Saint-​Gelais calls ‘counterfiction’.69 But Gilote et Johane’s is a counterfiction that also operates as counterfactual history. The dynamics of the new genre into which we have arrived make particular thematic claims upon proceedings. Certain features of debate as a form bear affinity with counterfactual historiography, especially the former’s tendency towards ‘indeterminacy and ambivalence’—​what Thomas Reed calls its ‘purposeful’ ‘aesthetics

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of irresolution’.70 Of essential structural importance is how medieval debate poetry ‘graft[s]‌formal irresolution onto a genre that seems purpose-​built to winnow good arguments from bad’.71 And so back to our text, whose women ‘called themselves’ Gilote and Johane [#37.7]. Johane, younger and a virgin, ‘considered faithful with regard to my body’ [15], urges her companion to ‘vous amendez’ [‘improve yourself’]: ‘get yourself married very quickly, /​for fear of sin [pecchié] and trouble’ [22–​24]. The term pecché defines their argument, variations coming fast and thick [20, 24, 29, 32, 36, 38] when virginal Johane attacks Gilote and ‘tote vostre vie’ [‘your whole way of life’, 18].72 Gilote admits, ‘Je estoie pucele, mes ore ne su mie’ [‘I was a virgin but now I am not’, 27], remarking that from the time she was first ‘engendré’ [‘engendered’] she has been ‘unable to keep myself from sin [garder de pecché]’: ‘Certes, c’est voirs, si su je nee’ [‘it’s certainly true, I was born that way’, 30–​ 32]. Therefore ‘Noun frai je, Johane. Ce serreit outrage   

‘I will not do it, Johane.   That would be an outrage De vivre en peyne e en damage.      to live in pain and  torment. Qe malement se marie ne fet pas qe sage.   Who marries badly does   not act wisely. Je serroi pris de su en ma mesoun,     I would be held close up   in my house, Desolé e batu pur poi d’enchesoun;     trampled and beaten for   little reason, E aver les enfauntz a trop de foysoun,    and having children in too   much abundance, E ja ne departyrai …’      and then I would never   get away …’ [54–​60]

Gilote’s take on Johane’s uprightness is that, too worried to avoid trouble, ‘Vous estes al hostiel tot demoraunt, /​Mesdit e repris cum un enfaunt’ [‘you always stay in the house, criticized and reprimanded like a child’, 45–​46]. As Gale Sigal observes, the lyric lady’s exaltation comes at double cost:  her mobility and her voice. Protected and praised, she is shut up in two senses.73 The poem’s voicing of competing generic perspectives—​and gender prescriptions—​intensifies with each exchange between the two women, who, per lyric bylaws, are not supposed to be speaking at all (apart from parley with eligible chevaliers), least of all to

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one another.74 ‘Sweet Virgin, grant us pardon’, implores Johane [#37.84]. Says Gilote:  ‘Your words require interpretation, /​and in many points [en moltz des pointz] I  wish to dispute you’ [95–​ 96]—​which she does in good wifely-​academic fashion. Like Dame Alison, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Gilote rehearses (using ‘ensamples … plusour’ [133]) what ‘Dieu dist meismes par comandement’ [‘God himself said by commandment’,  109] to justify her claims on ‘Dreite engendrure’ [‘lawful engendering’, 117]. She dares Johane to ‘Turnez le Byble desus e deius:     Vous ne troverez frere qe vous dirra plus. 

‘ Turn the Bible up and down,  ou will not find a friar who y   will tell you more. Afeytez vous, file! Afeitez vous, fole!  Instruct yourself, girl! Instruct   yourself, fool! Vous estes meynz sage. Venez a l’escole!  You are not very wise.   Come to school! Fetez come je face. Dieu vous avaunce!’  Act as I do. May God   advance you!’ [145–​149]75

Gilote’s confidence in divine support for her programme (‘Dieu vous avaunce!’) recalls—​or rather, prefigures—​our narrator’s envoi-​ appeal to God. In petitioning ‘the glorious King of Heaven’ [Dieu de ciel, roy glorious, 348] the latter appeals to an ethos of patriarchal lordship. Yet both speakers attest to that Great Determinist’s proclivity to ‘advance’ enterprises, or take mercy on those trapped in the flypaper of history, as he may—​if so inclined, per his inscrutable prerogative. In fact, God comes up a lot in the poem, no matter who is speaking.76 Similarly, just as our narrator concludes with a protestation of certainty, ‘verroiement’ [in truth,  343], so do the poem’s women launch their position statements: ‘“Veyre,” dit Johane, “ie su pucele”  ’ [‘In truth’, says Johane, ‘I am a virgin’, 13]; ‘“Veyre,” dit Gilote, “vouz estez desçue”  ’ [‘In truth’, says Gilote, ‘you are wrong’, 25]. This term also punctuates Johane’s concession—​‘You speak very well to me, truth be told [en veritez]’ [115]—​marking the virgin’s accession to her friend’s forward thinking as a new beginning. Gilote’s worldly ‘way of life’ reads as a simple function of historical necessity, the consequence of adverse theological and social conditions facing women. Johane’s position corresponds to the enclosed status of medieval women historically, as her valuation of ‘lele pucelage’ [‘faithful maidenhood’, #37.73] and inclination to

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remain ‘al hostiel’ [‘in the house’, 45] emphasize. Johane declares herself unreconciled (‘Ne su mie apayé’ [18]) to Gilote’s ‘male vie’ [‘bad life’, 22], but the state of the world, as fallen itself, provides a basis for the arguments that persuade her:

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‘Unqe ne fust femme, ne ja serra,   

‘Since at the beginning   God created Adam, never Pus qe Deus Adam primes crea,    has there been a woman   nor will there ever be Damoisele ne dame, de sa ne de la,    a girl or a lady from here or   from there, Qe a la foyz ne pecche, coment qe il va.’     who doesn’t sin sometimes.’   [33–​36]

Gilote’s trump card is recognition of contingency: ‘Vous estes terrene e si ne sauez /​Coment a drein vous meismes cheverez’ [‘you are of this world and so do not know how you yourself will finally end up’, 105–​106]. The necessary historical condition of being terrestrial—​‘terrene’ [of this world]—​produces nihilistic pushback in the (damned if they submit, damned if they resist) women of Gilote et Johane. To embrace fallenness (‘God loves a sinner /​who converts at the last minute’ [134–​135]) is to make a virtue of perversity. What remains to be seen is whether—​by invoking the tendency to compromise inherent to the debate form’s ‘aesthetics of irresolution’77—​such hyperbole ultimately produces a dampening effect. Gilote promotes a different kind of ‘girlness’, evacuating from Johane’s term ‘pucelage’ its basis in protected virginity. She practises and preaches, moreover, an ethic of female solidarity, in which ‘jeouene femmes’ [#37.268], far from competing for the attentions of ‘prodhome[s]’ [heroes, 16], counsel and support, and even procure partners for, one another. Going further, Gilote asserts her principles’ generalized application to all women ‘from here or from there’ [35], damoiseles and dames alike [36].78 Call it utopian—​no analogue to the overbearing mother of farce or the alienated old woman of fabliau appears79—​but Gilote’s programme reaches even across generations. Once converted, Johane is a quick study—​only, she wishes ‘to learn [aprendre] /​how I will be able to defend myself then [me … defendre] /​if I  am reproached by my parents’ [151–​ 153]. Gilote promises intergenerational advocacy: ‘the mother will plead for you before the father, /​for it is a natural thing [naturele chose] for the mother /​to help the daughter in every way’ [160–​163].

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More natural yet is that erotic hydraulics operate in another way than in lyric, proceeding from (and returning for validation to) a female collectivity. As for the father’s reproach: ‘Let it pass: it is nothing but wind’ [166]. As antidote to the violent misery of ‘mariage’ [#37.53] and enclosed infantilism of ‘pucelage’ [73], Gilote et Johane proposes the salve of female community—​the more interactive the better. Of greater interest to the poem than titillating scenes of bedding are the conversations between women that beget and evaluate erotic events.80 When the debate ends and Johane takes a lover, what the poem dramatizes is not their amatory negotiation or hardcore bower action,81 but the quondam virgin’s debriefing. Asked by her tutor, how goes ‘le gu d’amour’ [‘the game of love’, 186], Johane enthuses: ‘With my lover I have discovered so much [trové taunt]! … I was really crazy and poorly advised [mal avysee] /​to remain so long a maiden’ [190, 199–​200]. Johane’s gratefulness folds Gilote’s counselling role into a larger—​if not quite orthodox—​thematics of feminine intercession:  ‘May you have, as a good counsellor [bone counsilere], /​the blessing of God and his sweet mother’ [195–​196]. The poem’s next phase extends the topic of female advocacy, but in an increasingly formalized, later outright pedagogical mode. Here, the narration follows new recruit Johane and ‘Gilote her companion [sa compaigne], who was head teacher [chef mestre]’ [#37.203], as they travel around the town of Winchester, ‘telling [so much] about this event and preaching’ [De dire ceste aventure e de precher]—​so our narrator warns us—​‘that a man could hardly find [trover] a woman /​who would not concern herself [s’entremettra] with such duty [mestier]’ [205–​207].82 To illustrate this situation, ‘Si, com il alerent un matyn deduaunt’ [as they went out one morning having a good time, 210]—​note the reprise of our opening:  youth gone out, of a May morning, to seek pleasure—​ Gilote and Johane encounter a ‘jeuene espose’ [young wife] who asks for ‘counsail e aye’ [counsel and aid, 211–​213]. The distressed wife’s first function is to reinforce the poem’s generic transition into debate. Note her speech’s suffusion with the vocabulary of academic disputation: ‘a knight [chivaler] had told her /​that Gilote was a very eloquent woman [femme bien enloquyné] /​“and says that he had heard the debate [desputeysoun] /​that you won [vous venquistes] the other day with a great argument [a grant resoun]” ’ [214–​217]. One story of women talking begets another: ‘there is a lot to say, it’s true’ [‘Mout y ad a dyre c’est verité’, 224] and Gilote

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is a good listener, from whom ‘nothing should be hidden’ [‘ne serra rien cele’, 225]. ‘Uxor’ [Wife], as a Latin rubric at line 270 names her, is afflicted with a ‘baroun’ [husband] ‘trop … fieble en sa mesoun’ [‘too weak in his house’, 228–​229]: ‘This is the truth [Ce est la verité], he has a prick [vit] /​… too flexible [plyant] and too little’ [230–​231]. Faced with so traumatic a case, Gilote doubles down on empathy: ‘In truth [Veyre] … a woman who takes such a man /​is too wickedly deceived and overly betrayed. /​He can neither screw nor do his will [ne puet foutre ne fere talent]’ [238, 242–​244]. Given that we have been listening in Anglo-​ Norman, the poem’s next move may be its most transgressive. For—​‘Alas, alas, for Godes deth, such womon ys yshent!’ [#37.245]—​Gilote launches into a Middle English lament: ‘Alas, by God’s death, such a woman is ruined!’ ‘The comic effect of this lapse into English’, insists Kennedy, ‘depends on the association of each language with a distinct social class’,83 but this explanation ignores the cosmopolitan sophistication of neighbouring English lyrics. Still, as Rita Copeland notes, ‘[any] intervention of vernacularity in an official public sphere of learning is deemed subversive, just as a wife’s intervention would be’.84 Gilote’s English exclamation—​with its skewering of notions equating women’s sexual activity with ‘ruined’ life prospects—​is thus doubly subversive. Triply, if we imagine that (following the literal logic of her oath) she posits a world in which God is dead (‘alas, for Godes deth’) and human belief lies ‘yshent’. Compare our narrator’s dependence, in his envoi, on a more optimistic version of the future, in which a still-​living King of Heaven, in his infinite patriarchal wisdom, takes ‘our’ side. It is a natural thing for the Father to take the part of outwitted fathers and ineffectual barouns. Arrayed against this misogynist complex we have Gilote’s steady support for betrayed women: ‘Je mettroi consail; vous averez aye. /​ Vous averez medicine, si serrez garye’ [‘I will counsel you; you will have aid. You will have medicine; thus you will be cured’, #37.240–​ 241]. In a phrase replete with counterfactualist implications (what Miller terms ‘optative regret’85), Johane laments having ‘perdu mon temps en vidueté’ [‘lost my time in chastity’, 201].86 Gilote’s interventions emphasize the habitual failure of masculine discourse to impose its will successfully, to back up its claims to potency, leaving those privy to such failures nonplussed:  ‘N’est il pas baroun tenuz en terre /​Qe ne puet ov sa femme engendrure fere’ [‘he is not considered a husband anywhere on earth /​who cannot beget with his wife’, 260–​261].

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As a corrective to old husbands (with their non-​firing vits and claustrating hermeneutics), Gilote arranges to have a ‘jeouene clerjoun’ [‘young trumpet’] sent to the unfortunate wife, ‘Demayn quant vostre mary vet de mesoun’ [‘tomorrow, when your husband goes out of the house’, #37.246–​ 247]. By righteous aside, she adds: ‘You should not fear priests or friars, /​for their sermons for this reason: /​because the friar that reads by his learning [son art], /​preaches to the people and fucks on the side [e foute de sa part]. /​ We young women [Nous jeouene femmes] who never have seen writing nor learning [lettre ne art], /​will have no concern [n’averom regart] for what friars and priests say’ [264–​269].87 The young wife has other questions, chiefly technical, so Gilote teaches her domestic and legal pleading—​‘coyntise’ [‘tricks’, 292] by which she may manoeuvre around the ‘fortz estatus’ [‘strong statutes’,  272] the king has made to constrain wives’ adultery, for example by ‘Play de seinte Eglise’ [‘legal suit through holy church’, 289]. In other words, Gilote advocates pitting the competing masculine jurisdictions of church and crown, or canon and civil law, against one another. As had Johane, ‘this young wife did /​just what Gilote had told her to do’ [318–​319], remarking with similar optative poignancy (Miller; Galperin): ‘Thus had I done a long time ago [graunt temps passé], /​ but I was very afraid of sin’ [250–​251]. ‘Nous jeouene femmes’ [‘we young women’, #37.268]:  Gilote’s militant phrase, so easy in the saying, slips past virtually unnoticed. The knight of our opening ‘s’en ala juer’: went out to play, to amuse himself, to have a good time [1]‌. So likewise do Gilote and Johane, after their debate [210], and again after Uxor’s departure: ‘Cestes bones femmes s’en alerent juer, /​Gilote e Johane ensemble a moster’ [these good women went out to play, /​Gilote and Johane, together at church, 322–​323]. The diction and syntax are the same; differences lie in gender and number. But context is crucial. More discordant than finding doubled damsels debating in the woods is the prospect of crowds of unchaperoned women, in boisterous congress at church: ‘There they began to discuss this matter; /​they debated the text and the gloss. /​Openly they presented their argument; /​the women answered unanimously [comunement], /​“You have spoken well and like a scholar [clergialment]. /​Never have we heard such preaching [prechement]” ’ [324–​329]. The gender solidarity that bonded Gilote and Johane, post-​débat, had been extended, through Gilote’s conspiratorial ‘we young women’, to include the jeuene espose. Now the bones femmes Gilote and Johane reproduce themselves in multifold. After the seminar, ‘all the good

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women went home [totes bone femmes al hostel alerent], /​for urgent business [hastive bosoignes] called them; /​and they did everything according to this lesson’ [330–​332]. The ‘urgent business’ [hastive bosoignes, #37.331] calling Gilote’s audience home is unclear as to marital status, but clearly erotic in nature. Earlier, Winchester’s roiling women take confidence from the saying that ‘bosoigne fet la voie deforcer’ [‘necessity gets the way forced open’, 227], the joke (or grim irony) being that such methods are the conventional refuge of chivaler or baroun—​that is, recognized social entitlements. For a poem about sex, Gilote et Johane proves surprisingly unforthcoming as to erotic details, except at its climactic moment: ‘So far have these young ladies gone [Tant sunt celes damoiseles alé avant] /​that there is not a woman now living [il n’y a femme ore vivant], /​in whatever place that she may be residing, /​that doesn’t know how to juer a talevas devant’ [334–​337]. The (apparently raunchy) idiom means literally ‘play with the shield in front’. Kennedy translates the phrase tamely (‘make love’), yet in a forty-​three-​line gloss concerning the shapes of shields, ‘into which many an arrow was presumably “shot” [trere]’, he argues for talevas as ‘a slang term for the female pudendum’.88 Taking talevas as a ‘synecdoche’ for woman, Kennedy reasons that ‘ “devant” might then refer to the ordinary sexual position with the woman lying on her back’ (175).89 But this disposition of bodies seems contorted. Surely ‘shield in front’ must denote the theologically scandalous, famously emancipated position of ‘woman on top’ and not the arch-​traditional meme of femme pinned down, still and quiet, with the heavy authority of baroun or chivaler piled above.90 Why characterize such assertive women via ‘the ordinary sexual position’ and not a transgressive one? These are utopian futurists, not ‘women lying’ passively ‘on [their] back[s]‌’.91 Uxor’s complaints fail to clarify the movement’s position on best practices in carnal geometry—​‘Je su molt pres si me tienk clos, /​E son vit est touzjours derere mon dors’ [‘I am too near, so close he holds me, and his prick is always behind my back’, #37.232–​233]—​but they do dramatize the dissatisfaction of being held close and poked at by a fieble partner. Like her off-​colour allusions to impotence, Uxor’s tastes in coital positioning seem calculated to produce discomfort in certain subsections of the audience. ‘Playing with the shield in front’ communicates more about erotic agency—​the apportioning of desire between partners, and its relative privileging—​than it does about any specific arrangement of limbs, trunks, and torsos in space. The elastic details amount to footnotes

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from a lost chapter in the history of sexuality; what’s relevant is how the poem’s forward-​looking lovemaking has its basis (whatever the diagrams depict) in the frontal, leading position of the ‘shield’—​ that is to say, the woman. Crucially for the text’s erotipoetics, when women take the lead, sex retains its frolicsome nature (‘so much joy there is in making love’ [#37.176]), along with its essence as game. The verb juer, ‘to play’, recalls Gilote’s multiple references to ‘le jeu’ [44] or ‘le gu d’amour’ [‘the game of love’, 186]. Our damsels’ stocktaking duly emphasizes the physiological dividends that sexual blossoming brings: ‘when you have tried the game of love /​six or seven times at your pleasure’ [157–​158]. Gilote and Johane describe the ‘joie’ of sex [49, 68, 102, 176 197, 219; cf. 156] via metaphors featuring leisure pastimes, such as music (‘you will get a lot of playing, /​ in the middle, in the treble, and in the bass!’ [248–​249]) and chess (‘I have … played with him so much where we lie down, /​that by a simple “check!” [par un simple “escheke”] I also declare him checkmated’ [190–​192]).92 Gilote et Johane makes sex sound fun:  light-​hearted playing around rather than class transaction. Alarmingly new-​ fangled sexual positions aside, most notable about the poem’s conclusion is its focus on geographical perambulation: En Engletere e Yrlaund yl precherent.  Across England and Ireland   they preached, Meynte bone terre si envyronerent.    much good land, thus, they   walked around. A la vile de Pount-​Freint demorerent,  In the town of Pontefract   they stayed E a lur aprise plusours tornerent.  and they converted many   with their lesson. [#37.338–​341]

Where the courtly beloved is immobilized and silenced, and the déclassé pastora sooner or later ravished, the vital femmes in Gilote et Johane brag, complain, debate, advise, scheme, plead, imagine whole new ways history might go; and they preach, the better to inaugurate the future they envision. They also go where they please. Where the fair maids in neighbouring lyrics elicit displays of poetic craft and encyclopaedic learning from their narrators, this poem’s damoyseles e dames ‘get to school’ themselves—​first, one-​ to-​one in the wood (‘En un vert bois’ [2]‌); next, by threes around

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town (‘par Wyncestre’ [203]); later, in quorum at church (‘a moster’ [323]); and finally, on excursion across the countryside, lecturing, ‘now’ [ore, 335], even up to the march of Scotland where the king’s armies have had mixed success in imposing the royal will. The Yorkshire place-​name ‘Pontefract’ (‘la vile de Pount-​Freint’ [340]) does more than connote border fortification and denote a vertical sweep of territory (departing from Winchester, we have traversed the entire country).93 That its toponym means literally ‘broken bridge’, a fractured pont, makes it difficult to resist linking English royal inability to secure the Scottish March in those years with the embarrassing limpness of the aged barouns, who earlier proved unable to impose their will (‘ne puet foutre ne fere talent’ [244]) and so left their young wives ‘yshent’ [245]. Alas. Authoritative masculine itineraries break off at Pontefract, incomplete in trajectory. Gilote’s ‘shield in front’ politics, meanwhile, disseminate across ‘Meynte bone terre’ [much good land, #37.339], overleaping the Humber and even the Irish Sea with aplomb and vigour. Small wonder that ‘to her lesson’ [a lur aprise]—​a medieval radical feminist future if there ever was one—​‘many are converted’ [plusours tornerent, 341]. The exuberance of Gilote’s project finds a wide audience, as our narrator’s recourse to terms of geographical expanse illustrates. What was private has become public:  Gilote and Johane’s meeting in the wood has local carnal outcomes but ongoing implications for women everywhere. Indeed—​‘Veyre’—​we are made witnesses and must acknowledge the poem’s truth: this plague extends across time and space both. ‘So far [tant] have these young ladies gone [alé avant]’, complains the narrator, that ‘there is not a woman now living [il n’y a femme ore vivant]’, ‘in whatever place [En quel lu] that she may be residing’, who hasn’t taken their preaching to heart [334–​ 336]. Worse, ‘they did everything according to this lesson, /​and they still do [fount il uncore] wherever they may be [ou qu’il seient]’ [332–​ 333]. Ultimately, the troops radicalized by Gilote and Johane bring ‘cet aprise’ [332] back home. All the good women go inside (‘al hostel’ [330]). But we couldn’t be further from our initial problematic, of Johane’s solitary virgin huddled timidly ‘al hostiel’ [45]—​a lesson that promises to be brought home with force to those among the nation’s barouns who are ‘trop … fieble’ in their houses [229]. ‘Necessity’ may ‘[get] the way [la voie] forced open’, but such ‘bosoigne’ [227] requires a level of potency manifestly lacking in this, the twenty-​ninth year of old King Edward’s ‘Engletere’ [338].

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Just as we encounter surprisingly constituted women in this poem, and a regrettably insufficient breed of husband, it turns out we have no garden-​variety knight. He doesn’t seem very medieval, as Hanawalt defines the male of the species (‘consciously [striving] through a variety of mechanisms to keep women within their space’).94 Instead, our nameless young eavesdropper benefits sexually from Gilote’s mobilization programme, at the expense of the poem’s corps of (grey-​tone) husbands, priests, and fathers. Masculine culture, in other words—​the presumed solidarity that binds male narrator, male characters, and implied male audience—​ collapses when female claims to community, education, and bodily self-​determination are asserted. As in any crisis some emerge as traitors to the cause. Yet the poem declines to censure its renegade chivaler, as if his youth, genre coding, and overflowing virility make it perfectly understandable he’ll want to get in on this: sex without even the effort of sweet talk or show of force. That the text echoes itself, playing on the phrase ‘s’en ala juer’ [went out to play] at each structural threshold, each spatial-​thematic elaboration—​in setting out; as we take to the streets; next on the way to church; again as crowds of women head home; and finally as the epidemic progresses north, along the spine of the realm—​helps underscore that each recurrence of ala/​alerent, each sallying forth of bones femmes, is a step towards changed (dare one say ‘actual’?) historical conditions. Towards an almost but not quite unthinkable day of reckoning. ‘Jest’ or ‘lesson’, nervous aprise or ludicrous bourde, the poem cycles systematically through the various locations—​ sites geographic and generic, but also historically bound—​ of medieval masculine authority:  the greenwood of lyric and bower of chivalric romance; the household of farce and feast hall of courtesy literature; the schoolroom of débat; the civic streets of fabliau; the church of the ‘sermoun’ [#37.254]; the ‘escole’ [‘university’,  148] of public disputation; ‘Le tixt e la glose’ [text and gloss,  325] of chapel or solarium devotions; the courts with their ‘coyntise’ [‘pleas and tricks’,  292]; even an ad hoc parliament implied in the legislation ‘distrent’ [presented,  326] by Gilote and Johane, adopted by unanimous consent and taken home for implementation. Most important in considering the poem’s social-​ temporal trajectory, its universally ‘urgent business’, is that its women break out from each site of containment, each cultural, material, and formal bower in turn—​until finally they push into open countryside and unsketched future, travelling beyond the institutional and

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narrative jurisdiction of local men, such that the only realm left to confine them is manifestly not old King Edward’s, despite his ‘strong statutes’ of restraint (enclosure hasn’t worked), but the as-​yet-​unrevealed plan of God’s unfolding will. Gilote et Johane serves notice that, despite their present hold and social ubiquity, eventually the terms of women’s regulation must prove subject to review. How it didn’t happen but might have (or, Counterfactual genre history) To regard Gilote et Johane as a literary phenomenon with historiographical ramifications is to reopen the question of its hybrid genre identity. Staking their claims are débat, erotic fabliau, dramatic interlude, and a host of other genres, from Marian devotions to legal pleading to courtesy literature. But most crucial to the poem’s operation are certain features of its initial genre, the pastourelle, a ‘stylized’ verbal-​erotic contest between knight and shepherdess whose ‘raw sexuality, bawdy humor, and taste for physical violence make the genre a counterpoint to courtly aristocratic literary forms’.95 Particularly relevant to our inquiry into literary counterfactuality are the form’s deployments of time and space. For Helen Dell, the lyric trope of ‘ “l’autrier”, “the other day” so often opens the scene’ as to constitute ‘a generic signal’: ‘It marks out the spatial and temporal trappings of the song. It will tell of unimportant events of the past, events which are now concluded. The telling is predicated on the story’s conclusion and the fact of conclusion signals its unimportance.’96 The events related in Gilote et Johane are no more concluded than they are unimportant to narrator and audience. By contrast, the placement of a pastourelle’s action in the already-​ completed ‘plupast’ (or, French, plus-​que-​parfait) imparts a placidness to its narration, however ‘raw’ or ‘contested’ the eroticized violence it recounts.97 As Dell comments, ‘the pace is not frantic’, moving along instead ‘at an amble’.98 But if ‘the tempo of the pastourelle is leisurely’99—​compared with Gilote et Johane’s blitzkrieg through the genres—​this feature begs certain questions, from the perspective of the genre’s eponymous quarry:  the pastora who, in being encountered outside city walls, is by definition available.100 As its animating court/​forest binary illustrates, ‘fundamental’ to pastourelle is ‘the space in which it takes place’. Pastourelle openings ‘bea[r]‌the imprint of courtly poetic conventions’, but more

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decisive than an idyllic backdrop is the tension between worlds ‘built into the setting’. Looming palpably on the horizon is the aristocratic wanderer’s ‘departure point’—​the court—​yet the lyric foreground remains unfixed:  ‘Occasionally, the name of a geographically real place appears’, but these are ‘irrelevant to the story to follow’.101 Since it is told ‘from a point beyond its ending’ and is, to boot, ‘a song of elsewhere’, where restraints of home do not apply, the pastourelle ‘has the flavour of an amused post-​mortem account, almost a dirty joke: “a funny thing happened to me …” ’102 Key to this formulation are the words ‘to me’. A dual-​role chivalric protagonist, the consolidated figure of the pastourelle knight-​ narrator proves definitive of the genre.103 Predatory opportunists all (even the bumbling, charismatic ones), the ethical unsavouriness of pastourelle knights differs only by degree. But if it is crucial that ‘the chevalier-​poète is simultaneously singer, focalizer and actor’, stakes are raised ‘when the speaker asserts his complicity with listeners’ or otherwise ‘emphasizes his collusion’.104 For Geri Smith, ‘such instances imply that the knight is engaged in an auto-​erotic encounter with his own power’. Presuming ‘listeners who would [respond] with a hearty chuckle’, Smith conjures an audience ‘fully complicit’ with the form’s gendered behavioural prescriptions.105 But it needn’t follow that all elements of a period listenership (let alone a modern readership) must be imagined as accessories to medieval anti-​feminism—​least of all, those who (like converted Johane, Winchester’s dissatisfied wives, and ourselves) have ‘[gone] to school [a l’escole]’ with a ‘head teacher [chef mestre]’ [#37.147, 204] like Gilote. Gilote et Johane’s division of the pastourelle knight-​narrator into separate roles—​opportunistic knight-​actor and alarmed pater-​ narrator—​is reprised in the split persona of the shepherdess, who should, ‘as a pastourelle given’, be alone.106 Although sometimes she avoids ravishment,107 the pastora is ‘contained by [the] narrative’ she lends her name to, ‘placed there’ to be consumed by narrator and audience alike.108 But something different happens with temporality when a text gives voice to what its pastora says: contested affairs are less securely located in the past.109 Gilote and Johane’s transgressions have their seed in the ‘different voicings’ and embryonic narrative alternatives found in mainline (thirteenth-​ century Old French and Old Occitan) pastourelle.110 Even prior to their elaboration in later hybrids, such alternative voicings subject conventions ‘to a new kind of scrutiny’—​they ‘invert’, ‘subvert’, or otherwise ‘push’ them ‘to reveal dualities lurking within the unsaid

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of the courtly system itself’.111 Pastourelle’s fraught relationships to its own conventions show it to be a genre riven by ambiguity, potentially undone by the contestation it suppresses. Gilote et Johane alternately deploys and departs from pastourelle conventions, not least those relating to geography and temporality. ‘Everything has already happened’ in pastourelle,112 but in our poem nothing is finished. Nor, as noted, are we ‘detached’ from historical time or geographically real coordinates. Another difference is that where a consolidated knight-​narrator dominates pastourelle proceedings, as erotic protagonist and controlling voice, Gilote et Johane’s outrider recedes rapidly from view. First, he is occluded by a tree: when he ‘se arestut privément pur oyer’ [stopped to hear secretly, #37.4], he is in a ‘vert bois ramé’ [thick, green wood, 2], and ‘Les damoyseles ne le aparsurent mie’ [the young ladies did not notice him, 5]. Then, when he reappears 210 lines and unspecified days later, he and his narrative take a back seat to the desires and machinations of the poem’s rampant women. Uxor’s report—​‘that a knight had told her /​that Gilote was a very eloquent women /​“and says that he had heard the debate /​that you had won the other day [l’autrer] with a great argument” ’ [215–​218]—​launches a socially expansive phase for a story that might well have ended at Johane’s conversion. The poet’s winking redeployment here of the opening trope of ‘l’autrer’ [217] signals Gilote et Johane’s categorical departure from pastourelle thematics. Our springtime knight rides out [1–​2]; encounters prey, calculates, listens [3–​4]; and eventually [214–​219] begins to take sexual advantage of the situation. Yet conspicuously absent are the usual (focalization and vocalization) characteristics of the pastourelle protagonist. Like all young men in the poem’s world, our eavesdropping knight retains (even behind his tree) an implicit erotic motivation. Male sexual appetite is elemental, hardly to be remarked upon even when it overrides homosocial taboos.113 Apart from prompting Uxor towards a liaison, Gilote et Johane’s knight has no aventure to speak of (we never hear if they consummate) and literally no voice (his words come indirectly), let alone a controlling one. After pastourelle and débat, the genre of fabliau exerts the next strongest claim on Gilote et Johane. Like the former, fabliau displays much ‘genre fluidity’ and attendant ‘adaptability over a wide social bandspread’.114 Similarly echoing pastourelle is how ‘practically every single aspect of the fabliau text is bound up in some way—​ directly, ironically, parodically—​ with the courtly experience’.115 A good example may be seen in the ‘ambiguous comic role’

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of fabliau knights.116 Scholars remain split on whether such features support a ‘ “courtly” theory’ of the genre’s origins or bespeak an emergent, urban ‘littérature bourgeoise’.117 Notable either way is the ‘preponderance of knight-​characters’ in Anglo-​Norman as opposed to continental French fabliaux.118 This preference for chivalric over bourgeois themes may or may not ‘reflect the particular socio-​cultural conditions of the thirteenth-​century Anglo-​Norman community’.119 However, the point has implications for the present discussion, considering the fourteenth-​century manuscript in which Gilote et Johane survives. Harley 2253 has remained famous for its Middle English lyric corpus (see Chapter 1), while developing a reputation for compilatory ambition (see Introduction). As it happens, our book also houses much instructional and devotional material (see Chapters 2 and 4) along with the largest collection of Anglo-​Norman fabliaux now extant.120 In tracing the latter genre’s development ‘on both sides of the channel’, John Hines highlights several ‘identifiable insular … attitudes’ and formal features.121 But Hines’ concern is less the fabliau in England than the fabliau in English. Like the Old French scholars who (together with Chaucerians) comprise the ranks of fabliau critics, he skates with unseemly haste over the Anglo-​Norman exemplars that survive, notwithstanding their patent service as vehicles of transmission.122 The reflexive product of a literary-​linguistic nationalism until recently the norm on both sides of the Channel and disciplinary aisle, attitudes like these—​ Anglo-​ Norman attitudes, we might say—​continue to influence the reception of Gilote et Johane negatively. One way to rectify this situation is to take seriously Gilote et Johane’s own claims as to the historiographical stakes of the aventure it relates. Another is to ask: how might things have gone differently for this poem, if the world around it had unfolded differently? Lampooned by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (1871), the phrase ‘Anglo-​Saxon attitudes’ pertains to a style in insular illumination, in which figures in exaggerated swaying positions hold their palms outstretched.123 So might we imagine Gilote gesticulating, as she laments the plight of a young wife beset by a flaccid husband: ‘Alas, alas!’ Better to have worried about the fortunes of her poem. The dismissiveness towards Anglo-​Norman long harboured by Old French and Middle English scholars has consigned a lively tale to premature burial. In his satirical novel Anglo-​ Saxon Attitudes (1956), which cites Carroll for epigraph, Angus Wilson builds his plot around a disaffected son who, decades back, planted a phallic pagan artefact in the medieval bishop’s tomb that

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his archaeologist father was excavating. Were the hostile ‘practical joke’ (a bourde?) to be revealed, it would result in the latter’s posthumous professional ruin, as well as much questioning of national character and (more to the point) of the historical discipline on which it was founded.124 When he finally manages to rouse it, the concern of Wilson’s tepid protagonist—​a non-​publishing professor of Anglo-​Saxon history and former friend of the mischievous son—​is for ‘the general reputation of the English historian’: ‘It’s a far larger question of historical truth.’125 Historiographical conservatism is one of the few ideals in Wilson’s Dirty Realist novel that does not come in for skewering.126 My final section in this chapter will evaluate the impact of such attitudes upon interpretation of Gilote et Johane—​in particular, its prevailing literary-​historical placements. Wilson’s rejuvenated protagonist would disagree, but nowadays it goes without saying—​ or should—​that there is more than one future possible for this medieval fable, as for all texts. But futures, like pasts (and novels about medievalists; also medieval lyrics and mappaemundi), are made; they don’t just ‘happen’. They do not enjoy a singular, reliable, uncomplicated relationship to reality. Instead, they partake of the contestation that is constitutive of pastourelle. For all his disaffection with Anglo-​Saxon attitudes, Wilson uses history—​the academic discipline thereof—​as the magic salve through application of which an approximation of liveable modern life can be recovered. Such are the refuges of ‘responsible’ historical epistemology. The phallic prank never quite comes to light. ‘We’—​we fathers, we husbands, we historians—​are spared. But resolutions are never equally tidy for everyone. How she’s nobody’s grandmother (or, When ‘Anglo-​Norman’ means English) Are stories ‘real’? Do they ‘actually happen’?127 ‘In truth’ [‘Veyre’]—​ as two early scholars of counterfactualism would put it—​Gilote and Johane’s audacious social programme does succeed, and not just within their world but also in historical moments and textual locales far beyond. Gilote berated Johane because ‘You always stay in the house’, ‘reprimanded like a child’ [#37.45–​46]. But Johane didn’t remain inside. Go outside; look around. The cautionary tale has come to pass. The counterfactual has become actual. Once ‘held close up’ [57], the ‘pucele’ [‘maiden’, 27] has left the house, exerted her ‘voler’ [‘agency’, 43], defied her parents, gone to school,

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taken a lover, played the game, reaped the rewards, and set out to spread the word. It is hard to argue that women everywhere have not heard. The King of Heaven hasn’t ‘[had] mercy and pity on us’—​unless we’re talking about a different ‘us’ to the ones the narrator of Gilote et Johane had in mind. And yet, despite the long-​ term success of their programme, Gilote and Johane themselves, together with their seldom-​ read poem, remain contained. One structure containing them—​exerting decisive force upon all assessments of ceste aventure—​is their unique miscellany manuscript and its interpretive ecosystem. Another is English literary history. Some scholars have dared to imagine a future relaxing, even a dismemberment of the nationalist disciplinary hold on literary history, which has been longstanding and pernicious.128 The editing of Harley manuscript texts traditionally has involved another kind of dismemberment: Middle English lyrics published here, Anglo-​ Norman political songs there, Latin saints’ lives not at all. Recent criticism has prescribed less compartmentalization, and instead attention to formal, lexical, and thematic conversation between items.129 How might such a method work for Gilote et Johane and Harley 2253? The prevailing view is that, by pairing counterpoised items (on the principle that everything is known ‘by its contrary’), the compilation works to defuse the threat our young ladies pose, rendering it a merely comic extreme.130 Earlier I  mentioned the figure of the knight who acquiesces to the subversion of his own gender privilege and so helps launch what is, from the narrator’s standpoint, a social catastrophe. An outrider who declines his chivalric birthright and interrupts his amorous predation; who pauses to listen (‘oyer’) to women and encourages others to do so—​what is the relationship of this strange specimen to his fellows across the genres? As traitor to the doctrine of enclosure, he profits from Gilote’s schemes (more sex, more status). Consequently, the poem pulls away from this skulking figure, despite having embarked in his company. And yet, were the young knight to have stayed true to his gender and genre—​had he remained in the pastourelle we thought he was in—​still he would have enjoyed the ‘good time’ he went looking for in the woods. The rules governing erotic negotiation are different in Gilote et Johane—​outlandishly so—​but perhaps they’re found preferable not just by wives but by some young men as well. The main scribe of Harley 2253 is not one of them. Gilote et Johane concludes on fol. 68v, just prior to where Quire 7 also ends. But not before we encounter this portion of the book’s most formally

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outlandish item—​the text least like its (English lyric) neighbours in that it is composed in French instructional prose: ‘Ces sunt les pelrinages communes que crestiens fount en la Seinte Terre’ [These are the usual pilgrimage routes that Christians take in the Holy Land] (#38, fol. 68v).131 If Gilote and Johane’s naturally radical energies cannot be disciplined out (‘Femme refuse fermetés’ [woman defies control, #77.26]; ‘si su je nee’ [‘that is the way I was born’, #37.30]), perhaps their wandering can be directed. As my Introduction discussed, recent scholars have promulgated notions of the Harley scribe’s ‘anthologistic impulse’ and ‘careful planning’, or have staked a claim for ‘scribal authorship’, arguing for the scribe’s ‘artistic’, ‘unusually deliberative’, indeed ‘dialectic’ arrangement of his material.132 No miscellany but rather a sophisticated literary compilatio, Harley 2253, per this intention-​driven view, contains the wildcard energies of Gilote et Johane by grounding its feminine excesses within the sacred trajectory of the pilgrimage text immediately following (as well as in the orthodox anti-​feminism of surrounding poems pro and contra).133 Sparring alternately with love-​lyric, misogynist diatribe, and geo-​devotional prose, Gilote et Johane becomes a micro-​episode in a macro-​codicological project the essence of which lies—​as does its own—​in the forms and practices of medieval ‘desputeysoun’ [‘disputation’, 216]. One in a series of ‘contrapuntal soliloquies’, our poem voices an entrenched position, yet the conversation ricochets forward via a logic of unresolved, indeed unresolvable debate.134 Harley 2253 is ruled, in this neat vision, by an overarching poetics of irresolution, itself the product of its maker’s purported ‘incapacity to embrace single, uniform and practicable attitudes toward either nature or womankind’.135 Put at the service of the Harley compilation’s larger enterprise, Gilote et Johane itself, as a text otherwise orphaned by manuscript culture, is left flailing for relations, like a dancer without a partner. Such are the consequences of privileging material context as the pre-​eminent interpretive factor. If the compilation’s commitment to irresolution should be deemed insufficient to dampen the electric transgression of our damsels, English literary history writ large can be trusted to do so. For Revard, the ‘oppositional thematics’ and compilatory crafting to be found in Harley are specifically Chaucerian credentials.136 In his pitching of the codex as a manifestly intentional production, and one characterized by multivocalization, the Canterbury Tales come up again and again, as does the master himself, whose name recurs with metronomic frequency.137 This is especially

