Pity for the suffering of Christ and grief of the Virgin Mary, as well as injunctions to devoted love for both, become hallmarks of medieval affective devotion in the twelfth century and later. Yet centuries earlier, in the understudied Old English Advent Lyrics (also known as Christ I), Mary has a few things to say about her suffering. She speaks, however, not to God, nor even about Him at first, but rather laments to Joseph his lack of love for her. As she proclaims, “Eala Ioseph min, | Iacobes bearn, / […] nu þu freode scealt | fæste gedælan, / alætan lufan mine!” (Oh my Joseph, son of Jacob, now you shall entirely dissolve our union, forsake my love!; Advent Lyric VII, 164–7).¹ In dramatizing this dialogue between Mary and Joseph, Lyric VII plays upon a poetic type scene of the marriage lament, often employed in the Exeter Book poems, to portray Mary’s grief at the weakening of Joseph’s bond to her.² And in so doing, it also dramatizes the affective dynamics of her devotion to God and the hardship she endures because of it.

Devotional poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries look quite different from Old English poems such as the Advent Lyrics, but likewise enjoin devotion to and faith in Mary in Middle English, Old French, and Latin verses, as literary histories tell us they should. Moreover, these later poems evince conventions and conventional poetic topoi that only become available in England after the Conquest, following the new availability of Old French poetry and poetics.³ Yet amid all that changes, English poetics retains older vernacular poetic conventions, mingling their associated affects with those newly available. Just as pre-Conquest English devotional poetry had incorporated the conventions of heroic and elegiac poetics, English devotional poetry further incorporates conventions from the lay and the ballad as it moves across the Conquest. These forms bring their own associated affective content, and in them we see the shift from the more alien to the more familiar conventions of deeply felt religious devotion. Yet what arises anew is thus not affective piety itself but rather new hybrid forms of affective piety that have become the more legible to modern readers.

The difficulty modern scholars have had in recognizing the continuities in affective piety arises, in part, from defining just what one means when one talks about “affective piety.” Sarah McNamer describes “affective meditations on the Passion – richly emotional, script-like texts that ask their readers to imagine themselves present at scenes of Christ’s suffering […] in a private drama of the human heart,” and thus the advent of such meditations becomes a watershed moment in the “history of compassion.”⁴ For Lara Farina, affective piety is “the product of a theology of love, grounded in the body. In its most developed formulation by Bernard, this theology held that love, which is of divine origin, unites the human soul with God.”⁵ Farina defines the term more precisely here than, for example, R. W. Southern, who pinned the apparent lack of earlier medieval affective engagement on the “ceaseless round” of Benedictine monasticism. Each of these scholars concurs that something new happens in devotion or devotional literature around the twelfth century, but for each, the new thing has different contours. There is thus no single convention that might be identified as continuing across the Conquest to establish an earlier lineage for affective piety, nor would it be useful to efface the real changes in devotional literature that these scholars have identified. Moreover, scholars of earlier literature have contributed to the sense that compassionate, affective meditation was not central to earlier devotional literature: As I argued in previous chapters, scholars’ broader, more generalized sense of stoicism and absence of emotion arises around Old English poetry in particular, obscuring the complex emotional dynamics created by its particular conventions and aesthetic associations. Scholars are not wrong that the particular “blend of desire and asceticism” of a poem such as Thomas of Hales’s Luue Ron would not have been possible in Old English verse.⁶ But in spite of the absence of its particular conventions, Old English poetry does use a complex set of interwoven conventions to evoke powerful devotional feelings, using the affective associations arising from those conventions to engage the audience in a dynamic affective experience of devotional texts. And indeed, affect in pre-Conquest vernacular traditions was already understood as embodied experience.⁷

Across the previous chapters, this study has traced affective devotion through centuries of dramatic cultural and linguistic change, attending especially to those trails that continue rather than those that fade or arise anew. This chapter considers just what actually changes in English devotional poetry as it develops in the wake of the Norman Conquest. The introduction of French-speaking Normans and the greater influence of French literary conventions dramatically alter poetic form, as new devotional tropes combine with Old English traditions. Yet interspersed with these later forms in Middle English lyrics are verses preserving Old English poetic conventions, including copies of a number of the soul and body lyrics considered in Chapter 4.

The poems in this chapter are generally considered lyrics of one form or another, although scholars have struggled to articulate just what “lyric” means. As Julia Boffey and Christina Whitehead observe, scholarship has historically considered Middle English lyrics to be shorter poems, often connected to ideas of medieval music.⁸ Lyric in the modern sense prioritizes the speaker’s expression of individual emotion, characterized as “the genre of personal expression, a sense assumed whenever we talk about ‘the lyric I.’”⁹ Yet contrasted with such ideas of individuality, Emily Thornbury crucially observes that lyrics in Old and Middle English are highly conventional from one poem to another, such that “paradoxically, the verses’ individuality becomes clearer as one comes to understand the common expressions and motifs through which the poets spoke.”¹⁰ Along similar lines, David Lawton has coined the term “public interiority” for later medieval verse to express the way that the voice expressed in one text may be inhabited or “revoiced” in another.¹¹ Another challenge to the definition of lyric arises from the fact that in Old English, the shorter texts often considered to be lyric poems are comparatively rarer than they would become in Middle English, appearing predominately in the Exeter Book.¹² Lyrics crop up in more manuscripts after the Conquest, in English, Latin, and French, and in lyrics featuring some combination of the three. As the lyric becomes a more prevalent and more varied poetic form, the forms that dynamically interact with devotional conventions change too, enabling new hybrid conventions in the later period. But as we saw in Chapter 4, poems have a way of conserving past forms even as new ones are brought into the mix.

The mixing of lyric and other literary forms offers a case study for how English poetic conventions shift across the Conquest. Much of the present chapter, therefore, concerns itself with verse intertexts and the manuscripts that contain them: a pre-Conquest manuscript containing forms thought characteristic of later eras, and a series of post-Conquest lyrics preserving older forms even as their verses bear witness to how much has changed. In these manuscripts and the texts contained within them, we see that it is not just devotional sympathy but a set of conventions for evoking devotional sympathy that characterizes the affective piety most modern scholars recognize.

