The Old English words in the Corpus Glossary constitute one of the oldest extant texts in the English language, and one of the three longest in the Mercian dialect. Linguists now agree that the glossary was compiled somewhere in Mercian territory during the eighth century. Palaeographical evidence points to the eighth century as the period of compilation. Concerning two important questions, linguistic opinion seems at present vague and uncertain: First, to what extent is the language of Corpus the result of dialect mixture? Second, what is the relationship between the language of Corpus and that of the most important of the texts now looked upon as Mercian, the Vespasian Psalter?

The “Delamere” manuscript, owned successively by Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Delamere, and now passed into the possession of Mr. Boies Penrose II, has long been known to scholars for its complete text of the Canterbury Tales. It was first brought to notice by Furnivall, who listed, as well as the Canterbury Tales, the other poems, and described the state of the manuscript.

... it has lost 34 leaves in different parts of the volume ... The MS originally began with the Canterbury Tales and was regularly signed from a to z, 23 sheets. The scribe then put three sheets of Gower's Tales before the Canterbury Tales, and numbered the MS all through from 1 to 26, making the original first sheet a, number 3.

Le poème courtois intitulé Gautier d'Aupais est assez singulier. Il ressemble à Jehan et Blonde par le thème, au Lai de l'Ombre par les procédés, à Cligés par les monologues, à Amadas et Ydoine par les allusions et à Brun de la Montaigne par la forme métrique. Il est écrit en 48 laisses monorimes qui se composent de 876 vers dodécasyllabiques. L'objet de cette étude est d'expliquer un vers difficile qui se trouve dans la laisse xxxi du poème et par là de résoudre un problème tant littéraire que linguistique.

Among the numerous pieces of verse in the Exeter Book, one to which comparatively little critical attention has been devoted is the Harrowing of Hell. The only special studies of this poem were made many years ago, by J. H. Kirkland and Julius Cramer, though it has, of course, been discussed more or less casually in the several recent editions of the Exeter Codex.

Sir Tophas in John Lyly's Endimion merits study for several reasons. He is in some ways an adumbration of Shakespeare's Don Armado. He is, though a minor figure, probably the most amusing of Lyly's dramatis persona, a farced braggart with a curious individuality. Finally, he represents an early and successful attempt to domesticate on the Elizabethan stage not only the miles gloriosus of Latin comedy but also the capitano millantatore of the Italian theater. The notes that follow bring together materials bearing on the Latin, Italian, and English background of Sir Tophas—apart from Chaucer.

In den Handbüchern und Grundrissen der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte wird unter den Quellen oder Vorbildern, die Eike von Repgow bei der Abfassung des Sachsenspiegels massgebend beeinflusst haben sollen, allgemein der Name des Didaktikers Wernher von Elmendorf angeführt. Ein Lehrgedicht dieses in der zweiten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts in Thüringen reimenden niederdeutschen Geistlichen soll dem Verfasser des Sachsenspiegels als Vorbild gedient haben, als er die Reime zur Vorrede seines Rechtsbuches zusammenfügte. “Der zweite Teil der Praefatio Rhythmica, Vers 97–280, ist von Eike in Reimpaaren mit Benutzung eines Lehrgedichtes des Werner von Elmendorf abgefasst worden.” So lautet die Formulierung Heinrich Brunners, die in allen Auflagen seiner Grundzüge der deutschen Rechts geschickte wiederkehrt. Claudius von Schwerin schreibt in seinem neuesten Grundrisswerk Germanische Rechtsgeschichte: “Auch kannte Eike mittelalterliche Dichter,” was im Hinblick auf die auch von ihm angenommenen “zahlreichen Anklänge” an jenen Dichter im zweiten Teil der Reimvorrede mit auf Elmendorf zu beziehen ist. Karl August Eckhardt bemerkt in der Einleitung zu seiner Sachsenspiegelausgabe mit quellenkritischer Vorsicht bloss, dass sich in der Reimvorrede “Anklänge an Wernher von Elmendorf” finden.