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true of Revard’s work on Gilote et Johane, which he declares a ‘ “Chaucerian” interlude’ that holds the key to the Harley manuscript’s Canterbury Tales-​like ‘metanarrative’.138 Revard goes so far as to entitle his translation (for The Chaucer Review) ‘The Wife of Bath’s Grandmother:  or, How Gilote Showed Her Friend Johane That the Wages of Sin Is Worldly Pleasure, and How Both Then Preached This Gospel Throughout England and Ireland’. As inspiration for the heroic couplets into which he renders its irregular monorhymes, he cites Pope’s and Dryden’s ‘rococo’ ‘ “translations” of Chaucer’ (117–​118). And so on. Revard likes his heroines and in an avuncular spirit wishes to see them ‘alive and dancing even behind [the] veils’ of his translation (‘Wife of Bath’ 118). Yet no matter how well meaning, his Chaucerian rebranding has deleterious consequences. The domestication he attempts—​in yoking Gilote to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—​amounts to unacknowledged literary counterfactualism. More precisely, the gesture is counterfictional in that it asserts a reading contrary to the contents of a ‘previous fiction’.139 Gilote is categorically not a wife (‘There where you talk of marriage, /​ I will not do it, Johane’ [#37.53–​54]).140 Nor is Gilote—​aghast at the prospect of ‘having children in too much abundance’ [59]—​ by any stretch a mother, which disqualifies her from being anyone’s grandmother.141 Harmless metaphorical play it may seem. However, the forcible maternity Revard visits upon Gilote undermines the integrity of the character. And while her unwanted progeny offer to compensate by revising critical valuations of Harley 2253, such reimaginings make awkward demands upon medieval literary history, precisely where Anglo-​Norman touches Middle English on one side and Francophone nationalism on the other. Revard’s alignment of the Anglo-​ Norman behind the Chaucerian (with the former inevitably eclipsed) illustrates how scholars of Middle English continue working, in innocent disciplinary bonhomie, at ‘rever[sing] the Conquest’, a literary-​nationalist project inherited from nineteenth-​century Whig historiographical imperatives.142 But there are other opportunities available to Anglo-​Norman literary criticism than either this insular reflex, or its inverse of ratifying continental primacy. French had held sway in England since the upheavals wrought by 1066, so it is not as if fourteenth-​century elites didn’t give ‘serious thought’—​Ferguson’s condition for viable counterfactuals—​to maintaining that status quo. Handbooks like Walter Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-​century Le Tretiz, used to teach French to aristocratic children a generation

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or more removed from the continent,143 and courtesy-​literature exhortations (as in Harley 2253’s own Urbain the Courteous [#79, fol. 112]) about the necessity of learning French (‘a language much praised and loved by gentlemen’ [19–​20]) for making one’s way in the world, attest to the Francophone dimensions of English ambition in the pre-​plague period. What if French had remained England’s status vernacular (for courtly and legal, cultural and devotional interactions) instead of giving way in the fifteenth century to a Chaucer-​inspired, Westminster-​backed ‘cultivation of English as the national language’?144 Whose grandmère would Gilote be then? As chef mestre to the realm’s femmes, would her mandate include instruction in Anglo-​Norman:  the lingua franca that is also her lingua materna?145 Counterfactuals make convenient sign-​offs, as they are easily played against themselves. Still, they ought not be denigrated for the thought-​experiment credentials that give them rise. What if we treated historical counterfactuals at once more seriously and less piously, accepting stories as a legitimate form of historiography into the bargain? Seeing contemporary mores as the embodiment of an achieved future reminds us that we might regard the counterfactual vision Gilote proposes as ambivalently as its narrator and audience do, yet take it more seriously than the actuality of intervening centuries would seem, on the face of historical conditions, to merit. The critical future Revard envisions is distilled in his characterization of Gilote et Johane as ‘a kind of “prequel” to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’.146 If the search for mentions weren’t so fruitless, one might ask what place Gilote et Johane occupies in French literary history. (The short answer is that it has none.) Our poem’s Anglo-​Norman composition and insular provenance, its unique survival in a manuscript famous for its Middle English poems, and the fact that all Harley poems are in final estimation ‘tales composed or redacted in England for Englishmen’147—​all these things leave it poorly suited to deployment in mainline French discourse. Although ‘canons of British literature tend to privilege texts composed in the Middle English of emerging insular nationhood’,148 that our manuscript’s Norman documents are manifestly Anglo artefacts makes them available for grafting on to English literary history. Recognition of such helps explain the invocation of canonical names in Harley scholarship, especially Revard’s on Gilote et Johane. A  heightened Chaucerianism increases market appeal,

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though Shakespeare, too, receives gratuitous attention, along with other Western tradition worthies.149 Revard’s gestures are intended as literary-​historical uplift, but his intervention makes Gilote’s future (like Harley 2253’s) an Anglais one. Gilote is allowed to retain her alluring French lilt, but such meanings as her poem encodes are lodged definitively within English cultural history. Alas—​Gilote may well complain—​such a woman is ‘yschent’. Her future lies in literary consort work, at high-​ rent galas perhaps, in the company of most canonical gentlemen—​ but though she may mingle hereafter with the likes of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Pope, Dryden, and Shakespeare himself, this is escort work just the same. Gilote’s own professional goals included family counselling and social work, single-​sex pedagogy and progressive political organizing; her work took place in forest glades, city streets, and usurped pulpits. But gone (now we are at Literary Awards Night) are the Occupy Winchester politics and coalition-​ building travels that once brought such zest. Formerly Gilote was insurgent; to make her Chaucerian makes her abject. With Harley 2253 installed as the Canterbury Tales’ harbinger, Gilote becomes Chaucer’s handmaiden:  an establishment force. Her function consists in preparing the way for a vernacular English poetic transcendence that will be discovered in the Wife of Bath’s toothsome apotheosis. To enforce the association between Chaucer’s most famous pilgrim and her supposed Norman grandmother, Revard takes to calling the one ‘Alisoun of Bath’ and the other ‘Gilote of Winchester’.150 Although their relationship is at best thematic (no evidence suggests Chaucer ever encountered any Harley text; see Chapter 1), the parallel nominatives help transmute a counterfactual gambit (What if Gilote were a source for Alison?) into genealogy. Revard’s project is enabled via textual sleight: his assignment of a reproductive role to Harley’s anti-​maternal, anti-​ matrimonial radical. By such means, national history becomes (as so often) a family drama, with the added twist of suppressed linguistic difference. The cheery abduction, Anglicization, and counterfactual recasting of Gilote as ‘the Wife of Bath’s grandmother’ undoes her textual essence, imposing familial roles that the poem expressly disavows. Revard thus co-​opts the revolutionary potential of his poem’s ‘outrageous women’.151 The effect of his Chaucerian reframing is to siphon off the original’s homosocial momentum (‘and all the good women went home, /​for urgent business called them’ [#37.330–​ 331]), directing its fugitive, Francophone, radical feminist force

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into the docile channels of our redoubtably masculine—​that is, standard male homosocial—​English literary past.152 The insurrectionary project of ‘we young women’ has become that of we Middle English scholars. Not only is Gilote’s recasting of gender relations and recoding of social spaces thereby undone. Also dubbed out is the Francophone ebullience of her speech. The texts of Harley 2253, as we have seen, operate within a trilingual literary marketplace that is specific to provincial pre-​plague England.153 Translated to resemble Pope doing Chaucer, Gilote’s Anglo-​Norman accents lose their distinctiveness. Her voice falls into place among the host of speakers (mostly Middle English clerks) whose lyric laments, political complaints, and erotic adventures dominate Quires 7–​8. To trade upon Gilote’s insularity while erasing her linguistic difference is to repackage the old story, in which a Chaucer-​shaped Plantagenet tiger, knowing and muscular, brings down continental cultural hegemony (the French vernacular), while gathering for a next leap—​come the Reformation—​at Roman Latinity itself. Apart from providing refracted literary validation, what does it mean to view Gilote et Johane as ‘a kind of “prequel” to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’? Such a vision homogenizes the text, harnessing its plural potentialities of meaning so that they pull on behalf of an institutionalized, canonical English macro-​poetics. In paltry return, Gilote et Johane finally starts being read—​but only in heroic-​ Chaucerian, ‘Las Vegas neon’ translation.154 Revard’s project impregnates Gilote (paternity tests point to the Father of English Literature), then ushers her hastily to desexualized, honorary grandmother status, via an implied motherhood that is the stuff of Gilote’s nightmares (‘I would never get away’ [#37.60]). Such a script requires that we read literary history backwards; Chaucer’s childless Wife begets her own grandmother. Incidentally—​despite ‘fyve husbondes scoleiyng’ [CT, III.D 44f] and untold ‘wandrynge by the weye’ [CT, I.A 467]—​Dame Alison makes no mention of bearing children. Quite the opposite: some take the ‘remedies of love’ she has the ‘art’ to concoct (and prescribes to needful gossips?) as reference to birth control [CT, I.A 475–​476].155 But though she lacks biological offspring, this needn’t debar her—​any more than it does Gilote—​from reproductive fecundity of another sort. My argument in this chapter has struck an oppositional stance, but I  share Revard’s instinct to link Gilote to Alison—​on leadership terms. In her teaching of feminine rhetoric and modelling of wifely wiles, Chaucer’s character does evoke our Harley mestre, who showed herself so

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committed to gender mentoring and homosocial bonding. It may be that the mother will always take the daughter’s part, but the point to be taken from Gilote et Johane—​and for that matter from the Wife of Bath’s Tale, whose strong women (Queen Guinevere and the loathsome hag) are likewise removed from a childrearing economy—​is that women can choose to align along a horizontal social axis. Associational gender politics supersede, and contravene the lineage imperatives of, patriarchal familial relations. We all like a gal with spunk—​provided she knows her place. Revard’s critical ravishment and counterfictional maternalization of Gilote, who actively opposes this fate, compromises her politics, violates her characterization, and compounds these aggressions by drafting her into the ultimate male-​authored text, the departmental survey-​course procession that ends with an outing to Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. No shrinking violet (like Gilote et Johane’s youthful voyeur), the Middle English critic who offers to ‘raise up’ a disadvantaged Anglo-​Norman damsel by his canonical attentions stands revealed as another opportunistic predator, a pastourelle knight whose proposition sounds noble but camouflages a deal with advantages all on one side.156 Trouver [find, discover] is pastourelle’s normal term for describing a chevalier-​poète’s encounter with his pastora.157 In Gilote et Johane this verb appears not when our knight meets two damsels in dangerous woods, but when Johane reports on her amours (‘with my lover I have discovered [ai je trové] so much’ [#37.190]; when Gilote enthuses about what her ‘amy’ [‘lover’, 10] ‘me treove’ [‘gets me’, 12]; when the narrator laments that a man can’t ‘trover’ [find,  206] a woman anywhere who will say no; and when Uxor is promised that she’ll get a lot of playing (‘trovera grant foissoun’ [248]) out of her ‘young “trumpet” ’ [247]. These examples replace the unilateral ravishment of pastourelle with a dynamic of erotic exchange, emphasizing mutual consent. The future for Harley femmes seems bright. Or so it once did—​on folios 67v–​68v of the manuscript, where Gilote reigns triumphant. But that version of the future has been compromised. The effect (if not goal) of ensuing literary criticism has been to displace attention from the shield-​in-​front erotics and female homosocial politics that make its narrator and audience so nervous. (Our heroines’ mockery of older men who ‘can neither screw nor do their will’ [244] has doubtless had a deflationary effect on the poem’s stock among the gentlemen antiquarians and senior professoriate who have formed its post-​medieval readership.158) The intergeneric play and courtly inversions constitutive of pastourelle and fabliau,

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as elaborated in Gilote et Johane, produce an altered temporality, in which the literary mode itself changes the experience of time and space. Geographies are not just multiple, but fungible. History begins to seem a matter of verb tense.159 Writing recently (in a cross-​ period journal) on the difficulty of reading across periods, Nicholas Birns warns against ‘succumb[ing] to the sheer anarchy of multiple pasts’.160 In order to make Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s respective textual pasts ‘meaningful to themselves and their original audiences’, Birns deploys a temporal concept drawn from French grammatical terminology, the already-​complete ‘plupast’. According to Birns, Chaucer and Shakespeare’s shared historical plupast—​that is, their ‘[mutual] sense of not only the past but also the past’s past’—​‘existed concomitantly with the geographic alterity of the East’.161 We encounter different temporality and an inverse geography in Gilote et Johane, whose account of damoyseles going wild is never completed but always occurring, indefinitely ongoing—​in the opposite direction. Its narrator stays emplaced, but our poem’s unfinished historical business is less a simple past imperfect than a multidimensional histoire imparfaite (‘estoire’ denoting, in its AN usage on the Hereford mappamundi, both textual account and graphic representation: story/​history as well as map/​compilation162). Such a phenomenon (ceste aventure) unfolds not once and for all, like a pastourelle, joke, or sermon, but multiply and recurrently, according to another order of geographical-​temporal alterity—​whatever the designs of readers and scribes that follow. The debate-​driven compilation that is Harley 2253 may repair, in pious appeasement, back to the devotional embrace of Seinte Terre (#38) and crusader-​ occupied Acre (#39).163 But Gilote and Johane beat no such chastened retreat. Instead they push perennially outward, centrifugally away from the established routes (‘les pelrinages communes’) and authorizing sites of Christian orthodoxy. ‘They toured their way around [envyronerent] much good land’ [#37.339], converting hearts and minds and households. And they still do—​whatever canonical narratives or pilgrim penances we may seek to prescribe, by way of rehabilitation. This chapter has verged on treating Gilote as if, apart from resemblance to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (herself frequently accorded an ontological status independent of the Canterbury Tales), she were a textual phenomenon unique to her milieu. But Gilote and Alison are not so alone in their railing. Exegetical bad girls like Lot’s Wife and Potiphar’s Wife,164 and cycle-​play favourites Uxor Noe

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and the Second Shepherds’ Pageant’s Gill,165 demand mention, as do the ‘knowing’ women of fabliau, farce, and pastourelle166—​not to forget those enlivening anti-​matrimonial debate. That Gilote’s anti-​reproductive poetics constitutes a tangible historical thing, with a discernible afterlife, is evidenced by what Pamela Brown terms ‘the jesting literature’ of early modern England, a phenomenon that features ‘female satire with roots in social practice’.167 Brown’s recovery of this tradition of ‘anti-​masculinist’ jests illuminates Gilote et Johane:  from how ‘popular jest genres overlap and interpenetrate’ to how ‘women’s jesting constitutes a previously unnoticed vector of critique and social power, which may at times threaten and even disrupt reigning ideologies enforcing female subjection’.168 Cognizance of this alternate literary history moves us beyond the Harley manuscript funhouse (and larger fairground of anti-​feminism) within which our protagonists’ counter-​ orthodoxy has long been trapped. Niall Ferguson decries a present in which literary scholars bring their ‘modish’ techniques to bear upon ‘the ultimate “text”:  the written record of the past itself’.169 As usual, his provocation misses the point. Surely the ultimate text—​so the utopianists, novelists, and satirists excluded from his version of counterfactualism might remind him—​is not the past but the future: that estoire that has not yet been written, though it has been rewritten often enough. Once counterfactual, now actual, Gilote’s version of our medieval future and its pasts has increasingly pressing claims. Notes 1 Goldberg, ‘Antifeminism and Antisemitism’; Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews. For the intersection of anti-​feminism with literary medievalist Jewish studies (Chaucer especially), see Blurton and Johnson, The Critics and the Prioress. 2 ‘The Future of the Past: History in the Medieval Francophone West’, Los Angeles, February 2011. 3 Megill, Historical Error, i. 4 Ibid., 151; Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 2. 5 Megill, Historical Error, xii–​xiii, 151. 6 Critics describe its genre combination differently: Fein, Studies, 9; Dove, ‘Textual Intimacy’, 347; Reichl, ‘Debate Verse’, 230–​231; Revard, ‘Gilote et Johane’, 122; Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 117–​119. The last essay refers to Gilote et Johane (G&J) as an ‘interlude’, ‘travelogue’, and ‘cautionary tale’, while ‘jest’, ‘lesson’, and ‘prayer’ derive from the poem’s own usage. 7 Jubinal, Nouveau recueil, II.28–​39.

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8 Revard, ‘Gilote et Johane’—​whose chief priority, however, is to characterize Harley 2253’s compilation programme. For translations, see Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’, 146–​177; Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 125–​ 132; Fein, CH, II.156–​173. Fein cites debts ‘to an unfinished translation [by] Barbara Nolan’ (II.409). 9 My translations of AN poems in this chapter follow Kennedy, with emendation as necessary for clarity. 10 Lochrie, ‘Fabliau Politics’, 287. 11 Clanchy, Memory, 303–​304. 12 As textualized on mappaemundi like Hereford Cathedral’s; Birkholz, King’s Two Maps, xxii. 13 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 118. 14 Ibid.; cf. Revard, ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 271; Revard, ‘Scribe’, 22; Turville-​Petre, England the Nation, 194. 15 Megill, Historical Error, 151; cf. Gallagher, ‘Counterfactual Characters’, 316. 16 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 3, 2. 17 Ibid., 19, 10, 11, 15. 18 Ibid., 84, 14, 15, 86 (emphasis in original). 19 Ibid., 8, 9, 12, 7, 66. 20 Tucker, ‘Historical Contingency’. 21 Megill, Historical Error, xii, 151. For Waldenegg, ‘counterfactual history differs only in degree, and not in substance … from the normal business of historians’; ‘Counterfactuality and History’, 148. 22 Megill, Historical Error, 151, 153. 23 Ibid., 151–​152, and passim. 24 Ibid., 13 (emphasis added), 152. 25 Birke et al. Counterfactual Thinking, 1. Germany’s leadership in counterfactualist scholarship seems connected to that country’s post-​war preoccupation with cultural memory. 26 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 13. 27 Ibid., 66, 67. Cf. Tucker, who denounces Ferguson’s reductiveness on genre, yet still regards alternative history as ‘irrelevant’ to historiography (‘Historical Contingency’, 274). 28 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 69. 29 Saint-​Gelais, ‘Counterfictionality’, 249. 30 Ibid., 250, 248, 241, 252. For ‘the paradigm of possible worlds’ and its ‘potential for launching an innovative theory of fictionality’ within analytical philosophy, see Doležel, Heterocosmica, 15. Gallagher declares ‘the possible-​worlds account … superseded’ within literary studies (‘Fictionality’, 355). 31 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 83. 32 Ní Dhúill, Imagined Spaces, 7 (emphasis original). 33 Ibid., 2; cf. Miller, ‘Metaphysics’, 783. 34 Megill, Historical Error, 152.

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35 Ní Dhúill, Imagined Spaces, 2. 36 Ibid., 1. 37 ‘Counterfactuality in Literature and Literary Theory’, Freiburg, September 2009, www.hsozkult.de/​event/​id/​termine-​9934. 38 Widmann, ‘Plot vs. Story’. 39 Christ, ‘If I Were a Man’. 40 Warhol, ‘Narrative Refusals’. 41 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 68. 42 Ibid., 88. 43 Galperin, ‘What Never Happened’, 357. 44 Ibid., 358, 376, 380. 45 Miller, ‘Metaphysics’, 774 (referencing Stuart Hampshire). 46 Ibid., 774, 778, 781, 776, 782. 47 Tucker, ‘Historical Counterfactuals’, 265. 48 Spiegel, Past as Text, 110, xviii. 49 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 86, 18. 50 Spiegel, Past as Text, 110. 51 White, ‘Narrativity’, 10. 52 Saint-​Gelais, ‘Counterfictionality’, 252. 53 Hanawalt, ‘At the Margin’, 16. 54 Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 1. 55 Sedgwick, Between Men, i. 56 Dove (‘Textual Intimacy’) terms this genre the ‘propretés des femmes’ [characteristics of women], ‘involving … both blasme [accusation, reproach] and praise’ (334–​335). Five AN poems in Harley ‘[directly] concern what women are like’ and ‘at least five’ more in ME and Latin ‘can be associated with’ the discourse. 57 Ibid., 344, 337. Anti-​matrimonial admonitions occur in all versions of Le blasme, sometimes as a starting point. For Dove, item #77’s ‘equivocal’ opening ‘immediately suggests a marriage debate’ (338). 58 Some pastourelles (and fabliaux) ‘[muddy] the question of just who is meant to laugh at whom’, but such inversions work ‘[only] because it is safe for the truly powerful to make fun of themselves’ (Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 44, 37). 59 Dove, ‘Textual Intimacy’, 344–​345; Crocker, ‘Disfiguring Gender’, 351. 60 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 87. Polemical items like #77 (Le blasme des femmes), #78 (Femmes a la pye [Women and Magpies]), and #83 (De mal mariage [Against Marriage])—​which between them ‘[distil] anti-​ feminism to a vitriolic essence’ (Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’, 56)—​ are especially given to citing ecclesiastical and classical authorities. 61 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 44. 62 For example, #28.1 (Annot and John); #30.36 (The Lover’s Complaint); #35.6 (The Meeting in the Wood). 63 By Gravdal’s count, nearly one-​fifth of Old French (OF) exemplars end in rape; the remainder ‘consistently celebrate its threat’ (Ravishing

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Maidens, 105, 166). On whether pastourelle constitutes a ‘celebration of rape’ (Gravdal) or of prostitution (William Paden), see Sigal, ‘Courted in the Country’, 191–​192. Either way ‘the female figure’s potential promiscuity is an element of this generic landscape’ (Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 59). 64 Reichl, ‘Debate Verse’, 235. Harley 2253 also has two religious pastourelles: An Autumn Song (#63) and The Five Joys of the Virgin (#67); see Chapter 4. 65 For medieval fabliau’s similar ‘soft-​pedalling’ of sexual violence, see Sidhu, ‘Female Desire’, 9. 66 Brook, HL, 7. 67 Could what she loathes be the condition of vulnerability that damsel status imposes? 68 For avian protagonists in debate, see Conlee, ME Debate, xxii–​xxiv, 237–​293. 69 Saint-​Gelais, ‘Counterfictionality’, 244. 70 Reed, Debate Poetry, ix, 3, 22. 71 Ibid., ix; also 179–​ 180, for ‘unresolved debate’ that is intentional: ‘paired products of multiple or single authors that customarily include no determination’. 72 Variations on ‘vie’ appear in behavioural prescriptions throughout [8, 18, 19, 22, 28, 68, 93], underlining the tone of (mock) didacticism. 73 Sigal, ‘Courted in the Country’, 203. 74 Burns, Bodytalk, xv. 75 Gilote marshals her ‘Autres ensamples … plusour’ [‘many other examples’, 133] in response to Johane’s ‘plusours ensamples’ [75] and ‘autres ensamples’ [85]. 76 Many of these mentions take negative form (‘God does not exclude by any scripture’ [119]; ‘In the name of God it is not thus’ [63]), thereby asserting the inscrutability of divine intentions, whatever masculine authorities declare. 77 Reed, Debate Poetry, 22. 78 In doing so, she resembles the famously rebellious Uxor Noe [Noah’s Wife] of the mystery plays, whose fierce commitment to her gossips makes her refuse to board the Ark. See Birkholz, ‘Mapping Medieval Utopia’, 608–​609. 79 Hovland, ‘Early French Farce’, 20–​23; Sidhu, ‘Go-​Betweens’. 80 Perfetti, ‘Lewd and Ludic’, 18. 81 Two genital fabliaux appear in Harley, but G&J is light on raunch. When we participate in vicarious pleasures, the mode is auditory: ‘there lay a Giggle with a Quiet!’ [184]. 82 Mestier indicates sexual willingness, as when Johane’s lover ‘concerned himself with his duty [son mester]’ [183]. Entremettra is one of several compounds that create space for female homosociality via the prefix ‘entre-​’. Sidhu finds ‘entremetteur’, elsewhere, indicative of the

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‘ “go-​between” status’ of old women, which ‘the fableor is willing to sponsor … under certain circumstances’ (‘Go-​Betweens’, 57, 54). 83 Kennedy,’Poems about Love’, 167. 84 Copeland, ‘Why Women Can’t Read’, 260. 85 Miller, ‘Metaphysics’, 787. 86 Miller regards the ‘fantasy of a life unled’ (‘Metaphysics’, 775)  as a signature of literary counterfactualism. Galperin notes that literary-​ counterfactual ‘missed opportunities’ are often romantic in nature (‘What Never Happened’, 355, 374). 87 Revard calls Gilote ‘every cleric’s nightmare’ (‘Wife of Bath’, 120), apparently forgetting the priests and friars who, in G&J as in Chaucer, preach abstinence and ‘fuck on the side’ [#37.267]. 88 Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’, 175. Kennedy reduces line 262’s ten words (‘Ne il ne puet foutre, ne il ne puet trere’) to four (‘nor fuck nor come’), but his idiomatic rendering eliminates the sexual metaphorics of ‘trere’ [shoot]. 89 As all editors note, the term ‘talevas’ also appears in the fabliau Le chevaler e la corbaylle [The Knight and the Basket, #82.37], where it is used to disparage an old woman who blocks access to a knight’s ‘closé e enmuree’ [enclosed and walled-​in, 13] ‘bele amye’ [90]. 90 Johnson, ‘Women on Top’; Brundage, ‘Coital Positions’. For links between sexual positions and feminist emancipation in a post-​medieval context, see Brown and Faue, ‘Revolutionary Desire’, 274. 91 For (certain kinds of) sex as utopian practice, see Ní Dhúill, Imagined Spaces, 122. 92 Kennedy (‘Poems about Love’) proposes that talevas ‘had a special meaning in the game of dice and … took on a sexual connotation’ (175). 93 The Lancaster Rebellion of 1322—​which much affected Harley audiences (Revard, ‘Scribe’, 29)—​concluded with executions at Pontefract, a way-​station on the Roman road system structuring Matthew Paris’ maps of Britain (Birkholz, King’s Two Maps, 77–​82). Pontefract was also the centre of a short-​lived cult of (‘Saint’) Thomas Lancaster (see Epilogue). The c.1295–​1330 List of 108 English Towns (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 195, fol. 194v), which enrols toponyms via their signature attribute (like Chapter 1’s ‘Damsels of Hereford’), includes the ‘Marche de Punfretz’ [March of Pontefract,  93], among several entries of a military bent [‘Archers of Wales’, 47; ‘Navy of Southampton’, 60]; Birkholz, King’s Two Maps, 125–​126. 94 Hanawalt, ‘At the Margin’, 16. 95 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 15, 1.  Scholars have underemphasized G&J’s pastourelle debts, compared with other genre claimants. 96 Dell, Desire by Gender, 142; cf. Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 20. 97 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 14, 64. 98 Dell, Desire by Gender, 147. 99 Ibid.

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100 Sigal, ‘Courted in the Country’, 192, 205. 101 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition,  18–​21. 102 Dell, Desire by Gender, 146, 142. 103 Pastourelle knights act alone, and tend to remain anonymous even when assigning names to shepherdesses (Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 40, 22). ‘Typically’ the protagonist ‘is not changed by the encounter’ he relates (Dell, Desire by Gender, 144). In Latin pastourelles—​ and Harley Lyrics—​‘it is often implied that the speaker is a clericus’ (Reichl, ‘Debate Verse’, 237). 104 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 46, 48. 105 Ibid., 34, 50. By contrast, if G&J is a ‘performance-​poem’ voiced in parts (Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 118)—​five speeches are marked by marginal notation (‘J’ for Johane [115, 151], ‘G’ for Gilote [141, 260], and ‘Uxor’ [270])—​it offers a polyvalent challenge to such assumptions. For audiences of fabliaux and propretés des femmes, see Crocker (‘Provocative Body’, 12); Dove (‘Textual Intimacy’, 345). 106 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 40. 107 For spiritual ravishment, see Chapter 4. 108 Dell, Desire by Gender, 142. 109 Ibid., 152. G&J refuses the pattern in which the ‘woman must be brought under control’ so that ‘the knight can relate [his] adventure with a good chuckle’ (Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 62). 110 Originating in Provence but flourishing in northern France, pastourelle peaked by c.1300. Southern and northern groupings are ‘distinct’, the former ‘more refined’ and the latter bawdier (Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 3, 10, 8). English exemplars are few. 111 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 18. 112 Dell, Desire by Gender, 146. 113 Crocker, ‘Disfiguring Gender’, 342. 114 Sentences to follow are indebted to Levy’s review of fabliau scholarship in Comic Text, 1–​29; initial quotations from 7, 6 (paraphrasing Jean Rychner). Crocker similarly stresses the genre’s ‘hazy boundaries’ and ‘intermingling of voices’, with emphasis on its ‘continuous provocation’ via creative engagement with corporeality (‘Introduction’, 1, 4). 115 Levy, Comic Text, 6 (paraphrasing Nykrog). 116 Ibid., 8 (paraphrasing Honeycutt). 117 Ibid., 6 (paraphrasing Nykrog), 3 (citing Bédier). 118 Ibid., 19. 119 Ibid., 19 (paraphrasing van den Boogaard). 120 Nolan, ‘Anthologizing Ribaldry’. Two of these, unique to Harley, treat provincial knights and their households: La gagure, or L’esquier e la chaunbrere [The Wager, or The Squire and the Chambermaid] (#84, fol. 118) and Le chevaler et la corbaylle [The Knight and the Basket] (#82, fol. 115v); while two others, both genital fabliaux, survive in

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numerous continental manuscripts:  Les trois dames qui troverent un vit [The Three Ladies Who Found a Prick] (#75a, fol. 110) and Le chevaler qui fist les cons parler [The Knight Who Made Vaginas Talk] (#87, fol. 122v). The fifth, Le jongleur d’Ely et le roi d’Angleterre [The Jongleur of Ely and the King of England] (#75, fol. 107v), crosses genres as resolutely as Gilote et Johane and is likewise unique. Nolan (ibid., 292–​294) calls Jongleur an ‘exercise in ribaldry’ that ‘borders on being a moral dit’ while drawing on ‘the lai, the pedagogical dialogue, and the exemplum’ (cf. Reichl, ‘Debate Verse’, 230–​233). All except G&J (Quire 7) appear in Quires 12–​14. 121 Levy, Comic Text, 18–​19 (paraphrasing Hines). 122 Hines, Fabliau in English, 37–​42. Despite its fabliau richness and ME literary credentials, Harley 2253 receives only passing mention (ibid., 39). Cf. Nolan, ‘Anthologizing Ribaldry’, 289–​290. 123 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 194–​199. 124 Wilson, Anglo-​Saxon Attitudes, 268. 125 Ibid., 232, 244. 126 Cf. ibid., 138:  ‘I’m quite convinced, my dear fellow, that a proper study of history is going to contribute … to the making of a better world, and in that study, the knowledge of our beginnings is going to play its part.’ 127 For arguments that grant fiction the same cognitive value as scientific and social-​scientific thought experiments, see Klauk, ‘Thought Experiments’; Dohrn, ‘Counterfactual Explanation’. 128 Closing comments by Zrinka Stahuljak and Matthew Fisher, ‘The Future of the Past’, Los Angeles, 2011. 129 See Introduction. 130 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 107; Kennedy, ‘Poems about Love’, 55. Another way to put it is that Revard reads not Gilote et Johane itself, so much as the poem ‘in its manuscript context’ (‘Wife of Bath’, 119). 131 Ker, Facsimile, xi; see Chapter  2 for discussion. Pilgrimages in the Holy Land continues on to Quire 8, where it is followed by more geo-​ devotional French prose: Les pardouns de Acres [The Pardons of Acre] (#39, fol. 70), which describes acts of penance by which pilgrims may reduce their time in Purgatory. This text’s final prayer (‘Qe Dieus eit merci de los vyfs e les mortz. Amen’ [May God have mercy on the living and the dead. Amen, 43–​44]) may—​vaguely—​‘recall the closing to Gilote et Johane’, but to assert that ‘it is nearly the same phrasing’ (Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 122) is unsustainable. 132 Lerer, ‘Idea of the Anthology’, 1254; Nolan, ‘Anthologizing Ribaldry’, 326; Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 103; Fein, ‘Compilation’, 69; Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 96. 133 Revard (‘Wife of Bath’, 122; ‘Gilote et Johane’, 130) and Fein (CH, II.6, 409) alike suggest that Quire 7’s erotic desires are contained by the orthodox framing of #38–​39.

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134 Reed, Debate Poetry, 385, 179–​180. 135 Ibid., 199, with debts to Howell (‘Reading the Harley Lyrics’, 639–​ 640), who finds in Quire 7–​8 lyrics an ‘elaborate’ and ‘artful’ (625) pattern of ‘antithetical dialogue’, in ‘regular alternation of point of view’ (633). 136 ‘He has arranged these texts so that they illuminate each other … as do the Canterbury Tales’ (‘Wife of Bath’, 119). Turville-​Petre (England the Nation, 211)  also reads Harley via Chaucer, but see Nolan (‘Anthologizing Ribaldry’, 291)  and Fein (‘Compilation’, 68) for more cautious formulations. 137 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 117, 119, 121; ‘Four Fabliaux’, 111, 112, 113, 114, 124; ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 95, 108; ‘Gilote et Johane’, 122, 124, 129, 130, 132, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143; ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 278; etc. 138 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 124, 122; ‘Gilote et Johane’, 138. 139 Saint-​Gelais, ‘Counterfictionality’, 244. 140 ‘I never knew a woman who took a husband /​who sooner or later didn’t repent’ [61–​62]. Revard admits she’s ‘not the marrying kind’, but presses family upon Gilote nonetheless (‘Wife of Bath’, 119). Precisely unlike Chaucer’s Wife, when Gilote speaks of the ‘wo that is in mariage’ it is hypothetically, not from ‘experience’ [CT, III.D.1–3]. 141 In her only other reference to childrearing, Gilote teaches Uxor a playacting scheme for regaining her husband’s good graces (and control of her ‘doweyr’ [‘dower’, 283]): ‘Behold the woman! Behold the child! /​Dear husband, keep your promise!’ [306–​307]. For children (lost and unborn) as special sites of ‘optative regret’ and of literary counterfactualism generally, see Miller, ‘Metaphysics’, 787. 142 Georgianna, ‘Nationalism’, 35. Georgianna describes medieval studies’ search ‘for the origins of a fixed national [identity]’, which it located ‘in a mythical Anglo-​Saxon past’ (35–​37). Angus Wilson’s professor of Anglo-​Saxon history would approve. 143 Clanchy, Memory, 225; Crane, ‘AN Cultures’, 48–​49. An annotated copy of Bibbesworth opens BL Additional 46919, a trilingual sermon-​ notebook/​lyric miscellany produced by Hereford Franciscan William Herebert (d.1333), which shares items with Harley 2253 (Reimer, Works of Herebert, 8–​10); cf. Introduction. 144 Fisher, ‘Language Policy’, 1173; cf. Crane, ‘AN Cultures’, 55, 58. 145 For French as a ‘prestige [language] with pan-​European currency’ rivalling Latin, see Putter and Busby, ‘Francophonia’, 1.  Crane maintains that ‘within England … French was the reverse of a lingua franca’:  not an enabler of communication, but a learned argot designed to delimit audience range (‘AN Cultures’, 48). 146 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 119. 147 Nolan, ‘Anthologizing Ribaldry’, 289. 148 Ibid., 289–​290.

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149 Revard’s compulsive referencing of Shakespearean characters (‘Wife of Bath’, 118, 123) culminates in the Harley scribe becoming ‘more like Mercutio—​or Chaucer’s Theseus or Pandarus—​than he is like one of his book’s lyrical lovers’ (124). Revard’s ‘Fabliau Manuscripts’ and ‘Gilote et Johane’ tie Harley 2253, ever more tenuously, to European literary anthologies (Boccaccio, Carmina Burana, Arabian Nights) and scholarly compendia (Petrus Alphonsus, Andreas Capellanus, Matthew de Vendome). 150 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 119. 151 Ibid., 118. 152 Sedgwick, Between Men, 17. 153 Scahill, ‘Trilingualism’, 18. 154 Revard, ‘Wife of Bath’, 118. 155 In April 2005, Literature Network Forums [www.online-​literature. com/​forums/​showthread.php?6057-​Wife-​of-​Bath-​an-​abortionist] hosted a debate entitled ‘Wife of Bath an abortionist?’ At another extreme lies Puhvel (‘Remedies of Love’), who manages to consider both aphrodisiacs and serial poisoning of husbands without imagining the possibility of contraception. 156 Sigal, ‘Courted in the Country’, 197–​198. 157 Smith, Pastourelle Tradition, 45. 158 Crocker (‘Disfiguring Gender’, 346) notes the unsettling ‘challenge [to] men’s social authority’ that comes with ‘contesting men’s sexual fitness’. 159 Grethlein and Krebs, Time and Narrative. 160 Birns, ‘To Aleppo’, 364. 161 Ibid., 364–​365. 162 Wogan-​Browne, ‘Reading the World’, 126. 163 Revard, ‘Gilote et Johane’, 130. 164 Murdoch, Popular Bible, 165. 165 Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 121. 166 Burns, Bodytalk, 25, 108. 167 Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep, 3, 9. 168 Ibid., 9, 3–​4. 169 Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 65.