Blended Voices: The Ambiguous Lament of Advent Lyric VII

Lyric VII of the Advent Lyrics follows a set of other lyrics pondering the incarnation and birth of Christ, including meditations on the mystery of the virgin birth. The Advent Lyrics open the first section of the Exeter Book in which all of its longer poems occur, each focusing on “various models of Christian living,” as Mary Rambaran-Olm has argued.¹³ The lyric “we” of the poems addresses questions to Mary, who even answers in Lyric IV. Lyric VII, however, relates the particular conflict from the Gospel of Matthew in which Joseph questions the circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy. While the form of the lines on the page obscures at times who speaks which line, both Mary and Joseph profess the trouble and grief they endure through Mary’s pregnancy, and the communal repercussions they fear, before Mary reveals the truth of her state. Yet the poem’s dramatic irony arises from the audience’s prerequisite knowledge that Mary must be vindicated, and her endurance of hardship revered, even as Joseph’s may invoke our pity.

Carol Clover has analyzed scenes of women’s mourning in Old Norse and Old English poetry and compared these with other traditions including the scenes of women mourning for Hector in The Iliad.¹⁴ But another convention runs through Old and Middle English: that of the marriage lament, not for a death, but for the faithlessness of a man who is still alive. There are relatively limited feminine speakers in Old English poetry: In devotional poetry, these include most prominently Elene, Juliana, and Judith. Outside of devotional poetry, feminine characters in narrative poems such as Beowulf are given relatively little to say. Feminine speakers do appear in the shorter poems of the rest of the Exeter Book: the speaker of The Wife’s Lament, of Wulf and Eadwacer, and some of the riddle creatures as well as the feminized soul of Soul and Body. It is the convention of many of these latter poems – not the stoic confidence of Judith but the righteous grief of The Wife’s Lament – that characterizes Mary’s curious dialogue with Joseph in Lyric VII of the Advent Lyrics. The Wife’s Lament offers perhaps the clearest and most obvious example of this genre, although the dueling vocatives of Wulf and Eadwacer offer another. The subtly feminized Soul of the Soul and Body poems reproaches its Body in language reminiscent of marital strife, which only becomes more pronounced in the post-Conquest Soul’s Address to the Body, in which the Soul laments the progeny its union with the Body should have produced.¹⁵ That the pre-Conquest poems all appear in the Exeter Book, which opens with the Advent Lyrics, underscores the shared affective resonances among them. Much has been written about the connections among the Exeter poems, and the present discussion will not seek to resolve the many lingering questions about the anthology’s composition. We should note that the topos of the wronged (as opposed to mourning) woman’s lament appears fairly uniquely in the Exeter Book (with the exception, perhaps, of the other Old English Soul and Body in the Vercelli Book). The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer are often read alongside poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer as “elegies.” Reading these elegies alongside devotional poetry that shares its formal and affective conventions, however, illustrates formal innovation and the fluidity of generic categories within Old English poetry.

When Mary defends herself to Joseph in Lyric VII, the narration of the lyrics gives way to dialogue in this tradition of a marriage lament to a husband and lord. In so doing, it dramatizes the affective dynamics of Mary’s devotion and worldly hardship. Mary’s lament markedly focuses on the conflict between herself and her husband in the vein of the Wife of The Wife’s Lament or the Soul of Soul and Body – contrasting with the later topos, discussed by Carissa Harris, in Middle English and Middle Scots of a woman’s lament for a pregnancy.¹⁶ The unusual employment of the marriage lament topos in Lyric VII has two intriguing implications. First, we see an Old English poem using conventional formulaic phrasing and topoi for a unique literary and devotional context. But second, we see in this poem an overlooked example of forms of devotion generally thought to be characteristic only of a much later era.

To begin with, the form of Lyric VII poses problems for making claims about Mary’s speech, because scholars continue to debate just which of the lines actually constitute Mary’s speech. Vocatives in the passage – “Eala, Joseph min” (Oh my Joseph) and “Eala, fæmne geong, / mægð Maria!” (Oh young woman, maid Mary!) – offer clear cues that Mary and Joseph address one another directly. But other lines suggest that a change of speaker has occurred without a vocative to signal who the speaker is addressing and who, by process of elimination, cannot be the speaker. That the poem transitions between speakers is clear enough that critics from John J. Conybeare in the early nineteenth century to Francis Joseph Finan in the twenty-first have argued for Lyric VII as a form of the earliest English drama.¹⁷ And ever since Benjamin Thorpe’s 1842 edition of the Exeter Book, editors and scholars have worked to delineate just which lines should be attributed to whom.¹⁸ The present discussion sets aside the potential connection between Lyric VII and early drama: One difficulty is that of course this term of art was not current in the culture that produced the Advent Lyrics, and whether the contemporary term has any usefulness depends upon who sets the definitions. But what I am interested in, for the present discussion, is the question of what we may attribute to Mary, and what poetic and other conventions are evoked in her dialogue.

To begin with, we know a little about the Advent Lyrics, which are known also by the title Christ I, since collectively they form the first part of the three-part text known as Christ in the Exeter Book. The Exeter Book itself is dated to around the tenth century, and has been connected by some scholars to the cultural shifts of the Benedictine Reforms.¹⁹ The Advent Lyrics themselves, as distinct from the larger Christ poem sequence, form their own sequence of twelve divisions seemingly modeled to some degree on the “O Antiphons” that form part of the Christmastide liturgy, and upon other monastic antiphons associated with them.²⁰ As J. J. Campbell observed:

While the O Antiphon “O virgo virginum” underlies Advent Lyric IV, the model for Lyric VII has been less readily identified. Some of the lyrics based most clearly on the seven O Antiphons only adapt a phrase or two, while Lyric X for example has been suggested as “the poet’s ‘own O,’ or an original poem written in the pattern of the other Eala poems.”²² Thomas D. Hill, however, has argued that the series of lyrics follows a compilation by Alcuin of York, dated to around 790 ad, and identifies the antiphon “O, Joseph, quomodo credidisti quod antea expavisti” as the closest analogue for Lyric VII.²³ Bernard Muir observes, however, that other antiphonal analogues to the Advent Lyrics do not appear in the Alcuin compilation.²⁴ Based ultimately upon Matthew 1, the scene of Joseph lamenting Mary’s inexplicable pregnancy and Mary’s reply are “known to students of art and literature as the ‘Doubting of Mary’ or ‘Joseph’s Doubt’ motif.”²⁵ Modern scholars and medieval audiences thus know well the devotional content of Lyric VII, although its specific proximate source and thus some of its finer details remain elusive.

