This chapter addresses what theology might become when it is lyrically articulated: less dogmatic, more material; less sure of what it knows, more frank about what it desires. Through a sustained meditation on the work of poets Elizabeth Bradfield, Marie Howe, and Suzanne Paola, as well as that of theologians Josef Pieper and Herbert McCabe, it becomes possible to speak of the body and God, of sex and the sacred, as mutually disclosive. Theology has, for this chapter as for many of its sources, no proper language; the improprieties of lyric may, therefore, provide a particularly appropriate and attentive way of speaking the divine, no more or less than the human.

The introduction briefly outlines the literary culture of fifteenth-century Scotland and the contexts in which Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar were writing. Each text is described and some pertinent critical discourses regarding the works are discussed. Next, the narrative grotesque is situated within a broader critical history related to the critical term ‘grotesque’, which arose in reference to architectural decorations in the late fifteenth century before being adopted into other intellectual discourses. The narrative grotesque is defined as a distinct variety of the grotesque, since it is not limited to visual images and, rather, extends to textual corruptions, hybridisations, and ruptures that are paired with the dissonant affective reactions of horror and humour. The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo are shown to be exemplary starting points for the wider application of the narrative grotesque, since both exhibit numerous and varied ‘grotesqueries’.

In the final chapter on The Palyce of Honour the narrative strands are brought together by examining the ways in which Gavin Douglas weaves together pagan allegory with Christianity. The poem is demonstrated to create multiple intersecting hierarchies that highlight Douglas’s humanist-complected understanding of poetics as a mode of divine illumination. The figure of Venus in medieval cosmology and astrology is especially important to this phase of the discussion. Meanwhile, the motifs of are developed from their introduction in the previous chapter. Lastly, Douglas the poet is integrated as contributing yet another subjectivity through his dedication to James IV of Scotland which brings the Scottish king into the hierarchies discovered by the dreamer-narrator.

The book concludes by considering the interpretive influence of the images throughout MS Ashmole 61, repeated pictures of fish and flowers. Through this, the book argues that such patterns across the manuscript offer an additional prod to interpretation that requires recognition of agential objects from across the medieval household.

This chapter introduces household affect ecologies and household object ecologies, tracing them from the different theoretical perspectives used throughout MS Ashmole 61. It offers a deep description of Objects of affection’s central object, Ashmole 61, through a consideration of the book’s full materiality. This it considers in relation to other books of its sort – in the process establishing an alternative taxonomy for books produced in the late Middle Ages for, within, and by gentry and merchant households. The chapter surveys current theoretical developments in literary manuscript study and demonstrates what Ashmole 61 has to offer to a book history rooted in new materialist concerns. This it does through investigating features of Ashmole 61’s distinctive materiality, which includes an exceptional and extended campaign of iconic scribal signatures in the form of recurring fish and flower graffiti. The introduction also considers how our cultures of editing have transformed medieval books and ponders what they are currently becoming in the process of mass digitisation of medieval manuscripts – and how this development both challenges and enables ecologically grounded manuscript study.

This chapter attends to a series of narratives in the second quarter of MS Ashmole 61 whose affective purpose is fulfilled by an object, or array of objects, affirming the mercy offered through Christ and appropriately honoured through human forgiveness. In Knight Who Forgave his Father’s Slayer, the crucifix responds to a human kiss of forgiveness by physically embracing the generous party and thereby revealing the reunited community it has produced. Two other exempla (Jealous Wife and Incestuous Daughter) materialise the effects of spiritual filth in the fiends and chains, and the triumphant power of divine mercy in the form of human tears, with the sinful female protagonists spared their deserved eternal exile through human devotion and dedication. Two romances in this section of the manuscript address forgiveness from a less narrowly religious perspective: the hero of Lybeaus Desconus is confirmed in his knightly identity, and thus confirmed as a member of the community, by various non-human members of that community; The Erle of Tolous reveals the agency of non-human members through objects bearing and producing dedication where it did not previously exist, modelling an ethics supporting the whole community.

The second wife’s response is demonstrated to be a sort of distorted mirror of the first wife’s: she adopts many of the motifs, expressions, and concepts introduced in the first response, but reforms them anew. She also flytes her husband, but her flyting is more concerned with the performance of courtliness and courtly love. Her response includes an inset literary complaint, which is wholly unusual for the mode. In addition to highlighting similarities between her complaint and that delivered by the dreamer in Palyce, Richard Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat and The Quare of Jelusy are presented as Scottish intertexts. Concepts of melancholia and lovesickness are interwoven throughout her speech to create a grotesquely warped conglomeration of signification.

Despite the significant weaknesses (seen in human attempts at severing communion with the non-human, both worldly and divine) elsewhere in the collection, MS Ashmole 61 concludes with three vivid narratives of successful human reincorporation. St Margaret provides a transitional model, with the saint’s body a battleground on which false sacraments are transformed into true ones (boiling oil becomes holy unction; water torture becomes baptism) through the heroine’s collaboration with a piece of the holy cross, an angel, evil dragons, and her own prayer. This poem harmonises previously ruptured material and spiritual elements. Sir Orfeo models selective rewriting through the transformation of the classic tale of loss into one of recuperation, achieved by the hero through rejecting his human exceptionalism and uniting with his harp and living harmoniously among wild animals, ultimately becoming a human-tree hybrid that achieves his aims through working with rather than fighting his non-human opponent. The collection ends with the unique text King Edward and the Hermit, in which a scene of potential disharmony – latent in deer carcasses that in a different assemblage would have generated royal ire – is prevented through the intervention of a game that, with the assistance of alcohol, successfully reconstructs a relationship.

In this chapter the first response, delivered by the ‘first wife’, is examined in detail. Her response is shown initially to inhere with the conventional demande d’amour, despite veering towards sexual innuendo and humour. Her fantasy of free love and female sovereignty is compared to medieval conduct literature, especially the Scottish poem The Thewis off Gud Women. Her response, however, abruptly shifts tone, subject matter, and form in order to deliver an excoriating flyting against her husband. The Scottish poetic invective form depends on a vivid and horrifying vocabulary of abuse in order to deride opponents. The wife ably employs this in her attack on her husband, which reveals explicitly the sexual and emotional abuse to which she is subject. Her fluid discourse once again shifts as she casts herself as manipulating her husband with sexual favours in exchange for luxury material items. The complex and uncomfortable tone and subject matter created by the trio of themes is explicated by the narrative grotesque: William Dunbar destroys conventional ‘languages of love’ and perceptions about eloquent emotional expression and replaces them with discourses that meld horror and humour. This displacement of one pole of expression for another, however, is shown to be equally problematic in terms of subjectivity, authenticity, and veracity.