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4 Dying with Harley 2253: last lyric things

With its single-​minded pursuit of the topic of death, across multiple Harley quires and genres, Chapter  4 resembles Chapter  2 (‘Captives among us’), with its similarly cordoned-​off attention—​ in that case, to the manuscript’s post-​expulsion remembrance of Hereford’s Jews. But this final chapter also recalls our first (‘Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics’), in the focus it trains on the collection’s best-​ known items. The Harley manuscript geographies traced during that foray, with their featuring of embowered western levedis [ladies], operated on a terrestrial scale. Chapter 1, and so too Chapter 3 (‘Histoire imparfaite’), unfolded along earthly routes and pertained to this-​worldly communities: the familial, the regional, the cosmopolitan; women’s affiliations and men’s attempts to control them. By contrast, the ‘last lyric things’ and practical devotions of the present chapter have next-​worldly concerns. Moving beyond the ‘secular’ love songs that dominate our book’s early to middle parts (Quires 7–​8), to embrace the ‘religious’ portion of the Harley Lyric corpus (texts which cluster in Quires 8–​9), we migrate away from nostalgic desires for coterie emplacement, meditating instead upon spiritual-​eschatological displacement—​the sort that a confrontation with mortality inevitably brings. Scholars describe medieval death as a perennial growth industry. But modern conceptions that equate the Middle Ages with death culture derive from social and artistic obsessions that either develop, or sharply intensify, in the wake of the mid-​fourteenth-​ century Black Death—​a trauma that brought an end to, among much else, the era of the trilingual insular miscellany. To disentangle how Harley 2253, a pre-​plague miscellany, engages with the spatial challenges that mortality raises in a manner divergent from how post-​plague compilations do, requires that we attend to later formulations about the meaning of dying. Harley items that dance

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with death (or relocate us spiritually by means of it) are never far to seek, anywhere in the book’s fifteen quires and 140+ folios. But neither do we encounter, in this ebullient collection, quite so morbid an obsession with coming endyngs as will haunt later imaginations. Pestilence casts a powerful historiographical shadow—​one so dark that its eschatological trauma tends to eclipse even texts that were produced before King Death’s advent. After considering early lyric’s interface with matters of periodization, and providing a primer on medieval death, ‘Dying with Harley 2253’ raises the question of whether the Harley manuscript may, in a late-​added final booklet (Quire 15), function as a proto-​ Ars moriendi. Pre-​eminent among plague-​inspired genres, these multimedia handbooks on ‘the craft of dying’ served, in manuscript as well as early print form, increasingly to codify and script late medieval end-​of-​life experiences. But whatever genuflections Harley 2253’s closing quire may perform, via its Anglo-​Norman devotions and orthodox Latin treatises, our manuscript’s earlier English pieces are not so easily overwritten. For these literary meditations, highly artful by comparison, propose death-​facing trajectories and afterlife orientations all their own: quintessentially lyric perspectives that refuse to be theologically gainsaid. The Harley manuscript archives more than one kind of medieval dying. Put spatially, we might say it models plural approaches to the acute locational crisis—​Wher next shal Y fare?—​that mortality produces. Geography plays a determinant role in the codicological encounter between amatory lyric and Last Things, because to die, in either a Harley miscellany or Ars moriendi context, is pre-​eminently a movement between places. Appreciation of the sublime extremities to which medieval lyric delivers its reader will help us discern the surprising ways in which modern encounters with lyric form and ideology—​often just as death-​bent—​owe debts to the early exemplars whose eschatologies underlie their own. They don’t always acknowledge it, but poems featured by practitioners of what has been called the ‘New Lyric Studies’ prove nearly as death-​bent as Harley devotions are. A glimpse into the Hereford plague pit In 2010 comparative DNA analysis ‘resolved a longstanding debate about the aetiology of the Black Death’. The bacterium Yersinia pestis (borne by fleas on rats) was confirmed as the ‘causative agent’ in the bubonic plague responsible for the Great Pestilence

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of 1348–​1351. An international research consortium cross-​indexed skeletal remains from mass graves at sites across Europe, including three excavated in the precincts of Hereford Cathedral. Tooth-​ pulp from Hereford plague pits helped plot the ‘geographical spread of the disease’, providing researchers with ‘a paradigm for historical reconstruction of the infection’ in terms of ‘routes followed’. It seems bubonic plague did not proceed along a metropolitan Paris to London to points west itinerary, but leapt to the Welsh Marches direct from southern France—​an ‘axis of infection … not intuitively obvious from historical records’.1 As established via plague-​ pit aetiology, the routes travelled by the Black Death resemble, in their Provence to provincial Herefordshire leap, the geographical process of contagion displayed by another public health threat rampant in those years: vernacular love-​lyric, some contours of whose genre mapping we tracked in Chapter 1 (and saw contested in Chapter 3). Certain that ‘Heo me wol to dethe bryng /​ Longe er my day’ [she will bring me to my death long before my time], one Harley manuscript sufferer—​as documented in the text just prior to Gilote et Johane in Quire 7, A wayle whyt ase whalles bon [A Beauty White as Whale’s Bone] (#36, fol. 67)—​records for posterity the swift onset and awful progression of his symptoms: ‘Me thuncheth min herte wol breke atwo /​ For sorewe ant syke’ [it seems to me my heart will break in two, from sorrowing and sighing] [58–​59, 14–​15]. There obtains across medieval literature a structural affinity between love-​ sickness and pestilence. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale explores ‘the mutual operations of love and mortality’ using ‘moments in which the power of the gaze and bodily malady intersect’, such that desirous looking ‘carries a pestilential force’,2 while Pearl ‘interrogates, understands, and assimilates the pestilence’ through grimly affective ‘images of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection that existed long [beforehand]’.3 For Simon Gaunt, ‘[to] explore what is at stake in the ubiquitous association of love with death’ in medieval literature is above all to examine lyric: for ‘lyric articulates an unrealizable desire that sustains itself through its very unrealizability’, with death conceptualized ‘as a consequence of being in love’.4 Ardis Butterfield has shown how, formally and materially, ‘the very intractability of much medieval short verse’ to literary-​historical grand narratives and genre categories ‘has much to teach critics of all periods’.5 But what we call medieval lyric also undergoes internal development, proving intractable in its own time (inclined to ‘struggle with orthodoxies

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and institutions’, María Rosa Menocal finds6), even while providing verbal-​behavioural frameworks to which readers ‘could assimilate the circumstances of their own lives’.7 One way vernacular lyric develops is via deployment of Latin rhetorical practices, such as contestatory voicing.8 Other innovations come in the form’s exploitation of material formats, textual situations, and community enmeshments.9 But most profound of all are the changes that come—​ to literary form and religious practice alike—​ as a consequence of the exegetical ‘reconstruction of [erotic] desire’ for ‘innovative spiritual’ ends by Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153), in his influential Sermons on the Song of Songs.10 Jessica Brantley finds, in foregrounding Carthusian meditative reading, that a performative voicing of lyric texts determines the ‘spatial disposition’ of ‘what happens in’ a devotional miscellany, with implications for relations between lyric, codex, community, and spiritual practice.11 Traditional hallmarks of periodization tend to frame approaches to early lyric content. Seth Lerer has described Middle English lyric origins as indebted to ‘Anglo-​ Saxon philosophical concerns with the transitoriness of human works’, filtered through a ‘matrix of Old English elegy, religious polemic, and vernacular chronicle’. For Lerer, insular lyric becomes ‘a genre of the grave’ after partaking of a ‘preoccupation with architectural form and topographical manipulation’ introduced by the conquering Normans.12 Reinforcing this linkage is Rosemary Woolf’s The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (1968), which divides its (still-​authoritative) analysis by subperiod (Marian Lyrics, Passion Lyrics, and Lyrics on Death receive two sections each), on grounds that an ‘unmistakeable divide’ in style and content ‘occurs in the last few decades of the fourteenth century’.13 ‘Dying with Harley 2253’ builds upon such genealogical work by featuring the role played in our assessment of Middle English lyric—​and in lyric’s reciprocal assessment of us—​by the radically proximate trauma (for those who knew Harley in the fourteenth century) of the Black Death. Vernacular poetry has established links to pestilence, not only in canonical literary expression (Chaucer and Pearl as above, Petrarch, Guillaume de Machaut, Boccaccio, etc.) but in oral history and popular culture. Whatever its folkloric backstory, the Anglo-​American nursery rhyme ‘Ring around the Rosie’ archives deep-​seated memories of a link between vernacular lyric play (‘A pocket full of posies’) and demographic collapse:  ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down’.14 Dread of ‘dreri Domesdai’ [dreary Doomsday], as established in Quire 6 of the Harley miscellany, where fleshly

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‘faunyng’ [caressing] brings chilling, ‘fol colde’ ends [#27.6, 30, 54], can seem a long way from the vitality of lyric love that Quire 7 exalts (and which Quires 8–​9 reconfigure spiritually). Yet as we’ll see, love and death’s linked geographies in Harley 2253 help map a structural relation between the historical trauma of the Great Pestilence and the literary phenomenon of early English lyric. One of the Harley manuscript’s first English items—​also, its first lyric—​is the metaphysical tongue-​teaser known as Earth unto Earth (#24b, fol. 59v). This Quire 6 text sets semantic and thematic terms for the elaborate sequence of erotic encounters, existential complaints, and devotional excursions that will follow. Even by early Middle English standards, the poem is notable for its inverted syntax and provocative ambiguity, in particular its puzzling alternation (or is it communion?) between incarnational theology and bodily dissolution. Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh; 

 Earth took of earth earth   with woe; Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh;  earth drew another earth to   the earth; Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh;   earth laid earth in an earthen   pit {coffin}; Tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh. then earth had of earth, earth   enough.  [1–​4]

So runs the text in its entirety. The two longest words contain only six letters, yet to unpack these four lines could take all day—​ maybe until the end of days. As Edmund Reiss quips, the poem is ‘something of a riddle’—​so it won’t do to deflate its ‘august’ pretensions with too assiduous a crib.15 Critics have tended to assail this poem with much semantic and theological prodding, but for present purposes basic orientation is enough. The key point, by way of gloss, is that ‘erthe’—​which appears three times per line—​ signifies everything from dirt to landscape to the created world, from worm-​eaten viscera to manifest Godhead, from live human beings to the abstraction of death. But rather than rummage further among the broken sarcophagi of early lyric, better to leave these remains undisturbed. It will be enough to let Erthe toc of erthe hover before us as we proceed, beckoning like an existential crossword. My point in invoking it has been to establish that, even before the pestilence, English lyric is about death—​in an intimate,

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stark way, but also a playful, hopeful way. For Woolf, Earth’s riddling qualities ‘[imply] synthesis’ and demonstrate the ‘intricate unity of God’s plan’.16 ‘Tho heuede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh’:  if eventually, Earth had enough of being earth, so may we, as earth-​ bound readers ourselves, look with confidence to transfiguration. Or at least, so things stood when this poem was copied, circa 1330s, along with most of the rest of the Harley manuscript. In Reiss’ view this ‘brutally harsh’ poem wears at its closing ‘the smile of someone watching a hanging’.17 Certainly Earth’s tone, among other features (rhyme, alliteration, repetition), gives evidence of furtive artistry. But in my reading, these verses that begin Harley’s engagement with lyric—​ lines of spectacular concentration—​are considerably less negative. Instead they revel in an embrace of geographical paradox, which is to say, of earthly death and its transportational promises. Taken overall, Harley 2253’s lyric confrontations with mortality respond to the question of how to die in a spirit that differs markedly from that which characterizes its later cluster of death-​preparation texts (prayers, mass-​lists, and devotions). Vernacular lyric’s ‘insubordination’, it has been said, ‘is all too often read and set out in ways that make it respectable again’.18 By asking how Harley manuscript texts, lyric and instructional, model competing experiences of period dying, orthodox and heterodox, we shall generate multiple orders of critical payoff. The crossover Harley Lyric we encounter at life and world’s end—​at once sacred and secular, co-​opted and elusive—​ becomes terrain wherein death and periodization, literary history and geographical renewal, fold together. In Shards of Lyric (1994), described by its author as a bid to ‘restore … the radical presentness of the medieval past’, María Rosa Menocal locates the origins of lyric in exile—​specifically, the sense of historical dislocation produced by ‘the normative schoolchild’s vision’ of the year 1492 as ‘the beginning of the modern world’.19 Menocal attends to history’s iconic ‘act of [geographical] exploration’ because ‘the Discovery of the New World’ has a ‘[neat] parallel in the Rediscovery of our true heritage’—​the classical culture ‘that makes us modern and civilized, again, after the Darkness’. Like many since, Menocal labours to dismantle traditional periodization’s ‘amazing cartoon’ in which ‘the medieval is always backward, usually evil’.20 To restore unto a ‘messy and cacophonous’ culture its ‘highly productive hybridity’—​eclectic, polymorphic, syncretic, multilingual; Arabic and Jewish as well as Christian—​she utilizes vernacular lyric, a ‘poetry of … marked

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pluralism’.21 Reference has been made to the ‘social subversion’ and ‘struggle with orthodoxies and institutions’ Menocal finds ‘implicit in [lyric] poetics’. The form ‘always seems to keep bad company’, ‘[one] peculiarity of the love-​lyric in its hey-​day’ being how it ‘[consorts] secretly in back rooms with the heterodoxies of the day’.22 The alternating consonance and incongruity of such a view as regards Harley 2253 should be apparent. But most arresting about Menocal’s vision are its parameters. Western England (and even northern France) lies beyond ‘the heartland of lyric’, ‘a map … shaped by the contours of the Mediterranean’. Menocal further excludes from her ‘axiomatic definition’ of a salvageable ‘medieval’ era the years of the Black Death, with its ‘palpable darkness and host of cruel repressions’: ‘If there are rips in the fabric of history, then surely the one here is among the most glaring.’23 But that rip is so glaring, for some communities, poems, and books, that it cannot be mended, let alone bracketed away. An introduction to medieval dying With apologies to Menocal, medieval culture is death culture. As scholar after scholar testifies, the sensibilities of the Middle Ages were ‘dominantly negative’, to the extent that ‘each step for the traveller through life in the [period]’ was but ‘a stage in the process of dying’.24 For Jean Delumeau, ‘some civilizations are more fearful’ than others; for this one, ‘growing fear and insecurity [were] characteristic’.25 Johan Huizinga stands out as ‘the historian most responsible’ for the view of the Middle Ages as ‘a morbid, depressed and decadent era, during which society and culture were in collapse’.26 For John Aberth, Huizinga ‘dwells overmuch … on the darkness of late medieval life, and not enough on its light’.27 Yet Aberth himself distils the medieval experience into four themes:  famine, war, plague, and death. Simply put, to attribute to the Middle Ages an ‘obsession with death and dying’ remains a scholarly commonplace.28 But if medieval means macabre, lost in this historical shorthand is Menocal’s point: that most treatments of medieval death culture examine the late end of the period. Earlier, the culture managed to strike a balance between recognition of ‘the beauty of the world’ and the ‘savage desolation’ that dominates artistic expression from the mid-​fourteenth century onward.29 ‘The dead on [thirteenth-​ century] tombs’ strike Émile Mâle as ‘young, handsome, transfigured, already suited to participation in eternal life’:  ‘the makers

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of these effigies, far from fearing death, seem almost to love it, whereas those at the close of the fourteenth century come suddenly to see it as a thing of horror’.30 For Philippa Tristram, who examines literature’s ‘antithetical figures of life and death’, late medieval culture had lost its earlier assurance: ‘The bright face of God is no longer glimpsed through Creation, for the deficiencies of the created world are not indications of the perfection to come, so much as tokens of separation and dissolution.’ Even Chaucer’s famously elusive Retraction is evidence of a rift between sacred and profane:  ‘[any] religious sense’, rules Tristram, is ‘separate from what his imagination can discover’.31 The reason is not far to seek. After the plague, Delumeau observes, medieval people were ‘especially afraid’.32 Justifiably so—​in the Diocese of Hereford, nearly half of them were gone.33 As historical events go, the Black Death is unrivalled (except by the likes of 1492). Few dispute plague’s ‘seminal role in transforming the west’, with even Annales School adherents admitting its exceptional status as counterbalance to longue durée forces and purely structural historical explanations.34 There aren’t any out-​and-​out plague deniers, yet some scholars have ‘grown sceptical’ of the pestilence being ‘invoked as the compendious explanation of all those changes which make an end to the Middle Ages’: mobility of labour, religious extremism, growth of towns, new individualism, vernacular revolution, class insurgence, political absolutism—​the list goes on.35 Critically speaking, there are two camps: those who see plague as originator of change, and those who stress its role as accelerator of conditions already present.36 As regards late medieval death culture, all grant that the advent of plague—​especially the ‘spectacle of open grave pits’, ‘in which rich and poor alike’ lay grotesquely levelled—​ did much to ‘bring into prominence, and even render into obsessions’, certain pre-​existing elements of the culture.37 In short, pestilence had a decisive role in altering the tenor and cultural stakes of the medieval experience of dying—​ratcheting upward the existential intensity present since Anglo-​Saxon times. Standing at the plague pits beside Hereford Cathedral, where excavated bodies emerge looking ‘as though they were tipped in from wheelbarrows’,38 mortality becomes something different:  at once more visceral and more alienating. The reassuring space-​time of Christian eschatology seems to warp—​if not weep. The principle of the Black Death as an accelerator of forces already present offers purchase on key features of late medieval

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death culture itself. Among the many artistic repercussions of plague, four stand out. Architectural sculpture saw the development of Transi Tombs, two-​tiered cadavers in which grim skeletons on top refute the pretensions to resurrected perfection of the patron bodies caged below.39 Second: the motif of the Danse Macabre, which ranks as the ultimate ‘pictorial and poetic summation’ of the Black Death’s ‘eschatological trauma’.40 Some propose a derivation from plague’s characteristic rigor mortis, or peculiar, jerky death-​rattle. A third form connected to plague is the theme of the Three Living and the Three Dead, likewise visual and literary, in which errant knights, often kings, encounter later versions of themselves in varying states of dissolution, afterlife torment, or grace.41 Such works highlight the importance of geographical location to one’s bodily (post-​Judgement) future. Desires to communicate with the walking dead also show how views of the afterlife became reciprocal, and increasingly transactional: tied to prayer production and chantry mass offerings designed to speed the departed (or not yet departed) on their way to a better place.42 A fourth manifestation of changing styles in medieval dying was codicological, but in an instructional more than imaginative register. The Ars moriendi, handbooks on the craft of dying, sought to prepare their audiences for coming ends by providing prototypes of good death.43 The Virgin Mary’s ‘dormition’, in particular, provided an ‘idealized picture of “holy dying” ’ in which death is ‘fully “tamed” and under control’.44 Each of these forms was invented prior to 1350. But all became ubiquitous, period-​defining phenomena subsequently. So too Earth upon Earth: Harley 2253’s and one other copy pre-​date plague, but dozens of others, expanded and sometimes folded into Ars moriendi, populate the century afterward.45 With changes to cultures of dying and a new ‘prominence of the dead’ in this world came altered understandings of the next world, specifically its geography.46 The twelfth-​century ‘birth of Purgatory’ looms for Jacques Le Goff as a key sign of the ‘growing spatial conception of the afterlife’.47 Post-​plague, the ‘emergent “individualism” ’ reflective of evolving death culture takes the form of increased recourse to monumental architectural forms and geographical metaphorics as means of preparing for one’s own death.48 The process sees elaborate codification in the Ars moriendi, which place supreme emphasis on disposition of the deathbed, the domesticated layout of which includes fetish-​level attention to not just what is said and done, but where. Expiring bodies, flanked by

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attendants brandishing necessary tokens, are arranged into reproducible tableaux.49 The scholar most associated with Ars moriendi as a bibliographic technology of dying is Phillipe Ariès.50 Ariès emphasizes this multimedia genre’s formative role in producing modern subjectivity. Whereas ‘today [death] has become wild’, Ariès describes the medieval variety as ‘tamed’, in essence ‘a public ceremony’. As evidence he asserts the ‘simplicity with which the rituals of dying were accepted and carried out’ in this ‘household sort of death’.51 ‘Tamed’ death was ‘a ritual organized by the dying person himself, who presided over it and knew its protocol’. Over time, death ‘became the occasion when man was most able to reach an awareness of his life’: ‘in the mirror of his own death each man would discover the secret of his individuality’.52 Such a style of dying as accounting (‘supremely the death of the individual as opposed to the community’), which Ariès terms ‘personal death’ or ‘one’s own death’, contrasts with that previously practised—​the integrated household expiration earlier medievals experienced.53 We have to jettison Lerer’s insight on Anglo-​Saxon poetic preoccupations with ‘the confines of the coffin’ to make this periodization work, but such are the costs of a sleek historical paradigm. Ariès has not gone without critique.54 Much scholarship emphasizes the ‘new drive for penitential self-​awareness’ that culminated in 1215’s Fourth Lateran Council, and the subsequent arrival in England of proselytizing mendicant orders.55 Vincent Gillespie finds it ‘not accidental that the growth of popular affective piety’ was coincident with ‘an upsurge in circulation of moral and penitential lyric’. Underselling the uptick in market share enjoyed by all things mortality related following King Death’s accession, Gillespie characterizes death preparation, in its panoply of cultural forms, as ‘a growth industry’ throughout the period. It was ‘never too soon to start preparing’ for Last Things.56 But why lyric and death? Much as for Menocal, who ties lyric to 1492’s yoking of expulsion and discovery, the conundrum remains salient. Why pair such a slender form with the monumental business of dying—​particularly lyric in its labile Harley ‘crossover’ guise? Are not didactic wall frescoes, tomb sculptures, and reanimated kings more fitting to the theme? As we shall discover, the (always epochal) experience of dying depends not just on historical era—​lucky or unlucky generational timing—​but on the specific generic avenue one takes towards that universal mortal destination. For Gillespie, medieval vernacular lyric proves suitable to

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confrontation with the hereafter, insofar as such poems construct, from the ‘aphoristic bedrock’ of their semantic inheritance, the voiced ‘illusion of private feelings, spontaneously expressed’.57 Whether such a (classic) definition of lyric has full traction in a charnel-​pit context is an issue to confront at chapter’s end; en route, we’ll revisit certain of the material tensions that affect Harley 2253’s operation as a miscellany. For now, what’s essential is to flag lyric’s ruminative and rogue nature. If it is ‘invented in bitter exile’ (and thereby helps produce modern subjectivity),58 we must continually ask, exile from what? To ask how questions of dying are lyric questions redirects attention again—​as with anything death related—​to late medieval case studies and codicological contexts.59 Thus Gillespie, focused on moral and penitential lyric, gravitates to the capacious Vernon manuscript (c.1390–​1400, West Midlands), whose ‘canon forming’ assemblage of vernacular lyrics offers ‘a pattern book or portfolio of [such] verse’, and so ‘provide[s]‌for all moral/​spiritual needs of the reader’.60 Distilled into a ‘separate quire’ at the end of the codex, ‘Vernon’s lyrics place the abstract teachings found earlier in the manuscript into tightly realised and carefully argued verse scenarios.’61 An even more enthusiastic embrace of late medieval death culture comes in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302 (c.1426–​ 1431, Shropshire), the work of chantry priest and lyric poet John the Blind Audelay. Mixing verse and prose in Latin and English and comprising devotional instructions, prayers, and unique literary texts (including the densely alliterative Three Dead Kings), Audelay’s miscellany shares certain features with Harley 2253, from their richness as lyric compendia to their West Midlands gentry-​household contexts.62 Fein stresses how ‘ending well was the habit of Audelay’s moral and daily existence, one that extended … not just to the professional business of saving souls, but also to the acts of composing verse and shaping an anthology’. Indeed ‘[Audelay] arranged these texts to inspire good dying’.63 Like Vernon and Harley 2253 before it, Douce 302 takes the codicological shape it does because its maker ‘continually sought appropriate endings’ and ‘continually ruminated upon his own’.64 Given medieval literary history’s habit of reading the Harley manuscript in light of later compilatory practice (Introduction, Chapter  3), the temptation is to search within our multilingual, multitext codex for a version of Blind Audelay’s post-​ plague obsessions with deathbed atonements and good ends. But if

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scholars of medieval death insist upon the trench-​like significance of the pestilence, whether as initiator or accelerator of change, then whatever engagements with Last Things we encounter in pre-​plague Harley 2253 should little resemble those codified in death-​culture phenomena popular later, like the Transi Tomb, Danse Macabre, and Three Living/​Three Dead. How, then, does the Harley manuscript teach its readers to die in a way that differs from how later art forms and handbooks do? And where—​in its three languages, fifteen quires, 140+ folios, and 120+ texts—​to locate such difference? Last quire, last things The next step in this inquiry requires reading the Harley manuscript not in literary-​interpretive terms, but in a material-​textual vein. The bulk of the codex, as we have seen, was copied by a single scribe in the 1330s. Quires 5–​14, folios 49–​133, contain more than ninety items, including virtually all the literary texts (vernacular lyrics, political songs, fabliaux, debate poems, conduct literature, the romance King Horn, religious apocrypha like the Harrowing of Hell) for which the book is known. Less celebrated are the first forty-​eight folios, Quires 1–​4, comprising saints’ lives and biblical material in French verse and prose.65 Because these items were not copied by the main scribe (apart from rubrication) and include no English, they were excluded from Ker’s facsimile. By contrast, the Harley manuscript’s final quire (fols. 134–​140) is the work of the main hand (Scribe B). But bibliographically speaking this material is unlike the rest—​both his literary additions (in three languages) and the French hagiographical stock he used as starter. For one thing, Quires 1–​4 (which our coordinating scribe inherited) and 5–​14 (which he produced himself) are composed alike of bifolio gatherings, while Quire 15 consists of bound singletons: unfolded vellum sheets.66 For another, this quire’s seventeen texts are unusual orthographically. Revard’s palaeographical analysis (which compares the Harley scribe’s literary work against his dated work as a legal scrivener [1314–​1349]) indicates that whereas Quires 5–​14 were produced in the 1330s, Quire 15’s singletons were copied later—​ chiefly 1340–​ 1342, although the final items ‘contain forms matching almost exactly’ his 1347–​1348 legal charters.67 Thirdly, where the two-​column mise-​en-​page of the French hagiographic quires (fols. 1–​48) provided a model for his initial layout of texts (fols. 49–​133),68 Quire 15’s texts differ from the rest

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in being crowded more ‘densely on the page’.69 Taken together, these material-​textual differences suggest Quire 15’s items were ‘deliberately assembled as a group’.70 This bibliographic assessment aligns suggestively with the formal and linguistic character of these same texts. Another way Quire 15 shows itself a section apart in its own codex is that, unlike all but one of the preceding nine quires, it has no items in the literary Middle English that has become this manuscript’s calling card. Also unusually, all but two items are in prose. Scattered throughout Harley 2253 are texts of practical religion, but the book’s final quire is notable for how, instead of drafting didactic texts into multi-​generic, debate-​driven conversations, here such items reinforce one another, with little thematic deviation. A simple list of items illustrates the uniform tenor of the booklet: 100. (AN prose) Occasions for Angels 101. (AN prose) Occasions for Psalms in French 102. (AN verse) Glory to God in the Highest in French 103. (Latin prose) Prayer of Confession 104. (AN prose) Prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady 105. (Latin prose) Prayer for Contrition 106. (AN prose) Reasons for Fasting on Friday 107. (AN prose) Seven Masses to Be Said in Misfortune 108. (AN prose) Seven Masses in Honour of God and   St Giles 108a. (AN prose) Prayer to the Three Kings 109. (Latin prose) All the World’s a Chess Board 109a. (Latin prose) Three Prayers that Never Fail 110. (Latin prose) Occasions for Psalms in Latin 111. (AN prose) Occasions for Psalms Ordained by   St Hilary of Poitiers 112. (Latin prose) Heliotrope and Celandine (Properties   of  Herbs) 113. (Latin prose) St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying 114. (AN/​Latin verse)  Against the King’s Taxes 115. (AN prose) Seven Hours of the Passion of   Jesus Christ 116. (Latin prose) The Martyrdom of St Wistan.71 Apart from Chess Board (#109), Against the King’s Taxes (#114) constitutes the quire’s one obvious outlier (it is also unique in garnering

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regular critical attention), but even it can be read as aligning thematically with the materials around it, as shortly will be seen. In sum, Quire 15’s content differences (genre, language, theme, tone) work in tandem with its codicological differences (mise-​en-​ page, foliation, orthography, date of completion) to establish the baseline otherness of this concluding ‘independent block’ of the manuscript.72 By proceeding as he does here, our scribe violates the  principles of literary compilatio he established previously in this, one of an anthologistic period’s paradigmatic undertakings. Were this clutch of late-​bethought texts to survive separately (and were his hand not there to betray a relation), there would be little of the Harley scribe’s rangy literary personality discernible in Quire 15:  no English lyric; little French verse or secular fare; no glint-​in-​eye debates on women’s nature, social comportment, seasonal metaphysics, or the vagaries of love. We wouldn’t know him from these gathered genuflections before orthodox authority and ecclesiastical practice. The ‘oppositional thematics’ critics find characteristic of his book, and so compelling about it, are conspicuous by their absence.73 Harley 2253’s closing quire of singleton folios is, finally, so at odds with the character, contents, and tenor of the rest of the manuscript, as to render it an afterthought to the bolder, livelier, more vernacular, and more various quires preceding. Delumeau would not be far wrong in calling it a chastened final thought. To what extent, then, can Harley’s fearful and deferential final quire be considered a species of death-​preparation manual? And if it is one, what manner of Ars moriendi does Quire 15 constitute? More to the literary-​historical point, what interpretive profit results from regarding this variegated miscellany as, among other things, a handbook on dying in advance of pestilence; before death became quintessentially medieval? Briefly, the answer is: many Quire 15 texts do feature death, and not just #113, Anselm’s Questions to the Dying (a culminating item for quire and collection). In fact, the business of Last Things is broached before the start of Harley’s concluding booklet. Item #99, the last text prior, is a (Latin/​AN) Prayer for Protection: ‘One who says [these words] … will not die a bad death, but will have a good end’ [ne de mal mort morra, mes bon fyn avera, 1–​2]. Occasions for Angels (#100), which launches Quire 15 proper, recalls this prayer by offering directions on how to summon ‘the angel who comes to comfort one during the passage to death’. The quire’s first items thus ‘define it as a didactic booklet of practical religion’.74 Occasions

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for Psalms (#101), coming next, matches scriptural incantations with life-​crisis situations, introducing thereby a death-​preparation ethos: here are verses to pronounce ‘if you wish to be freed’ [4]‌, ‘when you must go where you are afraid’ [6], or for ‘one who wishes that God remember him’ [1], especially ‘when you are in tribulation’ [19]. Subsequent items describe how daily recitation of another prayer (to the Virgin) ensures against ‘[dying] unshriven’ [#104.5], what Psalms are best for the ‘gravely ill’ [#111.49] or those being judged [15], or when advancing towards the Enemy [27], and why Fridays—​ eventful in Christian history—​ are for fasting (#106). Built around the reminder that ‘[On] Friday God was Crucified’ [11] and casting forward to another ‘Friday [when] Enoch and Elijah will battle with Antichrist’ [14], thirteen examples illustrate how this is a day about Last Days. With one exception (the Annunciation [9]), all these Fridays feature death, usually in violent form:  Herod’s slaughter of innocents [7–​8], David’s defeat of Goliath [4], Elijah beheaded [5], St Stephen stoned [13], St Peter crucified [10], and so on.75 Other Quire 15 texts invoke death-​ prep thematics more obliquely. Item #103, A Prayer of Confession—​designed ‘to prepare oneself for attending mass’ but which also makes ‘mention of the infernal angels’ (Fein III.349–​350)—​would prove useful at last shriving before an impending death. Seven Masses To Be Said in Misfortune (#107) gestures similarly towards crisis, with a list ‘intended to aid persons who find themselves in trouble’ (352)—​ not imminent death per se, but those fragile conditions ushering us towards it: ‘sadness, prison, poverty … sickness’ [1]‌. Item #108, Seven Masses in Honour of God and St Giles, references a legend about ‘guardian saint’ Giles of Provence, to whom, during celebration of a mass to obtain posthumous grace for Charlemagne, an angel delivered a letter revealing a mortal sin the emperor ‘had never dared confess’ (II.353). Thus Giles, who in years to come would be invoked for protection against the Black Death, helps ready a dying client (or celebrity purgatorial soul) for passage unto Paradise. Giles’ intercessory performance delivers us forward to Quire 15’s anchor text, a deathbed exchange (De interrogandi moribundis beati Anselmi, #113) that imparts a brisk, interactive character to Harley final’s booklet.76 But before examining St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying, a word on what comes afterward. Between Anselm and manuscript’s end, there are three texts. Formally, these make a disparate group: Item #114, Against the King’s Taxes, offers

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a spirited policy complaint in macaronic (AN/​Latin) verse; Item #115, a Contemplacioun de la passioun Jesu Crist, provides hourly subjects for devotional meditation in Anglo-​Norman prose;77 and Item #116, De martirio sancti Wistani, recounts the martyrdom of a monastic Mercian prince, in Latin prose (likely the Harley scribe’s own).78 The manuscript’s final three items thus embody different genres, take different forms, and make different language choices. One avenue of alignment lies in their mutual preoccupation with precisely Anselm’s topic:  worldly endings. Death is inherent to martyrdom (#116) and Passion-​devotion (#115). Against Taxes (#114) participates insofar as, while concerned primarily with foreign warmongering, wool purveyance, and bad royal counsel, it makes repeated reference to impending dooms and life’s fragility. Its first stanza warns ominously, ‘May our king and his household not perish’ [Nostre roy e sa meyne /​ Ne perire sinas, 3–​4] as a result of treacherous advice, while Stanza 2 reflects sagely that ‘On account of treason, one often sees many perish’ [Par tresoun, voit honme sovent /​Quam plures perire, 15–​16]. Eventually all pretence of non-​partisanship is discarded, when it is declared, concerning the bad counsellors of opposing factions: ‘Unless they mend their ways, they must then perish’ [S’il ne facent amendement, /​Tunc debent perire, 107–​108]. For quire-​minded scholars, the warning in Against Taxes that the rich will ‘face God’s harsh penalties’ links categorically with the attention to divine judgement that Anselm, a few folios prior, had foregrounded, and that surrounding items invoke.79 If the prayers, occasions, and other texts above reference death intermittently, St Anselm’s De interrogandi moribundis does so directly. This text’s manuscript location argues its culminating impact upon the social as well as literary undertakings of both final booklet and compilation overall. Designed to be asked of ‘a brother or sister who is near death’ [frater vel soror proximus vel proxima morti, 2], Anselm’s interrogation concludes with promise that ‘To whom the preceding words are pronounced before death, he will not taste everlasting death’ [mortem non gustabit in eternum,  26]. What intervenes are formulaic prompts for both dying subject and clerical attendant—​questions and answers.80 Of particular interest is the third question (‘You confess that you have not lived as well as you ought to have?’ ‘Yes’ [6]‌), after which gesture to worldliness, we proceed to repentance [7], correction [8], right belief [9], and thanksgiving [10]—​with reinforcement of Christ’s death as the sole mechanism of salvation [11]—​before exhortation, ‘while the

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soul remains in you, [to assemble] in this lonely death … all your faith’ [in hac sola morte totam fiduciam tuam constitue, 12–​13]. With insistent vigour, Anselm’s representative urges his imperilled client to ‘Throw yourself entirely into this death, cover yourself over entirely with this death, enclose yourself entirely in this death’ [Huic morti te totum vel totam inmitte, hac morte te totum vel totam contege, hac morte te totum vel totam involue, 12–​14].81 Let erthe embrace erthe, make an earthen urn of that erthe, and then cover it over with more erthe, one might say—​except that the mood here in Quire 15 (fol. 137), after nearly eighty leaves of vernacular voices have paraded by, differs markedly from what it was in Quire 6 (fol. 59v), when lyric first made its appearance. Where Earth was ruminative, crabbedly English, and elusive, Anselm is upbeat, coolly Latinate, and on-​task. But—​ Anselm and his rites notwithstanding—​ does Harley 2253 really subscribe, in final accounting, to so orthodox and settled an ethos? Does the sophisticated (by common assent) reader of this effervescent collection really commit ‘totum vel totam’, as here exhorted, to Anselm’s prescribed embrace of dissolution? ‘Entirely’—​as Complete Harley renders this already-​doubled Latin phrase—​is a strong word. Why does God’s interrogator need to say it three times? Is it because we readers (authentic and honorary medievals alike) are not otherwise likely to ‘enclose ourselves’ unreservedly in death [hac morte]?—​be it tamed, wild, personal, or some hybrid sort. Whether mid-​fourteenth-​century or latter-​day witnesses, we all carry plague’s pall, bear with us the nihilistic trauma of pestilence. Anselm’s surrogate calls our death lonely: ‘hac sola morte’ [this lonely death, 12] will be an experience that encloses, enfolds, subsumes us entirely [13–​14]. And yet, as in both the integrated community dying of earlier eras and the crowded deathbed tableaux of coming years, this final exchange—​prior to our solo embarkation towards next-​ place fortunes—​ is supremely social. The performative utterance towards which Anselm builds has its essence in human companionship, the simple grace of hospice care. Spoken words—​registering midway along a spectrum between lyrical and liturgical—​are the chief thing a dying person needs, the ritual balm one requires to ensure a good ending. Thus shall be effected our metaphysical relocation; our transportation from one world to another. After extracting from our ‘dying brother or sister’ a string of (just-​audible?) assents (‘Etiam’ [yes]; ‘Etiam’ [yes]; ‘Etiam’ [yes] [3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]), Anselm instructs its interlocutor to propose the following legal-​defence scheme: ‘And if the

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Lord God should wish to judge you, say “Lord, I interpose [obicio] the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between your judgement and me”  ’ [15–​17].82 Three times in succession (‘Et dic iterum’ [21]) is Christ’s death ritually joined with that of the dying subject, after which comes the (culminating, liberating) promise that ‘To whom the preceding words are pronounced before death, he will not taste everlasting death’ [26]. With a solicitous Jesu interposed between ‘wicked’ sinner [19] and the ‘Lord God’ sitting in judgement [16], flanked by ministering angels (#100) and sundry saintly advocates (#108, #108a, #111), with his mother Mary looking on beneficently (#104), and with at least one faithful companion attending, backed by good St Anselm (#113), this codex-​ending death is becoming less and less lonely. The evidence above provides grounds for concluding that Quire 15 centres on death preparation. One’s perspective on the booklet shifts, however, when we examine this same suite of items with a different eye: one seeking vitality, rather than dissolution. Many Quire 15 texts, not least those concerning worldly endings, are tenaciously optimistic. They emphasize Annunciation, Birth, and Incarnation; mysteries of grace, of salvation, of promise fulfilled. The sole reason unrelated to death given in Fasting on Friday (#106) was to commemorate ‘Gabriel’s [proclamation] to Our Lady … that Jesus would be born to her’ [9]‌. Prayers such as #102, a French translation of Gloria in excelsis Deo, may allude to Final Days and Judgement scenes [10–​11], but dwell more on Christian triumph, universal historical fulfilment, and the joy of supplication accepted. Indeed, #102 requests pertly that God ‘pardon us’ [nous pardonez] and ‘receive willingly [our] prayers’ [recevez a gré /​Les preeyeres que nous fesoms, 8–​9]; that, as surely ought to be the case, ‘you who sit on the Father’s right hand in majesty have mercy’ [10–​ 11]. Item #107’s directions for masses prescribe that Fridays be ‘of the Cross’ [13], but for other days, it proposes happier themes: ‘a Mass of the Trinity on Sunday’ [3], of ‘all angels’ on Monday [5], ‘Tuesday, of the Holy Spirit’ [7], ‘Wednesday, of St John the Baptist’ [9], and so on to ‘Saturday, of Our Lady’ [13]. The next item’s masses (St Giles, #108) place death at their centre point (‘La quarte de Pasche: “Resurexi”  ’ [The fourth of Easter: I am risen, 6]) but build towards and descend from this theological watershed with Annunciation [3] and Christmas [4] on one side, followed by Ascension [7], Pentecost [8], and Our Lady’s Assumption [9] on the other. Even more nativity-​oriented is #108a (Prayer to the Three Kings), which foregrounds not the post-​plague meme of

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Three Dead Kings, but instead the Three Magi, ‘crowned kings, who went to seek Jesus when he was born of the Virgin Mary’ [1–​2]. Item #112, on the properties of herbs, extends Quire 15’s undertow promotion of concord among the living: an application of heliotrope produces ‘calm speech’ [verba pacifica, 4–​5], while celandine ‘remove[s] all quarrels and contentions’ [10–​11] and ‘if it should be put under the head of a sick man, [foretells] if he is bound to die of that sickness’ [11–​12].83 Such examples illustrate the Harley manuscript’s signature condition of tonal and thematic mixedness, its commitment to the principle—​as Revard urges—​that everything is ‘[known] by its contrary’.84 Item #103, a Latin Prayer of Confession, features Christ’s death, but in such a way as to escort us from trauma [2–​3] through judgement [4]‌unto mercy [5]. We progress spiritually ‘by [means of] your Passion, and by the wood of your salvational cross [salutiffere crucis tue], and by the spilling of your sainted blood [sancti sanguinis tui]’ [2–​3]—​taking always the long view, with eyes on future removal to a place of grace. Items #102 (Gloria in excelsis) and #111 (Occasions for Psalms) likewise proceed through the valley of death unto a kingdom of mercy. Declining to dwell on the pain of maternal witness, #104 (Prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady) revels in the power of death to effect triumph. To this end it dilates (in added prose) upon ‘those ineffable joys God’s Son and yours made for you’, ‘when he rose’, when he ‘appeared visibly to you’, and ‘when he ascended’—​and so too later, when effecting Mary’s Assumption and heavenly Coronation [12–​16]. The compendium’s last item, which narrates a tale of treachery, can be read as reflection on the nearness of final reckoning. But another way to spin The Martyrdom of St Wistan (#116) is to downplay its hagiographic morbidity in favour of the transporting ‘column of light’ [columpna lucis, 29] that appears to mark the spot (10 miles from the Harley scribe’s Ludlow base) of temperate Wistan’s cynical murder. Wistan’s sanctity—​the model he offers to inheritors of his localized grace—​resides in his being a prince who ‘prefer[red] to become co-​heir of a heavenly rather than temporal realm’ [9–​10]. Texts like these establish a positive baseline, but Quire 15’s bright faith in the death-​defying, salvific end of the incarnational spectrum—​its commitment to balancing morbidity with hope—​ crystallizes in the booklet’s most unusual item:  All the World’s a Chess Board (#109).85 This satire-​cum-​allegory describes medieval social types in chess-​piece terms, but only after characterizing the

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existential gameboard upon which all mortal dramas play out: ‘one square is white but another black on account of the twofold state of life and death, of grace and sin’ [1–​2]. With a zest predictive of later estates satire, Chess Board revels in how stratified stations (king and pawn, rich and poor) are jumbled together ‘in one bag’ [de uno sacculo, 8], if not ‘during the passage through this world’ [in transitu huius seculi,  11], then thanks to death’s democratic inexorability.86 Where Ars moriendi of later vintage bring a sombre, regulated propriety to dying, Harley items like Chess Board insist upon our cosmic ecosystem’s delicate, checquerboard balance—​its patterned countervailing of dark and light. What kind of handbook on dying—​finally—​does the Harley manuscript’s late-​added and divergent Last Quire constitute? To the extent that we may understand this booklet as an early Ars moriendi, its seven affixed singletons pursue such work with a palpable difference, compared with post-​plague varietals of the form. Quire 15 stakes much on what some characterize as a thirteenth-​ century vision of human endeavour and its encompassing world. Despite bracing challenges to such a world’s (purportedly) unified Christian system, in this postlapsarian but pre-​pestilential forest of passions and theatre of devotions, ‘life and death’ [#109.2] still work dialectically. Transgression and penitence still balance one another, as do joy and pain, doctrine and complaint: ‘one square is white, but another black’, to signify the created world’s carnal and spiritual contiguity: the ‘twofold state’ [duplicem statum] of ‘grace and sin’ [1–​2]. In those days the system was not yet broken. Not, at least, for the provincial elites and invested clerks who interacted with books like this. To describe medieval death, definitively like Ariès does, as either ‘tamed’ or ‘personal’, communally ‘integrated’ or individuated and ‘lonely’, is to misapprehend the components of the culture. It is to miss these states’ elemental condition of crossover. Impatient to produce a dynamic modern subject, done with simple joys, superstitious fears, and high-​scholastic systemization, broad-​brush historiographical visions ignore the untidy divergences and routine evasions of medieval subjects and the cultural artefacts they produced. Notwithstanding a propensity to didacticism, medieval vernacular lyric—​as represented in the finest examples of the form, such as encountered in Harley 2253—​proves accomplished at registering such cultural ambivalence. It should come as little surprise that scholars invested in medieval religious lyric as a functional devotional genre—​themselves committed, not infrequently, to one or another form of institutional

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Christianity—​ have tended to bracket consideration of Harley exemplars, dismissing their inconstant theological tendencies and ‘melodious’ poetic propensities as ‘byways in the history of the form’.87 It will be the business of our next sections to ascertain how we readers of Harley are taught to approach our inevitable endings not by the book’s hastily copied and late-​affixed prayers, devotional occasions, and the like, but instead in certain moments of lyric ‘delicacy and lightness’88 featured earlier in our journey through the quires. In privileging the rogue poems that brass-​tacks scholars marginalize, and that Anselm has no time for or truck with, we shall discover that there is more than one medieval craft of dying, and more than one way to ‘embrace totally’ the experience of expiration. ‘Art-​ lyric’ too has its consolations89—​ though such Last Things as it offers differ substantially from the evacuated submission before authority that institutional devotions require. Lyric extremities If St Anselm tells us flatly what to do and think upon our deathbeds, why look to lyric poems for further instructions in dying? The doctrine communiqués to which genre specialists are partial have purposes complementary to Anselm’s, so attention there—​to mainline religious lyric in its ‘directness and simplicity’—​is natural enough.90 But why pair the dislocating, plague-​era experience of dying with the elusive art-​lyric of Harley 2253? Simply put, it’s because the Harley manuscript—​trilingual, multi-​generic, and epoch-​straddling—​offers plural perspectives on the death culture most regard as definitive of the Middle Ages. The book’s riches were compiled prior to the Black Death, yet can only be read in the system-​crashing context of pestilence, and its cultural-​demographic aftershocks. Modern witnesses find Harley Lyrics ‘delightful’ even when sombre themed, but after plague’s arrival, these exquisite poems seem to have been little read by contemporaries. It will be the task of this section to show how Harley’s last-​ quire contents square awkwardly with previous stances the book takes on the subject of death. Anselm’s dictates aren’t necessarily best Harley practices, or for that matter best period practices, in approaches to dying. We have seen how Quire 15’s practical religious matter connects a pre-​plague manuscript to post-​plague death culture. To ascertain how the approaches to Next Places and Last Things discoverable in earlier quires orient us otherwise, we must explore the geographical metaphysics of devotional lyric as a form,