The first lines of Lyric VII unambiguously open with Mary’s lament:

These lines recall a bond of faith now (nu) broken, echoing the plaint of The Wife’s Lament, whose speech centers on her lord’s agency in renouncing the love that they had pledged and shared:

They also recall the words of the Soul to the deceased Body who betrayed it in Soul and Body, in which the Soul laments that it would have been better for the Body that they had never met than that the Body should fail to steward its soul in life.²⁶ In each, agency is assigned to the husband figure, with the power to honor or betray the beloved’s pledge.

Here is where things start to get muddled: The next lines continue to address a second-person singular speaker, a þu/þe for whom the speaker seems to suffer harm. But while the previous sentence, addressed directly to Joseph, seems by process of elimination to be spoken by Mary, this next segment seems to switch to Joseph without warning:

The spreading gossip and reproach seems to suggest that Joseph has learned of Mary’s pregnancy and has lost himself in a grief that only God may heal. But not every scholar has assigned all of these lines to Joseph. Earl Anderson, P. J. Cosijn, and Robert B. Burlin, for their part, consider the first part – “Ic lungre eam/ deope gedrefed, | dome bereafod” (I am suddenly deeply troubled, deprived of reputation) – to be the conclusion to Mary’s speech, and one can easily see why.²⁷ Mary, after all, suffers attacks on her reputation, even if Joseph might complain about this as a presumed betrayed husband as well. Much rests on whether “forðon” in the next line continues this clause or begins a new one. The words in question are “for þe,” about you, perhaps about the pregnant young woman. If hypothetically the words up to “dome bereafod” are Mary’s, and Joseph’s speech begins with “forðon,” “because” or “on account of,” we can read Joseph’s following statement as an explanation of the wrongs that Mary has just bewailed. Then again, Cosijn and Burlin think Mary’s speech continues further: in this case, the words heard “for þe,” “about you,” are those words Mary has heard through the grapevine – that Joseph now considers leaving her, that her plight has been spread abroad. To make this construction work, however, Cosijn and Burlin emend masculine feasceaftne in line 176 to feminine feasceafte.²⁸ In this case, Mary’s speech would only end, and Joseph’s begin, with the apparently clear vocative construction, “Eala fæmne geong, / mægð Maria!” (Oh young woman, maid Mary!) This reading would have the benefit of paralleling Joseph’s speech and Mary’s: both beginning with “Eala” and direct address. The “Eala” construction, however, need not come at the beginning of a new speech to echo clearly what has come before, and indeed, such interplay between the speeches is one of their hallmark features.

If the “Eala fæmne geong” were to begin the speech rather than end it, there are further interpretive problems:

It seems unlikely that Joseph is asking why Mary grieves, unless we read this as a particularly harsh rhetorical question. Yet the following speech, accusing the other of being defiled with sin, seems contextually as if it must be Joseph’s. So while, for example, Earl Anderson assigns this entire speech to Joseph, and John Miles Foley assigns all of it to Mary, we may posit another switch here, after the question and before its answer.²⁹ The following sentence, “Ic to fela hæbbe / þæs byrdscypes | bealwa onfongen!” (I have received too much harm from this pregnancy!), sandwiched as it is between two speeches more obviously attached to Joseph, seem consistent with his speech too, and yet could apply to Mary for obvious reasons before Joseph’s speech resumes.³⁰ Beyond the physical burden and spiritual duty of the child she carries, her betrothed has accused her of sin and defilement. From here, we clearly have Joseph, asking how he can forgive such defilement as he has heard of.³¹ Only after the full force of his doubt and grief does Mary speak boldly, revealing to Joseph what we, and any audience of the Advent Lyrics, would have known all along: that the child she bears is the Son of God and her pregnancy is not sinful but miraculous.

My aim in rehearsing the problems of attributing the lines of this dialogue is not to revise the work other scholars and editors have done to that end, but to consider the oddity of the problem to begin with. The poem’s dialogue form has led scholars to hail it as an early English instance of drama, whether or not the text might have been used in performance.³² Lyric VII is not unique, of course, as a dialogue in Old English – obviously in narrative poems, characters speak in turn, their speeches set off by a formulaic phrase: the construction “[noun] + maðelode” begins some twenty-five lines in Beowulf at the start of speeches, for example, while “ageaf ondsware” (she gave answer) punctuates such speeches six times in the b-verses of Juliana.³³ Lyric VII does no such thing. In the Old English Boethius, speeches by the protagonist, referred to usually as þæt mod (the mind), or his interlocutor, se Wisdom, have clearly marked beginnings and endings within the narrative: “Ða se wisdom þa ðis spel asæd hæfde” (Then when Wisdom had spoken this story.)³⁴ Lyric VII does not do that, either, but perhaps that solution is better suited to prose narrative. But we might consider the verse Solomon and Saturn written into the margin in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, which delineates the speeches of its two protagonists with a simple “Saturnus cwæð” (Saturn said) or “Salom[on] cwæð” (Solomon said.)³⁵ Given that this poem is written into the margins around a text of the Old English Bede, space is at a premium – partway down the page, a runic abbreviation for mon is used for the – mon of Solomon.³⁶ Inserting these extrametrical phrases to mark off dialogue was not only possible but necessary, even when a scribe was running out of room. But Lyric VII does not do this either.

