I looked around my acumulated medieval texts and realized that nearly all the medieval poems I know, and especially of which I have copies, are rather long.
I'd never really thought about length as a determining genre element. I have many short poems by Shakespeare or Donne or later poets, but only a very few Anglo-Saxon exemplars, and a few fifteenth-century contributions by "Unknown" grace my shelves from the medieval period. Is this an idiosyncracy of the sort of material I work with, or is there really a paucity of short poetry surviving from the Middle Ages?
And if there is plenty of shorter poetry, where would I go looking for it? I can think of the Carmina Burana. Perhaps collections of marginalia. Any other particular instances of fairly short poetry from the period (one or two pages or less)?
I'd never really thought about length as a determining genre element. I have many short poems by Shakespeare or Donne or later poets, but only a very few Anglo-Saxon exemplars, and a few fifteenth-century contributions by "Unknown" grace my shelves from the medieval period. Is this an idiosyncracy of the sort of material I work with, or is there really a paucity of short poetry surviving from the Middle Ages?
And if there is plenty of shorter poetry, where would I go looking for it? I can think of the Carmina Burana. Perhaps collections of marginalia. Any other particular instances of fairly short poetry from the period (one or two pages or less)?
Profile
owlfish- S. Worthen
- S. Worthen
Comments
Your suggestion is a good one. All of the examples I have of shorter poems are good for singing; good too because they are easy to memorize because the wordplay is more intense.
Carols and other songs would definitely be an alternative source of shorter texts, I agree.
Short's relative--most are multi-stanza, with the shortest ones being 2-3 pp in length.
That being said, you get multi multi bonus points from me (and then the dubious distinction of being added to my reading list) for mentioning my boy Lyddyboy in LJ land. Hope you don't mind ;)
I'll bring it on Saturday!
are you aware he's going to be here at the "25th annual international festival of authors"? he's doing a reading from "something rotten" on monday 25 october and being interviewed on the following wednesday at harbourfront!
http://www.readings.org/2004_IFOA/authorCard.php?id=fforde_jasper
tickets are $15 each
[ps. i commented on this story because i figured if i posted a comment to an older entry you might not read it, i.e. there was a better chance of you reading a comment to a more recent entry than to an older one]
On the vernacular front, I use the Oxford UP/Carleton Brown collections (13th, 14th, 15th c.) a fair bit--religious and secular lyric--because IMO they help to gauge a moral culture. Pretty much everything from those and other collections is on LION , which I'm assuming U of T has. I get them using text searches a lot, and I use them accordingly.
Lydgate wrote tons of short lyrics, picking up from Chaucer. These are mostly edited, but again, I use LION like every two minutes to find citations within his vast repertoire. The lyrics are often moral or religious (lots of fodder for the *mesure* mill there), and I use them writing about *Fall of Princes* because I think they're defensible evidence for
his moral theorywhat he's trying to teach princes.As a matter of fact, this is a big question for me as I feel my way toward genre issues: if Lydgate's lyrics fulfill the function of moral teaching, why write a work of epic quality (*Fall of Princes*) that basically teaches the same thing? What does that say about a conception of genre--which again I think is fluid and highly distinct from ours??
I think lyrico-narrative theory (take Sylvia Huot or my own teacher, Maureen Boulton) is highly interesting. There's definitely something to it when you think about the *Vita Nuova* or Machaut (obviously!), but I think you can carry it out to other kinds of texts.
Late secular lyrics ARE just high-class songs, fwiw. And anon. religious lyrics are proximate to carols--though when you get to Lydgate's lyrics they're highly formal, highly not settable to music.
Not writing very well this aft, sorry ;)