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especially in some hybrid exemplars. Attention not just to bowers and deathbeds as climactic sites themselves, but to the places that are to come after we unclench from these consummations, will provide us with a means by which to map early lyric eschatology. Places of love and embraces of death are not so much contiguous in Harley 2253 as enfolded. They pixilate into one another (‘one square white, but another black’) along the way to suffusing all mortal experience (erthe into erthe; a ‘Hevene’ to be ‘hevede here’ [#34.82–​84]) with a wash of literary-​sacramental light. Christopher Daniell has proposed that what late medieval subjects had most in common was their shared experience of dying.91 But contrary to what its last booklet instructs, to die with Harley 2253 proves as animated by joy as suffused with pain; it is a tentative, searching process, not settled institutional protocol. Renunciation such as Anselm scripts is not its consummation. Obedience is not paramount. Instead the essence of the experience—​as Harley lyrics describe it—​lies in an intense double simultaneity. The carnal here-​and-​now partakes of imminent immanence. Prospects of next-​place holy removal overlap upon this-​worldly erotic presence. Chapter 1 stressed the importance of spatiality in assessing the literary-​historical phenomenon of pre-​Chaucerian love-​lyric. But as in love [love], so in dethe [death] do Harley Lyrics foreground geographical motifs, structures, and thematics. Their poetics of emplacement and displacement—​ of proximity and separation, of local and universal, of enclosure and transcendence—​serve as the means by which the ever-​impinging reality of our mortality (‘one’s own death’) may be approached. Here at lyric’s extremity is where medieval eternity is discovered, and dissolution reconstituted as bodily inheritance. The genius of Harley’s best lyrics resides in their capacity to enfold the prospects of hell and heaven simultaneously—​ to embrace opposed existential modes and ideological notions simultaneously. If lyric’s performative essence enables them to bridge perceived divides between idiosyncratic experience and collective meaning, the next step is to map this capacity for double-​ness on to medieval culture’s perennial, Arièsien negotiation between communal and personal styles of dying. Some theorists have challenged formalist notions that render all experience poetic as a condition of its having any meaning—​but a replicable individuation (‘individual voiced feelings’, ‘multiple’ mobile ‘voices’) is what Harley Lyrics are about.92 These are roiling critical waters, but here—​on the question of lyric

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immanence—​is where ingenuous medieval devotions and knowing modern theory swim together. Our next step will be to trace—​in local textual terms—​how a few Harley Lyrics perform such a trick, of being carnal while also promising transfiguration:  of possessing the beloved and transcending her (or him) too, in an ecstatic dry-​run for death. The key tenets of Harley Lyric dying reveal themselves through geographical metaphors, which foreground an alternative manner of interfacing with Last Things. For the poems we will treat, the question of mortality is a question of place: they explore how present location can mitigate the trauma of coming dislocation.93 As we saw in Chapter 1, Harley Lyric lovers experience geography as a tension between separation and proximity. Spatial factors serve as basic components (positive or negative) of intimacy:  erotic or patronal, dyadic or communal, homosocial or heterosexual. But not only do geographical matters inform secular lyric-​erotics, with their foregrounding of displacement and reliance on tropes of exile and return; they also structure devotional expressions, in particular those prompted by the prospect of death or judgement. According to Jonathan Culler, apostrophe constitutes a quintessential element of lyric form.94 In a devotional context, such tropes occur when speakers end in prayer (‘Amen’), or address themselves to God, Jesus, Mary, or other intercessor. We encounter another kind of lyric apostrophe in Middle English verse love epistles.95 Such missives partake of letter form when they deploy ‘particular [conventions] of greeting’,96 but also insofar as they are structured by the (spatializing) device of current separation and longed-​for presence. Epistolary and otherwise, Harley Lyrics characterize the present in exilic terms, but it is the amorous-​rhetorical work of the form (whether appealing to an anticipated future or lamented past) to draw those separated together. When figured as a structural element of love (spiritual, carnal, familial), medieval lyric epistolarity thus underlines the consoling intimacies that attend existential displacement. Its nostalgic longing for ‘hom’ bespeaks vernacular lyric’s fallen condition, and in doing so repurposes the erotic deathbed as an eschatological departure lounge. Fol. 76’s When Y se blosmes springe (#53)—​a reverdie-​variant also known as A Spring Song on the Passion—​dramatizes contrition (‘Let me … /​… in this lyve bete /​That Ich have do wrong’ [let me atone in this life for what I  have done wrong, 45–​48]), while demonstrating the intertwinement of secular and sacred lyric. The poem relies on courtly conventions, but chooses Jesus as its

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romantic object: ‘Alas, that Y ne con /​Turne to him my thoht, /​Ant cheosen him to lemmon’ [alas, that I cannot turn my thought unto him, and choose him as my lover, 31–​33]. We began with the locus amoenus trope of pan-​European lyric: ‘When Y se blosmes springe, /​Ant here foules song, /​A suete love-​longynge /​Myn herte thourhout stong, /​Al for a love newe’ [when I see blossoms emerge and hear the song of birds, a sweet love-​longing trills throughout my heart, at the prospect of a new love, 1–​5]. Crowded out by birdsong and odorous flowers, the identity of our speaker’s ‘love newe’ stays initially concealed. We do not yet comprehend the religious nature of this ‘suete love-​longynge’, though there are semantic hints, in how we are pierced, shot throughout [‘thourhout’] as by nails, and suffused by desire for a new kind of love. Spring plays host not just to natural melodies and floral blossomings, after all, but to Lent, and the generative death that precedes rebirth. Further clues as to the beloved’s identity arrive when we hear how ‘that which gladdens my song’ [That gladieth al my song,  7] is a thing sweet but also authentic [‘so suete ant trewe’, 6]: ‘Ich wot al myd iwisse /​My joie ant eke my blisse /​On him is al ylong’ [I know full well that my joy as well as my bliss depends entirely on him, 8–​10]. Line 10’s masculine pronoun—​realization that we ruminate ‘On him’—​ introduces a discordant note. Overheard female speakers may be a staple in certain lyric subgenres (alba and aubade, for example), but desiring female narrators are rare in reverdie, pastourelle, and most other varieties of trouvère dit.97 If it hadn’t dawned already (Brook’s giveaway title is modern), line 14’s ‘grete nayles’ clinch matters: it is ‘Jesu, milde ant softe’ [21], whose ‘peyne us hath yboht’ [pain has redeemed us, 40], to whom wise supplicants turn ‘At oure lyves ende, /​When we shule wende’ [at our lives’ ends, when we must go forth, 48–​49]—​who knows to where. From a genre standpoint, this poem’s power lies in its rhetorical clarity: its firm devotional focus on the figure of ‘Jesu’.98 Most moving, however—​in the sense of promising spiritual transportation to a needful audience—​is its concluding desire that Christ will ‘us undefong’: will welcome and ‘receive us’ [50] or, more expansively, admit all supplicants into the homely-​erotic space of his sacramental hospitality. We must repair somewhere after our lease on the here and now expires; so ‘Amen’ [51] to that place being the verdant lyric bour where our lemmon dwells. The Harley manuscript’s previous item (fol. 75v) similarly features a care-​worn narrator, although this time we dwell in a darker season. For #52’s lyric speaker, ‘Wynter wakeneth al my care; /​Nou

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this leves waxeth bare’ [winter awakens all my worry, now that the boughs have become bare, 1–​2]. A Winter Song (as Brook entitles it) revels in metaphors of death and rebirth, playing emergence and barrenness against one another. This midlands winter doesn’t freeze readers into immobility; it produces stirrings, as oxymoronic boughs blossom into sterility (‘waxeth bare’) and withering anxieties grow. Whether amorous at root or spiritual, the defeatism is palpable: ‘Y sike’ [I sigh] and ‘mourne sare’ [mourn dolefully, 3], our speaker confesses, ‘When hit cometh in my thoht /​ Of this worldes joie: /​Hou hit geth al to noht’ [when it occurs to me how all joy in this world wastes away, 4–​6]. Considering the framing provided by A Spring Song on the Passion (immediately following, #53) and by the lyric just above on fol. 75v (which begins with a plea that ‘heovene kyng’ [heaven’s king] might ‘Yef us alle god endyng’ [grant us all a good ending, #51.1–​2]), how could the mood be anything but existential? An alert audience will expect a turn now to the consolation of doctrine. Elsewhere, Quire 8 provides plenty of it. But we don’t get religion in this poem. Even so, we do proceed to that business proper to early lyric: rumination on mortal extremities: ‘Alle we shule deye, /​Thath us like ylle’ [we’re all going to die, whether we like it or not, #52.11–​12]. The stance Wynter wakeneth adopts, for negotiating this crisis, eschews the institutional buttressing religious lyric partisans commend, taking refuge instead—​ appropriately, we will see—​ in verbal-​ eschatological riddling. To put things another way: Wynter first proposes that we confront mortality directly, ‘though we like it ill’. But a moment later comes a reflexive squirm. When we try to face down ‘our own death’ (as per Ariès), the best we can do is address it sidelong, in an indirect, extra-​didactic mode. Verse devotions and Ars moriendi appeal because they simplify, clarify, and ritualize matters in the vicinity of Last Things. Anselm requires certain actions and answers. But rote metrical formulae remove the ruminative burden and existential opportunity that lyric, in its shaggier, more elusive Harleian form, perennially reopens. Recite these prayers; call upon that intercessor; apply for salvation using precisely these words, repeated three times for good symbolic measure. Such handbook dying as Anselm instructs us in, and as post-​plague subjects widely practised, may strike the hurried theorist as a universal metaphysical palliative, but prosaic, call-​and-​response rumination is a far cry from the sophisticated, often playful fluidity of Harley Lyric dying. Crucially, both modes prove user-​friendly, by enabling readers to

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adopt narrativized subject-​positions—​the better to draw reading communities together. Because the ‘care’ this song would expunge is eschatological, its speaker’s bind is locational:  ‘Y not whider Y shal /​Ne hou longe her duelle’ [I don’t know where I shall go, nor how long I’ll dwell here, #52.17–​18]. Wintertime gloom emphasizes the contingency of worldly duelle-​ing, the insecurity of here-​ ness, as now-​ ness slips away. Like the lyric shards we began with, Wynter wakeneth is slight—​provocatively so—​as if to underscore its fear of sudden death. Earth unto Earth exhibits a similar existential evasiveness. But despite the pleasure it too takes in wordplay, this wintertime song submits before orthodox mores:  ‘That moni mon seith, soth hit ys: /​Al goth bote Godes wille’ [What many men say is true: everything passes away except God’s will, 9–​10]. If Earth presents mortality as a riddle, Winter capitulates to the period’s doctrine of death with a resigned shrug. Yet somehow the admission that ‘al [geth] to noht’ [#52.5] stands as itself a bulwark against despair. As Winter’s next thought elaborates, ‘Nou hit is, ant nou hit nys, /​ Also hit ner nere, ywys’ [now it is, and now it isn’t—​as if it never really were, 6–​7]. Charmingly self-​ cancelling, this declaration combines rustic bemusement (no word longer than four letters) with metaphysical sleight of hand. It takes back as much as it offers. Still, as a digest of rhetorical effects, the line verges on ostentation. Note the internal rhyme (is/​nys/​ywys), multi-​letter alliteration (on n and h), and several types of repetition (anaphora, conduplicatio, antanaclasis)—​all dealt out with a colloquial panache. The line takes refuge in the semantic substrata of vernacular lyric, and in doing so forwards a poetics of crafty despair: gallows prosody, as it were. The basic sentiment, on the other hand, is hardly unique. A Winter Song repurposes its notion that ‘this worldes joie … geth al to noht’ [worldly joy dissolves into nothingness, #52.5–​6] from the lyric just above it on fol. 75v, which concludes ‘Wel Ichot, ant soth hit ys /​ That in this world nys no blys’ [well do I know and true it is, that in this world there is no bliss]—​just ‘care, serewe, ant pyne’ [anxiety, sorrow, and pain, #51.22–​24]. Our world may offer no ‘joie’ officially, but a measure of pleasure there surely is, in vocalizing this unhappy fact; in the sheer enunciation of phrases like ‘nys no blys’. The last poem before Winter yearns for the ‘bon’ [remedy, 3] of a ‘god endyng’ [good ending, 2], which request it places ‘At the biginnyng of mi song’ [4]‌. But if its first stanza deploys apostrophe—​a plea that ‘Thou have merci of me’ [9]—​its second

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re-​boots our generic operating system, relocating the action from a Doomsday scenario to ‘This ender day in o morewenyng’ [the other day in the morning, 10]. This line jars because it invokes the chivalric trope of the errant lover: the kind that drives lyric complaint and chanson d’aventure (as in Chapter  3), but who are also (we’ll see momentarily) susceptible to devotional bait-​and-​switch, in lyrics like Quire 9’s Ase Y me rod this ender day [As I rode out the other day], also known as The Five Joys of the Virgin [#67, fol. 81v]. Poems like these raise courtly expectations before redirecting attention to another ‘may’ [maiden,  3] and the better brand of joy she enables, first by birthing the saviour, and now via our meditation upon her heavenly bourn. Other pastourelles religieuses keep the big reveal under wraps, but Jesu Crist, heovene kyng (#51) shows its hand immediately, rendering its retrospective appeal to courtly conventions pure gesture. In these Harley woods, transfiguration of carnal into spiritual has always occurred already. The other day’s ‘morewenyng’ [morning] is made not just to rhyme but to pair thematically with its homonym (mourning), when we hear how ‘With dreri herte ant gret mourning, /​On mi folie Y thohte’ [with bitter heart and great mourning, on my folly I  reflected, #51.10–​12]. We shall repair presently to how Christ ‘us so duere bohtes’ [redeemed us at great cost, 18]. But before we arrive, in Stanza 4, at direct address to ‘Jesu’ [16], and in Stanza 5 at the ‘joye withoute fyne’ [joy without ending,  27] we inherit through him, the poem pauses to laud the bodily medium by which transmutation comes. ‘So suete’ [exceedingly sweet] is the ‘One that … ber Jesu’ [who gave birth to Jesus, 13–​14], and whose ‘Merci Y besohte’ [favour I sought, 15]—​indeed whose intervention ‘alle’ [all, 7] need. Jesu Crist, heovene kyng doesn’t dwell on Mary, choosing to focus, if less exclusively than the poem preceding it, on a ‘love-​bonde’ [love-​bond, #50.24] with ‘Suete Jesu’ (fifteen uses [1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 33, 37, 41, 45, 49, 53, 57]). That ‘love’-​song’s figure of ‘bryht’-​ness, ‘healing’ [bote], and ‘rest’ [2, 41, 9, 46] sounds a lot like the one who bore him. Harley Lyric ‘reflection’ [thohte] on carnal folly usually conjures not a dread ‘kyng’ [#51.14, 7] but a blessed levedy: ‘Thi moder’ [#50.40]—​Our Lady to be precise—​whose lovesome merci [acquiescence] is passionately besohte. The point of seeking after and reflecting on Mary—​here as in Ars moriendi treatments of her dormition—​is to arrange for oneself a ‘god endyng’ [#51.2], and by so doing, to exert influence on ‘wher Y [shal] be’ [6]‌after that end. Medieval religious lyrics as described

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by genre authorities possess but thin membranes separating them, not just from one another and from ‘secular’ lyric, but moreover from church doctrine, from the death we all owe to God, and from the elaborate machinery of Christian practice. Harley 2253’s devotional lyrics do not much mingle, however, with texts of practical religion such as proliferate in Quire 15. And by contrast to the straightforward instructional ends scholars see as determinative for more stolid exemplars of the form,99 the sacramental tenor of Harley Lyrics is only indifferently institutional. To be sure, they are animated by spiritual stirrings; they are not, however, realized ritualistically (still less, pursued artistically) via explication of church teaching for its own sake. Instead, the rapture-​seeking poets and luf-​lorn clerks of Harley 2253 adopt a mortal orientation that resembles Ariès’ notion of personal death, more than it does the integrated communal passing we learn to stage-​manage via craft-​of-​dying manuals. With plague’s advent, the light-​touch mortalities of Harley Lyrics exert diminished appeal. Virtually all medieval lyrics function as inhabitable performative shells:  those featuring personal names and those without; those localized by toponyms and those not. As Gillespie explains, they offer ‘virtual spiritual dramas’ and ‘emotional paradigms’ that teach us how to feel and to behave.100 One corollary to this observation is that, sooner or later, every exemplar of the form nods forward to those several endings—​ Christ’s, our own, the world’s—​that perennially approach. Much as one devotional act produces a need for the next, and takes meaning from its place in a larger liturgical-​universal calendar, so do Harley manuscript religious lyrics, arrayed in holy phalanx across the quires, blend together. But rather than assert that the deep-​lying communitarian and crossover tendencies of lyric constitute a literary-​devotional double helix, wherein may be found the essence of medieval life, what Harley 2253 reveals—​but other period lyric compilations do not—​is that transcendence requires more than deference to ecclesiastical system. The erotic energy that inheres in secular lyric—​a joy in transgression that Audelay and Vernon repress—​forms the other strand in the cosmic ladder. Seen from the vantage point Quire 15 provides, the matter of dying appears ubiquitous in the Harley manuscript. Texts shot through with mortal passings proliferate. The book’s interest in coming endings isn’t a manifestation of the obsessive morbidity of late medieval death culture, however. There are deaths all over Harley:  sacrificial, violent, sensational; divinely inflicted,

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coldly executed; deaths military and martyrological, suicidal and merely medical. Political machinations destroy the upstanding; class oppression grinds the vulnerable into dust. Spears pierce the side, crosses loom cruelly, nails impale hands, and red rivulets stream down, though only later would these grim affective themes, under Franciscan husbandry and the nourishment of plague, grow quite so harrowing. In Harley 2253’s pre-​ pestilence moment, St Bernard, high prophet of crossover with his doctrine of intertwined amours—​the cupiditas (bodily love) that partakes intrinsically of caritas (desire for God)—​more than holds his own.101 Before plague pits jolt us into apocalypticism, medieval death isn’t unduly morbid. The flagellants and dead kings aren’t yet on the scene. The mortal occasion calls, rather, for a gentle refocusing of spiritual attention. Harley Lyrics foreground the exhortation that we be present—​in the day and season; in the poetic line; in the sensual moment of the bower. These poems urge that we revel in the human bind of corporeality, if nothing else, because of what comes along inevitably: profound uncertainty as to where—​if anywhere—​ we next shall go. Reading these poems, we partake of the fey grace of the terminal ward: exile ever impinges, endings are ubiquitous. But even so, prior to a hedging of bets in Quire 15, the Harley manuscript presents no chastened encounter with desolation. If bodies are twisted, they coil together in transporting ecstasy, a fecund holy-​carnal intertwinement. This is neither the controlled disposition of the Ars moriendi deathbed, nor the contorted horror of wheelbarrow corpses amid pestilential collapse. And yet it is medieval dying. Harley 2253 models plural approaches to dying, and in doing so evades the orthodoxies packaged in Quire 15—​whose dense-​ copied, late-​gathered singletons gather around Anselm’s Questions, that favourite Ars moriendi seed-​text. Harley lyric-​devotions make mortality a geographical problem:  if death means displacement, where lies the here-​after? Of course, secular lyric-​poetics are likewise structured by dislocation; by the condition of exile. As we saw in Chapter  1, to be a Harley lover is to be removed from home, deprived of rest. Plaintive ‘longyng’ yearns, quintessentially, for union with a beloved ‘fer from’ here [#30.1, #64.31]. Paradoxically, to express lyric desire is to invest in the prospect of an exquisite future. Heaven becomes the erotic haven that is had here, though the state of exile felt in worldly love reveals it as bittersweet approximation. The lyric cycle (of displacement, complaint, and promised homecoming) ties together St Bernard’s two loves. Those on

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post-​plague deathbeds were less able to embrace such elasticity, but for earlier medievals ruminating on lyric love and Last Things, the spectrum’s extremities bend together. An offhand line—​‘Jesu, for thi muchele myht’ [Jesus, by your great might, #51.16]—​connects the poem just treated to the Harley Lyric known (from its own first line) as Jesu, for thi muchele miht [#61.1] (fol. 79v). Even more than the former (on fol. 75v), this latter poem models affective piety in the Franciscan mode: ‘In myn herte hit doth me god /​When Y thenke on Jesu blod /​That ran doun bi ys syde’ [It does my heart good, when I  reflect on how Jesus’ blood ran down along his side, 5–​7]. As striking as its elucidation of crucifixion imagery is, our speaker’s confidence that if we ‘leve his folie’ [leave aside this folly, 37], ‘We shule have joie ant blis’ [we shall acquire joy and bliss, 38]. Even so, Jesu’s speaker can’t help raise the prospect of an alternate species of ‘joy’—​the kind found in carnal bowers: ‘Mon that is in joie ant blis, /​Ant lith in shame ant synne, /​He is more then unwis /​That therof nul nout blynne [A man that {thinks he} has joy and bliss, when he lies down in shame and sin, is more than unwise—​if he will not stint thereof, 21–​24]. As in Three Foes of Man (#27), ‘unwise’ ‘joie’ and false ‘blis’ are the problem. According to ecclesiastical mores, to ‘lith’ [indulge {wallow}] in carnal joy and bliss is not joy and bliss at all—​just endorphin compulsion. To express bankrupt desire is nothing more than hollow seducer’s wanhope. Taxonomists invariably tag Jesu, for thi muchele miht as a crucifixion lyric, but apocalypse, with its forbidden pleasures, steals the scene: ‘Al this world, hit geth away; /​Me thynketh hit neyyth Domesday; /​Nou man gos to grounde’ [#61.25–​27]. ‘All this world passes away’:  so far, so straightforward:  it’s what the medieval world does. To render the subsequent lines proves trickier:  ‘To me it seems as if Doomsday is approaching, when I see humanity going to ground {degrading itself; wallowing in the dirt} like this.’ Rather than raising a lover up and transporting him unto bliss, bower-​love here initiates ontological collapse, a breaking down of the lyric subject. Erthe unto erthe, one might say:  love’s future, nou man gos to grounde, is bodily decomposition. Derne [secret] coupling makes the courtly world go ‘round, but fruitless dethe is what illicit amours generate. At issue is the movement that ‘this world’-​ly ‘joie ant blis’ produces. Carnality’s deep geography has an eschatological terminus. Lyric copulation (to ‘lith in shame ant synne’) leads to a pit of ashes. If love-​longynge has a place, according to this Harley accounting, it’s not ‘by west’ [out west] like it was

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previously in the collection [#30.37, #44.10]; it’s down that pit dug in haste beside Hereford Cathedral, so much accessed by wheelbarrow in 1349. Apart from some early, stern specimens in Harley’s portfolio (Three Foes [#27], Charnel amour est folie [#24a]), such is the closest we’ll come to the dogmatic mainstream of the form. Holding aside Quire 15, this is also the nearest we’ll approach to ‘lonely’ post-​plague dying, with its dreri, downtrodden fear. Set before and after Jesu (#61, fol. 79v) are two of Harley’s finest religious lyrics:  Stond wel, moder, under rode [Stand firmly, Mother, before the cross] (#60, fol. 79) and I syke when Y singe [I sigh when I sing] (#62, fol. 80). Both dramatize events on the hill of Calvary, with the former featuring the Virgin Mother’s pathos-​ laden dialogue with her son on the cross (‘Sone, Y fele the dede stounde’ [Son, I experience your death-​hour, #60.10]), and the latter providing an affective-​meditational how-​to (‘Ys woundes waxen wete’ [his wounds grow wet, #62.8]), with this famous encounter as model (‘Marie, reweth the’ [Mary, let yourself grieve,  10]). If the lyric subgenre known as chanson d’aventure combines chivalric outriding with overheard speech (a lover’s complaint or a shepherdess forestalling ravishment; see Chapter 3), Stond wel recasts this lyric framing device by doubling down on the condition of the abject feminine subject, routing Mary’s emotional rhetoric along devotional channels.102 I syke similarly uses Mary as focal point, though it foregrounds the case of a foundering penitent, placing this disconsolate speaker (‘Of serewe is al mi thoht’ [my thoughts are all on sorrow,  54]) in the position of onlooker (‘Y se’ [I see, 2]).103 Jesus serves as both lyrics’ ultimate love-​object (‘my lemmon’ [my beloved,  47], as the latter says). But Mary provides a paradigm for our right relation with that more august beloved. Other poems in and beyond the Harley manuscript exploit the genre’s courtly/​spiritual crosshatching by casting the Virgin as amorous acquisition—​the heavenly Lady who substitutes for an earthly Fair Maid—​but here Mary plays the role of plaintive lover. Partly because Harley 2253’s religious lyrics overlap plentifully, and partly because they clump together (especially in Quires 8–​9), we have gleaned our way across this central portion of the miscellany while mostly eluding secular embraces. A few outliers infiltrate the second half of Quire 8’s run of devotional lyrics, but more notable is how many tropes, conventions, and phrases bridge any supposed secular/​ religious divide. Ars moriendi naturalize the proposition that successful dying requires submission before ecclesiastical ritual. Consideration of one final aventure, this time

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in Quire 9, will reveal how Harley Lyric extremities point forward not just a premodern generation or two, but to decidedly contemporary lyric deathbeds—​and to a brand of eschatopoetics that may not perceive quite how medieval its affiliations are. Bower love and coming death Eighty folios into the Harley miscellany—​ more than midway through this life, but not too late—​we follow yet another rider into dark woods: From Petersbourh in o morewenyng,  Heading from Peterborough   upon a morning, As Y me wende o my pleyyyng,   as I went out to take my  pleasure, On mi folie Y thohte …   I reflected on my foolishness   … [#63.11–​13]

What does it mean, in the mortal context we are examining, to depart  from a borough [town] or bour [bower] named for St Peter: ecclesiastical rock; celestial bookkeeper; warden at heaven’s gate? Furthermore, what to make of the initially pley-​ful nature assigned to this errand of aventure, a journey that must (and soon will) be interrupted? When strategically combined and discursively reframed, love-​ lyric conventions provide an opportunity for devotional outreach. Amours ‘in this world’ do not necessarily constitute impediments to higher-​order love. But if at worst they are invitations to damnation, are they at best developmental stages to be moved past, in a Bernardian ladder-​of-​love progression? On balance, Harley evidence suggests otherwise. Overall the compilation tends towards ambivalence, but numerous items assert that by generating a species of renewable erotic energy, lyric form can re-​route love’s rich hermeneutic potentiality. Certain early items (such as Quire 6’s Three Foes of Man) hold categorically that ‘derne’ amours [#27.9] escort their adherents to the charnel house—​as surely as the ‘ashes-​ to-​ashes’ texts Lament for Simon de Montfort (#24) and Earth upon Earth (#24b) bleed into Charnel amour est folie [Carnal love is folly] (#24a; now recognized as a separate item).104 But other outcomes are possible in lyric-​love’s encounter with religious authority, and with dying. For most commentators, amorous aventures—​eschatologies that in other contexts would be deemed heterodox—​manifestly

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predominate in Harley 2253, lending the book what modest fame it possesses. As we saw via Gilote et Johane (#37, fol. 67v), chanson d’aventure openings prepare audiences to journey in multiple directions. Here is how one later riding out begins: Ase Y me rod this ender day  By grene wode to seche play,  

  As I rode out the other day, into a green wood to take my  pleasure, Mid herte Y thohte al on a may … I thought deeply {reflected   with all my heart} on a certain maid … [#67.1–​3]

Generically speaking, an initial fork points towards either ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ terrain. The secular route itself splits into sub-​ branches—​from classic pastourelle with its outrider–​shepherdess encounter (The Meeting in the Wood, #35; cf. De clerico et puella, #64), to trouvère dit, as when The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale (#34) turns aside from wayfaring to itemize a local beloved’s charms, to more colourful débat or fabliau hybrid variations, as explored in Chapter  3. Pastourelles religieuses borrow freely from other lyric subtypes, as when they deploy tropes of Christ as lover-​knight, or apply techniques of courtly blazon to Our Lady. In the devotional lyric Ase Y me rod [As I rode out] (#67), whose incipit I rehearsed above, the chanson d’aventure opening gives way quickly. All narrative elements disappear after one stanza, in favour of penitential declamation. First, we meet with three stanzas of courtly-​Marian blending: ‘With al mi lif Y love that may; /​He is mi solas nyht ant day, /​My joie ant eke my beste play, /​Ant eke my love-​ longynge’ [with all my life I love that maid, she is my solace night and day, my joy and also my greatest pleasure and also my heart’s desire, 13–​16]. These amorous protestations evolve, come Stanzas 5–​9, into systematic enumeration of the Virgin’s more canonical blessings: ‘Nou Y may, yef Y wole, /​The fif joyes mynge [now I will, if I can, call to mind the Five Joys, 23–​24]. Poetic crafting is far from absent, but Ase Y me rod places such a premium on communication of doctrine that scholars consider it ultimately an instructional exercise. As taxonomic summaries and generic titles (such as Brook’s The Five Joys of the Virgin) suggest, Stanza 1’s animating frame is soon forgotten. Critics dismiss the promise of May-​time aventure in lines 1–​3 as fashion, a cynical hook without continuing interpretive claim, once it has done its work of breaking readers

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through the penumbra of worldly affiliation.105 Our safe arrival unto Mary as meditative subject (‘Preye we alle to Oure Levedy’ [55]) eliminates all pretence of a lyric plot. Stanzas 2–​4 allude to high drama: the incarnation will ‘bringe up of helle pyn /​ Monkyn that wes forlore’ [bring up, from the pain of hell, mankind that was forlorn, 29–​30]. But Stanzas 5–​9 offer doctrinal rehearsal rather than penitential development, outlining one joy per stanza (e.g., the Annunciation, ‘When Gabriel from hevene cam /​ Ant seide God shulde bicome man /​Ant of hire be bore’ [when Gabriel came from heaven and declared that God would become man, and be born of her, 26–​28]). Death stalks even the landscape of Marian lyric, of course. But as a matter of course, this rigid state is transcended, as when, in ‘The furthe joie’ (the Resurrection [43]), Jesus ‘that wes slawen, /​Aros in fleysh ant bon’ [who was slain, arose in flesh and bone, 45–​46], or in ‘The fifte’ (the Assumption), ‘When hire body to hevene cam’ [when Her body ascended to heaven, 49–​50]. Nor does concluding Stanza 10 return us to our chivalric narrative frame. Instead it describes—​ in a voice newly sacerdotal—​not Christ’s ascension, or Mary’s, but our completed transformation, figured as formal evolution from lyric into prayer: ‘Preye we alle to Oure Levedy’ [let us all pray to Our Lady], the poem urges, ‘That heo of us haven merci, /​Ant that we ne misse /​In this world to ben holy /​Ant wynne hevene blysse. /​ Amen’ [so that she will have mercy upon us, and so we won’t fail to be holy in this world, and thus win heaven’s bliss. Amen, 55–​ 61]. Our riding out ‘to seche play’ with thought ‘al on a may’ has, after a run-​through of our devotional pacings, escorted us ‘thurh’ [through,  10] a worldly vale of ‘love-​longynge’ [16] unto a penitential terminal—​the last station proper to death preparation. To wynne ‘heaven’s bliss’ requires thohteful loving (right devotion) ‘in this world’—​plus the grace of a Levedy of merci. Before embarking on this ritual journey (one that will teach erthe to transcend earth), the surrogate self of our lyric protagonist ‘on thoro lay’ [33]. To render this line is difficult: we ‘lay’ somewhere, but where exactly? The phrase ‘on thoro’ should by rights denote ‘trapped in a pit’, but our Marian context, as compounded by thoro’s ancillary semantic range [trough, manger; hence crib], places us instead in a nativity scene. Ase Y me rod’s allusion to an incarnational crib that is also a worldly slough of despair recalls the earthen ‘throh’ [pit, coffin, trough, #24b.3] of Harley’s first lyric, the eschatologically elusive Earth unto Earth. But whether we inhabit a blessed embryonic

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state or a Domesday deathbed remains, for both poems, somewhat in doubt.106 As it happens, the Harley scribe includes in his book yet another text (a third) on Marian joys—​this one in Anglo-​Norman verse. ‘Elegant’ and ‘symmetrically patterned’, Quire 8’s Marie, pur toun enfaunt, also known as The Joys of Our Lady (#49, fol. 75), shares with Ase Y me rod the core formula of one stanza per ‘joie’ [13, 19, 32, 37].107 But like Quire 15’s three-​part Prayer on the Five Joys of our Lady (#104, AN prose/​verse/​prose), this item lacks the literary pretence of a chanson d’aventure frame. Instead, two opening and two closing stanzas warn against ‘li maufé mescreaunt’ [the evil miscreant, 5] and ‘le malfé’ [the evil one, 52], petitioning our heavenly judge to ‘de la mort garaunt’ [protect us from death,  4] and bring our souls ‘en ciel’ [to heaven, 54]. To invoke an outrider trope betrays a residual interest in chivalric amorous aventure—​that is, the lyric Y’s abandoned narrative progression—​which the devotional progression, on to recitation of Marian joys, may succeed in displacing, but doesn’t fully erase. Pastourelle form remains available for further Harley manuscript deployment, as when the conceit reappears (we’ll see below) in Quire 9’s An Autumn Song (#67). The point-​by-​point colloquy between Anglo-​Norman and Middle English Harley Joys, not to mention between verse and doctrine, underscores the concourse between poetic and prayerful rumination. These qualities in turn increase the obtrusiveness of Ase Y me rod’s first stanza, which comes to feel more and more supplementary. A lyric-​outrider trope titillates with its promise of erotic struggle. However, the statistical likelihood of ravishment that Kathryn Gravdal has established (pastourelle’s omnipresent ‘threat of rape’) raises numerous questions with regard to the spiritual development that our variant proposes to effect.108 The potential for bodily degradation implicit in lyric wayfaring haunts any poem that invokes such a frame—​however glibly, and even if we are hustled thereafter into religious seclusion. In short, no matter their subtype divergences, and wherever they fall upon a secular–​ religious spectrum, medieval love-​lyric poetics converge upon the figure of a lady who offers to effect transformation. The sprinkled references to infernal dangers (le malfé) and celestial hopes (en ciel) in other Harley Five Joys texts underline how Marian devotions and chansons d’aventure, too—​not just out-​and-​out mortality lyrics—​are concerned quintessentially with dying. Bower love bears an engrained formal relation to coming death. But this brand

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of medieval dying unfolds not how the experience is structured in and by Ars moriendi. We come now to my chapter’s watershed poem, which takes place not in springtime, when lusty youths ride out and landscapes bloom, but in autumn, when flowering beauty fades: ‘Nou skrinketh rose ant lylie-​flour /​That whilen ber that suete savour /​In somer, that suete tyde’ [Now withers the rose and the lily-​flower, that used to bear a sweet smell, in the sweet summertime, #63.1–​ 3]. Brook entitles this Quire 9 lyric An Autumn Song (others use Nou skrinketh), but the poem quickly moves on from seasonal retrospection into eschatological forecasting. In doing so, it deploys courtly motifs to make a chilling point:  ‘Ne is no quene so stark ne stour, /​Ne no levedy so bryht in bour, /​That ded ne shal byglyde’ [There is no queen so mighty and strong, nor any lady so radiant in her bower, that death will pass her by, 4–​6]. If fol. 81v’s Ase Y me rod (Five Joys [#67]) featured an outrider filled with longings for a certain Virgin Mother, this fractionally earlier variant on the form (fol. 80)  proceeds more strangely yet. It departs in secular company, thoughts apparently bent on pleyyyng. But Nou skrinketh reveals its devotional gambit early: whoever would inherit heaven’s bliss [‘heuvene blis abyde’, #63.8] must ‘fleysh lust forgon’ [forgo carnal desire, 7] and instead ‘on Jesu be is thoht anon’ [hold Jesus always in mind], in particular how ‘therled was ys side’ [his side was pierced, 9–​10]. To this end, the poem stockpiles devotional conventions. Like others in the vicinity (#53, fol. 76; #60, fol. 79; #67, fol. 81v) and further afield (#45, fol. 72; #102, fol. 134v), it ends in a posture of prayer: ‘Amen’ [#63.60]. Indeed, we culminate in dramatic supplication before Christ: ‘Jesu, have merci of us, /​That al this world honoures’ [58–​59]. Prior to this prostration, however, Nou skrinketh makes supplication unto Mary: ‘Ledy, preye thi sone for ous, /​That us duere bohte’ [Lady, pray on our behalf to your son, who redeemed us at great price, 17–​18]. In summoning Mary as a deathbed attendant, this plea connects medieval lyric’s focal beloved to that same heightened practice—​paradigmatic dying—​ with which Ars moriendi routinely associate the Virgin. Everything withers (skrinketh) in this world, as in all human milieux, but a beloved maiden can ‘shild us from the lothe hous /​That to the Fend is wrohte’ [shield us from the loathsome house that the Devil has wrought for us, 19–​20]. An Autumn Song’s single most arresting phrase—​ ‘the lothe hous’ (#63.19; cf. #21.154)—​conceives of death as bad design. (As in Dante, damnation manifests itself in brilliantly fiendish

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architecture.) The moment comes in Stanza 2, after the lyric has made its second beginning, this time a narrative one, via the chanson d’aventure trope noted above. Already when departing ‘From Petersbourh in o morewenyng’, our speaker was primed for ‘thohte’, which is to say, spiritual reflection: ‘Menen Y gon my mournyng /​ To hire that ber the hevene kyng, /​Of merci hire bysohte’ [I began my mournful lament to her that bore the King of Heaven, and besought her of mercy, #63.14–​16]. Dethe’s advent—​always worthwhile matter for reflection—​casts an inexorable shadow over this lyric landscape. Our protagonist may be implicitly chivalric, and thus partake of worldly celebrity, but (unlike in Dante) we hear nothing very definite about this sinner’s ‘folie’:  just that ‘Myn herte of dedes wes fordred /​Of synne that Y have my fleish fed /​Ant folewed al my tyme’ [my heart was full of dread for the sins with which I have fed my flesh, and pursued during all my days, 21–​23]. We aren’t permitted to wallow in details of a misspent life. Cutting corners on confessional colour, the poem throws its emphasis forward, upon that climactic moment which will so obsess late medieval society (and drive the popularity of Ars moriendi): ‘Y not whider I shal be led /​When Y lygge on dethes bed, /​In joie ore into pyne’ [I know not whither I shall be led, when I lie on death’s bed: unto joy or into pain, 24–​26]. Harley lyric dying differs from the experience Anselm scripts in that it doesn’t require our unreserved embrace of hac sola morte [this lonely death]. Instead, An Autumn Song prescribes embraces of a more familiar kind: ‘On o Ledy myn hope is, /​Moder ant virgyne’ [My hope rests upon a certain Lady, Mother and Virgin, 27–​28]. With her aid, we shall pass unto heaven’s bliss: ‘Whe shulen into hevene blis /​Thurh hire medicine’ [29–​30]. Stanzas 4 and 5 of Autumn leave behind dying-​as-​travel topoi (dethes-​bed; wher next), as well as gestures to the eschatological built environment (lothe hous), to dilate instead upon the theme of Mary as spiritual physician. Considering the masculine ‘familial’ context explored in Chapter 1, it will not surprise that our all-​praised ‘Levedy’ [#63.45] distributes ‘hire medycyne’ [her healing,  31] plentifully, ‘Wherso eny sek ys’ [wherever anyone is sick, 47]. If she displays peerless skills in this discipline—​‘Nis ther no leche so fyn /​Oure serewes to bete’ [nowhere is there a finer leech for chasing away our sorrows, 35–​36]—​it may be because the Virgin-​Doctor’s dethe-​bedside manner is patient-​centred and process-​oriented: ‘Of penaunce is his plastre al’ [her healing is all about penance,  41]. Emphasis falls less on Mary’s inherent graces, than on the movement to grace enabled through her. Or rather, ‘Thurh hire’. It’s an

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innocuous phrase, but ‘through her’ becomes, via stealthy repetition [30, 45, 49], a way to describe active devotional learning, and then produce it. In each case bodily exchange effects spiritual transfer. Described nearby as ‘Levedy Seinte’ [Lady Saint, #66.13, 21] and ‘hevene quene’ [heaven’s queen, 11]—​more fount of patronage than maternal bereaved or maiden-​quarry—​Mary virtually compels our redemption. She inspires and then enables the ‘wan’ [9]‌autumn soul’s march through penitential stages conceived in architectural terms. In a transaction enabled by intimate proximity, Autumn—​ like other amorous lyric—​delivers us from ‘thral’-​dom into freedom [#63.44]; from ‘sek’-​ness into health [30]; from mortal danger into ‘blis’ [49]. Above all, An Autumn Song intrigues for its equal-​opportunity devotionalism. Unusually among Harley manuscript exemplars, it offers a lesson not just for sick-​at-​heart lovers, but also for another group of potential penitents, those who inhabit the more fraught, less dynamic position of passive beloved. ‘Women, in your jollity’ [jolyfte, #63.54], ‘you must reflect on God’s suffering’ [thench on Godes shoures, 56]: ‘Thah thou be whyt ant bryht on ble, /​… Falewen shule thy floures’ [you may be radiant and bright of complexion now, but your flowers {beauties} shall wither, 55, 58]. Autumn’s admonitory speaker suggests that shining faces and transitory ‘floures’ can—​ when supported by timely reflection on God’s ‘shoures’ [bleeding; pains, esp. of childbirth]—​ be redeemed for ‘heovene boures’ [heaven’s bowers,  53]. Animated, revenant-​ like, by the poem’s verbs of expiration (falewen, skrinketh), a radiant beloved is made to intervene in her own May-​time aventure, exchanging the (masculine) lover’s usual states—​displacement and vital diminishment—​for better ones. Or more precisely, a better place. Normally Harley levedis carry transcendence to longinge lovers, or as Quire 7’s Alysoun enthuses, ‘[S]he may me blisse bringe’:  ‘from hevene it is me sent’ [#29.27–​28, 7, 10]. But where men wallow in pain, stuck in sloughs, ‘Wymmon, with [their] jolyfte’—​an innate joy that uplifts—​possess a special capacity: the ability to self-​relocate. If one way geography structures the lyric experience of dying is by backlighting the scene of forest-​glade amours with autumnal regret—​carnal joy being thus perceived from a deathbed vantage point—​then another way it does so is by rendering the capsule of embowerment transformative itself. Penitential lyric shares with pastourelle a retrospective cast, in that both forms feature a backward look of assessment. Rather than relate an anecdote of ravishment (a funny thing happened to me l’autrier [the other day]), the