The effect of this absence of speech markers is that these lines about experiencing pain, or shame, or shattered expectations in marriage, might apply either to Joseph thinking he has been betrayed or Mary imagining that she is about to be. And much scholarship on Old English would presume this ambiguity to be a failure either of the present or the past: A scribe who wouldn’t bother, or didn’t know how, to at least mark where one speech ended and another began, or a puzzle, something the medieval audience would have known perhaps from a liturgical source now lost, but certainly something that could be solved if we only had the right information. This assumption tacitly underlies the attempts I cited earlier to make such delineations retroactively ourselves. But given that other dialogues in Old English verse delineate speeches quite clearly, we have reason to think that the scribe or the poet could have done the same. Choosing not to might then be a matter of already knowing the stops, so to speak, particularly if the lyric was or evoked some form of early drama. But a convention closer to hand might be that of the antiphon itself that inspires the Advent Lyrics, more and less loosely, in which voices combine. The turn from third-person speaker to the blended voices of Mary and Joseph is not quite the same as the call and response of the liturgical antiphon, but it shares the feature of encouraging the audience of devotional narrative to imaginatively inhabit the voices of devotional figures, whether the text was used for recitation or simply private meditation. Rather than addressing Mary or speaking of her in the third person, Lyric VII adopts the form of a dialogue in which she and Joseph both speak. A line that might be spoken by either Mary or Joseph, or perhaps both at once, invites readers to inhabit both perspectives just as the performance of the antiphon allows each voice to inhabit the liturgy. The blending of the trope of the wronged woman’s marriage lament with the ambiguity of voices creates a complex, layered effect. This ambiguity plays up the drama of love and grief, forcing both speakers to inhabit a shared affective space, before Mary reveals her true state to Joseph.

Such deliberate ambiguity, blending different voices of two poetic speakers, might seem more characteristic of Modernist poetry than medieval. Yet in his essay, “Old English Poetry Verse by Verse,” Eric Weiskott considers how the syntax and manuscript punctuation of Old English poetry overtly enables similar ambiguity. Following Bruce Mitchell’s arguments for the existence of “intentionally ambiguous” “apo koinou,” Weiskott points to the difficulty of a passage such as Beowulf 258–9: “him se yldesta | andswarode / werodes wisa | wordhord onleac” (“the eldest answered him, the leader of the troop, unlocked his word-hoard ”).³⁷ The ambiguity, Weiskott points out, of whether werodes wisa may be the subject of andswarode or onleac was considered an effect only of modern “syntactical uncertainty in the reading” by Eric Stanley.³⁸ But Weiskott makes a case for what he calls “the syntactical reversal,” in which a phrase that appears as the subject of one verb must be “reanalyzed” as the subject of another.³⁹ As Mitchell had argued, much of the syntactic certainty we have about Old English poetry relies on editorial punctuation rather than the syntax or punctuation of the poems as they survive in manuscript form.⁴⁰

What might a technique of intended ambiguity mean for Lyric VII? Consider the possibility that “Eala fæmne geong” (Oh young woman) in line 175 meaningfully either ends the preceding speech or begins the following one. We might reconsider the verse “Ic to fela hæbbe / þæs brydscypes | bealwa onfongen!” (I have had too much torment for this child-bearing!; Advent Lyric VII, lines 181b–2). The marriage lament convention asks its audience to consider the plight of one wronged by their mate. Whether either, or both, Mary and Joseph grieve with these words, this variation on the trope forces us to inhabit the sorrow and wonder of both in spite of our knowledge of how their story will turn out. Doubts belong primarily to Joseph, while Mary knows, as the audience does, the story of her miraculous pregnancy the whole time. The tropes of the marriage lament allow her to do more than to say what we already know: She laments Joseph’s lack of faith in her just as Joseph laments her apparent lack of faithfulness to him.

Dramatizing the moment before the miracle, or at least before it is revealed, illustrates its wonder by asking its audience to reflect also upon its fear and the worldly hardship and doubt for the humans it involves. Unlike the speaker of The Wife’s Lament, or Wulf and Eadwacer, or the troubled soul of the Soul and Body poems, Mary is not only subject to the will of her worldly betrothed. While the speakers of marriage laments are typically constrained by the situations a male character has left them in, Mary’s situation has been established by God, and she abandons her earlier lament to proclaim joy for both of them:

The truth of Mary’s pregnancy disrupts convention and the old law by which Joseph had feared she would be punished. Declining conventions by which speakers might be clearly distinguished, letting voices blend and overlap while drawing upon the convention of the marriage lament, Advent Lyric VII may not be a drama per se, but it does dramatize the stakes of God’s incarnation for the humans to whom it was revealed. The dramatic irony arises from its audience’s knowledge of this: The miracle has been accomplished. But just as the “O” antiphons raise a multitude of voices to celebrate the miracle anew, Lyric VII blends voices differently, involving its audience in the affective drama of the moment before the miracle. And it uses these combined conventions to do so long before we expect such affective devotion to have taken place.

My Lemman on the Rood

Pity for the suffering of the Virgin Mary and pleas for her pity in turn become the hallmark of later medieval English devotional poetry. But periodizations elide how newer and older devotional poetic conventions did not merely continue to exist at the same time, they exist side by side in the same physical objects, in books such as Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B. 14. 39 (323) (the same manuscript containing several of the soul and body poems considered in Chapter 4) and Cotton Nero A. xiv. These manuscripts also feature macaronic poems on Mary, short lyrics, and an early example of the English ballad form in a poem on Judas Iscariot. One prominent convention in these later poems is the antithesis of Mary and Eve, one also found in Old English poetry but originating in theological writings from at least the second century ce.⁴¹ While many of the devotional affects evinced in them are visible in Old English poetry, as the previous chapters have argued, new terms and new poetic forms bring new affects to the fore – most notably, professions of love.