Geoffrey Chaucer and Oton de Graunson, as members of the retinue of the Duke of Lancaster, were thrown into close personal association, and Chaucer's translation of some of Oton's balades affords conclusive evidence that literary connections also existed between the two poets. The full extent of Oton's influence upon Chaucer can not now be accurately determined, inasmuch as some of Oton's poems have been lost and even of those which have been preserved some are still difficult of access. We are specially fortunate, therefore, in having available a sequence of Valentine poems by Graunson, who seems to have been the first to popularize this type of verse in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer himself, notably in the Parlement of Foules and the Complaint of Mars, also took part in this cult of Saint Valentine's Day, and there thus seems reason to expect that an examination of Oton's Valentine poems may supply evidence which will be helpful in interpreting these Chaucerian pieces.

Chaucer's poetry is generally felt to be distinguished by “an irony so quiet, so delicate, that many readers never notice it is there at all or mistake it for naïveté.”1 Granting, of course, the danger that “naïveté” may in turn be mistaken for irony, we may still suspect, with G. K. Chesterton, that Chaucer “made a good many more jokes than his critics have ever seen.”2 Whatever disputes continue about certain passages, no one is likely to deny today that the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is rich in subtle and satiric ambiguities. A more debatable and more neglected question, and one which I wish to pose here, is: How early did the ironic spirit manifest itself in Chaucer's works?

In the sale of the large collection of Gurney Manuscripts in 1920 one manuscript was overlooked, and still remains in the possession of Mr. Q. E. Gurney of Norwich, the brother of the former owner. Miss Allen supplies some information in regard to the date and the previous history of this manuscript; and a list of its contents (omitting, of course, the prose Abbey of the Holy Ghost) will be found in Carleton Brown's Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse.

In his book entitled Malory Professor Vinaver propounds a plausible hypothesis that certain features of the romance of Gareth in the seventh book of the Morte d'Arthur were inventions of the author.

The hero—Beaumains—is Malory's own hero, and his name, impossible in any French romance, strangely resembles that of Malory's patron [Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick]. His successive battles with the Black, Green, and Red Knights, and particularly his behaviour at the tournament at the castle of Lady Lioness, at once call to mind the romantic adventure of Richard Beauchamp. At that tournament the King of Ireland wondered who Beaumains might be, “that one tyme semed grene, and another tyme at his ageyne comyng he semed blewe. And thus at every cours that he rode to and fro he chaunged his colour so that ther myght neyther kynge nor knyghte have redy congnyssaunce of hym.” The parallel is so close as to lead me to believe that some parts of the book of Beaumains were written in remembrance of Beauchamp's gallant deeds.

Tyrwhitt (about 1790) dated the A-Text of Piers Plowman upon the evidence of a reference (Passus v, 10–20) to a southwest wind storm which occurred in 1362. Scholars have generally accepted this as the date of composition. But Professor Cargill has shown the reference to have no value in deciding the terminus ad quem in view of the specific and lively records of this storm to be found in later sources: John Richesdale, for example, born after the time of the storm, as he tells us, speaks of it familiarly just as we might of the great blizzard of '88, still a memorable event.

After the Redcross Knight has been rescued from Orgoglio by Prince Arthur and from Despeyre by the wise and watchful Una, he is brought by the latter to the House of Holinesse, “Where he is taught repentaunce, and The way to heauenly blesse.” There Mercy, “a matrone graue and hore,” leads him to one of the places of his purification, a “holy Hospitall” in which are employed seven bead-men who spend their days in doing godly works. The first of them, as eldest and best, has charge and government of all the house, giving entertainment and lodging to all who come and go. The second has for his office the giving of food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. A third has in custody the common wardrobe, from which he dispenses “clothes meet to keepe keene could away,/ And naked nature seemely to aray.” A fourth is appointed for the relieving of prisoners and the redeeming of captives. A fifth cares for the sick and comforts those lying at the point of death. Still a sixth bead-man superintends the burial of the dead, lest the wondrous workmanship of God's own mould might be defouled.