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chevalier-​poète of Autumn downplays the past. He references vague misdeeds (‘dedes … /​Of synne’ [#63.21–​22]), but only to better fixate on worlds to come. Life for him—​as well as for us, and for every lyric in this quire—​distils down to a single moment, that of mortal passage. Salvation becomes a matter of simple directionality. Earlier we ‘not whider’ [knew not whither] we should go upon exiting our ‘dethes bed’ [24–​25]. Now, buoyed by the placid confidence Marian devotions impart, we begin to expect accession to a suete-​ smelling locus of stability—​a destination not of ‘pyne’ [pain, 26] but, ‘thurh hire’, of ‘blis’ [49.] Bodily joie comes to feel tactile—​ though tactically, it’s a familiar gesture:  ‘Heried be hyr joies fyue’ [praised be her Five Joys,  46]. Another way of putting it is that lyrics like these employ the Virgin as spiritual antechamber. Just as Our Lady provided an incarnational way-​station for Christ, on his journey from eternity to Erthe and back again, so, at lyric and life’s ‘endyng’ [#66.19], does the salvific female body (‘Suete lemmon, thench on me’ [#65.8]) become an interstitial location:  a place of amorous incubation. The beloved’s embrace forms a place between places. It effects a state between states. Religious lyrics prove as willing as secular lyrics (as in the last quotation, from fol. 80v’s When the nyhtegale singes [#65]) to exploit this erotic-​existential ambiguity. One of just two ‘secular’ lyrics in Quire 9, Nightingale prays its ‘suete leof’ [sweet beloved, 11] who is ‘so fayr a may’ [18] for carnal satisfaction: ‘A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche’ [a sweet kiss of your mouth can be my physician, 12].109 A folio later, Ase Y me rod teases audiences by withholding—​for a stanza and a half—​the identity of its ‘feyr’ ‘may’ [#67.8, 3]. Not long previous, An Autumn Song pioneers this tactic when its speaker confirms (in a phrase redolent of courtly amours) that ‘On o Ledy my hope is’—​before adding, a beat later, the revelatory clause I downplayed above: ‘Moder ant virgyne’ [Mother and Virgin, #63.27–​28]. In the negative space of a line-​break we not only forestall death’s advent, but discover the nature of bower-​ balm:  its inevitable spiritual admixture. In the lyrics collected in Harley 2253, the erotic, maternal, devotional, and patronal collapse together, with ‘Lady Saint Mary’ [#66.13]—​or her local proxies—​inhabiting multiple roles, not all chaste perhaps, or exactly orthodox, but all coded feminine.110 To enter a Harley glade may be, as we found in the Quire 6–​7 lyrics of Chapter  1, to journey towards a restorative regional hom, which evokes a nostalgic sense of west; but it is also, in certain Quire 8–​9 poems, to pursue an existential challenge, to confront

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an eschatological limit-​point. To pass through the exile of lyric promises various kinds of balm. And though it may occasion anxiety, to brave such a tempering offers to replace pastourelle’s primal scene of contestation—​where petty displays of masculine force are reproduced as humorous retrospection—​with the less timorous, more transporting possibilities of vernacular lyric worlds to come. Such crossover matters come to a head in the string of English religious lyrics that dominate Quire 9—​four consecutive (#60–​63), culminating in An Autumn Song (fol. 80). But subsequent items offer opportunities to test this proposition. Overleaf from Autumn on fol. 80v, De clerico et puella [The Clerk and the Girl] (#64)—​ another Middle English lyric, despite the Latin title bequeathed it—​occasions further reflection on the relationship between dying and longing. But De clerico arranges early lyric’s primordial elements in reverse fashion, espousing a theology of love diametrically opposed to previous formulations:  ‘My deth Y loue, my lyf Ich hate, for a levedy shene’ [I look forward to my death, and I hate my life, on account of a radiant lady, 1]. As with many a bucolic Harley lover, the desire his beloved (naturally) generates threatens to overwhelm: ‘Heo is brith so daies liht’ [she is as bright as daylight,  2]. Indeed this levedy’s heat proves too intense:  ‘Y falewe’ [I wither], he avers, ‘so doth the lef in somer when hit is grene’ [as does the leaf in summer when it is green,  3]. Three lines before the ‘Amen’ that concludes An Autumn Song and fol. 80, resplendent ‘Wymmon’ [women] were warned of ‘floures’ [beauty] that would ‘falewen’ [wither]. Now, three lines on to fol. 80v, a love-​ waxing Clerico wilts—​‘Y falewe’—​even in his summer ripeness. As is typical of love-​lament (including religious pastourelle), our speaker foregrounds ‘My serewe, my care’: sorrow and anxiety that his beloved ‘al with a word … myhte awey caste’ [with a single word could cast away, 7]. Soon we arrive at the usual, dire extremity—​ ‘Weylawei!’ [woe is me,  13]:  literally, good fortune [weole] goes away111—​with protestation that his mortal end approaches: ‘Yef Y deye for thi loue, hit is the mykel sham’ [if I  were to die for your love, it’d be a great shame, 15]. Finally, to support his entreatment that ‘you should have pity on me, your man’ [Thou rewe on me, thy man, 13], he presents his ‘Sorewe ant syke ant drery mod’ [sorrowing and sighing and morbid spirit, 5]. Together, these constitute unassailable evidence of a deathbed-​state. Good St Anselm will send deputies, in Quire 15, to service those ‘for whom death approaches’. But here in Quire 9, deathbed ministrations are the province not of priestly technocrats but of

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an intercessory force more potent: ‘my suete lemman’ [#64.16; cf. #65.8, 9, 13, 15]. How does it profit you, Clerico complains, ‘my lyf thus forte gaste’ [to destroy my life in this way, #64.8]? Or again, after Puella has shooed him (not for the first time) away from ‘mi bour’ [my bower, 19; cf. 11]: ‘Suete ledy, thou wend thi mod! Sorewe thou wolt me kythe’ [sweet lady, unless you change your mind, you will cast me into sorrow,  21]. Like other Harley lovers we have met, Clerico is more concerned with analysing his own existential state (and connecting thereby with a masculine familial audience), than parsing his lemman’s desire:  ‘Ich am al so sory mon’ [I am such a woebegone man, 22], he wails. Other lyric speakers genuflect before divinity’s ‘muchele myht’ [great power, #51.16, #61.1], but in this ‘sory’ case, despair prevails: ‘al is serewes mythe’ [everything lies in sorrow’s power, #64.24]. At poem’s end we achieve no erotic breakthrough, enter unto no place of rest. Instead, we face an earth-​bound affair’s ongoing, existential contingency. Since ‘Ych have tholed for thy love woundes fele sore’ [I have suffered for your love many grievous wounds, 30], ‘Suete ledy, thou rewe of me’ [sweet lady, have pity on me]: ‘Nou may Y no more’ [I can’t stand it any more, 32].112 So far, so conventional. We have been this way before. However, to identify a literary gesture as convention is less to explain it than to explain it away. Commonplace, half-​serious, or otherwise, what ought we to make—​after having made our way through a thicket of devotions—​of so this world-​ly a clerk-​lover’s courtship of death; of his incessant invocations of doom; of his characterization of derne love’s stakes as authentically eschatological? Rather than continue belabouring a late medieval question (what craft of dying is this?), better to hazard a leap forward, across the pit separating plague times from our times. This chapter’s final section will bring the retrospective insights acquired above to bear upon lyric cultures which themselves owe debts, more substantive than they may know, to early vernacular forebears. The news from dim-​lit Harley glades may be fresher than expected. New Lyric Studies gets medieval After falling in prominence during the reign of New Historicism, lyric has begun to reassert itself as an animating force in literary studies. One sign of life came in PMLA’s Spring 2008 Theories and Methodologies section—​itself a consequence of the 2006 MLA Convention’s official focus on lyric. Virginia Jackson, responding

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to Marjorie Perloff’s (Presidential Address) worries about ‘the demise of literary study in literary study’, leads off by identifying the ‘problem of defining the lyric’ as central to any critical renewal. Jackson charges that ‘transhistorical categories of lyric reading’ have led to ‘idealization of the lyric’ and to a ‘lyricization of poetry itself’:  lyric studies remains defined by a fault line in which (a ‘retro-​projection of’) Romantic lyric serves as an implicit interpretive standard.113 Brent Hayes Edwards, for his part, objects to Perloff’s ‘conventional definition of the literary as the ground of disciplinary training’, because it evinces a desire for ‘the dissociation of art from society’.114 Edwards finds Perloff’s ‘argument against the instrumental use of literature’ specious, protesting that interpretation ‘must not relinquish its unique point of articulation with the social’.115 Taking another tack is Jonathan Culler. Where Jackson believes poetic genres have ‘collapsed into one big idea of poems as lyrics’,116 Culler suggests that ‘narrative has become the norm of literature’—​indeed ‘the very condition of experience’. Reconstruction of a speaker-​character’s ‘novelistic situation’ serves now as the literary-​phenomenological baseline ‘to which poetry, when studied, is frequently assimilated’. This characterization of poetry as ‘a dramatization of the encounter between consciousness and the world’ amounts to a rhetorical fallacy wherein ‘lyric reveals itself as drama’.117 The key distinction, for Culler, is that ‘if narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now’.118 Culler’s category of the lyric ‘now’—​as distinct from that which ‘will soon be gone’119—​embraces rather a lot of historical ground. Against wide scepticism about transhistorical moves, he promotes a ‘revival of the idea of the lyric as a poetic activity that has persisted’ since antiquity, despite ‘different social functions and manifestations’.120 The essence of his case lies in ‘the special language of lyric’ and its attendant status as a ‘linguistic event’, features which together generate a ‘distinctive lyric temporality’:  Culler’s lyric now denotes a patterned, neither once nor future state, marked out by ‘the rhythm and the bodily experience of temporality’.121 Such an approach doubles down on formalism, but another way of apprehending lyric temporality is to emphasize historical poetics. In like spirit, Yopie Prins advocates attention to ‘a broader historical range of poets’ (230), encouraging us to ‘think of historical poetics as a labor for many critics to undertake’ (234).122 But as Prins’ own ‘[historical] turn’123 (230) reaches back only to Victorian times, and as the PMLA roundtable shows no interest in the thousand-​odd

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years between Rome and Renaissance, it remains unclear whether this ecumenical vision extends to material so apparently foreign as medieval devotional verse. Where Menocal asserted a place for the medieval in lyric studies by bracketing only ‘the time of the Black Death’ (plus all non-​ Mediterranean Europe) from consideration, Ardis Butterfield agitates on the period’s behalf by answering Culler’s animating question—​‘Why Lyric?’—​with another:  ‘Why medieval lyric?’124 Attending to ‘lyrics on the page’ and the formal-​material vagaries of ‘preprint verse’125 enables Butterfield to intervene in disciplinary conversations that (per the enduring caricature) presume the medieval to be beneath notice (‘backward, usually evil’). But if ‘the sheer torque required to turn medieval verse into lyric’ was a particularly ‘impressive critical feat’ of the New Criticism,126 it is also the case that medievalists of recent vintage have proved adept (Butterfield not least) at transmuting literary-​ historical scrap metal, at leveraging the unlovely, the reviled, the culturally discarded. By making a critical virtue of abjection, rather than excluding plague-​proximate death-​culture, there might be effected further medieval renewal of lyric studies. Ironically, since literary medievalism has only infrequently considered lyric in recent years, a handful of excellent interventions notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether rapprochement can be achieved, between the equally accepted notions of medieval lyrics’ ‘abnegation of individuality’ and of the ‘individual voiced feelings’ discoverable in poems like Harley 2253’s.127 The most generative contribution to PMLA’s roundtable comes from Rei Terada. ‘Lyric studies has been new before,’ Terada begins dryly.128 More suggestive than any proposed ‘modifications of canonical lyric reading’ is Terada’s ambition to lay bare ‘the prosaic infrastructure of the lyric’—​her challenge to ‘[the assumption] that lyrics more than other media are concentrates of culture or consciousness’. By way of persuasion, Terada emphasizes her relief that after years, probably centuries, during which ‘lyric’ is used as an intensifier … the current conversation about lyric isn’t especially heightened. The lyric zone of electrification is dissipating along with the belief in the autonomy of the lyric object and in the specialness of the lyric mode.129

What counts nowadays is use: ‘If “lyric” is a concept that will help us think, it’s because it helps us think about something besides

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lyric.’ To say ‘that lyric studies is a means to an end does not denigrate lyric’, therefore, ‘but only requires it to be like anything else’.130 Medievalists will be pleased to learn that the artless memos they imagined permanently unfashionable turn out to have been avant-​garde before their time. It is just as the generation of Rosemary Woolf, Douglas Gray, and Raymond Oliver said: devotional lyrics should not be discounted, but appreciated for their bottom-​line functionality. The banal candour of Terada’s argument—​since it works ‘like anything else’, it doesn’t much matter ‘what lyric is’—​ initially attracts.131 But it would be a missed opportunity for medieval lyric (which needs all the opportunities it can get) not to inquire into the overpowering ‘relief’ Terada’s confession produces for the not-​unselfconscious scholar of ‘emotion’ (also ‘theory, history of philosophy, romanticism, psychoanalysis’) who purveys it.132 The drain-​swirl of lyric dissipation described here leads to heightened language, sentences shot through with emotional charge: ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for release from lyric ideology’; ‘I’m relieved to see this and would like to see still more of it.’133 Repetition (the device rhetors call mesodiplosis) stands surety for a speaker’s felt intensity: ‘again, if they seem uniquely ideological, they only seem so’.134 In support of these deflations of lyric pretension, we have only the strength of feeling assigned Terada’s utterance to recommend it. That, and the discursive authority (old-​fashioned auctoritas) of the invited speaker. Official medievalist observers may be experiencing a familiar tingling sense. The metaphors are post-​industrial (electrification, dissipation), but the sentiments which attend upon lyric expiration evoke an epistemology of epochal rupture. Is long-​ suffering, lyric-​beset Terada waiting for a ‘release’ from being, well, medieval? Stuck, stagnant, oppressed by tradition and its yoke: the usual markers of Burckhardtian periodicity are in evidence.135 In closing, Terada will exhort us to ‘let lyric dissolve into literature and “literature” into culture’—​and then flash a charismatic weariness:  ‘let it be all right for me not to read a lyric to exemplify this point’.136 Just prior to staging this exit, however, she recounts—​so as to dramatize her quondam incarceration within lyric ideology—​a ‘story in which lyric power cancelled and redoubled itself’. This climactic anecdote fixates on her adolescent browsing of The Pocket Book of Modern Verse (1972): I returned frequently to the poems at the end of the book—​for example W.S. Merwin’s ‘Some Last Questions’ … and [Bill] Knott’s ‘Goodbye’, which reads in its entirety: ‘If you are alive when you

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read this, /​close your eyes. I am /​under their lids, growing black’. I kept looking at them because I was hypnotized by their seeming authority. All of the poems had a perplexing authority, in fact, but theirs was the most perplexing because I was so little able to explain to myself what they were appealing to.137

If at a previous stage our discourse reeked of stagnation, it takes no specialist (psychoanalytic or otherwise) to ascertain that here—​or rather, now—​we are on firmly medieval terrain: that awful district of the cultural imaginary where King Death rules. ‘Proto-​adult’ Terada138 may have been ‘hypnotized’ into ideological ‘perplexity’, ‘unable to explain’ what Merwin’s and Knott’s lyrics ‘appeal to’, but audiences of Harley MS 2253 would understand. New-​ millennium Terada wants to liberate herself by cancelling (or declaring cancelled) lyric power, thus debunking its usurped status as heightened discourse—​in place of which, now that the form is banal, we are to embrace lyric studies as simply, finally, the ‘means to an end’. But lyric—​so suggest Earth unto Earth, An Autumn Song, and De clerico et puella—​has long been a means to an end; has always doubled as a mode of literary-​existential travel—​that end being The End, the goodbye residing beneath eyelids ‘growing black’ (Knott). Terada’s obsessive browsings revolve around precisely those geographical-​eschatological threshold preoccupations this chapter has foregrounded: death, dying, last lyric things; cancellation, dissolution, authority; love, loss, and the perplexities thereof. Terada’s inability to recognize the eschatological authority to which her favourite poems appeal seems a consequence of her unfamiliarity with medieval ways and means. Consequently brazen, her later self proposes for the superseded form that is Western lyric a ‘last benedictory function’: that of serving as ‘the lure that attracts suspicion to aesthetic ideology as such’.139 Certainly, there inheres in the eschatological knot (naught? not?) that Knott’s ‘Goodbye’ presents, as well as in Merwin’s (Anselmian) ‘Last Questions’, an authorizing claim to ‘specialness’, or ‘memorable’ formal ‘patterning’.140 Yet this ontological aura is a species of the same heightened stakes with which Terada invests her own narrative, with its rhetorical craftedness, its appeals to the temporal-​existential challenge that dying alone brings. Earlier, we had ‘dissolve’, ‘cancel’, ‘relief’, and ‘release’, ‘let it be all right’—​and now, in loco presbyteris, a ‘last benedictory function’. Given her choice to foreground lyrics that are quite patently about dying, why no mention that these texts themselves stage a confrontation with dissolution? Surely the

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lyrics Terada disinters from her Pocket Book full of poesies appear where they do for a reason. Can it be accidental that Merwin’s ‘Questions’ and Knott’s ‘Goodbye’ are placed at the end of her lodestone anthology—​or, come to it, that Terada uses death poems as a means by which to bring her performance to its end?141 What would it mean to make medieval lyric new? Or to make lyric newly medieval?142 Death may be a feature so routine, and dying so engrained in lyric, that Terada need never mention the subject. Medievalists, though, have found examining such morbid matters a renewable critical resource. ‘Sacrifice your love,’ counsels Aranye Fradenburg: we practically specialize in immolation.143 Scholars of later cultural forms desire that we be ‘past that moment … in which we nurse our need for benedictory false aesthetic ideologies’ such as lyric provides. Not for Rei Terada the assuagements of literary hospice care, the mystificatory coddling of Ars moriendi. Those functions, those ‘darkening eyelid’ dynamics, tied as they are to tired elitist notions of lyric concentration and formal exceptionalism, are pre-​structuralist; fearful; adolescent. The medicine Terada prescribes is bracingly progressive, but hazy (like much other liberation ideology) on practicalities. ‘Compared with finding out what comes next, it isn’t important what lyric is’.144 We are to stumble out of the ‘perplexing’, eschatological ‘last questions’ ‘Goodbye’ raises into … ‘whatever comes next’. To Terada, it isn’t important what lyric is. But to me, as a lonely reader of a book few now read, it seems vitally important, for understanding lyric form and function, at least to ascertain where it is. Where—​ ontologically, temporally, physically, formally—​does lyric reside? It’s at the end. Of the book; of life’s journey; of the conference talk or journal essay; of a medieval morning’s erotic forest foray. As for the consolations of lyric ideology: they perform a function for late modern bourgeois subjects analogous, so Ariès might observe, to that which the Ars moriendi served in early modern times. Paperback verse anthologies and early print Crafts of Dying are middle-​class commodities, in each case among the aspirational bestsellers of their day. Terada’s turn to Merwin and Knott in the ruminative space of late-​print PMLA, as she gathers resources for her own ritual ending, argues lyric’s continuing function as a species of Ars moriendi. The riddled corpse she declares dead (erthe into erthe) has at least one more trick of renewal in it yet. Terada would debunk the formal ‘specialness’ at the heart of lyric ideology, in favour of banal functionality. But (so our look  backwards reveals) it turns out lyric ideology itself is functional—​in a

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deathbed sense. Whether featuring abject lovers desiring carnal embrace or expiring souls filled with apocalyptic trepidation, the form is oriented towards the discourses and practices of dying. In a word, lyric’s essence is eschatological. Lyric’s never evacuated claim to specialness, its (perplexing?) spatio-​temporal authority, is itself the substance, the transubstantiating means, of its functionality (as Edwards might say, the ‘point of its articulation with the social’145). Last Things are lyric things—​even when, as in Terada’s oppositional case, or for heterodox Harley lovers, it is the choice to reject these consolations that constitutes our use of them. It is their specialness we must give up. But give up (and give up and give up) we must. Nothing is so devastatingly banal as a plague-​pit tooth-​pulp. The more determined we are to transcend them—​declaring ourselves past a need for aesthetic consolations—​the more thorough their entwinement with the operative structures of abjection becomes.146 ‘We should be able to do something besides talk about how other people believe in its ontology’, pleads Terada,147 contemptuous of lyric prosthetics and, presumably, all other forms of literary-​ historical belief. Whether or not ‘we’ believe in its claims to specialness, functionally speaking, lyric endures as a form (it needn’t be the only one) that helps us travel, that enables human subjects in extremis (‘when facing death’, ‘when sick or imprisoned’, when hopelessly in love) to face up to, never mind just finding out, ‘what comes next’. Ashes to ashes. Ase Y me rod. Darkened eyelids. Erthe enough. Brave new theorists excepted, who can’t use lyric’s offer of a boost over unknowable ontological thresholds? When earth removal for London’s £15 billion commuter ‘Crossrail’ project turned up a Black Death burial pit, the archaeologist on the job was at pains to ‘reassure the public that there was no longer any health risk’ from the bones or soil.148 My hope is that we cannot say the same for this period’s excavated vernacular lyric—​rather, that we may find such riddled corpses, and the vellum tombs they inhabit, still able to move us, possessed of something to teach us about dying. To read the lyrics of Harley 2253, I have tried to suggest, is to attend above all to the (perennial) process of relocating that is basic to all practices of living, medieval and contemporary, lyric and otherwise. Mindful of previous discussions of pronouns, let me be clear: when I say ‘we’ here, I mean ‘we “other people” ’—​those of us who fail to number among Terada’s avant-​ garde. But what of those elusive medieval subjects for whom these words held enough ontological appeal to occasion their copying in the first place?

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In the version of the Harley manuscript’s early history to which I  subscribe (Revard offers several), the bulk of the book, Quires 5–​14, was produced at the patronal bequest of and with collaboration by Joan Mortimer Talbot, twice-​widowed lady of Richard’s Castle (near Ludlow), in the decade prior to her 1341 death.149 Per this timeline, Quire 15’s clutch of devotional-​instructional singletons will have been gathered in response to her decline (hastily, it would seem), or in the wake of it. The Harley scribe himself ceases work in April 1349. Rumour of plague came north the previous November from Hereford, where many items in his book originate, via Leominster, ‘where he probably learned his letters’.150 Quire 15 may function as a reminder of its copyist’s approaching mortality. Nor is it inconceivable that this prescriptive booklet, with its last bits completed late in the decade, was collected upon the outbreak of pestilence, and affixed as an appendix to Harley 2253 latterly. Revard and Ker give educated guesses as to copying dates, but binding evidence remains inconclusive.151 No longer so inconclusive are the routes of contagion, as historical epidemiology and literary history together instruct, by which the death-​bound form of medieval lyric travels to meet us. Before eschatological relocating there comes a lyric reckoning. For Harley audiences, depending on the century, this means certain moments wherein worldly endyngs and Last Things are faced, but without the awful baggage open plague pits bring. The great auctor of expiration, Ariès, posits the new cognizance of our own subjectivity that managed dying brings as the very basis of Western modernity, while Menocal points to the exiles and dislocations wrought by 1492. But surely whatever period one inhabits, endings always come too soon. Or do they? Maybe pre-​plague lyric, in its beautifully rogue rendering of the experience of dying before King Death, can teach us the last, best trick of all:  how to leave aside such unthrifty obsessions. Notes 1 Nicholas Wade, ‘Europe’s Plagues Came from China, Study Finds’, 31 October 2012, www.nytimes.com/​2010/​11/​01/​health/​01plague. html, accessed 14 January 2020; Haensch et  al., ‘Distinct Clones’ www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20949072​. 2 Fumo, ‘Pestilential Gaze’, 136, 85, 88. 3 Coley, ‘Narrative of Pestilence’, 215, 213.

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4 Gaunt, Love and Death, 10, 167. 5 Butterfield, ‘Why Medieval Lyric?’, 326. 6 Menocal, Shards of Lyric, 51. 7 Gillespie, ‘Penitential Lyrics’, 68. 8 Nelson, Lyric Tactics,  31–​58. 9 See Butterfield, ‘Why Medieval Lyric?’; Taylor, Textual Situations, 76–​99; Wenzel, Preachers, Poets; Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 121–​166. 10 Farina, Erotic Discourse,  50–​52. 11 Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 302–​303. 12 Lerer, ‘Genre of the Grave’, 132, 131, 129. 13 Wolf, Religious Lyric, v. 14 Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 157–​158. 15 Reiss, Art of the ME Lyric, 56, 53. 16 Woolf, Religious Lyric,  84–​85. 17 Reiss, Art of the ME Lyric, 56. 18 Menocal, Shards of Lyric, 38. 19 Ibid., 18. 20 Ibid.,  18–​19. 21 Ibid., 19, 43. 22 Ibid., 51, 124, 122–​123. 23 Ibid., 39–​40, 43. 24 Tristram, Life and Death, 15, 159; Bynum and Freedman, Last Things, 4. 25 As described by Worcester, ‘Face of Death’, 157. 26 Aberth, Brink of the Apocalypse, 262; Wieck, ‘Death Desired’, 441–​442. 27 Aberth, Brink of the Apocalypse, 262. 28 DuBruck, ‘Poetic Perception’, 309; Binski, Medieval Death, 70. 29 Tristram, Life and Death,  4–​5. 30 As described by Tristram, Life and Death, 15. 31 Ibid., 5, 17. 32 As described by Worcester, ‘Face of Death’, 158. 33 Dohar, Black Death, 37–​ 40 (‘General Mortality’), 40–​ 55 (‘Clerical Mortality’); cf. Platt, King Death,  1–​18. 34 Cohn, ‘Comparative History’, 21. 35 These comments are Tristram’s, Life and Death, 7–​8, but to question plague’s actual impact has become conventional. For ‘post-​plague’ as a period flag, see Platt, King Death, viii. 36 Cohn, ‘Comparative History’, 21–​22. 37 Tristram, Life and Death, 7–​8, 13. 38 James, ‘Years of Pestilence’, n.p. 39 Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol,  2–​4. 40 Aberth, Brink of Apocalypse, 205–​206; Papka, ‘Limits of Apocalypse’,  235.

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41 For visual, literary, and archaeological perspectives, see Binski, Medieval Death, 134–​138; Tristram, Life and Death, 162–​167; Daniell, Death and Burial, 69. 42 Binski, Medieval Death, 24; Gordon and Marshall, Place of the Dead, 4. 43 For overviews, see O’Connor, Art of Dying Well; Beaty, Craft of Dying; Appleford, Learning to Die. 44 Duclow, ‘Dying Well’, 395–​396; for ‘tamed’ death, see below. 45 Murray, Erthe upon Erthe, ix–​x. Fein (CH, II.387) notes ‘four types spread across forty-​one manuscripts’; Harley’s gnomic A-​version ‘precedes [three] more openly didactic’ variants. 46 Gordon and Marshall, Place of the Dead, 3; Bynum and Freedman, Last Things, 1. 47 As described by Marshall, ‘Geographies of the Afterlife’, 112. 48 Gordon and Marshall, Place of the Dead, 6. 49 Beringer, ‘Death of Christ’, 506–​507. 50 The relevant texts are Ariès, Western Attitudes, 34–​37, Hour of Our Death, 97–​ 107, and Images of Man and Death, which inventories deathbed scenes (94–​112). 51 Ariès, Western Attitudes, 12, 14. 52 Ibid., 11, 46, 51–​52. 53 Binski, Medieval Death (37), Gordon and Marshall, Place of the Dead (4–​6), and DuBruck, ‘Introduction’ (4)  provide explication. Precise dates for Ariès’ eras remain elusive. 54 DuBruck, ‘Introduction’, 4, 9. 55 Gillespie, ‘Penitential Lyrics’, 70. 56 Ibid., 74, 72. 57 Ibid., 75, 80. 58 Menocal, Shards of Lyric, 91. 59 See Brown, Religious Lyrics XVth, 236–​258 (‘Songs of Mortality’); Woolf, Religious Lyric, 67–​114, 309–​355 (‘Lyrics on Death’); Gray, Themes and Images, 176–​220 (‘Death and the Last Things’). 60 Gillespie, ‘Penitential Lyrics’, 86–​87. 61 Ibid., 85, 87. 62 Fein, Poems and Carols. 63 Fein, ‘Death and the Colophon’, 297, 302. 64 Ibid., 302. 65 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 276. 66 Ker, Facsimile, xvi, believes these were ‘intended as the first half of a [bifolio] quire’; conjugate stubs remain. 67 Revard, ‘Scribe’, 64; cf. Ker, Facsimile, xxii. 68 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 100–​101; Ker, Facsimile, xvii; Fein, ‘Literary Scribes’, 65. 69 Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 145. 70 Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 145. Fein describes Quire 15 as a ‘handbook’ that ‘might once have stood alone’ (CH, II.7).

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71 List from Fein, CH, II.485–​486; cf. Ker, Facsimile, xv–​xvi. 72 Ker, Facsimile, xvi; Fein, CH, II.4–​7, emphasizes Harley’s ‘booklet structure’. 73 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 95. 74 Fein, CH, III.347–​348. 75 The two non-​violent passings are Moses’ (‘on Friday the sons of Israel entered the Promised Land’ [2]‌) and the Virgin’s pain-​free ‘[trespas] a cyel’ [passage to heaven, 12]. Other versions of Fridays for Fasting have a lower proportion of events featuring death (Fein, CH, III.351). 76 For Anselm’s Questions as standard in Ars moriendi (normally, section three of six), see Beringer, ‘Death of Christ’, 500–​501; O’Connor, Art of Dying Well,  31–​35. 77 Beringer believes Ars moriendi were influenced by Passion meditations (like #151) in hourly breakdown ‘and their wording’ (‘Death of Christ’, 509). 78 Fein, CH, III.364–​365; cf. Epilogue. 79 Fein, CH, III.360. 80 Binski stresses the Ars moriendi’s ‘lay appropriation’ of ecclesiastical privilege (Medieval Death, 41)  whereas Harley 2253’s Latinate Questions and prayers presuppose clerical attendance at the deathbed. 81 Ars moriendi exhort us to be ‘active participant[s]‌ ’ in our dying (Beringer, ‘Death of Christ’, 508–​509). 82 Later, Christ’s death is interposed ‘between my wicked deserts and myself’ [19–​20], and ‘between me and your anger’ [iram tuam,  22]. Such usage is central to later Ars moriendi. 83 Ker, Facsimile, xv. Fein (CH, III.359–​360) describes the ‘work of natural lore’ by Albertus Magnus from which two (of sixteen) herbs are here extracted. 84 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 107–​108. 85 For chess ‘as a way to model political order, [and] for individuals to imagine their own civic identities’, see Adams, Power Play, 3, 43–​46. 86 Notwithstanding Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (1957), there is little medieval literature connecting chess and death. 87 Woolf, Religious Lyric, 2–​3. For Harley exemplars as exceptional, cf. Jeffrey, Early Lyric, 212; Ransom, Poets at Play, xiii, xxvi. 88 Woolf, Religious Lyric, 3. 89 Diehl, European Lyric, 243; Reiss, Art of the ME Lyric, xi–​xii. 90 Diehl, European Lyric, 243; Woolf, Religious Lyric, 1–​3, 15. 91 Daniell, Death and Burial, 2. 92 Lerer, ‘Genre of the Grave’, 128; Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 49. 93 Gordon and Marshall, ‘Placing the Dead’, 1. 94 Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 135–​154. Alpers extends Culler’s notions into ‘historically diverse lyric cultures’ (‘Apostrophe’, 1). 95 In mapping the ‘overlap between medieval letters … and Middle English love poetry’, Camargo cites Harley 2253 as a notable ‘precursor’ in a genre ‘peak[ing] around 1500’; Love Epistle, 6–​8,  26–​29.

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96 Ibid., 28. 97 Sigal, Erotic Dawn-​Songs, 4–​5, 13. 98 Woolf, Religious Lyric, 58. 99 Pronouncements about religious lyrics’ ‘functional nature’ proliferate; see Oliver, Poems without Names, 11–​13; Gray, Themes and Images, 3–​4. Woolf proposes an opposition between homiletic and poetic, which brackets ‘poetic collections’ like Harley as ‘[un]characteristic’ (Religious Lyric, 71, 374). 100 Gillespie, ‘Penitential Lyrics’, 79–​80. 101 For Bernard’s eroticized ‘reading of the Song [of Songs] as a love-​ lyric’, see Farina, Erotic Discourse, 6–​7 (emphasis original). 102 Stanbury uses #60 (Stond wel) to examine lyric performativity and women’s speech (‘Gender and Voice’, 227–​229, 237–​240). 103 Whitehead, ‘Religious Lyrics’, 107–​ 109; Stanbury, ‘Gender and Voice’, 235–​237. Cf. Stanbury, ‘Virgin’s Gaze’, for Stond wel’s ‘ocular plot’ (1087–​1089). 104 Fein, CH, II.384–​388. 105 Fein speaks of a ‘secular ploy’ (CH, II.444); Whitehead of ‘an attempt to add a romance frisson’ (‘Religious Lyrics’, 105); Gray of a ‘brilliant [opening]’ whose ‘effect is slowly dissipated’, revealing a ‘sententious core’ that is ‘crudely didactic’ (‘Themes and Images’, 172). Woolf, uninterested in poetical frames, hails the ‘coherent’ thought, ‘moving units of meditation’, and ‘evocative force of the content’ (‘Religious Lyric’, 137, 141). Kuczynski appreciates the poem’s ‘playful’ wit (‘Religious Contents’, 157–​158). 106 For resistance to reading #67.33’s ‘on thoro lay’ as referencing ‘thorwe’ [crib]—​ but without objection to ME throh/​OE þruh [coffin]—​see Brook, HL, 86. 107 Fein, CH, II.430. 108 Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 43. Kay (‘Sublime Body’, 5) characterizes medieval violence as ‘something both desired and enjoyed’, partaking of ‘sexual [longing]’ and ‘religious truth’ alike. 109 That Nyhtegale (bookended by ‘poems of identical meter’) overlaps semantically with Harley devotions is no surprise, it being ‘the type of English love song … most prone to be adapted by religious poets’ (Fein, CH, II.432–​433). 110 See Stanbury (‘Gender and Voice’, 237) for the ‘sanctified transgression’ inherent in Mary’s embodiment of multiple feminine roles: virgin/​maid; mother/​bereaved; beloved/​patroness. 111 The antonym to rueful weylawei is ‘welcome’: entreatment that good fortune or weal [weole: #33.50, #36.45, #43.11] may arrive. 112 Fein translates ‘rewe’ as ‘have pity’ [#64.13, #73.31], but note the religious valence in #62.10’s ‘Marie, reweth the’ [Mary, it grieves you], #60.19’s ‘thou rewe al of thi bern’ [you suffer much for your

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child, #60.19], #92.13’s ‘we reowen sore’ [we earnestly repent], and #93.21’s ‘hit wol me reowe sore’ [it will grieve me sorely]. 113 Jackson, ‘Who Reads Poetry?’, 181–​182. 114 Edwards, ‘Specter of Interdisciplinarity’, 188, 190. 115 Ibid., 189, 191. 116 Jackson, ‘Who Reads Poetry?’, 183. 117 Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, 201. 118 Ibid., 202. 119 Ibid., 203. 120 Ibid., 202. 121 Ibid., 205. 122 Prins, ‘Dysprosody’, 230, 234. 123 Ibid., 230. 124 Butterfield, ‘Why Medieval Lyric?’, 334. 125 Ibid., 319, 323. 126 Ibid., 325. 127 Woolf, Religious Lyric, 6; Lerer, ‘Genre of the Grave’, 128. 128 Terada, ‘After the Critique’, 195. 129 Ibid., 195–​196. 130 Ibid., 196. 131 Ibid., 199, 196. 132 Ibid., 196. Research Interests from faculty webpage [www.faculty.uci. edu/​profile.cfm?faculty_​id=5079]. 133 Ibid., 196; emphasis added. 134 Ibid., 199; emphasis added. 135 Holsinger, ‘Genealogies of Critique’, 1225–​1226. 136 Terada, ‘After the Critique’, 199. 137 Ibid., 197. 138 Ibid., 196. 139 Ibid., 199. 140 Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, 205. 141 Culler (ibid.) also declines to flag the mortality thematics of poems he cites, while Alpers (‘Apostrophe’), pushing into the Renaissance, downplays death even further. 142 For the productive ambivalence that defines medieval literature’s own surprising preoccupation with ‘the discourse of the new’, see Ingham, The Medieval New, 6, 20. 143 Fradenburg, Sacrifice your Love. 144 Terada, ‘After the Critique’, 199. 145 Edwards, ‘Specter of Interdisciplinarity’, 191. 146 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 183–​206, explores abjection’s special pertinence to medievalism. 147 Terada, ‘After the Critique’, 199. 148 Williams, ‘Unearthed’, n.p.

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149 Revard, ‘Scribe’, 22; ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 100–​101. By 1341 ‘he had finished most of the manuscript’ (ibid., 110). 150 See Dohar, Black Death, 34–​60, for plague’s progress across Hereford Diocese; Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 98, for late-​decade copying of fol. 140v; McSparran, ‘English Poems’, 392–​395, for Harley texts’ transmission between Hereford, Leominster, and Ludlow. 151 I owe this suggestion to Lawton, personal communication, St Louis, April 2015; cf. Fein, ‘Four Scribes’, 35–​39. By this time ownership may have passed to Joan’s son John Talbot (c.1318–​1355); Revard, ‘Scribe’, 22.