One poem of a kind that would not have existed in English before the Conquest is the lyric My Leman on the Rood, extant in several versions in different manuscripts alongside a similar Man’s Leman on the Rood.⁴² Each of these poems opens, not unlike the Old English Dream of the Rood, with the sinner confronted with the sight of Christ suffering and dying on the cross. Unlike that poem, the model for the proper affective response to the sight of the crucifixion is that of Mary and John, who “sori stod him bi wepinde” in Man’s Leman and similarly stand near, weeping or otherwise, in each version as the wounds of Christ are catalogued in detail.⁴³ In each version, Christ is called a lef-mon or leman. While the word is, of course, a compound of OE leof (dear) and man, the Middle English Dictionary records over a third more attestations of the word in the sense of “lover” or “paramour” than in the sense of “a spiritually beloved one”; in practice, the latter cannot so easily be distinguished from the former.⁴⁴ After the invocation of Mary and John, the versions of the poem diverge somewhat, but each contains a version of a couplet on the suffering of the crucifixion: “Hys bac wid scuurge iswungen, / Hys side depe istungen” (His back beaten with a whip, His side deeply pierced; My Leman on the Rood II, lines 7–8).

These grievous wounds come about as a result of the “sinne an lowe of man” (the sin and love of man), as the “double reading” (as Bella Millet has called it) in Bodley 57 records.⁴⁵ Two of the manuscript variants record either “sunne” or “gilte” only and one has only “luue.”⁴⁶ In the “double reading” of Bodley 57, the preposition “of” simultaneously expresses possession and object, in the sin that belongs to “man,” but also “man” as the object of Christ’s “lowe.” Just as in The Dream of the Rood, the extremity of Christ’s suffering for human sin produces an immediate and bodily affective response: “Hiþe hi mai wepen / and selte teres leten, / ief hic of luue chan” (Easily I may weep and drop salt tears, if I know how to love; My Leman on the Rood I, lines 8–10) as St. John’s MS 15 has it. The Royal version repeats the final line thrice, placing emphasis on the contingency of yif (My Leman on the Rood I, lines 10–12). What has changed between these two types of poem is not the connection between Christ’s suffering and a sympathetic response, but the sharing of the specific affective response that Mary and John model, and the naming of this affective response as luue.

In On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, the speaker also addresses the Virgin Mary in terms reminiscent of romantic love.⁴⁷ This lyric is one of the four Wooing Group texts in Cotton Nero A. xiv. The texts of the Wooing Group, and the manuscripts that contain them, speak to the shifting multilingual landscape of the literary world in England. As W. Meredith Thompson has observed, “the orthography in the four manuscripts [that contain the Wooing Group texts], like that of AB, is largely based on late OE, but modified both by subsequent development and by the influence of French.”⁴⁸ Standing at the crossroads of multiple traditions, the Wooing Group and its related texts draw upon the writings of monastic figures, including those of Anselm and Bernard as well as the Æthelwoldian Old English translation of the Benedictine Rule.⁴⁹ The prose Lofsong of Ure Lefdi loosely adapts an early twelfth-century Latin verse prayer, Oratio ad sanctum Mariam.⁵⁰ Alongside four of the five Wooing Group texts, in Cotton Nero A. xiv we also find a copy of the Ancrene Wisse, The Apostles’ Creed in English, and short excerpts of Latin verse and prose.⁵¹

This is the new context in which English devotional poetry is written and read. The prose and verse texts of the Wooing Group are likely influenced by the Ancrene Wisse and the Old English prose tradition in turn, as well by one another and works such as Anselm’s Meditations, Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs, and Bernard’s student Aelred of Rievaulx’s Mirror of Charity.⁵² These works along with the Ancrene Wisse represent the early classically recognized forms of affective piety and inspire later ones. So, too, do vernacular literatures, including in Anglo-Norman French, exert a formative influence on this literature. In his study of the Wooing Group texts, Thompson wrote, “[s]imilar parallels might be found in other vernacular literatures of the period, especially in Anglo-Norman. However, the discovery of parallels, enlightening as it may be to the strength of a tradition, is very different from the discovery of sources.”⁵³ Source study was Thompson’s concern. But the “strength of a tradition,” or more rightly, the resilience of a poetic tradition undergoing the formative pressures of new influences, is the concern of the present study. Writers such as Anselm, Bernard, and Aelred change the terms of devotional affect across Europe (although they do not shy away from supposedly earlier affects such as terror and shame) just as, in England, new vernaculars take their place alongside the old. Old English poetry had already mixed the conventions of heroic verse and elegy with those of homily and the saint’s life. Now, as that tradition continued to evolve, it incorporated new devotional material in Latin and French as it did new conventions and forms of verse.

The lone verse text in the Wooing Group is the aforementioned lyric On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi. From the start, the speaker addresses Mary as “mi leoue lefdi” (my dear lady) and offers her “al min heorte blod” (all my heart’s blood) (On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, lines 2, 4). Much of the middle of the poem takes up the common conventions that characterize other devotional poems, including the inexpressibility of the divine:

The speaker laments that “But ich habbe þine help ne beo ich neuer bliðe,” (Unless I have your help I will never be joyful,) hanging the affective possibility of joy on the favor of the lady (On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, line 116). Mary’s Son, too, is called “leoue,” but the poem marks him as “þine,” also belonging to Mary and thus adding to the many qualities that may be praised in her (On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, line 76). The language of extreme affective longing for, and of belonging to, the beloved continues: “Mi lif is þin, mi luue is þin, mine heorte blod is þin, / and ȝif ich der seggen, mi leoue leafdi, þu ert min” (My life is yours, my love is yours, my heart’s blood is yours, and if I dare say, my dear lady, you are mine; On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, lines 157–8). Out of context, these lines would sound like a love song rather than a devotional lyric. These lines figure the devoted speaker as belonging to Mary, and express a shy hesitance only in claiming her in return.

