Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture by Valerie B. Johnson;Kara L. McShane;

Author:Valerie B. Johnson;Kara L. McShane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2022-04-04T08:17:49.097000+00:00

Chapter 9 Outcast Lyrics: Responsive Reading in the Findern Manuscript

Cynthia A. Rogers

The Findern manuscript, a fifteenth-century scrapbook collecting excerpts of Chaucer, Gower, and other authors, has long been studied for its love lyrics—in particular those composed by its gentry creators. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of these lyrics were anthologized with thematically similar lyrics from other manuscripts, which encouraged scholarship on those lyrics that fit those thematic lenses. The following essay, however, considers the manuscript’s lyrics that have been overlooked—the outcasts—the lyrics rejected by modern editors because they do not fit comfortably into established categories. I take my initial cue from Thomas Hahn’s collaborative article “Text and Context: Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale” written with historian Richard Kaeuper, which brings a historical context to their reading of “The Friar’s Tale” and reciprocally analyzes the tale for what it reveals about medieval culture. Similarly, I will be interrogating the text and context of these Findern lyrics to consider what they reveal about the social reading practices of the medieval world and, conversely, how a knowledge of those reading practices helps us to tease meaning from these outcasts.1

My analysis shows that, rather than autonomous works meant to be read as stand-alone lyrics, these outcast lyrics are embedded in their manuscript context and should be read as responses to the other poems copied on nearby pages. Like a chess piece pulled off its game board and held in the hand, one of these lyrics when read alone seems insignificant and uninteresting. In order to understand either a chess piece or an outcast lyric, it must be returned to its position within the game. Its interest and power lies in its relationship to the other pieces: Which does it attack? Which does it support? Because of this intertextual relationship, these lyrics give us a rare glimpse of reading as a leisure activity in the Middle Ages, where reading is both social and interactive. They demonstrate how, for late medieval people, the reading of poetry required both listening and the potential for verbal response as conversation and composition.

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