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Ye goon to … Hereford? Regional devotion and England’s other St Thomas

My Introduction proposed that Harley 2253, a book of extraordinary diversity, gets sutured together—​ crafted into a unified wholeness—​by those who read it. It also noted how Harley Manuscript Geographies would, like previous books on the codex miscellany, itself tend towards miscellaneity. These points had their basis in literary materialism, as seen in my delineation of thirteen ‘Aspects of the miscellany’ as a codicological form. But to survey the Harley manuscript also requires tools from cultural geography. One inspiration for my study can be found in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1987), which culminates in two case studies: ‘It All Comes Together in Los Angeles’ and ‘Taking Los Angeles Apart’.1 Contemporary Los Angeles provides Soja with a ‘medley’ of perspectives upon ‘experienced historical geography’ that compel not because they offer ‘comprehensive, holistic regional description’, but because they are ‘eclectic, fragmentary, incomplete, and frequently contradictory’. Soja argues that ‘totalizing visions, [however] attractive’, cannot capture the plural ‘meanings and significations’ evoked by a landscape, if read ‘as a fulsome geographical text’. In any spatial system, ‘countervailing metaphors and metonyms too frequently clash’, with ‘discordant symbols drowning out the underlying themes’, for any one paradigm to prevail.2 The 120+ literary and devotional/​ instructional works found in Harley 2253 offer a medley comparable to Soja’s Los Angeles. Informing my own inquiry has been a commitment to approaching Harley manuscript texts ‘from the perspective of their association with the West Midlands’.3 Throughout, we have witnessed medieval subjects ‘making their own geographies, and being constrained by what they have made’.4 But each encounter has

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needed to balance the claims of multiple generic and geographical systems. In Chapter  1, this meant reconstructing the mobile life experience of Hereford Diocese clerks, and tracing this phenomenon’s displacement on to Harley love-​lyrics, which reconcile the contradictions of cosmopolitanism and regionalism in the fetishized body of an embowered western beloved. In Chapter 2, we found that royalist territorial and Christian-​devotional imperatives led to the expulsion of Hereford’s Jewish population, from a frontier community whose textual remembrance of their departed neighbours—​in pilgrimage itineraries and biblical paraphrases near the centre of Harley 2253—​vacillates between contempt and empathy, rapprochement and erasure. Chapter 3 traced the ‘counterfactual’ trajectories of women who refuse to submit to medieval patriarchal realities. Social spaces and generic structures, alike, are constructed so as to contain medieval women and regulate their expression. But taking seriously the narratives of self-​determination asserted by two Harley femmes, who rewrite the pastourelle in which they find themselves, offered textual-​ geographical means by which to challenge the regimes of gendered enclosure, literary-​history’s not least. Chapter 4 imagined another order of future-​ tense geographical removal, by featuring lyric eschatologies and the Harley miscellany’s late-​added quire of Ars moriendi [craft of dying] texts. The afterlife spatiality envisioned in the manuscript’s ‘last lyric things’—​texts offering literary salve against the trauma of coming expiry—​proved enduring, worming its way into contemporary poems, even as desires for this-​worldly emplacement give way to fixation upon the next, as embodied in medieval devotional substitutions of Oure Levedy (or Suete Jesu) for secular lyric’s beloved lady. This Epilogue channels the dialectical spirit of Soja’s geographical vision, by reviewing how—​after much system discordance and anarchic pulling apart—​the trilingual, multi-​text miscellany that is Harley 2253 comes together as a literary-​cartographic compilation. Our final foray will track how a ‘whole-​book’ meaning comprising ‘something more than the sum of its parts’ is not found, so much as assembled,5 from the intertwined standpoints of codex geography and literary sanctity. Sacred space, in and around Harley 2253, manifests in terms of a Hereford-​centred ecclesiastical regionalism. Composite and eclectic, the Harley manuscript produces its ‘sum’ effect by marshalling multiple senses of oppositionality:  a metropolitan–​provincial tension that, in modern criticism as in medieval texts, proves constitutive of regional community, and

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reconciles sacred and secular. Pursuing such a textual-​geographical model will deliver us to the cusp of (dialectical) fulfilment. Literary-​codicological unity and medieval cartographical desire run along parallel conceptual tracks. Both trade upon the promise, or abjured temptation, of a totalizing vision: that order of ‘comprehensive, holistic’ geography which ‘may be impossible’.6 The final miscellany ‘Aspect’ treated by my Introduction concerned sanctified bodies, and the incarnate worlds they underwrite: how saints comprise a signature feature of the form. Harley 2253 is famous for other genres, yet saints’ lives prove essential to its compilational undertaking. As pilgrimage demographer Ronald Finucane has shown, saints are, in an intimate way, about place,7 and as Catherine Sanok demonstrates, English vernacular hagiography produces overlapping forms of secular and religious community, along the way to making eternity present and holiness proximate.8 There are three Latin saints’ lives in Harley 2253, and each has regional grounding: St Ethelbert of Hereford (#18, fol. 53), St Etfrid of Leominster (#98, fol. 132), and St Wistan of Wistanstow (#116, fol. 140v). Genres tend to clump together in period miscellanies, but these texts stand apart from one another in the Harley manuscript—​perhaps because they serve a structural role: as bookend-​frames, or textual-​architectural pillars for the collection. It is central to the literary geography of Harley 2253 that these are Diocese of Hereford vitae, and that they appear at the outset and (two) conclusion(s) of its codicological project. England’s other St Thomas Thomas Becket would seem to have little competition in his role as fourteenth-​century England’s pre-​eminent saintly property and bodily inspiration for literary compilation. Certainly, he does if approached via phrases like ‘the Age of Chaucer’, or narratives that laud him as patron of the realm as a whole, with influence extending to ‘every shires ende’ equally.9 But late-​century, metropolitan, and canonical perspectives tell only part of the story—​as previous chapters of Harley Manuscript Geographies have sought to demonstrate. At the Herefordshire church of Credenhill, there survives a chancel window that challenges the Canterbury martyr’s position—​whatever Chaucerian pilgrims’ tales may attest—​as self-​evident matrix for the realm’s sacred, political, and literary geography. This piece of stained glass, and the situation it invokes, has been little examined. During the six decades before the Black

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Death, however—​ a period coinciding with the lifetime of the Harley scribe—​Thomas of Canterbury was obliged to share the country’s devotional attention, and to compete for his pre-​eminent place in its landscape of sanctity, with another English St Thomas. This competitor was the holy and blissful Thomas Cantilupe, royal councillor, university theologian, and Bishop of Hereford 1275–​1282: a rancorous Norman prelate who died in the midst, as it happens, of a jurisdictional quarrel with his archbishop. That medieval England’s two ecclesiastical St Thomases were ‘seen as of like stature’ by partisans is illustrated by Credenhill’s c.1310 window, which (per the Friends of Hereford Cathedral) ‘shows St Thomas of Hereford standing equal with, and alongside, St Thomas of Canterbury’.10 This window, overlooking Hereford five miles off, may not be unique of its kind,11 and, at about twice the dimensions of the Harley manuscript, is something less than monumental. Still, such an artefact cannot help but throw historical light, however oblique its angle of refraction, on a prelate who died pressing the question of which had authority when territories clashed: the courts of Hereford or those of Canterbury? Medieval jurisdictional skirmishes tend to weary modern eyes, and Bishop Thomas was unusually sensitive regarding perceived rights. The case of Saint Thomas Cantilupe, however, has surprising regional importance, as well as literary-​ codicological resonance—​ to go along with a special role in the history of cartography. Cantilupe matters for Harley Manuscript Geographies because of the foothold he offers, in the form of politicized devotions his shrine inspired for six decades after his death, first when his successors, with royal support, promoted his sainthood, and then during years of rebellious foment across the region. His commemoration amounted to a cause célèbre for area ecclesiastics and lay elites alike.12 As Becket’s example demonstrates, and as Credenhill suggests for Cantilupe, prospective saints, especially in a cult’s years of ascendancy, find their way into all sorts of cultural realms; chancel windows are only the start. Below we shall progress from a cathedral shrine unto a miscellany codex—​ from St Thomas of Hereford to Harley MS 2253—​and (nearly) back again. But Credenhill’s hypothesis of two mighty Thomases, of Canterbury and Hereford, equally balanced in sanctified force, must be conceded as wishful thinking:  a historical counterfactual as implausible as a world in which insurgent femmes escape embowerment to control their own bodily movements; or as a pluralist England in which Christian neighbours can attend a Jewish wedding feast

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without reprisal. Hereford cannot hope to match Canterbury, and yet, the proposition is worth considering—​since contemporaries clearly did. Doing so will enable altered understandings of medieval literary history and cathedral cartography—​plus help broker a closing peace, in this monograph, with a once-​celebrated book’s diminished status. The rise and fall of Cantilupe’s shrine recalls the malleable standing of the Harley manuscript within literary studies; for both acquire meaning in proportion to their inescapably regionalist character. Recent literary-​ geographical scholarship, with its emphasis on peripatetic communities and textual exchange, ought to have rendered obsolete our subfield’s ‘rather old fashioned’ search for ‘regional “cultural identity” ’—​and yet the South-​West Midlands’ ‘attraction to scholars as a potential counterpoise to the dominant culture of the metropolis’ remains as relevant as ever.13 Harley 2253 provides codicological grounds upon which to test the Credenhill window’s oppositional proposition—​while St Thomas of Hereford offers means by which to evaluate the tenets of Ricardian literary history, with its determinative, often nationalist, metropolitan impingements. The ‘traditional geography of Middle English literature’, rightly or wrongly, ‘encourages a perception of the regionality of West Midlands [genres]’14—​ romance, lyric, and devotions—​even as we continue to read Harley 2253 via perspectives that Chaucer imposes. Unlikely to be a coincidence Thomas Cantilupe died in August 1282 in Orvieto, Italy, where, upon being excommunicated by Archbishop Alexander Pecham, he had gone to pursue his case at the Papal Court. His flesh and viscera were buried in Italy; his heart was acquired by Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, for a College of the Bonhommes he founded at Ashridge;15 and his bones came back to Hereford. Miracles began in 1287, following relocation of Cantilupe’s relics to the cathedral’s north transept; others coincided with a 1288 visit from Edward I. Richard Swinfield, Cantilupe’s chaplain and Bishop of Hereford 1283–​1317, had already begun pressing for canonization, sending proctors to determine whether miracles had occurred at Orvieto, and to sound out papal influencers. By 1305 Swinfield had secured royal and sufficient curial support. He also procured for Cantilupe’s shrine the treasure known as the Hereford Cathedral mappamundi. Swinfield had this monumental visual-​ textual encyclopaedia

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affixed to the wall of the cathedral’s north transept, adjacent to the saint-​elect’s new shrine (1287–​1349), where to queued-​up pilgrims it offered devotional guidance and theological edification. In 1306, papal commissioners travelled to Hereford to inquire into Cantilupe’s saintly credentials before throngs of partisans. His excommunication presented a hurdle, but eventually—​thanks to thirty years’ investment and the curial savvy of Swinfield’s successor, Adam Orleton, Bishop of Hereford 1317–​1327—​Thomas Cantilupe was canonized. This occurred in 1320. Edward II (1307–​1327) had lent support, but soon political conditions began to devolve, such that from 1321 until the king’s defeat and removal in 1326–​1327, conflict between royal and baronial forces amounted to civil war. The rebellion of 1326 was orchestrated by the alienated Queen Isabella and her paramour, Marcher Lord Roger Mortimer of Herefordshire, whose family (with a branch at Richard’s Castle) included adherents to Cantilupe’s cult,16 while Edward II’s deposition was extracted from him by none other than Adam Orleton. To trust the Bishop of Hereford, the king declared, ‘is as dangerous as to carry fire in one’s bosom’.17 Patterns of regional devotion are not always ‘readily explained’, but research by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Finucane indicates that while some English shrines were associated with royalist causes, pilgrimages to other shrines ‘were actually protest marches, demonstrating anti-​royalist sentiment’. Sometimes ‘popular devotion’ might serve as a ‘vehicle for criticism of or resistance to the political status quo’.18 Chapter 1 of this book examined the regional nostalgia generated by certain Harley Lyrics, with their cosmopolitan longings for ‘hom’, as figured in the embowered body of the local western beloved:  a ‘levedi’ dwelling ‘by west’. But such regional partisanship applies even more forcefully to those factional ‘saints’ for whom the Harley scribe copies laments—​namely Simon de Montfort and Thomas of Lancaster, leaders in the Barons’ Wars of the mid-​1260s and early 1320s, respectively.19 Most notable about Cantilupe’s shrine at Hereford is its meteoric rise in the late thirteenth century, its prominence during the 1320s while baronial rebellion flared in the west, and then its precipitous decline.20 All but forgotten—​except by the indefatigable Friends of Hereford Cathedral—​is that Bishop Thomas’ shrine competed on something like even footing for a while, with the royal-​associated shrine of that other St Thomas, to which the king twice pointedly repaired for devotions, so as to keep Parliament waiting.21

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Becket’s exemplification of an ecclesiastic ‘pattern of sanctity’, and his status as a symbol of ‘clerical immunity from lay jurisdiction’, made him necessarily a model for Cantilupe. Becket’s significance was European, but Cantilupe’s admirers ‘made what they could of the coincidences … to find in St Thomas of Hereford some echoes at least of St Thomas of Canterbury’.22 Demographic analyses of pilgrimage to Cantilupe’s shrine show how an appeal that was initially localized, over time became regional in dimension.23 Upon canonization, indulgences encouraging pilgrimage and invitations drawing notables to Cantilupe’s feast were issued throughout the realm. At Rochester, a penitent chaplain was ordered to undertake two barefoot pilgrimages: one to Thomas of Hereford and another to Thomas of Canterbury, with certificates to be obtained from sacristans at each shrine. But not all were so accommodating: when word began to spread of Cantilupe’s miracles, ‘an official of the Archbishop of Canterbury suspended the canon responsible for publishing the news’.24 When in September 1326 a rebel fleet landed, royal ranks broke, the king fled for Wales, and his key supporters were captured, the occasion of this surprisingly swift victory was marked by the queen’s triumphal procession from Bristol to Hereford—​‘insurgent headquarters’ and the site of royalist hangings.25 It doesn’t rival London to Canterbury, but Bristol was the only town outside Hereford to have hosted at least ten Cantilupe miracles.26 Isabella’s 1326 journey, in which rebels trace a Marcher pilgrim-​route, is recorded by one cathedral historian, incorrectly, to have culminated at the Bishop’s Palace on 1 October: the eve of Cantilupe’s feast.27 With its disregard for historical precision, the case recalls the symbolic neatness of Credenhill’s ‘Two Thomases’ window. So too for some later heresy trials: ‘in each case the date of the cathedral trial—​on 3 October, the Morrow of St Thomas—​is unlikely to be a coincidence’.28 It is also ‘unlikely to have been mere coincidence’ that 2 October, the calendar spot selected for Hereford’s new saint in 1320, had been the date of Orleton’s enthronement three years before.29 Unfortunately for his constituents, St Thomas of Hereford did not maintain his early level of efficacy as a patron saint. Pilgrim traffic fell away once Orleton graduated to the wealthier sees of Worcester (1327) and Winchester (1333), while the disproportionate political pull of the region dissipated with Mortimer’s removal by Edward III (1330). By 1336 annual pilgrim offerings at Hereford—​once equivalent to a baronial income—​had declined

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to levels desultory enough to prompt papal questioning.30 Plans to translate Cantilupe’s remains to a ‘more sumptuous’ shrine, and thus reignite region-​wide devotions, had long been in the works. But when the Black Death struck there arose more pressing reason. In October 1349, Edward III and other notables travelled to Hereford for a hopeful Feast of Translation.31 But processions led by Cantilupe’s relics proved insufficient in holding plague at bay. ‘It was thought’, present-​day Hereford Canon Meryl Jancey writes, ‘that the whole church in England would benefit from this translation’, as had been the case with Becket’s translation. But pestilence continued until 1351, with outbreaks recurring for a decade.32 As a dignitary of Hereford Cathedral, repairs to which his shrine funded, St Thomas retains parochial appeal (with new impetus from a British Pilgrimage Trust walking-​path).33 Matters were different in the decades before plague—​while there flourished the regional literary culture culminating in Harley 2253, with its vernacular political songs, devotions, and love-​lyrics. Period interests in promoting ‘regionality’ through romances featuring ‘local heroes’ and ‘a strong sense of locale’ may have been ‘a particularly aristocratic preoccupation’, not extending to ‘gentry readers or those of the middling sort’.34 Devotion to Thomas of Hereford, by contrast, enjoyed ‘popular acceptance’ in addition to aristocratic and ecclesiastical sponsorship. This ‘potency of shared experience’ meant that Cantilupe’s cult ‘transcended both the physical and political boundaries of [Marcher] society’, functioning as ‘a great leveller’, with the highborn participating in pilgrimage ‘alongside the populace of the locality’.35 But how do experiences at a medieval cathedral shrine translate into the literary-​geographical realm? What would it mean to locate Thomas Cantilupe in Harley 2253? The sacred map of the country—​redrawn Laura Varnam begins her study of medieval architectural sanctity by noting how Canterbury Cathedral ‘formed the centre of the sacred map of the country, rather like Jerusalem on medieval mappaemundi’.36 The ‘laity’, she emphasizes, were ‘taught [not only] to view the church as sacred space but to contribute to the production of that sanctity’. Employing a fifteenth-​century Canterbury Tales-​ continuation known as The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn, Varnam describes Chaucer’s pilgrims’ attempts to ‘[decipher] the iconography’ of the church building to which they arrive at journey’s end—​especially its ‘stained glass’.37 Where

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Varnam reads sacred space via The Canterbury Interlude’s foregrounding of ‘pilgrims’ experience in the cathedral and at the shrine of Thomas Becket’,38 I explore how the Harley manuscript, as a compilation offset from metropolitan cultural history, produces a different pilgrim experience and reconfigured literary geography. Noting that ‘competition among’ pilgrimage sites ‘meant that sanctity was increasingly valued as a form of symbolic capital that could improve a church’s social as well as sacred status’, Varnam explains how spaces like Canterbury Cathedral became ‘a multimedia project and a community concern. They were constructed out of a fusion of architecture, icon, national culture, and narrative practice’. Shrines combine ‘intense potency’ with an ‘ability to organize and redraw the map of the surrounding space’, such that ‘when a sacred space is created through miracles … a new topography is established as communities gather and regroup around the material site’.39 If the Canterbury Tales and Canterbury Cathedral’s centrality to medieval culture makes this pair ‘a perfect test case for examining how sacred space operates’,40 Harley 2253 and Hereford Cathedral provide a regional perspective that challenges the former’s self-​evident dominance—​means by which the sacred map of the country might be re-​drawn. Above we emphasized journey ends and shrine arrivals, but Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales proves just as ‘striking’, geographically, for where it begins. As David Wallace notes, London functions as an ‘absent city’ in his compilation.41 A pilgrim company randomly met—​‘by aventure yfalle /​In felaweshipe’ [CT I.26]—​ proceeds to ‘bring itself into being’ through ‘the self-​constituting dynamics of associational form’. But Chaucer’s assembled pilgrims do not begin their journey within city-​limits; they embark from dangerously marginal Southwark.42 As we move away in mixed company (casting an ever-​wider net, through recitation of tales ‘striving for spatial inclusiveness’43), we are exhorted to maintain focus on the ‘holy blisful martir’ [CT I.17] towards whom we travel. ‘Ye goon to Caunterbury’ [CT I.769], prompts our guide. We ruminate on the ‘celestial city’ to which we’re journeying, not the ‘earthly city’ from which we’ve come.44 Topographical way-​stations between Southwark’s Tabard Inn and the cathedral Chaucerian readers never reach are called out in tale-​ links periodically—​ ‘the Wateryng of Seint Thomas’ [CT I.826–​827], ‘Lo, Depeford’ [I.3906], ‘Lo Grenewych’ [I.3907]’, ‘Loo, Rouchestre’ [VII.1924], ‘Boghtoun under Blee’ [VIII.554–​ 557]—​ the better to mark our progress along an itinerary that recalls a mappamundi’s  sequence

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of aligned towns. The radial spines underlying world maps (such as Hereford Cathedral’s), before these took graphic-​ schematic form, derive from networked town lists found in sources that are Roman administrative-​, commercial/​mercantile-​, and, especially, pilgrimage-​based.45 Too much has perhaps been made of the anecdote wherein crusaders are said to have enquired, town by town as they journeyed east, ‘Which way to Jerusalem?’ As historians of cartography stress, not all mappaemundi place Jerusalem at their centre.46 Still, medieval map-​making can be said to have structural basis in the pilgrim networks generated by the cult of the saints.47 So too have literary travellers—​taught by Chaucer to desire transcendence and hermeneutic unity—​often made their dutiful way to a place of still sanctity, at journey’s end and world’s centre.48 In preceding chapters, I  have resisted the practice of reading Harley 2253 via the perspective the Canterbury Tales provides. But Chaucer studies always encroach. In Chapter 1, we found that assessments of Harley Lyrics tend to be framed (to their detriment) by metropolitan and Ricardian perspectives. In Chapter 2, we found that expelled Jews are remembered in alternative ways along the Welsh frontier in the c.1330–​1340 Harley manuscript, when compared with later texts from other regions, most notably, Chaucer’s paradigmatic Prioress’s Tale. In Chapter 3, we encountered rampant Anglo-​Norman women who deserve more than to be harbingers of the Wife of Bath, teleological way-​stations in English nationalist literary history. And in Chapter 4, we discovered that to read the added quire of death-​preparation texts with which the Harley manuscript concludes, when freed from a post-​ plague perspective such as Chaucer’s Retraction provides, is to encounter an alternately constituted, less chastened conception of medieval dying. Attempts to align the literary project of the Harley miscellany with Chaucer’s multi-​voiced undertaking can be taken too far (see Chapters  1 and 3). But destinations other than Thomas Becket’s cathedral shrine are possible. The Harley manuscript and the Canterbury Tales both establish literary sanctity through saintly association. Credenhill’s window presents the patrons of Hereford and Canterbury as episcopal peers, but Cantilupe doesn’t occupy the seminal position in Harley that Becket does in the Canterbury Tales. Still, if the latter’s missing metropolis is always present for early Chaucerian readers, Harley manuscript audiences prove just as decisively regional. Harley 2253 confronts readers with, not an absent city, but an absent saint. If canonized Bishop Cantilupe

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provides a bodily site around which sanctified forms of community coalesce for Herefordshire readers, he constitutes a conspicuous absence in this codex. To ask ‘Where is Cantilupe in the Harley miscellany?’ is to borrow trouble codicologically, but the question does move us towards Hereford. Seeking to locate St Thomas with regard to that book will help us take concluding stock of this one. There is no capstone Vita sancti Thomae for Harley pilgrims to arrive unto, and no tale-​ telling contest to dramatize interactions between texts. If we are to find the prelate of Hereford, we will need alternative means. In the spirit of Chapter 2’s search for expelled Jews, might we locate Cantilupe’s ‘absent presence’ in allusions to or versions of him? Extending Chapter 1’s correlation of lyric and region, are Harley saints’ lives mappable as a generic form?49 Might Chapter  3’s counterfactual method of asking ‘What if?’ produce codicological payoff? Thinking about St Thomas of Hereford helps clarify the compilation dynamics at play in the Harley manuscript. Especially at book’s end, for as Chapter 4 illustrated, how a codex concludes is a matter subject to revision. The historical personage most affiliated with the ‘Two Thomases’ window was Credenhill’s early fourteenth-​ century incumbent. A younger son of the family whose seat lay adjacent, Thomas Talbot (1287–​1362) was made rector in 1307, shortly after Cantilupe’s sanctity inquest. In 1319 he joined Orleton’s diplomatic train at Avignon, and from canonization onward, he is a Hereford canon, materially invested in Cantilupe’s shrine.50 But Thomas Talbot isn’t himself the point; more notably, he was brother-​in-​ law to Joan Mortimer Talbot (d.1341), lady of Richard’s Castle outside Ludlow, and uncle to John Talbot (d.1355): chief candidates to have been the patrons for whom the Harley manuscript was produced. In 1347, its main scribe drafted a legal holograph for John Talbot at Richard’s Castle, around the time he wrote the book’s final item.51 If one place Cantilupe might be found is in Harley’s saints’ lives, another lies in references within other genres. There are a few oaths ‘par seint Thomas’ [by St Thomas]. One comes in Quire 13’s La Gaguere [The Wager] (#84, fol. 118), when a lord urges his squire to assault his wife’s chambermaid: ‘as a reward you’ll have, by Saint Thomas, /​a horse … worth ten marks’ [93–​94]. Another comes in Quire 8 when, following a run of English religious lyrics, our copyist inserts into a departie, or lament of unrequited love, the refrain: ‘Je pri a Dieu e seint Thomas /​Qe il la pardoigne

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le trespas’ [I pray to God and St Thomas /​That they forgive her her trespass, #54.8, 19, 34]. This appeal for intercession remains ambiguous as to which St Thomas it refers to, so were it somehow a codicological promise, lyric down-​payment on a hagiography to come, it goes unfulfilled.52 Presuming that ‘poets did not choose saints’ haphazardly, Jan Ziolkowski suggests that what matters in ‘oaths of convenience’ may be an ‘association with particular dates or places’. ‘Oaths that establish geography’ cater to audiences by honouring saints ‘[esteemed] locally’, or signal characters’ ‘place of origin’.53 In the Anglo-​Norman fabliau and lyric above, both unknown outside Harley, invocation ‘by St Thomas’ helps locate readers in an insular, perhaps regional, here and now. Considering how Credenhill’s window couples Becket and Cantilupe, ambiguity when swearing ‘par seint Thomas’ may be part of the point. Ker’s work on manuscript provenance offers another means by which Cantilupe might be found. Ker established the Harley scribe’s placement and loyalties via several Latin verses—​corresponding with episcopal seal mottoes of Swinfield and Orleton—​which he drafted on to fol. 6v of Royal 12.c.xii. On this and other evidence it has been judged that these books’ main copyist nursed a special interest in Hereford bishops, from Ethelbert to contemporary times.54 Another motto features St Edmund of Abingdon (d.1240), who befits a theme of ecclesiastical regionalism. England’s next most recent saint recalls Cantilupe’s baronialism, in that he admonished Henry III to uphold Magna Carta, and Edmund further typologizes Thomas of Hereford in that both saints were university theologians, both clashed with Canterbury Cathedral, and both exerted influence along the Welsh Marches.55 Ker’s Facsimile corrigenda mention ‘[yet another] verse’ on fol. 6v of Royal: ‘Virgo parens natum tibi Thomam redde beatum’ [The Virgin Mother renders blessing unto you, Thomas]. This line ‘might’, he proposes, ‘refer to [Earl] Thomas of Lancaster’.56 But Bishop Thomas of Hereford seems likelier, given the efforts of Swinfield and Orleton (commemorated nearby) in promoting his cult. So too for a marginal notation—​‘De Seint Thomas’—​on fol. 62v of Harley 273, our scribe’s commonplace book. That this phrase appears alongside his Hours of the Virgin—​the patron to whom, with Ethelbert, Hereford Cathedral is formally dedicated—​ increases the likelihood of a Cantilupe allusion.57 Our scribe shows much interest in English saints, especially regionally prominent churchmen, in his other manuscripts, so it seems reasonable to anticipate discovery of Thomas Cantilupe in Harley 2253.

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Absent saint The Harley manuscript’s first forty-​eight folios contain Anglo-​ Norman religious texts in verse and prose. These include The Gospel of Nicodemus (#3, fols. 33v–​39), Passion extracts from a versified Bible history by Herman de Valenciennes (#2, fols. 23–​33v), and the Vitas patrum (#1, fols. 1–​21v), a verse abridgement of the Latin lives of the Desert Fathers (mostly, their wise sayings), plus prose martyrdoms of St John the Evangelist, St John the Baptist, St Bartholomew, and St Peter (#4–​7, fols. 41v–​48v). Ker’s facsimile excludes these items for being French and devotional, and because apart from rubrication they aren’t by the main scribe. But there is much congruence between Scribe A’s religious items and later items by Scribe B.58 This content convergence ‘attest[s]‌to a strong didactic impulse behind the conjoining of Harley’s two parts’.59 Whereas Quire 1–​ 4’s materials help readers imagine lands distant and holy, in the texts he produces himself Harley’s main scribe directs attention to nearby landscapes and the special sanctity, if also irony and carnality, which resides therein. This valorization of the local proves especially true of Harley’s three Latin vitae. As Revard shows, when beginning to assemble his collection, Scribe B first rubricated the booklets inherited from Scribe A (full of saintly wisdom), then began his own portion with a Latin Vita sancti Ethelberti [Life of St Ethelbert]—​official patron, along with the Virgin Mary, of Hereford Cathedral.60 Put another way, his compilation project begins twice: each time with hagiography. This planting of saints at threshold locations enables the sanctifying they embody to spread across a growing multi-​text miscellany. Many readers would be interested in Quire 1–​4’s ‘biblical and hagiographical mini-​anthology’.61 But who, Revard asks, ‘would particularly want vitae of the four “added” saints on folios 41v–​ 48—​ John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, Bartholomew, and Peter? Most plausibly, someone who might be called upon to preach in one of several Ludlow area churches under patronage of these four saints’. To Revard, ‘it seems no coincidence’ Quire 4’s added saints belong to churches in Scribe B’s ‘working area’.62 Such a proposition aligns with how each of Harley’s Latin vitae treats ‘a local hero, honored [for] connection to Mercian history’.63 The boundaries of Anglo-​Saxon Mercia overlap with those of the Anglo-​Norman South-​West Midlands. Quire 6’s St Ethelbert—​ Hereford Cathedral’s foundational martyr—​ is beheaded by the famous Offa (King of Mercia 757–​796), who sees him as a political

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threat (#18), while Quire 14’s St Etfrid journeys south from saint-​ rich Northumbria to convert Merewald, a previous ruler of Mercia, who establishes Leominster Priory with Etfrid as its head (#98). There is little to The Martyrdom of St Wistan—​codicologically Harley’s final text (#116) and chronologically its latest—​and less to Wistanstow, 8.5 miles north of Ludlow along the Hereford–​ Shrewsbury road. Yet Harley’s account foregrounds, where its source does not, Wistan’s genealogy: grandson to King Wiglaf of Mercia, he is martyred by his godfather [cognatus et compater, 11] Brithfard.64 Such details argue little individually. But together these vitae promote an ecclesiastical regionalism through resistance to royal authority. In reading their narratives, and absorbing what Sanok calls insular hagiography’s ‘geography of genre’,65 we progress from an outmoded, violently temporal Mercia into a Christianized community whose authority is manifested in saints native to the landscape. Overall, Harley 2253’s saintly roster is diverse: biblical and Mercian; Near Eastern and insular; eremitic and political; Latin and vernacular. But these historically various figures share a commitment to locally grounded sanctity. It is difficult to overemphasize the relationship between client corporation and patron saint’s body. Quire 14’s Legend of St Etfrid, priest of Leominster [Legenda de sancto Etfrido presbitero de Leominstria] (#98) seems designed to enable Leominster’s Benedictine Priory to capitalize upon a saintly association; indeed ‘by heaven’ was Etfrid ‘conducted to [that] place’ [#98.9].66 The symbiotic terms of saint/​client relationships are laid out in the Vita sancti Ethelberti (#18), the Harley manuscript version of which emphasizes an episode in which the ghost of martyred Ethelbert—​ appearing in a brilliant light [cum immenso lumine, 115–​116]—​asks a layman to move his body from its current sepulchre to a new site at ‘Stratum Waye’ [lit., Street of the (River) Wye,  117] or Hereford.67 Our miscellany’s originating Life thus highlights a task of bodily translation: Ethelbert’s corpus sacrum [sacred body, 123] must, as precondition for miraculous action in its vicinity [maxima mirabilia,  132], be disinterred, transported, and reburied within the sanctified ground upon which Hereford Cathedral will come to be built. In consequence of this spiritually ordained but geographically realized process, St Ethelbert the King accedes unto his rightful authority and ‘assigned place’ [locum assignatum, 124; locum preordinatum, 131] as a regional patron. The light-​, tomb-​, and place-​motifs that characterize The Life of St Ethelbert reappear together in the manuscript’s final item, The

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Martyrdom of St Wistan [De martirio sancti Wistani] (#116, fol. 140v). This spare, 32-​line text includes little beyond some genealogical set-​up—​refusal of Mercia’s throne; disenfranchisement—​ and martyrdom at ‘a certain designated place’ [certum locum assignatum,  22]. After Wistan’s body is conveyed and entombed, we hear of its signature miracle: a ‘column of light’ [columpna lucis] stretching ‘as far as the eye could see’ [29], marking the spot as Wistan’s Place. This concluding vita, with its localization to ‘the realm of the Mercians’ [regnum Merciorum,  13] and culmination in focalized light and ‘countless miracles’ [infinita … miracula, 32], resembles Scribe B’s inaugurating life in how both tie sanctity to an ‘assigned place’ [locum assignatum]. Like Etfrid with its route to Leominster ‘commanded by heaven’ [#98.9], Ethelbert and Wistan provide ecclesiastical grounding for assertions of regional sovereignty. A  spiritual vocation (combined with royal blood) gives sanction to a hagiographic form of community, the essence of which lies in locality. Indeed, variations on the word (locum, loco, loco, loci) appear four times in Wistan’s final sentences, and multiple times in Etfrid’s.68 The intimate relation between geography and sanctity that Finucane posited is borne out in Harley 2253, with, as Etfrid says, special purchase ‘in the western zone of the Mercians’ [in plaga Merciorum hesperia], where saints ‘shine’ with unusually powerful ‘light’ [lucis] [#98.84]. Added saint Revard, who pursues codicological beginnings, wished to know ‘who would have wanted all the lives of saints in Quires 1–​4 enough to bind them together’ at the front of his book.69 But I remain stuck on exclusion. Why make no room in this gathering of regional vitae for Herefordshire’s, and his own lifetime’s, most important saint? It cannot be that Thomas Cantilupe didn’t matter to a clerk with ties to leading area families (Talbots, Mortimers, Genevilles), one versed enough in local martyrology to have copied (or himself redacted) Mercian vitae like he did. This is to say nothing of his episcopal seal mottoes. Surely Bishop Thomas, to whose shrine pilgrims flocked during his youth and early adulthood, makes as attractive a corpse to exhume as hoary Ethelbert, or rebel-​baron Thomas of Lancaster whose cult barely took hold, let  alone obscure Etfrid and Wistan. In 1321, a Hereford Diocesan official’s brother undergoes censure for taking the name of Thomas Cantilupe too lightly in jest [levitate]; he avoids imprisonment, but

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only after public penance and family intervention. This penitential drama takes place in the same parish church—​St Laurence’s of Ludlow—​to which the Harley scribe’s benefice aspirations pertain.70 In the near vicinity of Harley 2253’s copying, St Thomas Cantilupe’s memory is not likely to have faded, considering how he generated both transgressive jesting and official rebuke. So where, with regard to our miscellany, is he? As Elizabeth Scala observes, ‘the primary function of the medievalist is to locate missing stories’, and this impetus ‘structure[s]‌ the way we think about’ early literature. But ‘if medieval literary works always bear witness to an other text’—​an absent narrative that is ‘lurking behind’—​it becomes crucial to examine the connection between ‘manuscript textuality and literary structure’.71 The dynamics of literary-​medievalist desire involve first recognizing sanctity as literature,72 and then acknowledging the constitutive relationship that obtains between sainthood—​embodied sanctity—​and geographical locality. Scala seizes on practices of scribal-​ editorial arrangement—​ her paradigmatic example being the Ellesmere Chaucer (c.1400–​1410)—​to demonstrate how medieval literature’s ‘governing principles’ reside in ‘cultural conditions of manuscript textuality’, especially as linked to needs for narrative ‘authorization’.73 These insights enable our return to the conundrum of Harley 2253 and the ‘absent presence’ there of Hereford’s Thomas Cantilupe. For, as the triad of Becket, Canterbury Cathedral, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exemplifies, saints’ shrines offer uniquely constructive means by which to establish textual authority—​a commodity with roots, we continue to find, in topographical place. What Cannon calls ‘the grounds of English literature’ (see Introduction) is established on textual absence itself, that lack which literary manuscripts may aspire to banish, but never will. My desire in this Epilogue has been to discover Thomas Cantilupe within the pages of Harley 2253, or, absent such archaeological success, to see him (re)placed within its sanctified textual territory—​a book as equivocally canonical, nowadays, as the saint himself. Cantilupe is never plainly named in Harley 2253: its few passing invocations ‘par seint Thomas’ remain elusive. But, let us remember, the copyist of Harley 2253 and Royal 12.c.xii also connects to Harley 273, a book of devotional and household texts ‘more gathered than copied by him’, yet one he came to treat as his own.74 We have noted our scribe’s propensity to start and end his projects with saints: Royal 12’s Office for St Thomas of Lancaster;

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Harley 2253’s Ethelbert, Wistan, and Etfrid. Harley 273 operates likewise in this vein: its first item, a calendar of liturgical feasts and saints’ days (fols. 1–​6), rubricates the dedication date of Ludlow’s Church of St Laurence. Calendars of this sort (not uncommon in period miscellanies) locate their textual communities upon a seasonal-​ecclesiastical wheel. As is the case today, matters quotidian are heightened in this durable form, even as matters devotional are grounded by the church’s yearly cycle of feasts, its celebration of saints universal, national, and local. Patron obits are frequently added, or those of ecclesiastical dignitaries. Calendars can be dated by what feasts they include or lack, as saints are added to the canon, and can be localized by geographically specific entries.75 Even if it could not be dated paleographically, we could be reasonably sure that the Ludlow Calendar fronting Harley 273 was produced before 1320. Whoever laid it out allocated one month per page, and one day per line, then afterward added liturgical feasts and saints’ days. When doing so, this practised textura hand left the space following 2 October—​Thomas Cantilupe’s feast day—​ conspicuously blank. Even in our scribe’ own calendar, we do not, it would appear, reach fulfilment. And yet, Harley 2253’s absent saint does, four decades after his death, make a cameo appearance. On folio 5v, line 4, some later hand has added, in makeshift imitation of the surrounding script: ‘S.th.Herford’: Saint Thomas of Hereford. The cathedral city’s outskirts have been reached—​and perhaps too the ‘thropes ende’ of a celestial one [CT X.12]—​though it remains unclear by whom, and with what literary-​geographical effect. Other calendars from this region, such as Worcester Cathedral Library Q.26 and Oxford, Balliol College 321, similarly pre-​date 1320 but have Cantilupe’s 2 October feast day added—​typically ‘Thome confessoris’ [Thomas the Confessor] or St Thomas of Hereford (as in Harley 273)  to distinguish him from the archiepiscopal martyr.76 Some, such as Hereford Cathedral Library P.ix.7 (a mid-​1260s breviary that includes obits for cathedral dignitaries), also add, in post-​1349 hands, Cantilupe’s 30 October Translation.77 The addition of his 2 October feast day to the calendar in Harley 273 must perforce post-​date 1320; probably, since 30 October’s Feast of Translation has not been added, this entry was made prior to 1349. (Leominster’s ‘St Etfrid’ has been added, on 26 October.) As transposition ceremonies go, Harley 273’s calendar additions and Royal 12.c.xii’s episcopal seal mottoes come nowhere near the elaborate choreography of Cantilupe’s

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Translation in October 1349. But these documentary traces of St Thomas, his pointed inscriptions into the Harley scribe’s other books, do bespeak a desire for locally sanctioned and regionally sanctified fulfilment—​ a geo-​ hagiographic form of community made uniquely available through Hereford Cathedral’s ever-​ oppositional former bishop. If, ‘when he first began working on what became Harley 2253, he was merely copying out a very important local saint’s life’—​ ‘perhaps as preparation for when called upon to preach at the feast of St Ethelbert’78—​it is tempting to think that for his capstone piece to such a collection, Scribe B might procure something on Hereford Cathedral’s other hometown saint, perhaps in preparation for when called upon to preach at the Translation Feast of St Thomas Cantilupe.79 Affairs were beyond desperate in Hereford Diocese in 1348–​ 1349.80 Perhaps Thomas of Hereford’s Translation would heal the realm’s ills, just as Thomas of Canterbury’s had. Hopes were high, but the rest is failure. The Black Death continued to rage, with heavy death-​tolls intermittent until 1351. The Harley scribe is gone by late 1349, although not before having assembled the last quire of death texts we examined in Chapter 4.81 Cantilupe appears in his earlier books, via the calendar additions and seal mottoes we’ve discussed. But in his most ambitious compilation, St Thomas of Hereford fails to materialize. Perhaps it is because Cantilupe fails his constituents, ‘whan that they were seke’ [CT I.18]. Or perhaps it is because our unusually ambitious scribe did not live long enough to complete the capstone vita for his collection. Whatever views Hereford Canon Thomas Talbot’s Credenhill window may afford, and whatever thinking about literary compilation his sister-​in-​law Lady Joan Talbot’s miscellany may encourage, Thomas Cantilupe provides nowhere near the presence in the Harley manuscript that Thomas Becket does in the Canterbury Tales. Even more than at the close of Chaucer’s pilgrimage narrative, the episcopal ‘seint Thomas’ to whom we journey remains absent. Yet, as Scala helps us see, precisely by staying gone the absent narrative of Cantilupe’s Life imparts unto Harley that needed ‘literary structure’ which critics continue to find lacking in its pages. One impetus for the Harley manuscript comes in hagiography, in the twinning of sanctity and geography that is embodied in local saints Ethelbert, Etfrid, and Wistan, and in baronial martyrs Simon de Montfort and Thomas of Lancaster. But if its makers have ‘chosen and arranged’ items to tell ‘an overall “story” ’ about

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oppositionality,82 then we confront again the paradoxical ‘regionality’ marking West Midlands literature:  Herefordshire’s constitutive service as ‘counterpoise’ to metropolitan culture.83 Like the vernacular lyric beloved, saints become an instrument by which this codex grounds its project—​and asserts literary-​geographical authority for it. The Harley manuscript, like some other works beloved of medievalists, remains unfinished. An unwritten 1340s Life of St Thomas Cantilupe amounts to its Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn. This pseudo-​Chaucerian continuation—​ composed ‘to coincide with [Thomas Becket’s] 1420 jubilee’, perhaps by ‘a monk at the cathedral with responsibilities for [his] shrine’—​ picks up Harry Bailey’s ‘joly compaignye’, after The  Parson’s Prologue left them entering ‘at a thropes end’ [CT X.12–​14], upon arrival at Canterbury Cathedral.84 The spiritual culmination promised—​entrance into the consolidating presence of that ‘blisful martir’ [I.17] to whom all, from ‘every shires ende’ [I.15] are progressing—​will now be textually ‘fulfilled’ [X.17].85 Chaucer’s own narrative ends outside Canterbury, of course, ‘the makere of this book’, as he ‘taketh … his leve’, seeing fit to deny his pilgrims their cathedral arrival.86 As goes medieval cartographic desire—​a ‘longing for geographical satisfaction’ never possible to obtain—​so goes desire in the Canterbury Tales.87 But of what would a capstone Harley Life of St Thomas Cantilupe consist?88 And why might this matter to the literary-​geographical undertakings my own book has staged? Harley 2253’s compilation began with a miracle-​working body’s foundational procession, its proto-​pilgrimage to slain Ethelbert’s unbuilt shrine, around which a cathedral rises. And when that building’s roof, centuries later, proceeds to fail—​ there was an acute architectural crisis prior to Cantilupe’s first miracles—​we are called back from our ‘wandrynge by the weye’ [CT I.469] to witness another interment in the ground that holds Ethelbert. Away north in the plague-​ridden countryside, ten miles past Ludlow on the Hereford road, a column of light marks an obscure saint’s place (‘Lo, Wistanstow!’), and ten miles south of Ludlow comes Etfrid’s priory (‘Lo, Leominster!’) where we are ‘half-​way’ to St Ethelbert and the Virgin and St Thomas Cantilupe’s Welsh borderlands cathedral. ‘Ye goon to Hereford’, the maker of the Harley manuscript might have said: ‘God yow speede!’ [CT I.771] But, like Scribe B himself, readers of Harley 2253 never reach October 1349, never join the Hereford Chapter’s choreographed procession. Edward

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I  helped prompt Cantilupe miracles in 1288; now Edward III, on a reeling kingdom’s behalf, is present for the procession of St Thomas’ relics through a decimated town, followed by their formal Translation to an improved resting place. As a figure inextricable from his cathedral, Bishop Thomas makes an obvious pairing with Ethelbert, Hereford’s foundational saint, but he is also (as Harley 2253 ever teaches) ‘known by his contrary’: flanked if not obscured by his metropolitan namesake. Speaking of namesakes, Credenhill rector Thomas Talbot was born in 1287, Thomas Cantilupe’s year of miracles. Canon Thomas’ ‘Two Thomases’ window isn’t large, and though it faces Hereford, the cathedral’s spires are difficult to see. More easily discerned is St Thomas of Hereford in his (much anticipated) rightful glory:  equal to and opposite St Thomas of Canterbury. In discussing the eminent R.A. Dobson’s attempts to ascertain the provenance of the Ancrene Wisse [Guide for Anchoresses], an early Middle English text comparable to the Harley Lyrics in its semi-​ canonical standing and South-​ West Midlands orientation, Cannon observes that ‘the [specific] place Dobson proposed … matters much less than the degree to which he insisted on the importance of some place’.89 Dobson’s ‘plumping for geographical precision at all costs’ turns out to have been ill-​advised, philologically speaking. Still, his obsessive attempt to localize Ancrene Wisse proves appropriate to the foundational ‘role of place in [early ME] texts’. Dobson’s spatial reading results in an ‘extraordinary misprision’:  his ‘discoveries were most topographically right where they were most paleographically wrong’.90 How might this lesson of productive misprision be applied to Thomas Cantilupe and the Harley manuscript? Sylvia Tomasch would characterize Dobson’s passion for provenance certainty as yet another species of ‘cartographic desire’91: a craving for control over text and territory, inability to achieve fulfilment of which is no more surprising than are our overdetermined medievalist returns to this terrain: by Bella Millet who has corrected Dobson’s mistakes;92 by Cannon who rehabilitates their spirit if not substance; and now by myself. But to what concluding literary-​geographical insight does such recognition bring us? The Pilgrim’s Tale of St Thomas When pilgrims to Hereford Cathedral approached the shrine of former bishop Thomas Cantilupe in the early fourteenth century,