The poem signals its shifting generic conventions, referring to itself as “ðesne englissce lai” (this English lay; On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, line 167). Taking the form of an utterance, more akin to a dramatized prayer than a narrative, the poem does not embody the typical generic features of a lay. As Annie Sutherland has observed, the text’s calling itself a “lofsong” evokes “psalmic or ecclesiastical prayer, which encourages a reading of this lyric as pseudo-liturgical, part of a routine of Marian devotion.”⁵⁴ Simultaneously, borrowing the term lai from Old French evokes a new web of poetic associations, including the conventions of romantic love more familiar from works like those of Marie de France, for example. As Sutherland argues, “referring to the poem as an ‘englissce lai,’ [the poet] seems acutely conscious of having imported a hitherto Anglo-Norman literary form into a straightforwardly domestic context.”⁵⁵ The mixing of devotional and literary forms, across generic and linguistic boundaries and with their attendant affective associations, is made explicit in the terms the poem uses for itself. In parallel with the conventions of fin’amor, the petitioner who speaks assumes an abject position in relation to the beloved lady, without whom all happiness becomes impossible.⁵⁶ Of course, abjection may also characterize the proper attitude of the penitent in the contemplation of the divine, but the bodily affective symptoms are those of the desperate lover: “Vor þine luue i swinke & sike wel ilome, / Vor þine luue ich ham ibrouht in-to þeoudome” (For your love I labor and sigh often enough, for your love I am brought into servitude; On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, lines 97–8). The pledge of servitude, the sighing and pain of love, and the prospect of being utterly lost without the lady’s love, all characterize medieval romance and anticipate the extremities of divine love that characterize religious verse in the centuries to come. But the speakers of the Wooing Group texts were not all male lovers pledging fealty and enduring pain for the sake of the beloved lady, and indeed, On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi had long been excluded from the Wooing Group on those grounds.⁵⁷ On the contrary, the devotional texts of the Wooing Group, lexicographically related to the Ancrene Wisse, anticipate a female audience.⁵⁸ Đe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, for example, the only Wooing Group text not to appear in Cotton Nero A. xiv, imagines the anchoress finding delight and intimacy in the love of Christ.⁵⁹

On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi exhibits complex metrical influences as well. Written in end-rhymed lines, stretches of the poem also alliterate. In demonstrating the persistence of alliterative meter, that is, verse in which alliteration coincides with the structure of meter, across the English Middle Ages, Weiskott’s English Alliterative Verse necessarily excluded all end-rhymed verse.⁶⁰ But while alliteration itself, even in alliterative meter, may thus be considered “ornamental,”⁶¹ the alliteration within texts such as On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi remains significant. As Richard H. Osberg has shown, in both this poem and the contemporaneous Serve Christ, the alliterating syllables are also stressed syllables, and J. P. Oakden considered such verses a form of the alliterative long line.⁶² Osberg acknowledges that some of the departures from, say, the alliterative requirements of the Old English long line also occur in “late” poems such as The Battle of Maldon. Osberg argued instead that the alliterating patterns in poems including On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi and Serve Christ derive not from Old English alliterative poetry but from the “unbroken tradition of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English alliterative prose that culminated in the two great bodies of English exalted devotional prose works: the St. Katherine Group […] and the related pieces, ‘Ureisen of Ure Louerd,’ ‘Ureisen of Ure Lefdi,’ ‘On Lofsong of Ure Lefdi,’ and ‘Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauverd.’”⁶³ That is, the Wooing Group texts minus On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi, which was not at that time considered part of the group. Nikolai Yakovlev, however, develops a more complex understanding of the governance of alliterative meter accounting for change in the prosody of the language, allowing him “to trace a developmental arc from the Beowulf meter to the Brut meter.”⁶⁴ Whether the Ureisen derives its ornamental alliteration from verse or prose, then, it represents a continuation of pre-Conquest aesthetics, and the affective associations attendant upon them. At the same time, it incorporates the new literary and devotional tropes by which affective piety would come to be known.

The Waning World of the Luue Ron

In the mid-to-late thirteenth century, a female audience ostensibly prompts Thomas de Hales’s Luue Ron – specifically the “mayde” who asks Thomas to create a “luue-ron” (love-song) so that she will know what a “soþ lefmon” (true lover) might be like.⁶⁵ After the first stanza, the lyric is addressed to her, as the speaker declares that he “hire wule teche as ic con” (will teach her as I can; Luue Ron, line 8). But this poem does not begin with declarations of everlasting love; instead, it begins with the transitoriness of the world, much like the Old English soul and body poems before it. The things of the world, the speaker tells the maiden, “Vnder molde hi liggeþ colde / & faleweþ so doþ medewe gras” (Under the earth they lie cold, and wither as does the meadow grass; Luue Ron, lines 15–16).⁶⁶ The sober reflection that all will pass away is older than Christianity, to say nothing of Old English devotional poetry. But the poetic reflection that takes us under the earth, into the grave, recalls the poetic conventions of that earlier tradition, as do the aural effects of a number of alliterating lines. No lefmon is yet forthcoming; instead, we are told of men generally that “Nis non so riche ne non so freo / þat he ne schal heonne sone áway” (There is none so rich nor any so noble that he shall not soon be away from here; Luue Ron, lines 25–6). The transience culminates in the haunting image of the entire world “al so þe schadewe þat glyt away” (all as the shadow that glides away; Luue Ron, line 32).

We might recall from Chapter 1 that one scholar had contrasted the depiction of deeply felt, affective devotion in the Luue Ron with Old English devotional conventions, specifically with those of The Dream of the Rood.⁶⁷ That the Luue Ron spends so many lines mourning for worldly transience, in a manner so reminiscent of Old English poetic convention, raises the question of what, precisely, the differences between earlier and later medieval affective dynamics are.⁶⁸ Formally, the Luue Ron offers the sort of antitheses that often characterize Old English poetics – the stark distinction between fortune and its reversal: “Þat was bi-fore nv is bihynde, / þat er was leof nv hit is loþ” (That which was before now is behind, that which was dear now is hateful; Luue Ron, lines 35–6). This alliterating antithesis becomes a foundational part of the argument for what a “soþ lefmon” must be. A true beloved could not be of this world at all, because love in the world is susceptible to change: “Þeo luue þat ne may her abyde, / þu treowest hire myd muchel wouh; / Al so hwenne hit schal to-glide, / hit is fals & mereuh & frouh” (The love that may not last here you trust with much woe, also when it must depart it is false and feeble and fickle; Luue Ron, lines 41–4). Worldly love, then, brings woe while it lasts and woe when it does not. The rhyme of “abyde” and “to-glide” suggest that these opposites are actually the same thing: Worldly love while kept is already lost, already filled with weakness and woe.