One does not ordinarily associate the Elizabethan broadside with classical antiquity, although the ballads of the late sixteenth century are fairly studded with allusions to ancient literature. It is unlikely that the inquiring, responsive writers of the day should not have exhibited, in some slight way, their knowledge of the older literatures. When Thomas Newton confessed his translation of Seneca to be “an unflidge nestling, unable to fly: an unnatural abortion, and an unperfect Embroyon,” he was indicting much of the more shallow scholarship of his contemporaries. With such thorough-paced savants as Cheke and Ascham, Mulcaster and Camden, we have no business; but it is interesting to note the way in which their more lowly brethren used their learning. When ballad writers try to put their classics to good account in making a broadside doggerel of some ancient myth, the results are at once ludicrous and irritating—ludicrous in their naive distortion of source, irritating in their flagrant violation of whatever decorous beauty the original may have had. I shall attempt to sketch a few of the ways in which the popular writer's classical education influenced the most thoroughly popular of literary productions, the broadside ballad. The querulous will immediately raise the caveat that these ephemeral broadsides can hardly be dignified with the term “literary productions,” but when one considers that Surrey and Dyer, as well as Elderton and Deloney, had their poetic efforts published in this form, the distinction seems factitious.

A good deal of attention has been devoted to the question of Chaucer's intention when he created the character of Criseyde. Almost all answers have as their starting point a common assumption: that Chaucer was doing his best to create a unified character in the modern sense of the phrase. They start, that is, from the assumption that Chaucer meant Criseyde's character and actions to appear all of a piece and from the fact that he made her false to Troilus in the end. Only two conclusions are possible on the basis of these premises: either Chaucer intended Criseyde's character to appear compatible with her betrayal of Troilus from the first, or he intended it to appear to change during the course of the narrative in response to the events. The first of these conclusions, with its assumption as to Chaucer's conception of things, is the one most frequently encountered.

Erich Schmidt's brilliant essay, Fatisi und das sechzehnte Jahrhundert, gave the final sanction to the thesis, voiced by Goethe himself, that the Faust legend is in all its attributes a product of the Reformation. Despite recurrent protests, raised before and after the publication of Schmidt's essay, the Lutheran character of the legend has come to be regarded by literary historians as a dogma. To be sure, the universally Christian ancestry of Faust, Simon Magus, Theophilus, and other Manichæan and mediæval forerunners of the sixteenth-century Devil's Disciple, was unearthed by a host of parallel hunters; still, the Lutheranism of the legend has been upheld until today. Eugen Wolff's attempt to prove that the Volksbuch was a Catholic pamphlet met with little success. Although Adolf Hauffen conceded that there must have been a Catholic Faustbook also, the “genuine Lutheran tendency” of the legend, the triumph of faith over learning, was emphatically pointed out by Wolfgang Stammler in 1927; its Humanist and Lutheran tendencies were stressed by A. Bernt in 1930; and the familiar argument was reiterated by the recent work of G. Bianquis, who declared that in its form of 1587, and in all its subsequent versions, Faust's life is a Lutheran treatise.

In Tottel's Miscellany there are 310 poems, including the thirty-nine added in the second edition of 1557. Of these 310, ninety-six are noted as by Wyatt, forty by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and 134 by “Vncertain auctours.” There are fifty-four sonnets in Tottel. Wyatt contributed twenty-seven, or exactly half. Surrey contributed fifteen; Grimald, three; the uncertain authors, nine. Rather more than one out of every six poems in the book is a sonnet. It is interesting that, among these fifty-four sonnets, fourteen different rime patterns are to be found. These constitute eloquent evidence of the mood of experimentation in which the English sonnet was conceived. It is a mistake to assume that Tottel contains only two types of sonnets, the Italian (or Petrarchian) and the English (or Shakespearian). Even if we define the first type loosely (and we must, when dealing with its early manifestation), there remain fifteen sonnets in the Miscellany which more or less defy classification. It is instructive to consider the various rime patterns in some detail. From them we may get, not only a suggestion of how the English sonnet evolved, but also a clue to the authorship of at least two sonnets by uncertain authors. A study of rime patterns is a narrow approach to the whole problem of sonnet technique, but, when applied to the English sonnet in its infancy, it has an unusual usefulness.