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they were confronted with an image encompassing all of Christian history. This ‘estorie’ took the form of a large mappamundi,93 dense in detail but ‘designed to be visible from a distance’. Affixed beside Cantilupe’s tomb at ‘an ideal height for instruction and edification’,94 the Hereford Cathedral Map occupied the central panel of a triptych whose flanks depicted the Annunciation: Angel Gabriel to the left, Virgin Mary to the right.95 Until Translation of the saint’s remains to their new shrine (in the Lady Chapel) in 1349, the map-​triptych stood in alignment with a rose window in the cathedral’s north transept.96 The Hereford Map’s location testifies to its incorporation within the medieval ecclesiastical establishment—​ institutionally, architecturally, epistemologically—​ while the orthogonal frame provided by triptych and transept helps reinforce the image’s own concentric geometry. In the T-​in-​O format that structures most mappaemundi, the known world is divided into three continents (Europe, Africa, and Asia) encircled by ocean. The Middle Ages inherited this schema from classical geography, but the form came to carry typological meaning. Jerusalem replaced Rome at the centre of the system, and the form’s geometric elements—​its cruciform ‘T’ and Eucharistic ‘O’—​characterize this world as the stage for Christian history’s unfolding, Creation through Incarnation to Judgement.97 Historians of cartography agree on the basics of what lay viewers were expected to make of such visual/​ textual compendia:  a monumental mappamundi amounts to a summa of geographical, historical, and legendary knowledge, encased in a theological frame. Viewers took away more than just a sense of where they stood geographically; ‘edification’ meant learning to know their place in salvation history, as well as in political and ecclesiastical pecking orders.98 Mappaemundi provide an authorized framework for imagining the world in ways no medieval miscellany does, even those of a devotional bent. And certainly, theories of the Hereford Map’s ‘function’ should be sought in its institutional and architectural context. Ultimately ‘the role of this and all Christian mappaemundi’ is ‘to point the way from the terrestrial City of God to the celestial City of God’.99 Exegetical intention need not determine audience experience, however. Visitors to the Hereford Cathedral shrine of St Thomas, like readers of Harley 2253, had mixed backgrounds. What most had in common was a shared regional orientation. Mappaemundi furnish ready answers to big questions, and, once activated, the curiosity of viewers might be ‘channelled in useful ways’.100

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The project of ‘church cartography’ is to point to a place beyond itself.101 In this it is like much vernacular poetry in the Harley manuscript, secular and religious. If heaven is a topos of the future, then the carnal contemporary world, the province alike of death and of exquisite transgression, is a disposable topography. Yet somehow that site becomes also a renewable one. Like the book and the body, to both of which it is often compared, the world is a way-​station, that which must be cast off but which never quite can be. To move towards God is to reject the earth (and the bower) as the place of the past, and to treat history (including literary history) as a discarded slough. The incarnate world is not an endpoint, permanently ‘estable’ [established] like the fire of hell—​alluded to in the Judgement Scene atop the Hereford Map—​or ‘pardurable’ [enduring] like heaven’s ‘joie’.102 Mapped but passing, it constitutes both a stage for and a substance of transformation. The Harley manuscript partakes of some, but does not embrace all of this geo-​ spiritual dynamic, medieval cartography’s this-​world/​next-​world dialectic. Even now, centuries past its makers’ passing, and after an added quire’s orthodox chastening, we remain embowered and reading: looking back, looking home, looking west. Like a sermon at journey’s end, the theological lessons at Cantilupe’s shrine now begin, complete with edificatory pointing towards the carto-​encyclopaedia that adorns it. My mapping of Harley manuscript geographies finds its limit-​point in our arrival before the Hereford Cathedral mappamundi. Here is not the place to stage the disciplinary confrontations that might ensue. Suffice it to say that new worlds—​literary-​medievalist, cultural-​geographical, and otherwise—​will continue to unfold from the extraordinary compilation that is Harley 2253, for exactly as long as we continue to invest in reading it, and in seeking to ascertain its place. Postscript No Life of St Thomas Cantilupe survives before two extant from the 1670s. One of these, by the expatriate English Jesuit Richard Strange (a rector in Ghent), directs itself towards a displaced ‘English Catholic community on the continent’, while the other (folded into a county history) is by Herefordshire antiquarian Thomas Blount, who is ‘not known to have travelled abroad’.103 These two lives ‘[do not] contradict one another’, agreeing in outline and basic elements, but they do ‘differ in spatial references’.104 Blount’s account of Cantilupe includes frequent ‘allusions to the

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local landscape’ and ‘incorporate[s]‌the saint’s deeds’ into area topography:  ‘By explicitly marking the saint’s footsteps’ and ‘referring to [natural and architectural] landmarks’—​ especially the bishop’s cathedral tomb—​Blount ‘anchored the saint in … Herefordshire’ and ‘embedded his narrative in the locality’.105 Strange’s Life and Gests, by contrast, ‘stripped Cantilupe of all locality’ because his audience—​a community ‘displaced’ and ‘dislocated’—​‘had no need for saints’ cults [that were] fixed in the landscape [and thereby] bonded a localized community’.106 Scattered at home or in exile abroad, English Catholics ‘had more to gain from mobile relics and books’—​ like Strange’s own, which proposed itself as an alternative to Cantilupe’s unmovable tomb by ‘abstracting the saint from [his originating] landscape’.107 St Thomas’ travelling relics (his Life and Gests included) were ‘a physical means to uphold a geographically scattered community’, making them analogous to the Harley manuscript’s mobile vernacular lyrics, which resonate differently for episcopal clerks away on embassy, compared with gentry audiences ensconced at home. Both sets of texts, by circulating, ‘bonded [readers] wide apart from each other rather than uniting a geographically [fixed] community’.108 From a literary-​geographical standpoint, this story of scattered relics resembles—​in reverse—​the process by which the disparate and dispersed items in Harley 2253 come together, following production elsewhere, for a Ludlow agglomeration. My book’s emphasis on pre-​plague literary transmission and manuscript geography thus finds its Counter-​Reformation counterpart. Liesbeth Corens’ account of Strange’s ‘exilic writing’, a diasporic rhetoric originating ‘on English shores’ amid ‘the particularities of local saints’ cults’ but later travelling abroad,109 also recalls the out-​and-​back spatial dialectics described by Edward Soja, at this Epilogue’s outset. Now that we have finally found them—​not at the end of Harley 2253 but in the late seventeenth century—​Strange’s and Blount’s Janus-​faced lives of Thomas Cantilupe appear to insist upon the literary-​geographical multiplicity (or ‘unity in dispersion’110) that medieval miscellany form itself underwrites. Cantilupe’s recovered Lives, one rooted in the Herefordshire landscape, the other addressing a community dispersed, provide complementary ‘means of interconnecting’.111 Their double spatiality of taking apart and coming together—​of simultaneous regional emplacement and cosmopolitan/​universalist extension—​is a quality that St Thomas of Hereford also helps illuminate, in his conspicuous absence from

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Harley 2253, and in his delivery of pilgrims into the presence of the Hereford Cathedral mappamundi.

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Notes 1 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 190–​221, 222–​248. 2 Ibid., 247. 3 Scase, ‘Introduction’, 3. 4 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 87. 5 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 264; see Introduction. 6 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 247. 7 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 152–​ 172 (‘The Geography of Pilgrimage’). 8 Sanok, Legends of England, 47–​48, 177. 9 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, A.15 (emphasis added). 10 Jancey, St Thomas of Hereford, 5–​6, 9–​10. For Becket as Cantilupe’s foil (plus reproduction of Credenhill’s glass), see Duggan, ‘Cult of Thomas of Canterbury’; cf. Ranguin and Kline, ‘Relics and the Two Thomases’. Hereford Cathedral brochures and poster-​boards continue to exploit the comparison. 11 A c.1420 window from the Bishop’s Manor at Stretton Sugwas—​en route from Credenhill to Hereford—​features Cantilupe beside cathedral patrons St Ethelbert and the Virgin Mary; O’Connor, ‘Bishop Spofford’s Glass’. 12 Bartlett, Hanged Man. 13 Pearsall, ‘Epilogue’, 273–​274. 14 Wiggins, ‘ME Romance’, 239. 15 Earlier, Edmund gave Ashridge a copy of Comestor’s Historia scholastica along with a (now fragmentary) mappamundi—​the Duchy of Cornwall Map—​to which Hereford’s is indebted; Barber, ‘Maps of the World’,  19–​23. 16 Bass, ‘Miraculous Marches’, n.p. 17 Bannister, HRO, xxx. 18 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 164–​ 165; Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 43. 19 Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance’, 178–​ 182. Royal 12.c.xii’s Office for St Thomas Lancaster (fol. 1)  features an incipit ‘found in three other texts dedicated to St Thomas (de Cantilupe) of Hereford, St Ethelbert of Hereford, and the Virgin, all of which originate from Hereford’ (McQuillen, ‘Thomas of Lancaster’, 22–​23). 20 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 173–​188. 21 Denholm-​Young, Vita Edwardi Secundi, 17, 42. Despite early association with ecclesiastical resistance and ‘baronial conspiracies’, Becket’s shrine became specially linked to English kings, who worked ‘to

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cultivate the [connection]’ (Duggan, ‘Cult of Thomas of Canterbury’, 31–​32). 22 Duggan, ‘Cult of Thomas of Canterbury’, 21, 23. ‘Prayers and readings’ provided for Cantilupe’s feast ‘bear close resemblance to those used for [Becket]’; Diocese of Hereford, Praying with the Saints, 29. 23 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 188. 24 Ibid., 42–​43, 182. 25 Usher, ‘Political Bishop’, 46. 26 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 185. 27 Bannister, HRO, xxxvi. 28 Swanson and Lepine, ‘Later Middle Ages’, 49. 29 Haines, Career, 41. 30 Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 181; Morgan, ‘Effect of the Cult’, 151. 31 Morgan, ‘Effect of the Cult’, 147; Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 179. 32 Jancey, St Thomas of Hereford, 18–​19; Dohar, Black Death, 59–​61. In 1620, Cantilupe’s relics were again carried through the streets to ward off plague, but this time ‘the procession had the desired effect’; Barret, ‘Relics of Cantilupe’, 182. 33 St Thomas Way, based on a pilgrimage recorded in Cantilupe’s canonization proceedings, runs from Swansea to Hereford: http://​thomasway.ac.uk/​explore-​the-​way/​, accessed 14 January 2020. 34 Wiggins, ‘ME Romance’, 254–​255. 35 Bass, ‘Miraculous Marches’, n.p. 36 Varnam, Sacred Space, 7. 37 Ibid., 2, 1. 38 Ibid., 1. 39 Ibid., 3, 7. 40 Ibid., 7. 41 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 156–​158. 42 Ibid., 157–​158, 65. 43 Ibid., 87. 44 These words are Varnam’s, but Terkla (‘Original Placement’) describes the Hereford Map using identical terms. 45 Birkholz, King’s Two Maps,  73–​74. 46 Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, 340–​342. 47 Brown, Cult of the Saints. 48 Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 202–​205, 330, 385. 49 Breckenridge, ‘Mapping Identity’. 50 Thomas Talbot appears in Hereford Registers and Cathedral Muniments over half a century, and associates closely with fellow Hereford clerk and canon Roger Breynton (c.1290–​1351), whose connections to Harley 2253 and the Hereford mappamundi I  have proposed elsewhere; Birkholz, ‘Biography after Historicism’; ‘Hereford Lives’.

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51 Revard, ‘Patrons and Milieu’; cf. above. 52 Two other texts (both by Scribe A) include ‘Thomas’ references. Hermann de Valenciennes’ Passion (#2, fol. 23) treats ‘Thomas l’apostre’ [Thomas the Apostle, 2004], first when distraught at Lazarus’ death, and later when he encounters risen Jesus, posing as a ‘pilgrim … from Jerusalem’ [82–​89, 2010–​2015], while The Letter of Pilate to Emperor Claudius (#3b, fol. 39) mentions ‘a Jew named Thomas’ [un Judeu par nun Thomas,  39] who bears witness to the crucifixion, reporting on Jesus’ miracles and his disciples’ faith. 53 Ziolkowski, ‘Saints in Oaths’, 181, 185. 54 Ker, Facsimile, xxiii; Hathaway et al., Fouke, xlii–​xliii. 55 This motto ‘surrounds a representation of the death of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Ker notes (Facsimile, xxiii). Harley 273 (fol. 17) includes Edmund of Abingdon’s Miroir de seint Eglise, a clerical handbook of ‘considerable circulation in three languages’ (Boulton, Sacred Fictions,  3–​4). 56 Fein, Studies, 19. 57 As in the Stretton Sugwas window’s grouping; see above. 58 For example, Quire 15’s prayers and occasions, Quire 11’s Bible books, Quire 10’s Old Testament stories, Quire 7–​8’s Holy Land geographies, Quire 6’s religious apocrypha, etc. 59 Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 137. 60 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 97–​99. 61 Thompson, ‘Frankis rimes’, 276. 62 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 99. That items #2–​ 7 appear together in other manuscripts ‘[implies] that there were monastic or university pecia-​copiers who produced these texts en bloc’ (ibid.). 63 Kucyznski, ‘Religious Contents’, 138. 64 Ibid., 139 65 Sanok, ‘Geography of Genre’, 171. 66 Kuczynski, ‘Religious Contents’, 139. 67 Kuczynski describes Harley’s Ethelbert as ‘intended to make the Hereford connection … more pointed’ (ibid., 140). 68 Wogan-​ Brown, ‘Locating Saints’ Lives’; Sanok, ‘Forms of Community’; Breckenridge, ‘Mapping Identity’. 69 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 99. 70 Bannister, HRO, 189–​190. Revard (‘Oppositional Thematics’, 100–​ 101; ‘Goliard’s Feast’, 849–​850) discusses the Harley scribe’s Ludlow benefice aspirations. 71 Scala, Absent Narratives, 1 (emphasis original). 72 Von Contzen and Bernau, Sanctity as Literature. 73 Scala, Absent Narratives, 2. 74 Revard, ‘Scribe’, 67–​68. Revard elsewhere characterizes Harley 273 as ‘primarily a chaplain-​preacher’s handbook’, with other texts useful for one aspiring to become a household steward (‘Goliard’s Feast’, 849–​850).

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75 Wieck, Medieval Calendar. 76 Worcester Cathedral Library MS Q.26, fol. 84 [old foliation]; Oxford, Balliol College MS 321 (Collectarium Herefordense), fol. 57. See also Worcester Cathedral Library MS Q.86 (a breviary ad usum ecclesiae Herefordensis), fol. 157v; Worcester Cathedral Library MS F.160, fol. 148. 77 Harley 273, fol. 5v, line 4; for (heavily used) Hereford Cathedral Library MS P.ix.7 (and related MSS), see Frere and Brown, Hereford Breviary, xvii, xx, xxxv. 78 Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 99. 79 Fein finds it ‘conceivable’ of St Wistan, similarly, that ‘the scribe himself redacted the story and preached it to a [feast day] congregation in Wistanstow’ (CH, II.9). 80 Dohar, Black Death,  34–​60. 81 The Harley scribe’s final holograph is dated April 1349; Revard, ‘Scribe’, 56. 82 Revard, ‘Goliard’s Feast’, 841; Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics’, 107–​108. 83 Wiggins, ‘ME Romance’, 239; Pearsall, ‘Epilogue’, 273. 84 Varnam, Sacred Space, 7. 85 Lawton describes the ‘hermeneutic unity’ produced by the Canterbury Tales compiler’s ‘closure sequence’ (‘Chaucer’s Two Ways’, 6, 40). 86 Thus Ellesmere’s rubric linking Parson to Retraction. 87 Tomasch, ‘Geographic Desire’, 3; Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, 44, 200. 88 For two Counter-​Reformation Cantilupe lives, see Postscript. 89 Cannon, Grounds, 141–​143 (emphasis original). 90 Ibid., 143, 171. 91 Tomasch, ‘Geographic Desire’, 10–​11. 92 As noted in Cannon, Grounds, 141. 93 Westrem, Hereford Map #15. 94 Terkla, ‘Original Placement’, 144–​145. 95 Kline, Hereford Paradigm, 2–​5, 76–​80, 202–​203; Terkla, ‘Original Placement’, 132–​133, 138, 143; Westrem, Hereford Map, xix–​xx. 96 Terkla, ‘Original Placement’, 135, 141, 145. For cathedral layout and fabric, see Aylmer and Tiller, Hereford Cathedral. 97 See Woodward’s classic account, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’. Westrem (Hereford Map, xv–​xlvii) updates. 98 Terkla, ‘Original Placement’, 146. 99 Ibid., 145, 146. 100 Ibid., 146. 101 Birkholz, King’s Two Maps, xxi–​xxv. 102 Westrem, Hereford Map #9, #7. 103 Corens, ‘Saints Beyond Borders’, 34. 104 Ibid.

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105 Ibid., 34–​35; Botzom and Botzom, Thomas Blount Manuscript History of Herefordshire. 106 Corens, ‘Saints Beyond Borders’, 35; Strange, Life and Gests of Cantilupe. 107 Corens, ‘Saints Beyond Borders’, 35. 108 Ibid., 36. 109 Ibid., 35, 38, 27. 110 Ibid., 37. 111 Ibid., 28.

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Appendix Harley manuscript contents Quire

Folio

Item Title (per Fein, CH)

Form

Booklet 1 1–​2 1r–​21v 2 21v–​22r

1 1a

The Lives of the Fathers The Story of Thais

AN verse AN verse

Booklet 2 3 23r–​33v

2

AN verse

3–​4 4 4 4 4 4 4

33v–​39r 39r 39v–​41v 41v–​43v 43v–​45v 45v–​47v 47v–​48v

3 3a 3b 4 5 6 7

The Passion of Our Lord (Herman de Valenciennes) The Gospel of Nicodemus The Letter of Pilate to Tiberias The Letter of Pilate to Emperor Claudius The Life of St John the Evangelist The Life of St John the Baptist The Life of St Bartholomew The Passion of St Peter

Booklet 3 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

49r–​50v 51r–​52-​v 52v 52v 52v 52v 52v 52v 52v 52v

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

ABC of Women Debate between Winter and Summer How to Make Red Vermilion How to Temper Azure How to Make Grass-​Green How to Make Another Kind of Green Another for Yellow-​Green How to Apply Silverfoil How to Make Iron as Hard as Steel How to Make White Lead

AN verse AN verse ME prose ME prose ME prose ME prose ME prose ME prose ME prose ME prose

53r–​54v 54v 55r 55v–​56v 57r–​58v 58v–​59r 59r–​v 59v 59v 59v 59v–​61v 61v 61v–​62v 62v

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 24a 24a* 24b 25 25a 26 27

The Life of St Ethelbert Soul of Christ, Sanctify Me A Goliard’s Feast Harrowing of Hell Debate between Body and Soul A Song of Lewes Lament for Simon de Montfort Carnal Love is Folly What Allures is Momentary Earth upon Earth The Execution of Sir Simon Fraser On the Follies of Fashion Lesson for True Lovers The Three Foes of Man

Latin prose AN verse AN verse ME verse ME verse ME verse AN verse AN verse Latin verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse

AN prose AN prose AN prose AN prose AN prose AN prose AN prose

Booklet 4 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

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Quire Booklet 5 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7–​8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8–​9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9–​10 10–​11 11

Appendix Folio

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Form

63r–​v 63v 63v 64r 64v–​65v 66r 66v 66v–​67r 67r 67v–​68v 68v–​70r 70r–​v 70v–​71v 70v–​71r

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71v 71v–​72r 72r–​v 72v–​73r 73r–​v 73v–​74v 75r 75r–​v 75v 75v 76r 76r 76r 76v–​77r 77v 77v–​78v 78v–​79r

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

79r–​v 79v 80r 80r 80v 80v–​81r 81r–​v 81v 82r–​83r 83r 83r–​92v 92v–​105r 105v

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Annot and John Alysoun The Lover’s Complaint Song of the Husbandman The Life of St Marina The Poet’s Repentance The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale The Meeting in the Wood A Beauty White as Whale’s Bone Gilote and Johane Pilgrimages in the Holy Land The Pardons of Acre Satire on the Consistory Court The Labourers in the Vineyard [vacant] (cf. Ker, Facsimile, p. ix) Spring Advice to Women An Old Man’s Prayer Blow, Northern Wind The Death of Edward I The Flemish Insurrection The Joys of Our Lady Sweet Jesus, King of Bliss Jesus Christ, Heaven’s King A Winter Song A Spring Song on the Passion I Pray to God and St Thomas While You Play in Flowers Song on Jesus’ Precious Blood Mary, Mother of the Saviour Jesus, Sweet Is the Love of You Sermon on God’s Sacrifice and Judgement Stand Well, Mother, under Rood Jesus, by Your Great Might I Sigh When I Sing An Autumn Song The Clerk and the Girl When the Nightingale Sings Blessed are You, Lady The Five Joys of the Virgin Maximian Maiden, Mother Mild King Horn Old Testament Stories Names of the Books of the Bible

ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse AN verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse AN verse AN/Latin/ME AN verse AN verse ME verse AN verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse ME verse AN & ME ME verse AN prose Latin prose

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Booklet 6 12 106r 12 106r–1 ​ 07r 12 107v–​ 109v 12 110r–​v 12 110v–1 ​ 11r 12 111r–​v 12 112r 12 12–​13

Item Title (per Fein, CH)

Form

73 74 75

God Who Wields All This Might The Sayings of St Bernard The Jongleur of Ely and the King of England The Three Ladies Who Found a Prick The Song on Women The Blame of Women Women and Magpies (Nicholas Bozon) Urbain the Courteous Trailbaston

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The Man in the Moon The Knight and the Basket Against Marriage The Wager, or The Squire and the Chambermaid A Book of Dreaming The Order of Fair Ease

ME verse AN verse AN verse AN verse

75a 76 77 78

13 13 13 13

112r–1 ​ 13v 113v–​ 114v 114v–1 ​ 15r 115v–1 ​ 17r 117r–1 ​ 18r 118r–​v

13 13–​14

119r–1 ​ 21r 85 121r–1 ​ 22v 86

14

122v–​ 124v 124v–1 ​ 25r 125r–1 ​ 27r 127r–​v 127v

87

The Knight Who Made Vaginas Talk

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88 89 90 91

ME verse ME verse ME prose AN prose

92 93 94

14 14

128r 128r–​v 128v–​ 129v 129v–​ 130v 131r 131v–1 ​ 32r

Satire on the Retinues of the Great Hending The Prophecy of Thomas of Erceldoune Distinguishing Features of the Bodily Form of Jesus The Way of Christ’s Love The Way of Woman’s Love The Teachings of St Louis to His Son Philip The Land of the Saracens

14

132r–1 ​ 33r 98

14

133v

Booklet 7 15 15 15 15 15

134r 134r 134v 134v 134v–1 ​ 35r

14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14

79 80

AN verse AN verse AN verse AN verse

81 82 83 84

95 96 97

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ME verse AN verse

ME prose ME verse AN prose AN prose AN prose Latin prose

99

Heraldic Arms of Kings Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo The Legend of St Etfrid, Priest of Leominster Prayer for Protection

100 101 102 103 104

Occasions for Angels Occasions for Psalms in French Glory to God in the Highest in French Prayer of Confession Prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady

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Folio

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Form

15 15 15 15

135r 135r 135r 135v

105 106 107 108

Latin prose AN prose AN prose AN prose

15 15 15

Prayer for Contrition Reasons for Fasting on Friday Seven Masses To Be Said in Misfortune Seven Masses in Honour of God and St Giles 135v 108a Prayer to the Three Kings 135v–1 ​ 36r 109 All the World’s a Chess Board 136r 109a Three Prayers That Never Fail 136r–​v 110 Occasions for Psalms in Latin 136v–1 ​ 37r 111 Occasions for Psalms Ordained by St Hilary 137r 112 Heliotrope and Celandine 137r–​v 113 St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying 137v–​138v 114 Against the King’s Taxes

15

138v–1 ​ 40r 115

15

140v

15 15 15 15 15

116

Seven Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ The Martyrdom of St Wistan

AN prose Latin prose AN prose Latin prose AN prose Latin prose Latin prose AN & Latin verse AN prose Latin prose

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Index

Index of Harley manuscript items Titles per Fein, CH; items from Royal 12.c.xii and Harley 273 also included; listing of quires appears after listing of items; see Appendix for items in MS order. ABC a femmes see ABC of  Women ABC of Women (#8) 164, 91n91 Advice to Women (#44) 67, 68, 77–​79, 86, 91n92–​93, 229 Against Marriage (#83) 192n60, 91n91 Against the King’s Taxes (#114) 144n43, 211–​214 All the World’s a Chess Board (#109) 211, 217–​218, 249n85–​86 Alysoun (#29) 67–​68, 78–​79, 86, 88n32, 90n72, 92n93, 146n86, 236 Annot and John (#28) 63, 65, 67, 70, 75, 86, 89n32, 155, 192n62 Anselm’s Questions to the Dying see St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying Armes de roys, Les see Heraldic Arms of  Kings Ase Y me rod this ender day see Five Joys of the Virgin, The Autumn Song, An (#63) 193n64, 230, 233, 234–​238, 243 Beauty White as Whale’s Bone, A (#36) 86, 89n32, 93n126, 201, 250n111 Bestiaire d’Amour (Harley 273) 46n46

Blame of Women, The (#77) 76, 164–​165, 183, 192n56–​57, 192n60 Blasme des femmes, Le see Blame of  Women, The Blessed are You, Lady (#66) 236–​237, 146n86 Blow, Northern Wind (#46) 70, 76–​77, 90n72, 146n86 Bok of Swevenyng, A see Book of Dreaming, A Book of Dreaming, A (#85) 104–​105 Carnal Love is Folly (#24a) 229–​230 Charnel amour est folie see Carnal Love is Folly Clerk and the Girl, The (#64) 78–​79, 86, 89n32, 91n92, 92n96–​97, 108, 227, 231, 238–​239, 243, 250n112 Contemplacioun de la passioun Jesu Crist see Seven Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ Death of Edward I, The (#47) 45n30, 144n43 De clerico et puella see Clerk and the Girl, The

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308 De interrogandi moribundis beati Anselmi see St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying De martirio sancti Wistani see Martyrdom of Saint Wistan, The Dit des femmes, Le see Song on Women, The Dum ludis floribus see While You Play in Flowers Earth upon Earth (#24b) 92n93, 92n100, 203–​204, 207, 215, 220, 224, 228, 230, 232, 237, 243–​245, 248n45 Enseignements de saint Louis see Teachings of St Louis to His Son Philip Erthe toc of Erthe see Earth upon Earth Estoyres de la Bible see Old Testament Stories Fair Maid of Ribblesdale, The (#34) 54, 65, 68, 76–​78, 90n61, 90n72, 91n92, 146n82, 166, 220, 229, 231 Fasting on Fridays see Reasons for Fasting on Fridays Five Joys of the Virgin, The (#67) 193n64, 225, 231–​234, 237, 245, 250n106 Fouke le Fitz-​Waryn (Royal 12.c.xii) 44n15, 101, 148n118 Gagure, La see Wager, The Gilote and Johane (#37) 42, 89n42, 153–​154, 164–​199, 201, 231 Gloria in excelsis Deo en fraunceis see Glory to God in the Highest in French Glory to God in the Highest in French (#102) 216–​217, 234 God that al this myhtes may see God Who Wields All This Might God Who Wields All This Might (#73) 86, 92n93, 109, 113, 121, 132, 145n63, 250n112

Index Gospel of Nicodemus, The (#3) 122, 265 Harley Lyrics see Harley Lyrics (General index) Harrowing of Hell (#21) 105–​107, 210, 234 Heliotrope and Celandine (#112) 217, 249n83 Hending (#89) 104, 105, 111, 137 Heraldic Arms of Kings (#96) 112–​114 Hereford Cathedral Ordinal, extracts from 2, 14–​15 Herman de Valenciennes, La Passioun Nostre Seignour see Passion of Our Lord, The Hours of the Virgin (Harley 273) 264 Household Accounts, Irish, extracts from 2, 14–​15, 76, 95 How to Make Red Vermilion (#10) see paint recipes How to Temper Azure (#11) see paint recipes I Pray to God and St Thomas (#54) 263–​264 I Sigh When I Sing (#62) 86, 229, 250n112 I syke when Y singe see I Sigh When I Sing Ichot a burde in boure bryht see Blow, Northern Wind In a fryht as Y con fare fremede see Meeting in the Wood, A Jesu Crist, heovene kyng see Jesus Christ, Heaven’s King Jesu, for thi muchele miht see Jesus, by Your Great Might Jesus, by Your Great Might (#61) 146n86, 228–​229, 239 Jesus Christ, Heaven’s King (#51) 223–​225, 228, 239 Jesus, Sweet is the Love of You (#58) 108

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Joies de Notre-​Dame see Joys of Our Lady, The Jongleur of Ely and the King of England, The (#75) 196n120 Joys of Our Lady, The (#49) 107–​108, 233 King Horn (#70) 14, 31, 143n22, 148n118, 148n120, 210 Knight and the Basket, The (#82) 194n89, 195n120 Knight Who Made Vaginas Talk, The (#87) 196n120 Lament for Simon de Montfort (#24) 144n44, 230, 258, 270 Land of the Saracens, The (#95) 112, 115–​117 Legend of St Etfrid, Priest of Leominster, The (#98) 147n93, 255, 266–​267, 269–​271 Legenda de sancto Etfrido see Legend of St Etfrid, Priest of Leominster, The L’enquest que le patriarche de Jerusalem fist see Land of the Saracens, The Lenten ys come with love to toune see Spring Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo (#97) 114, 117–​120, 127, 135 Letter of Pilate to Emperor Claudius (#3b) 278n52 Life of St Bartholomew, The (#6) 265 Life of St Ethelbert, The (#18) 255, 266–​267, 269–​272, 278n67 Life of St John the Baptist, The (#5) 265 Life of St John the Evangelist, The (#4) 265 Lives of the Fathers, The (#1) 13–​14, 265 Lover’s Complaint, The (#30) 51–​52, 54, 67–​71, 73, 77, 87, 91n92, 192n62, 227, 229 Ludlow Calendar (Harley 273) 269

309 Maiden, Mother Mild (#69) 109–​110, 116, 121, 133, 145n63 Man in the Moon, The (#81) 79, 92n93, 92n100 Marie, pur toun enfaunt see Joys of Our Lady, The Martyrdom of Saint Wistan, The (#116) 15, 123, 214, 217, 255, 266–​267, 269–​270, 279n79 Mayden, moder, milde see Maiden, Mother Mild Meeting in the Wood, A (#35) 90n72, 92n96, 166, 192n62, 231 Miroir de seint Eglise (Edmund of Abingdon) (Harley 273) 278n55 Names of the Books of the Bible (#72) 113, 132, 278n58 Nomina librorum bibliotece see Names of the Books of the Bible Nou skrinketh rose ant lylie-​flour see Autumn Song, An Occasions for Angels (#100) 212, 216 Occasions for Psalms in French (#101) 212–​213 Occasions for Psalms Ordained by St Hilary of Poitiers (#111) 213, 216–​217 Office for St Thomas of Lancaster (Harley 273) 194n93, 268, 270, 276n19 Old Testament Stories (#71) 96, 108, 113, 122, 124–​142, 147n101, 148n118, 148n120, 178, 278n58 paint recipes (#10–​17) 14–​15, 39, 49n180 Pardons of Acre, The (#39) 115, 117, 189, 196n131 Passion of Our Lord, The (Herman de Valenciennes) (#2) 122, 265, 278n52 Passion of St Peter, The (#7) 265 Pelrinages communes que crestiens fount en la seinte terre, Les see Pilgrimages in the Holy Land

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Index

Pilgrimages in the Holy Land (#38) 112–​117, 127, 131, 183, 189, 196n131, 196n133 Poet’s Repentance, The (#33) 70–​78, 80, 86, 90n68, 90n72, 91n92–​93, 165, 250n111 Prayer for Deliverance, A see Maiden, Mother Mild Prayer for Protection (#99) 212 Prayer of Confession (#103) 213, 217 Prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady (#104) 213, 216–​217, 233 Prayer to the Three Kings (#108a) 216–​217 Properties of Herbs see Heliotrope and Celandine

Spring (#43) 86, 92n93, 250n111 Spring Song on the Passion, A (#53) 108, 221–​223, 234 St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying (#113) 212–​216, 219–​220, 223, 227, 235, 238, 243, 249n76 Stand Well, Mother, under Rood (#60) 86, 108, 229, 234, 238, 250n102–​103, 250n112 Stond wel, moder, under rode see Stand Well, Mother, under Rood Suete Jesu, kyng of blysse see Sweet Jesus, King of  Bliss Sweet Jesus, King of Bliss (#50) 67, 108, 225, 254

Reasons for Fasting on Friday (#106) 213, 216, 249n75

Teachings of St Louis to His Son Philip (#94) 112 Three Foes of Man, The (#27) 64, 86, 89n32, 92n95, 92n100, 93n125, 203, 228–​230 Three Ladies Who Found a Prick, The (#75a) 196n120, 92n98 Trailbaston (#80) 79–​80, 92n101, 148n115

Satire on the Consistory Courts (#40) 72–​73, 79, 91n76, 91n81, 92n95, 92n102 Scriptum quod peregrini see Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo seal mottoes, episcopal (Royal 12.c.xii) 44n18, 264, 267, 269–​270 Sermon on God’s Sacrifice and Judgement (#59) 106–​107, 145n54 Seven Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ (#115) 120–​123, 127, 129, 214 Seven Masses in Honour of God and St Giles (#108) 213, 216 Seven Masses to be Said in Misfortune (#107) 213, 216 Short Metrical Chronicle (Harley 273) 44n15 Song of Lewes, A (#23) 45n30, 144n44 Song of the Husbandman (#31) 71–​ 73, 92n102, 144n43 Song on Jesus’ Precious Blood (#56) 108, 145n65 Song on Women, The (#76) 91n91, 164–​165

Une petite parole see Sermon on God’s Sacrifice and Judgement Urbain the Courteous (#79) 79–​80, 92n99, 92n103, 104, 185 Vita sancti Ethelberti see Life of St Ethelbert, The Vitas patrum see Lives of the Fathers, The Wager, The (#84) 195n120, 263 Way of Christ’s Love, The (#92) 92n93, 92n100, 251n112 Way of Woman’s Love, The (#93) 92n93, 92n100 Wayle whyt ase whalles bon, A see Beauty White as Whale’s Bone, A When the Nightingale Sings (#65) 67, 237, 239, 250n109 When the Nyhtegale Singes see When the Nightingale Sings

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Index

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When Y se blosmes springe see Spring Song on the Passion, A While You Play in Flowers (#55) 79 Women and Magpies (Nicholas Bozon) (#78) 192n60 Winter Song, A (#52) 222–​224 Wynter wakeneth al my care see Winter Song, A Quires 1–​4: 14, 23, 210, 265, 267 Quire 5: 14, 15, 39, 42, 164, 210, 246 Quire 6: 14, 42, 86, 92n93, 92n96, 92n100, 105, 144n46, 202–​ 203, 210, 215, 230, 237, 246, 265, 278n58 Quire 7: 14, 23, 26, 42, 53–​54, 67, 71, 73, 76, 79, 82, 89n42, 92n100, 109, 113, 117, 134, 144n43, 153, 165, 182, 187, 195n121, 196n133, 197n135, 199, 201, 203, 210, 236–​237, 246, 278n58 Quire 8: 14, 23, 26, 42, 53, 72–​73, 76–​77, 79, 82, 89n42, 92n93, 92n100, 107–​109, 113, 117, 134,

311 144n43, 187, 196n131, 197n135, 199, 203, 210, 223, 229, 233, 237–​238, 246, 263, 278n58 Quire 9: 14, 26, 42, 53, 79, 92n93, 92n100, 107–​109, 121, 144n54, 199, 203, 210, 225, 229–​230, 233–​234, 237–​238, 246 Quire 10: 14, 42, 109, 113, 124, 134, 210, 246, 278n58 Quire 11: 14, 42, 96, 113, 124, 134, 210, 246, 278n58 Quire 12: 14, 23, 42, 79, 92n93, 92n98, 104, 109, 132, 164, 195n121, 210, 246 Quire 13: 14, 23, 42, 92n93, 92n98, 92n100, 104, 132, 195n121, 210, 246, 263 Quire 14: 14, 42, 92n93, 92n100, 104, 112, 116, 120, 132, 195n121, 210, 246, 266 Quire 15: 14–​15, 23, 42–​43, 120–​121, 144n43, 200, 210–​213, 215–​219, 226–​227, 229, 233, 238, 246, 248n70, 278n58

312

General index

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Includes persons, places, non-​Harley texts, and selected subjects; for Harley texts and related items, see Index of Harley manuscript items.