Neither love nor the lover can ever be constant; his love lasts “buten o stunde” (only a moment; Luue Ron, line 49). He cannot be a soþ lefmon because he can never be one thing for long at all:

These lines mingle the affective and practical aspects of the false lefmon’s inconstancy. The rhetorical antithesis that balances the halves of each of these lines recalls tantalizingly similar effects accomplished in Old English verse using rhyme and alliteration at the same time, for example in Christ II:

Although the rhyme pattern differs, the effects of alliteration and rhyme at once underscore the diametrical opposition of the terms in play. While divine justice resolves the choices laid out in Christ II, when it comes to the fickle lover of the Luue Ron, the torment is precisely that the choice between opposites is never made. Alternately loving and wearying of love, happy or angry, he desires to literally or figuratively come and go by turns such that his love is simultaneously present and absent. Many of the following lines are concerned, then, not with ecstasy over the soþ lefmon, whose identity is withheld, but with grief over the vices of the false lover.

But just as the catalogue of laments for a faithless lover begins to recall that of, say, the condemned soul in The Soul’s Address to the Body or the Old English Soul and Body before it, the Luue Ron turns its cataloguing to something rather more foreign to pre-Conquest poetry:

The “hwer is” of this stanza recalls the ubi sunt passages, characteristic of although not unique to earlier English verse. But the poem’s references to classical texts and French Romance have, in the thirteenth century, only more recently become prevalent in the English poetic lexicon by way of Anglo-Norman French.⁷⁰ The first three pairs – Paris and Helen, Amadas and Idoine, Tristan and Iseut – are all famous lovers now lost to the world. Hector and Ceasar are perhaps less obvious references in the search for the soþ lefmon, but they also represent great men whose greatness has been lost. Even with the references of French romance, however, the primary affective mode in these verses is not so much love or sympathy but lament for the transience of worldly wealth and greatness, a mode deeply familiar to the “aesthetics of nostalgia” that characterize Old English elegiac and historical verse.⁷¹ The first line of the following stanza rings with a striking echo of the elegiac “nu swa hit no wære” (Wife’s Lament, line 24b) of Old English lament: “Hit is of heom also hit nére” (It is of them as though it never were; Luue Ron, line 73).

Direct influence would be difficult to discern, and it is not so clear that Thomas of Hales borrowed conventions from Old English poetry as directly as, say, the poet of the Soul’s Address discussed in Chapter 4. And as similar as “swa hit no wære” and “also hit nére” might sound, echoing across roughly four centuries of dramatic linguistic change, worldly transience is of course not a unique concern of Old English poetry, even if it is a characteristically prevalent one. But this very fact speaks to the larger contention of this project. Conventions of language and poetic forms shift – sometimes dramatically but sometimes not – but the affective investments of early English devotional poetry persist. The Luue Ron represents a devotional aesthetic involved with complex devotional feeling, a pity for holy figures mingled with sorrow for the waning world in which sinners live and die and hope for mercy. But this is much what poems from The Dream of the Rood to Guthlac and Advent Lyric VII had done. Although Christ now is not only lord but lefmon, this term represents not a new emphasis on affective devotion but a new facet of it that mingles with the old. It draws both upon new religious conventions for understanding and describing religious feeling, and new poetic references and forms whose affective associations can be brought into conversation with the old forms.

The lefmon arrives in the middle of the lament of the Luue Ron, much as it does in the middle of medieval English literary history. “Al is heore hot iturnd to cold” (All their heat is turned to cold), the Luue Ron warns us, and even one as rich “as henry vre kyng” (as our king Henry) or fair as Absalom “nere on ende wrþ on heryng” (would not be in the end worth a herring; Luue Ron, lines 78, 82–6). Only eighty-odd lines into the poem does the speaker finally come to the point: “Mayde, if þu wilnest after leofmon, / ich teche þe enne treowe king” (Maiden, if you desire after a lover, I will teach you about a true king; Luue Ron, lines 87–8). Only after the worldly kings are dismissed can the suitable leofman be introduced. Naturally, he is the culmination of the good traits of the earthly lovers who have fallen short, and the polar opposite of them in his total lack of their flaws:

Out of their context, it would not be clear at all that these lines were talking about Christ. While his qualities both within and without are beyond compare, they are the sort of physical and moral qualities that might be ascribed to a lover in a romance. Moreover, the leofmon here is clearly cast as one, as a nobleman “of lufsum lost” (of amorous desire). The allegory of the individual as the beloved of Christ follows in the footsteps of writings such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s commentary on the Song of Songs, but so too does it play into the expectations of conventional lay and love lyric.

The speaker continues describing how only the soð lefmon fulfills, and indeed surpasses, the worldly ideals of the perfect lover. He is the “ricchest mon of londe” (the richest man in the land), and even “Henri, king of engelonde […] to hym buhþ” (Henry, king of England, bows to him; Luue Ron, lines 97, 101–2). Moreover, unlike the worldly lover who is gone as soon as he arrives, this one “send his sonde / & wilneþ for to beo þe cuþ” (sends his message, and wishes to be known to you; Luue Ron, lines 103–4). Aside from Henry, no less a king than Solomon finds himself left in the dust by the soð lefmon, who, far from requiring any dowry, offers such wealth as neither “kine ne kayser non” (king nor any emperor) could provide (Luue Ron, line 112). The fine adornments of Solomon’s temple compare poorly to the wealth of the abode of the soð lefmon, which “þe is bihote / if þat þu bist his leouemon” (is promised to you, if you will be his sweetheart; Luue Ron, lines 119–20). The reference to Solomon seems more than merely incidental, given that many of the tropes often connected with affective piety as we know it arise from, among other sources, Bernard of Clairvaux’s aforementioned writings on the Song of Songs, a text traditionally attributed to Solomon.⁷² Solomon bears, then, the associations of biblical love poetry as well as those of his great wisdom and wealth, but even he serves only as a figure of the greater love and wealth offered by the soð lefmon. The promise of wealth from heaven draws upon Christ’s promise that “[i]n my father’s house there are many mansions.”⁷³ The lines perhaps also embody a turn such as that of the endings of Old English elegies, starkly contrasting heavenly permanence with the fleeting wealth of the world.

The next stanza evokes the parable of the wise and foolish builders from Matthew 7, as the house of the soð lefmon “stont vppon a treowe mote / þar hit neuer truke ne schal” (it stands upon a true hill, where it shall never fall; Luue Ron, lines 121–2). Meditating upon the idyllic home of the lover, the speaker poses the rhetorical question, “Ne beoþ heo, mayde, in gode weye / þat wel luueþ vre dryhte?” (Is she not in a good circumstance, maid, who loves well our lord?; Luue Ron, lines 135–6). The shift to the language of lords, rather than lovers or men, marks the increasing shedding of the facade at this point in the poem, as the lefmon belongs more and more obviously to more than just the maid alone: “Nere he, mayde, ful seoly / þat myhte wunye myd such a knyhte?” (Were he not, maid, fully blessed, who might dwell with such a knight?; Luue Ron, lines 143–4). The lover is like a knight, a king, a lord, and yet surpasses all of these. But the maid must defend herself against others who might take her away from her ideal beloved:

Here the poem switches from the immense treasures of the lord and soð lefmon to the single priceless treasure the maid herself is said to possess. Contrasted with the rich trappings and sturdy foundations of the soð lefmon’s great wealth, the kastel of maidenhood appears vulnerable and requires active defense.⁷⁴ As Susanna Greer Fein observes, both maidens and their virginity are likened to flowers in both love poems and devotional texts of the period.⁷⁵ Invoking this shared conventional image, the Luue Ron partakes in the currents of love poetry while making love itself another instance of a worldly thing to be forsaken for the ideal lover. After several more stanzas extolling the value of the maiden’s chastity, the speaker returns to the task at hand, and how he has answered the maiden’s request to him:

In the Luue Ron, Thomas has both fulfilled and transformed the maiden’s request. His poem works by mastering the references of the very conventions he rejects: the great romances and great heroes of the poetic past, as well as the love lyrics of the present. These combine with the tropes of Middle English devotional literature, and tropes familiar from centuries past, including phrases that at times recall the language and images of Old English elegy. Moreover, after using these techniques to offer, in place of a conventional lover, the promise of Christ as the soð lefmon and devotion to him as the fulfillment of her desire, the poem acknowledges that while the maiden remains in the world she will remain in longing. In that, the poem itself becomes the response to her ongoing desire:

Since the true love exists beyond the bounds of earthly experience, the maid may come to him, but will have to wait. This poem, then, and its swete recitation must both stand in stead of the experience of the lover and also reiterate the promise of its fulfillment. The “he” of line 205 presents some ambiguity: Does the pronoun suggest the lover, or the poet who has left her with this message, or the poem itself? In any event, the Luue Ron offers an affective association – of romantic love, rather than of a thane’s devotion to a lord – that departs from the many Old English poems which also lament the waning of the world and promise permanence only in heaven. But it moreover represents a new set of poetic conventions, in which the associations of the love lyric present themselves more readily but permit no less wistfulness about the loss of the things of the world than the earlier conventions had.

While the poem’s first hundred lines lamented the transience and inadequacy of worldly wealth and the worldly wealthy who hold it while they live, the following section of the poem begins the conventional turn typically seen in Old English elegies – but with a difference. Where poems like The Wanderer or The Seafarer offer the permanence and superiority of heavenly riches as an answer to the fleeting trappings of wealth in worldly life, in the Luue Ron such riches belong not to a lord who might take care of those in his service but to a lover who offers this wealth as a pledge of wedded love. The conventions are not lost, at least not to their medieval audience, but are transformed to such an extent that modern readers may no longer hear their echoes. Yet we should not think, although the affective associations of the lover are different from those of the lord, that the affective depth of the earlier poems was lost on their audiences as it has sometimes been on us.

Tracking Poetics

In some ways, the poems I have discussed may seem unlikely subjects for this book’s final chapter, since they demonstrate just how much English devotional poetry changes across the Norman Conquest. But by that same token, they also show us just how particular these changes were. New influences in devotional thinking come into play, it is true, but what the literature evinces most clearly are new literary forms. These new conventions of rhyme and love lyric, like the heroic and elegiac conventions before them, create new affective associations in literary spaces where old and new devotional conventions linger, shift, and overlap. Over so much time, with so much that is new, the survivals of earlier pre-Conquest devotional poetic conventions (along with their attendant affects) seem all the more striking. How did such conventions, and their affective sensibilities, survive?

In the ninth century, Alfred the Great wrote of another moment of upheaval and apparent cultural and linguistic loss. In his preface to the Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Cura pastoralis, he lamented that clerics in England could no longer read the Latin learning contained in the books that were left to them, even though “hier mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð” (here one may see their tracks still).⁷⁶ The tracks, of course, are a hunting metaphor, but they also refer to the literal tracks left by ink on pages. We know that after the Conquest, places such as Worcester preserved learning in Old English, studying their “tracks” much as Alfred had enjoined others to study and preserve those in Latin. But we also know that the change in language from Old English to Middle was gradual, and that poets in the thirteenth century need not have followed the tracks of other poets very far at all to discover very old forms and conventions in poems much nearer at hand.