Aaron le Blund 101, 136–139 Aaron of Ireland 100–101 Aaron the Priest 130, 132–33 Aberth, John 205 Abraham 130, 132–133 absence, Jewish see Jews, absent presence of absence, literary 11, 29, 31, 55, 95, 97, 103, 111, 145n57, 147n90, 151–152, 179, 212, 261–270, 275–276 Acre 189 Acta Sanctorum 143n5 Adam 105–106, 169 Adams, Jenny 249n85 affective piety 108, 110, 114–115, 119, 129, 201, 208, 227–229 afterlife 41, 87, 114, 199–200, 207, 209, 215, 220, 224, 227, 235, 244–245, 254, 274 see also heaven; hell; Purgatory alliteration, alliterative literature 54, 56, 62, 67, 71, 75, 77, 81–82, 84, 87n3, 93n108, 204, 209, 224 Alpers, Paul 249n94, 251n141 Ancrene Wisse 272 Anglo-​Norman 2, 6, 7, 11, 14, 23, 42, 44n15, 62, 79, 87, 89n46, 96, 101, 105–106, 109, 112–113, 120, 123, 136, 140, 151, 153, 155, 171, 180–188, 200, 214, 233, 262, 264–265 Anglo-​Saxon 5, 17–18, 33, 62, 74–75, 96, 180–181, 197n142, 202, 206, 208, 265

Anglo-​Saxon Attitudes see Wilson, Angus Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle 18 Annales School 206 Annunication 213, 216, 232, 273 anonymity 6, 28–29, 37, 48n122–123, 51, 57, 60, 195n103 Anselm, St see St Anselm’s Questions to the Dying (Index of Harley manuscript items) anthologization 2–3, 9, 18–22, 39–40, 112, 183, 209, 244, 265 see also miscellanies anti-​feminism 2, 42, 70, 76, 92n98, 103, 152, 171, 178, 183, 190, 190n1, 192n60 anti-​Judaism 97, 100, 108, 117, 120–121, 136–137, 144n24, 146n83, 147n94, 152 antiquarianism 15–16, 27–28, 37, 40, 46n63, 53, 188, 274 antisemitism 129, 147n94 apocalypse 29, 107, 122, 128, 132, 227, 228, 244–245 architecture 97, 128, 138, 164, 202, 207, 234–236, 255, 260–261, 271, 273, 275 Ars moriendi 200, 207–208, 212, 218–219, 223, 225–227, 229, 234–235, 239, 244, 249n77, 249n80, 249n81–82, 254 Ashridge (Hertfordshire) 257, 276n15 Aspin, Isabel S.T. 46n48, 148n115 Audelay, John the Blind see manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce (302)

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Index audiences 4, 26–29, 36, 38, 53–54, 60–61, 63, 67, 69, 72–74, 80, 99, 103–104, 108–109, 116, 123, 139, 152, 154, 156–57, 166, 173, 175–177, 178, 185, 188, 189, 194n93, 195n105, 197n145, 207, 222–223, 231, 237, 239, 243, 246, 262, 264, 273, 275 Augustine of Canterbury, St 84 Augustine, St; Augustinianism 84, 142, 147n95 authorship 9–11, 15, 26–29, 45n42, 51, 54, 60, 67, 73, 75, 91n88, 132, 155, 163, 183, 188, 193n71, 268 Avignon (Papal Curia) 59–60, 80–81, 84, 93n105, 99, 148n129, 263 Babylon 105 Bahr, Arthur 5, 18, 21, 24, 38, 43 Bale, Anthony 98, 144n24 baronial rebellion, baronialism 29, 59, 81, 94, 100, 103, 110, 135, 258, 264, 270, 276n21 Barrett Jr., Robert W. 34–35 Bartholomew, St 265 Beadle, Richard 34 Becket, Thomas, St (Archbishop of Canterbury) 99–100, 255–262, 264, 268, 270–272, 276n10, 276n21, 278n55 Beirut, Bleeding Icon of 115–122, 135 Bell, Kimberly K. 31 Beringer, Alison L. 249n77 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 202, 227, 230, 250n101 Bernau, Anke 29–30 bestiaries 113, 146n77 see also Bestiaire d’Amour (Harley 273) (Index of Harley manuscript items) Bethphage 115 Bibbesworth, Walter (Le Tretiz) 184, 197n143 Bible (Hebrew; Latin Vulgate; Old French) 112–114, 122, 124, 126, 132–133, 138, 140–42, 143n10, 168

313 see also Comestor, Peter; Desmoulins, Guyart; Passion of Our Lord, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Bible, books of Genesis 113, 124, 133 Exodus 117, 124–125, 133, 143n4 Leviticus 133 Numbers 124, 125, 131–133 Joshua 133 Judges 133 Matthew 122, 140, 142, 149n146 Mark 122 Bible historiale see Desmoulins, Guyart Binski, Paul 189 biography 11, 12, 46n50, 58, 60, 75, 80–81 Birns, Nicholas 189 Black Death see plague Blount, Thomas 274–275 Boccaccio, Giovanni 186, 198n149, 202 Boffey, Julia 23, 29, 32, 63, 68, 87n8 Bonenfaunt, grandson of Aaron le Blund 136 Brantley, Jessica 202 Bridgnorth 101 Bristol 99, 100–101, 259 Britain 29–30, 35, 84, 158, 194n93 Brithfard of Mercia 266 British Library 1, 5, 13 Brook, G.L. 7, 53–54, 81–82, 87n1, 92n97, 93n107, 109, 166, 222–223, 231, 234 Brown, Carleton 7 Brown, Pamela 190 Bury St Edmunds 100, 135 Busby, Keith 21 Butler, Alban (Lives of the Saints) 143n5 Butterfield, Ardis 21, 201, 241 Cable, Thomas 89n43 calendars 269–270 see also Ludlow Calendar (Harley 273) (Index of Harley manuscript items)

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314 Calvary, hill of 112, 122–123, 229 Camargo, Martin 249n95 Cana (Galilee) 114, 117 Cannon, Christopher 6, 17–18, 30, 32, 268, 272 Canterbury Cathedral 259–261, 264, 268, 271 Canterbury, Diocese of 256–257, 259, 262 Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn 260–261, 271 Canterbury Tales see Chaucer, Canturbury Tales Cantilupe, Thomas, St (Bishop of Hereford) 59, 64, 94, 99, 116, 143n5, 256–260, 262–264, 267–275, 276n10–11, 276n19, 277n22, 277n32–33 Capes, W.W. 142n1, 143n10 Carroll, Lewis 180 cartography 32–36, 40–41, 96, 99, 111, 128, 157, 254–257, 262, 271–274 see also mappaemundi Chaganti, Seeta 147n90 Chambers, E.K. 56, 88n9, 88n16, 90n54 chanson d’aventure 166, 225, 229, 231, 233, 235 Charlemagne 213 Charlton, Thomas (Bishop of Hereford) 46n49 Chaucer, Geoffrey 2–3, 5, 28–29, 56–57, 60, 81, 88n18, 88n21, 90n72, 153, 168, 183–189, 201–202, 206, 220, 255, 257, 260–262, 268, 270–271 Canterbury Tales 42, 183–184, 186, 189, 197n136, 197n140, 260–262, 268, 270–271 Knight’s Tale 201 Miller’s Tale 90n72 Parson’s Prologue and Tale 271, 279n86 Prioress’s Tale 95, 262 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale 168, 184–189, 197n140, 262

Index Chaucer’s Retraction 206, 262, 279n86 Chazan, Robert 138–139 Cheshire, Chester 35, 65 children, childbearing 115, 146n83, 167, 181, 184, 187–188, 197n141, 204, 236, 251n112 Christ life and ascension 105–106, 112, 114, 117, 140, 232, 237 as lover/​beloved 92n100, 221–222, 229, 231, 254 Passion of 106–110, 114, 117–123, 127, 129, 138, 145n60, 146n65, 201–202, 213–214, 216–217, 221–223, 226, 228, 249n77, 249n82, 265, 278n52 redemption by 30, 107, 110, 115, 121, 139, 222, 225, 234, 236 rejection of 107, 113, 121, 148n113 supplication unto see prayer wounds of 108, 110, 121–122, 129, 133, 135, 146n65–66, 147n95, 229, 239 Christ, Birte 162 Christendom 97, 112, 115, 138–139, 150n154, 152 cities see metropolitanism clerical identity, clerical privilege 26, 64, 73–75, 81, 104–105, 151, 259 codicology 1–3, 8, 13–44, 53, 81, 183, 200, 207, 209, 212, 253–257, 263–267 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 35 Comestor, Peter (Historia scholastica) 124–125, 140–142, 276n15 commerce see merchants compilation, literary 3, 10–13, 16, 17–22, 24–28, 37–44, 98, 134, 182–183, 189, 191n8, 212, 214, 254–255, 261, 263, 265, 270–271, 274 see also anthologization; miscellanies

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Index Complete Harley (Fein) 8, 16, 35, 95–96, 133–134, 215 see also Fein, Susanna conduct literature 2, 9, 24, 42, 79, 103–105, 111, 120, 132, 138, 157, 176–177, 185, 210 Connolly, Margaret 2, 30, 43 conversion 116–117, 122–123, 128–129, 141, 179 Copeland, Rita 171 Corens, Liesbeth L. 275 Corrie, Marilyn 18, 21 cosmopolitanism 10, 29, 40, 52, 54, 58, 60, 65, 70, 73, 77–78, 81–87, 93n121, 95, 99, 138–139, 141, 151, 157, 171, 199, 254, 258, 275 counterfactualism 111, 137, 151–152, 158–163, 165–166, 171, 176–77, 181, 184–186, 190, 191n21, 191n25, 194n86, 197n41, 254, 256, 263 counterfictionality 163, 165–166, 184, 188 courtesy literature see conduct literature courtly literature, courtly discourse 12, 26, 54, 68–69, 83–85, 108–109, 164, 174, 177–180, 185, 188, 221, 225, 228–231, 234, 237 Cozbi, daughter of Zur 133, 136 Crane, Susan 6, 197n145 Creation, created world 112–114, 157, 169, 203, 206, 218, 273 Credenhill Church, chancel window 255–257, 259, 262–264, 270, 272, 276n10 Crocker, Holly A. 195n114 crossover, sacred/​secular 25–26, 29, 38, 43, 67–68, 204, 208, 218, 226–227, 238 Croxton Play of the Sacrament  95 crucifixion see Christ, Passion of crusade 103, 110, 114, 117, 123, 139, 140, 149n140, 189, 262 Culler, Jonathan 221, 240–241 cultural geography see geography, cultural

315 Curia, Papal see Avignon Cvetkovich, Ann 146n86 Daniel 104–105 Daniell, Christopher 220 Danse Macabre 207, 210 Dante 80, 84, 234–235 David 104–105, 112, 213 death and dying 30, 41–42, 199–246, 254, 262, 270, 274 see also afterlife; ars moriendi; Christ, Passion of; Last Things; martyrdom; plague deathbeds 207–209, 213, 215, 219–221, 227–230, 233–239, 245, 248n50, 249n80 debate, disputation 2, 9, 19, 21, 30, 42, 79, 93n125, 95, 106, 148n109, 156, 166–172, 174, 176, 179, 183, 189–190, 192n57, 193n68, 193n71, 196n120, 210–212 Dell, Helen 177 Delumeau, Jean 205–206, 212 Desmoulins, Guyart (Bible historiale) 140–142, 149n144, 150n154 Despres, Denise L. 97, 148n109 devil, the 106, 233–234 devotion, regional 36, 41–42, 64, 94–95, 99–100, 111, 144n24, 253–275 devotional culture 4, 95, 98, 115, 123, 144n24 devotional texts 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 25, 28, 31, 39, 42, 44n15, 45n30, 61, 64, 78, 87, 92n100, 96, 98, 105–142, 145n62, 147n97, 151, 176–177, 180, 183, 185, 189, 196n131, 199–246, 250n109, 253–275 see also geo-​devotional  texts Dharwadker, Vinay 81–83, 86 dialect 34, 62, 81–82, 84, 90n63, 93n107, 93n109 dialectical arrangement 10, 84, 183, 218, 274 dialectics, spatial 52, 84–85, 253–255, 274–275 Dickens, Charles 162

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316 Dinshaw, Carolyn 251n146 Dobson, R.A. 272 Domus Conversorum (London) 148n129 Donaldson, E.T. 88n18 Doner, Janet R. 147n96 Doomsday 107, 141, 157, 202–203, 207, 214–217, 221–225, 228, 233, 273–274 Dove, Mary 192n56–57 dream literature 99, 104–105, 125 Dryden, John 184, 186 Duchy of Cornwall Map 276n15 Duffy, Eamon 258 Early English Text Society 7, 45n36 early Middle English 5–6, 30, 32, 54, 62–63, 87n1, 203, 272 East Anglia 100, 102 East, Near East 96, 115–116, 189, 266 editing 4, 7–8, 26, 37–39, 53–55, 96, 120, 133–134, 158, 182, 194n89, 268 Edmund of Abingdon, St 264, 278n55 see also Miroir de seint Eglise (Index of Harley manuscript items) Edmund of Cornwall (Earl) 257, 276n15 Edward I (King of England) 17, 94–95, 100, 102, 134, 137, 142, 154–156, 257, 271–272 see also Death of Edward I, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Edward II (King of England) 17, 59, 64, 258–259 Edward III (King of England) 17, 148n115, 259–260, 272 Edwards, A.S.G. 23, 29, 32 Edwards, Brent Hayes 240, 245 Edwards, Robert R. 82–85, 93n119, 93n121 Egypt, Egyptians 124–125, 129, 131 Einbinder, Susan L. 102–103, 141 Eleanor of Provence (Queen of England) 100 Elijah 114, 213

Index embowerment 31, 57, 64–70, 77–81, 86–87, 92n97, 152, 165, 170, 176, 199, 220, 222, 227–228, 230, 233–237, 239, 254, 256, 258, 274 enclosure, female 163–170, 176–177, 182, 194n89, 220, 254 endings, worldly 136, 209, 214, 215, 216, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 242–246 see also apocalypse; death and dying English literature, English literary history 1, 3–6, 14, 17–18, 20, 22, 27–30, 32–35, 38, 41, 43–44, 51–58, 69, 81–87, 95, 97, 103, 124, 137, 151–158, 164, 181–188, 190, 201, 204, 209, 212, 220, 241, 246, 254, 257, 262, 268, 274 Englishness, English nation 31–32, 35, 58, 83, 85, 88n21, 98, 103, 110, 131, 138, 144n44, 151 eschatology 30, 41, 127, 199–200, 206–207, 220–246, 254 Etfrid of Leominster, St 267, 269 see also Legend of St Etfrid, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Ethelbert of Hereford, St 264, 267, 271, 272, 276n11, 276n19 see also Life of St Ethelbert, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Europe 63, 65, 111, 117, 128, 197n145, 198n149, 201, 222, 241, 258, 273 Evans, Sandy 147n95, 147n96 Eve 70, 105 exegesis 105, 113, 116, 124, 140–142, 189, 202, 273 fabliaux 2, 14, 42, 76, 89n42, 96, 103, 111, 132, 153, 169, 176–177, 179–180, 188–190, 192n58, 193n65, 193n81, 194n89, 195n105, 195n120, 196n122, 210, 231, 264

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Index familia, episcopal 12, 41, 58–62, 64, 66, 68, 75–76, 79–81, 85–86, 188, 199, 221, 235, 239 farce 169, 176, 190 Farina, Lara 250n101 Fein, Susanna 7–9, 15, 23, 36–37, 45n36, 45n40, 45n42, 66, 83, 88n11, 90n71, 90n73, 124, 132, 146n66, 147n93, 196n133, 209, 248n70, 250n105, 250n112, 279n79 see also Complete Harley Ferguson, Niall 158–163, 165, 184, 190, 191n27 fictionality 70, 76, 158–163, 191n30, 196n127 see also counterfictionality Finucane, Ronald 88n26, 255, 258, 267 Fletcher, Chris 1, 5, 13 Fouke le Fitz-​Waryn see Fouke le Fitz-​Waryn (Index of Harley manuscript items) Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye 244 France, French Court 60, 99, 102, 112, 115–116, 126–127, 140, 195n110, 201, 205 Franciscanism 19, 59, 108, 110, 129, 197n143, 227, 228 Frankis, John 22, 25 Gabriel (Angel) 216, 232, 273 Galperin, William H. 162, 172, 194n86 Gaunt, Simon 201 gender, genre and 164–167, 176–180, 182, 190, 192n56, 194n95, 195n114, 196n120 gender studies 4, 160–162 Geneville family (Geoffrey; Katherine; Nicholas) 76, 267 geo-​devotional texts 117, 119, 134, 183, 189, 196n131, 270 geography, Christian/​universal 80, 112, 114, 127 see also mappaemundi; universalism

317 geography, cultural 1–2, 32–33, 38, 49n152, 52, 60–61, 82, 139, 253–254, 274 geography, literary 1, 3, 32–36, 38, 40–41, 44, 52–54, 82, 86, 95, 111–112, 142, 151, 158, 163–164, 255, 257, 260–261, 269, 271–272, 275 Georgianna, Linda 197n142 Giles of Provence, St see Seven Masses in Honour of God and St Giles (Index of Harley manuscript items) Gill (Second Shepherd’s Play) 190 Gillespie, Alexandra 25 Gillespie, Vincent 208–209, 226 Gloucester, Gloucestershire 31, 99, 100, 135 Gog/​Magog  128 Golgotha 107 grammatical terminology 63–64, 69, 107, 129, 154, 156–159, 162, 172, 177, 181, 189, 222, 245–246 Gravdal, Kathryn 192n63, 233 Gray, Douglas 242, 250n99, 250n105 Great Pestilence see plague Griffin, Robert J. 28 Grosseteste, Robert, St (Rules) 89n40 Guinevere, Queen 188 hagiography see saints’ lives Hahn, Thomas 6, 18 Haines, Roy Martin 61 Hamo de Hereford 101, 136, 139 Hanawalt, Barbara 163, 164, 176 Hanna, Ralph III 21–22, 32–33, 46n67, 81, 82, 84, 93n108, 100 Harley Lyrics 2, 12, 41, 51–87, 88n11, 88n13, 90n54, 95–96, 100, 103, 107–111, 113, 120–122, 132, 138–39, 145n57, 145n61–63, 146n65, 146n86, 148n118, 151–155, 165–166, 171, 174, 180–183, 187, 195n103, 197n135, 199–246, 258, 262, 272 see also Index of Harley manuscript items

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318 Harley Lyrics, The see Brook, G.L. Harley manuscript as physical object 13–17 see also rubrication quires of see Index of Harley manuscript items scribes of 3–4, 8–16, 23, 27, 31, 37–42, 44n15–18, 45n42, 46n48, 46n57, 53, 61, 65, 67, 89n34, 93n109, 96, 99, 101, 105, 113–114, 119, 122, 124–127, 131–142, 147n101, 149, 164, 182–183, 189, 198n149, 210–212, 214, 217, 233, 246, 256, 258, 263–271, 278n52, 279n81 see also Harley scribe, legal charters by texts in see Index of Harley manuscript items Harley scribe, legal charters by 3, 9, 89n34, 210, 263, 279 Hathaway, E.J. 44n16, 44n17 Haveley, Nick 93n105 heaven 54, 66, 84, 108, 132, 140, 154, 157, 168, 171, 182, 217, 220–236, 249n75, 266–267, 274 hell 86, 92n95, 93n126, 105–106, 210, 220, 232, 274 Heng, Geraldine 148n117 Henley, Walter see Walter of  Henley Henry III (King of England) 17, 100, 144n44, 154, 156, 264 Herebert, William see manuscripts, London, British Library Additional (46919) Hereford Cathedral 3–4, 12, 15, 53, 61, 94, 96, 99, 134, 141, 150n155, 201, 206, 229, 260–275, 276n10 Hereford Cathedral, Friends of 256, 258 Hereford Cathedral mappamundi 35, 94, 111, 134, 143n4, 150n155, 189, 191n12, 257, 262, 272–274, 276, 276n15, 277n44, 277n50 Hereford Cathedral School 64–65

Index Hereford, city/​citizens of 41, 64, 94, 99, 102, 135, 138–140, 142, 143n10, 269 Hereford, Diocese of 61, 99, 136, 206, 255 Hereford, Hamo de see Hamo de Hereford Hereford, Jewish sites in 100–101, 136, 138–139 Hereford, plague pits at 201, 206, 227–229, 246 Herefordshire 15, 32, 41–42, 54, 56, 90n56, 95–96, 99–100, 102, 111, 123, 141–142, 151, 201, 255, 258, 263, 267, 271, 274–275 Herman of Valenciennes see Passion of Our Lord, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Herod 213 Hillaby, Joe 100, 136, 139, 142n2 Hilton, R.H. 89n44 Hines, John 180 Historia scholastica see Comestor, Peter historicism, New Historicism 51, 54–56, 58, 61, 82, 93n108, 155, 158, 239, 272 history, counterfactual see counterfactualism History of the Book see manuscript philology Hogan, Theresa Clare 92n93 Holy Land 42, 96, 112, 131, 183, 278n58 see also Pilgrimages in the Holy Land (Index of Harley manuscript items) homosocial desire 61, 69–70, 179, 186–188, 221 Honorius IV (Pope) 136–137, 145n55 household, episcopal see familia, episcopal household, lay/​gentry 2–3, 9–12, 14–15, 19, 26–28, 38, 44n17, 53–54, 60–67, 74–76, 92n96, 95, 135, 138, 157, 176, 189, 195n120, 208–209, 269, 279n74

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household, royal see royal court Howe, Nicholas 33 Howell, Andrew 197n135 Hugh of Saint-​Victor see Saint-​ Victor, Hugh of Huizinga, Johan 205 Iberia 117 incarnation, incarnate 30, 80, 87, 110, 114, 117, 124, 203, 216–217, 232, 237, 255, 273–274 India 67, 82, 83 Ingham, Patricia C. 251n142 instructional texts 14, 24, 28, 39, 42, 96, 105–106, 112, 145n54, 156, 180, 183, 199, 204, 207, 211–212, 219, 226, 231, 246, 253 intentionality 15, 21–22, 24, 40, 160, 183–184, 193n71, 273 intercession 74, 170, 213, 221, 223, 239, 264 interlude 153, 177, 184, 190n6, 260–261, 271, internationalism 29, 34, 81–83 interpretive communities see textual community Ireland, Irish Sea 15, 67, 174, 184 Isabella (Queen of England) 258–259 Israel, as territorial entity 125, 131–132, 137 Jackson, Virginia 239–240 Jancey, Meryl 143n5, 260 Jerome, St 113, 140 Jerusalem 116, 118, 123, 140, 260, 262, 273, 278n52 Jewish-​Christian relations 94–97, 115, 119, 126–129, 135–142, 145n45 Jewish studies 95–100, 108, 124, 190n1 Jews absent presence of 95–100, 103–112, 134–135, 140, 145n57, 147n90, 148n129, 151, 263 biblical 96, 99, 104, 123–137, 141–142

319 captivity of 100–101, 105–107, 111, 122, 124, 126–129, 133–135, 137, 139–42, 151 conversion and see conversion English devotion and 97, 124–125, 129–131, 138 expulsion of 94–104, 107, 110, 112, 123, 126–127, 132–140, 142, 143n4, 143n5, 145n55, 149n140, 199, 254 in Hereford 41, 94–97, 99–102, 111, 123, 135–139, 141–142, 142n2, 152 legal restrictions upon 97, 101, 132, 136 lending and commerce 99, 101–102, 104, 139 mapping of 95, 110–112, 114, 123, 128 synagogues of 124, 127–128, 133–134, 139 tolerance by Christians toward 95, 97, 99, 111, 119, 135–136, 141–142, 143n17, 241 violence towards 95, 97, 99–100, 107, 111, 117, 120, 123, 125–126, 133, 140, 144n25, 145n45 wedding feasts of 94, 96–97, 100, 114, 117, 123, 136, 139, 152, 256 John XXII (Pope) 59, 93n105 John the Baptist, St 105, 114, 216, 265 John the Blind Audelay see manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce (302) John the Evangelist, St 265 Joseph of Arimathea 106, 123, 129 Jubinal, Achille 153, 156, 158 Judas 110, 121 Kay, Sarah 250n108 Kennedy, Daniel Corbin 154–156, 158, 171, 173, 191n9, 194n88, 194n92 Ker, N.R. 7, 14, 44n16–17, 45n36, 210, 246, 248n66, 249n83, 264–265, 278n55

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320 knights, chivalric culture 65, 74, 112, 121–122, 129, 139, 147n96, 153–154, 165–166, 170, 172–173, 176–180, 182, 188, 194n89, 195n103, 195n109, 195n120, 207, 225, 229–233, 235 Knott, Bill 242–244 Kuczynski, Michael P. 145n57, 250n105, 278n67 Lacy, Walter de 101 Lampert-​Weissig, Lisa 148n113 landscape 22, 43, 54, 57, 76–78, 87, 98, 112, 165, 193n63, 203, 232, 234–235, 253, 256, 265–266, 275 Langland, William 5 Last Judgement see Doomsday Last Things 200, 208–223, 228, 245–246 see also death and dying Latin texts, Latinity 2, 7, 15, 19, 23, 31, 42, 54, 63–64, 79, 81, 98, 113–114, 117, 120–121, 123–124, 140, 171, 182, 187, 192n56, 195n103, 197n145, 200, 202, 209, 211–217, 238, 249n80, 255, 264–266, 157 Lavezzo, Kathy 35, 49n152, 111, 112, 144n24, 146n71 law, legal realm 72, 79, 91n81, 106, 112, 128, 133, 137, 141, 146n67, 148n115, 151, 168, 172, 177, 185, 215 Lawton, David A. 252n151, 279n85 Lazarus 278n52 Lefebvre, Henri 87n2 legal charters by Harley scribe 3, 10–12, 210, 263 Le Goff, Jacques 207 Leominster, Leominster Priory 93, 101, 246, 252, 266–267, 269, 271 see also Legend of St Etfrid, Priest of Leomister, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Lerer, Seth 18, 20–22, 47n82, 62, 183, 202, 208

Index Levy, Levites 96, 125–126, 130, 132–133, 136 Levy, Brian J. 195n114 Life of St Thomas Cantilupe 271, 274–275 see also Strange, Richard Lilley, Keith D. 35–36 Lincoln 97, 100, 102, 135–136, 144n24 Linguistic Atlas of Late-​Medieval England 34 List of 108 English Towns, The 62, 89n40, 194n93 literacy 64, 89n36, 89n50 literariness, the literary 5, 10–11, 18–19, 21–25, 30, 161–162, 189, 211, 233, 240, 262 literary geography see geography, literary literary history see English literature London 13, 19, 27, 81–82, 84–85, 97, 99–100, 102, 135–136, 144n25, 148n129, 201, 245, 259, 261 Longinus 121–122, 129, 133, 146n66 Lot’s Wife 189 love carnal 31, 41, 54, 60, 64, 78, 86–87, 173, 175, 218, 220–221, 225–230, 234–237, 245, 265, 274 courtly see courtly literature familial see familia, episcopal spiritual see crossover; devotional texts; love, carnal ludic culture, play 4, 71n90, 136–137, 159, 161, 170, 172–174, 176, 182, 184, 194n92, 202, 218, 231–232, 249n85 Ludlow 1, 3–4, 9–13, 26–27, 38, 53, 66–67, 75–76, 89n34, 93n109, 99, 101, 138, 142, 144n36, 149n129, 156–157, 217, 246, 252n 150, 263, 265–266, 271, 275, 278n70 Ludlow Calendar see Ludlow Calendar (Index of Harley manuscript items)

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Ludlow scribe see Harley manuscript, scribes of Ludlow, St Laurence’s Church 268–269 lyric see devotional texts; Harley Lyrics; love, carnal; New Lyric Studies macaronic texts 22–23, 42, 79, 109, 214 Machaut, Guillaume de 202 McSparran, Frances 45n42, 46n48, 93n109, 252n150 Magna Carta 264 Mâle, Émile 205–206 Mandeville’s Travels  112 manuscript geography 33–35, 96, 151, 175 manuscript philology 3, 4, 8, 12, 16, 18, 20–21, 24, 34, 37–39, 60, 81–82, 84, 147n90, 183, 201–202, 209–211, 241, 253 manuscripts Cambridge, Trinity College (323) 19 Cambridge, University Library (Gg.I.i) 92 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates (19.2.1) (Auchinleck MS) 19, 48n109, Hereford, Hereford Cathedral Library (P.ix.7) 269, 279n77 London, British Library Additional (46919) (Herebert MS) 19, 47n76, 197n143 London, British Library Cotton Caligula (A.ix) 19, 25 London, British Library Cotton Nero (A.x) (Gawain MS) 1 London, British Library Harley (273) 11–12, 15, 44n15, 46n46, 264, 268–270, 278n55, 278n74 see also Index of Harley manuscript items for individual items London, British Library Harley (913) (Kildare MS) 19, 25, 47n76

321 London, British Library Harley (978) 19, 48n109 London, British Library Harley (2253) (Harley MS) see Harley manuscript; Index of Harley manuscript items London, British Library Royal (12.c.xii) 44n15, 44n17–18, 45n32, 101, 148n118, 264, 268–269, 276n19 see also Index of Harley manuscript items for individual items Oxford, Balliol College (321) 269 Oxford, Bodleian Library Digby (86) 19–20, 22, 25–26, 48n109 Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce (195) 89n40, 194n93 Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce (302) (Audelay MS) 20, 25, 30–31, 209, 226 Oxford, Bodleian Library Eng. poet. a. 1 (Vernon MS) 20, 25, 30–31, 48n109, 209, 226 Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Misc. (108) (South English Legendary) 19, 25, 30–32 Oxford, Jesus College (29) 19, 22 San Marino, Huntington Library EL 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Chaucer) 268, 279n86 Worcester, Worcester Cathedral Library (F.61) 63, 89n48 Worcester, Worcester Cathedral Library (F.160) 279n76 Worcester, Worcester Cathedral Library (Q.26) 269, 279n76 Worcester, Worcester Cathedral Library (Q.86) 279n76 mappaemundi (maps of the world) 36, 41, 110–112, 134, 181, 191n12, 257, 260, 262, 273–274 see also Hereford Cathedral mappamundi mapping, textual see geography, literary Marian texts see Mary, Virgin, St

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322 Marie de France 19 marriage 184, 192n57, 192n60 martyrdom 30, 103, 123, 214, 217, 227, 256, 265–270 Mary, Virgin, St 68, 70, 74, 90n68, 108–110, 114, 123, 145n58, 146n65, 148, 168, 177, 202, 207, 213, 216–217, 221, 225, 229, 230–237, 250n110, 249n75, 250n112, 264–265, 271, 273, 276n11, 276n19 materialism, literary see manuscript philology Matthews, David 46n63 measurement, geographical surveying 62, 70, 113–114, 116, 132, 253 Mediterranean 205, 241 Megill, Allan 159–160 Menocal, María Rosa 202, 204–205, 208, 241, 246 merchants, mercantilism 25–26, 84, 99, 101–104, 106–107, 119, 139, 155, 260, 262, 271 Mercia 214, 265–267 Merewald (King of Mercia) 266 Merwin, W.S. 242–244 metaphysics 31, 42, 203–206, 212, 215–224, 237–239, 243 metropolitanism 2, 13, 27–29, 34–35, 52, 55–57, 59, 66, 77–79, 81–86, 87n2, 103–105, 143n19, 177, 180, 186, 201, 255, 257, 261–262, 271–273 Middle English 1, 2, 5–6, 10, 19, 23, 31, 42, 44n15, 51–87, 108–109, 113, 151, 166, 171, 180–188, 199–246, 249n95, 257 Miller, Andrew H. 162–163, 171–172, 194n86, 197n141 Millet, Bella 272 miracles 95, 99, 115–120, 148n109, 257–259, 261, 267, 271–272 miscellaneity 8–9, 13, 17–23, 26, 38–40, 43, 253 miscellanies aspects of  22–32

Index audiences of see audiences compilation of  18 geography and 32–36 language mixture in 2, 4, 22–24, 42, 53, 109, 116, 210, 212, 214 see also multilingualism mixed generic contents of 2, 4, 9, 15, 19–20, 23–26, 38, 53, 96, 116, 199, 209, 212 physical qualities of 13–17, 19–20, 25 saints and 2, 14, 19, 30–32, 41–43, 254–276 taxonomy of 2–3, 8, 20–23 misogyny see anti-​feminism Mittman, Asa Simon 147n94 mobility 3–4, 10–12, 42, 51–87, 89n34, 95, 102, 131, 149n129, 151–153, 164–167, 174, 176, 200, 206, 220, 223, 228, 254, 275 Montfort, Simon de 100, 144n25, 144n44, 258, 270 see also Lament for Simon de Montfort (Index of Harley manuscript items) Mortimer, Roger 15, 59, 258–259 Moses 105, 117, 124–126, 129–31, 148n118, 249n75 Moses, son of Hamo de Hereford 139 multilingualism 2–4, 6–7, 18, 20, 22–24, 27–29, 33, 42, 95, 108, 187, 197n143, 199, 204, 209, 219, 254 see also macaronic texts Mundill, Robin R. 100, 102, 144n36 nationalism, national identity 13, 16, 28–29, 34–35, 42, 57–58, 82–86, 88n21, 96, 98, 100, 105, 119, 124–125, 131, 133, 137, 151, 157, 180–186, 197n142, 257, 261–262, 269 Nazareth 114 next world see afterlife New Criticism 37, 55, 241 New Formalism 16, 220, 240

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Index New Historicism see historicism New Lyric Studies 200, 239–246 New Philology see manuscript philology Newman, Barbara 25–26 Ní Dhúhill, Caitríona 161 Nichols, Stephen G. 20–21, 43 Nicodemus 123 see also Gospel of Nicodemus (Index of Harley manuscript items) Noah 113 Noah’s Wife 193n78, 189 Nolan, Barbara 196n120 North-​West Midlands 93n107, 97 Northumbria 266 Norwich 100, 135, 144n24 Nottingham 62 oaths 30, 171, 263–264 O’Donnell, James J. 20–21, 43 Offa (King of Mercia) 265 Office for St Thomas of Lancaster see Office for St Thomas of Lancaster (Index of Harley manuscript items) Oliver, Raymond 242, 250n99 Orleton, Adam (Bishop of Hereford, Worcester, Winchester) 44n18, 46n49, 58–62, 64, 68, 75, 258–259, 263–264 O’Rourke, Jason 21, 36 orthography 14, 45, 210, 212 Orvieto, Italy 257 Oviedo, Spain 117–120, 127, 135 see also Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo (Index of Harley manuscript items) Oxford 19, 62, 99–100 Paradise 106, 213 Paris 79, 99, 141–142, 144n128, 150n152, 201 Paris, Matthew 194n93 Passion lyrics see Christ, Passion of pastoral care 20, 59–60, 94, 127

323 pastourelle 42, 89n42, 153, 165–166, 177–182, 188–190, 192n58, 193n63–64, 194n95, 195n103, 195n109–110, 222, 231–238, 254 patrons, patronage 8–12, 24, 26, 28, 34, 39, 58–61, 68, 72–76, 80–81, 85, 89n34, 89n50, 91n84, 101, 136, 155, 207, 221, 236, 246, 250n110, 255, 259, 262–266, 269, 276n11 Pearl 90n72, 201–202 Pearsall, Derek 1, 4, 21, 40, 55 Pecham, Alexander (Archbishop of Canterbury) 257 Pelagius (Bishop of Oviedo) 117 Pentateuch see Bible (Hebrew; Latin Vulgate; Old French) Percy, Thomas 6, 15, 45n30 Percy Society 7 performance, performativity 31, 62–63, 68–70, 73, 78, 80, 109, 129, 145n62, 155, 157, 195, 200, 202, 213, 215, 220–221, 226, 250n102 periodization 5–6, 15, 17–19, 28, 32–33, 57, 73, 95, 98, 131, 151–152, 156, 178, 185, 189, 200–208, 212, 219, 224, 226, 241–246, 247n35, 255, 260 Perloff, Marjorie 240 pestilence see plague Peter, St 213, 230, 265 see also Life of St Peter (Index of Harley manuscript items) Peterborough 230, 235 Petrarch 80, 202 Pharaoh 125 Phinehas, son of Aaron 132–133, 136, 140 pilgrimage, pilgrimage texts 2, 31, 42, 59–60, 66, 88n26, 96, 99–100, 114–120, 127, 131, 134, 155, 183, 189, 196n131, 254–276 plague 1, 17–18, 25, 28–29, 34, 56, 58, 60, 61, 199–208, 210, 212–213, 215, 219, 227, 241, 243, 245–246, 260, 270

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324 PMLA 7, 239–241, 244 Pocket Book of Modern Verse 242–244 political songs 2, 7, 9, 14, 28, 30, 41–42, 45n32, 53, 71–73, 83–84, 96, 103, 110–111, 138, 182, 187, 210, 214, 218, 260 Pontefract Castle 174–175, 194n93 Pope, Alexander 184, 186–187 Potiphar’s Wife 125, 189 practical literature see instructional texts; devotional texts prayer, prayer texts 2, 30, 109, 112, 116, 121, 139, 145n46, 153–154, 156, 190n6, 196n31, 204, 207, 209, 211–214, 216–17, 219, 221–224, 232–234, 237, 249n80, 264, 277n22, 278n58 see also devotional literature Prins, Yopie 240 Promised Land 124, 131, 249n75 pronouns see grammatical terminology Provence, Provençal 69, 100, 195n110, 201, 213 Psalms see Occasions for Psalms (Index of Harley manuscript items) Puhvel, Martin 198n155 Purgatory 196n131, 207, 213 quires see Index of Harley manuscript items Radulescu, Raluca 19–20, 27, 29, 43 Ransom, Daniel J. 4 rape, ravishment 108, 166, 174, 178, 188, 193n63, 195n107, 229, 233, 236, 250n108 reception 13, 32, 39, 51, 60, 112, 156, 180 Redmarley d’Abitot (Worcestershire) 26 Reed, Thomas 166 regionalism, regional identity 13, 27, 29–32, 34–35, 58–65, 73, 76–77, 81–86, 88n16, 92n103, 93n107–108, 95–96, 101, 110–111, 135, 138, 151, 157, 199, 237, 253–275

Index registers, episcopal 25, 59, 91n84, 111, 145n55, 277n50 Reichl, Karl 195n103 Reiss, Edmund 203–204 relics 30–31, 115–120, 147n90, 257, 260, 272, 275, 277n32 Revard, Carter 3, 8–12, 14, 44n6, 44n16, 44n18, 46n46, 66, 73, 76, 84, 156–158, 183–188, 191n8, 194n87, 196n130, 196n133, 197n140, 198n149, 210, 217, 246, 265, 267, 278n74 rhetoric 54, 64, 69, 77, 87, 122, 155–156, 159, 163, 166, 187, 202, 221–222, 224, 229, 240, 242–243 Ricardian literature 5–6, 55–58, 84–85, 93n119, 96, 98, 257, 262 Richard of Cornwall (Earl) 144n44 Richard’s Castle 76, 157, 246, 258, 263 Richmond, Colin 137 Ring around the Rosie 202 Robbins, R.H. 7, 45n21, 55–56, 88n16, 88n18, 91n76 Rochester 259, 261 romance 2, 14, 19, 30–31, 44, 45n20, 62, 101, 103, 148n118, 148n120, 176, 210, 250n105, 257, 260 Rome, Roman Empire 115, 194n93, 241, 262, 273 Roth, Cecil 97, 143n10 royal court, royal household 84–85, 89n40, 93n121, 121, 130, 214 royalism, royalist authority 29, 41, 83–84, 89, 100–101, 103–104, 106, 110–111, 141, 175, 214, 254, 256–259, 266–267 rubrication 13, 15, 20, 34, 37, 57, 122, 124, 126, 134, 147n101, 171, 210, 265, 269, 279 Saint Erkenwald 84 Saint-​Gelais, Richard 160–163, 166 Saint-​Victor, Andrew of 99, 141–142 Saint-​Victor, Hugh of (Descriptio mappe mundi) 147n96, 150n155

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Index saints see miscellanies, saints and; pilgrimage; relics; saints’ lives saints’ lives 2, 14, 19, 31–32, 95, 98, 42–43, 103, 144n44, 145n45, 182, 210, 217, 255, 258, 262–275 Salter, Elizabeth 33–34, 62–63 sanctity, sanctification 29–32, 36, 41–43, 99, 125–130, 143n5, 217, 250n110, 254–272 see also saints’ lives Sanok, Catherine 31, 255, 266 Saul, Nigel 65, 73 Scahill, John 21–22, 30 Scala, Elizabeth 268, 270 Scase, Wendy 33, 35, 48n123 Scattergood, John 83–84, 145n44 Scotland, Scottish March 175 scribes, scribal practice 8, 11, 13, 16, 25–26, 38, 45n42, 82, 84, 126, 132, 183, 189, 268 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 69 sermons, preaching 26, 63, 106–108, 120–123, 139, 148n109, 169–170, 172, 174, 175, 184, 189, 194n87, 197n143, 202, 265, 270, 274, 278n74, 279n79 Shakespeare, William 186, 189, 198n149 Short Metrical Chronicle see Short Metrical Chronicle (Index of Harley manuscript items) Shrewsbury 3, 144n36, 266 Shropshire 144n36 Shuffleton, George 66n146 Sidhu, Nicole Nolan 193n65, 193n82 Sigal, Gale 167 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 1, 5, 62 Smith, Geri L. 178, 192n58 Solomon, King 104 South English Legendary 19, 31–32, 146n86 see also manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Misc. (108) Southwark 261

325 South-​West Midlands 18–20, 29–31, 62, 65, 93n107, 257, 265, 272 space, sacred 82, 124, 127, 139, 222, 254, 260–261 see also sanctity space, social see geography, cultural Spiegel, Gabrielle 163 Stacey, Robert C. 137 Stanbury, Sarah 250n102, 250n110 Statute of Jewry 101 Stephen, St 213 Stone, Brian 91n92 Strange, Richard 274–275 Stretton Sugwas 276n11, 278n57 Strickland, Debra Higgs 143n4, 146n77 St Thomas Way 277n33 Swansea 277n33 Swinfield, Richard (Bishop of Hereford) 44n18, 58–60, 62, 64, 68, 75–76, 94–96, 102, 105, 111, 136, 142, 142n1, 142n3, 144n38, 145n55, 257–258, 264 Talbot family 15, 76, 157, 258, 263, 267 Talbot, Joan Mortimer 246, 252n151, 263, 270 Talbot, John 252n151, 263 Talbot, Thomas 263, 270, 272, 277n50 Tally, Robert T., Jr. 191n50 taxation 43n144, 71, 101, 103, 211–214 temporality 99, 111, 115, 127–128, 135, 147n97, 153, 165, 176–179, 189, 240, 243–245 Terada, Rei 241–245 Terkla, Dan 277n44 textual community 4, 10, 12, 26–27, 53, 62, 67, 72, 81, 85, 96, 157, 269 Thomas, a Jew named 278n52 Thomas of Canterbury, St see Becket, Thomas, St Thomas of Hereford, St see Cantilupe, Thomas, St

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326 Thomas of Lancaster (Earl) 258, 264, 267–268, 270, 194n93 Thomas the Apostle, St 278n52 Thompson, John J. 34, 133–134 Three Dead Kings (Audelay) 209 Three Living/​Three Dead 207, 210, 216–17 Three Magi 120, 216–217 see also Prayer to the Three Kings (Index of Harley manuscript items) Tomasch, Sylvia 36, 97–98, 272 topography, topographical texts 2, 4, 30, 32, 42, 43, 52, 61, 62, 77, 80, 96, 112–113, 115–116, 202, 261, 268, 272, 274–275 see also geography; landscape toponymy 101, 114, 138, 151, 175, 194n93, 226 Transi Tombs 207, 210 translation 8, 27, 64, 77, 87n1, 104–105, 115, 134, 140, 143n10, 153, 155, 173, 184, 187, 191n8–9, 216, 250n112 translation, bodily 59, 84, 116, 260, 266–73 travel, travel literature 2, 27, 42, 52, 57–60, 65–66, 69, 77, 80–82, 91n77, 96–97, 112–113, 151–155, 170, 177–178, 186, 190n6, 201, 205, 235, 243–246, 258, 260–262, 274, 275 see also geography; mobility; pilgrimage; topography trilingualism see multilingualism Trillek, John (Bishop of Hereford) 60 Trim, Ireland 15, 101 Tristram, Philippa 206 Troy 84 Troyes, France 141–142, 143n10 Turville-​Petre, Thorlac 23, 46n67, 83–84, 88n21, 197n136 typology 20, 98, 104–105, 111, 114–116, 118, 122, 127–128, 135, 161, 264, 273

Index universalism, universal history 29, 43, 74, 78, 85, 96, 100, 112, 114, 116, 123, 127, 208, 216, 220, 223, 226, 269, 275 universities 6, 27, 94, 99, 176, 256, 264, 278n62 utopianism 161, 169, 173, 190, 194n91 van Court, Elisa Narin 97 Varnam, Laura 260–261, 277n44 voice 15, 81–82, 86–87, 108, 123, 125, 131, 167, 178–179, 183, 187, 195n105, 195n114, 202, 209, 215, 220, 232, 241, 262 von Contzen, Eva 29–30 virginity 167–170, 175 see also Mary, Virgin, St Wales, Welsh March 3, 30, 34, 54, 57, 65, 89n46, 97, 99–100, 201, 207, 259, 262, 264, 271 Wallace, David 49n152, 261 Walter Map 19 Walter of Henley (Husbandry) 89n40 Warhol, Robyn 162 Warton, Thomas 6, 15 Webb, John 142n3, 145n55 Wenzel, Siegfried 20–21, 43 West Midlands 18, 20, 34, 54, 81, 93n107, 209, 253, 257, 271 Westminster 94, 99, 149n129, 155, 185, 188 West of England 58, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 76–77, 86 Westrem, Scott D. 128 White, Hayden 163 Whitehead, Christiania 250n105, 145n57 Widmann, Andreas 161–162 Wiglaf (King of Mercia) 266 Wigmore Abbey 99, 141–142, 150n155 Williams, Raymond 88n16, 92n94 Wilshere, A.D. 132–134

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Index Wilson, Angus (Anglo-​Saxon Attitudes) 180–181, 196n126, 197n42 Winchester 41, 135, 154–158, 170, 173, 175, 178, 186 Winchester, Diocese of 58, 60, 259 Wirral (Cheshire) 65, 155 Wistan of Wistanstow, St see Martyrdom of St Wistan, The (Index of Harley manuscript items) Wistanstow 265, 266, 271, 279 Woolf, Rosemary 145n57, 202, 204, 242, 250n99, 250n105

327 Worcester 62–64, 89n41, 99–100, 144n36 Worcester Cathedral 63, 89n44, 269 Worcester, Diocese of 19, 32, 58–60, 72, 75, 80, 89n48, 259 Worcestershire 19, 26, 31 Wright, Thomas 6–7, 15, 45n32 Wye, River 65, 266 Yorkshire 100, 102, 175 Zimri, son of Salu 133, 136 Ziolkowski, Jan 8, 264