BY the accidents of piecemeal publication, the Middle English verse of Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86 has never been presented as a distinct body of poetry collected in a book by one compiler, nor has it, therefore, been recognised as an authentically medieval anthology in the English vernacular, c. 1280. That an anthologising impulse underlies the material preservation of English verse in Digby is undeniable, for the English portions of the book occur as blocks of continuous verse, first in double columns on fols. 119ra–143ra and fols. 163vb–168vb and then without columns on fols. 195v–200v. The bicolumnar sequence is headed by The Harrowing of Hell (art. 40); the single-column set begins with The Debate between the Body and the Soul (art. 68). These subjects are overtly paired in the somewhat later Harley and Auchinleck manuscripts (c. 1330–40) and they may be implicitly paired in Digby too: their physical separation may be mainly attributable to the scribe's principle of organisation by metre (short line or long line) as he ruled and filled quires with verse texts. Neither Harrowing nor Body and Soul opens a quire, but when the Digby scribe commenced copying in English, in quires xv and xxv, respectively, it was these two eschatologically paired items that he inserted first. Christ harrowed hell that souls may be redeemed and individuals ought to therefore heed well (with dread and hope) what will happen when their souls will eventually part from their bodies.

The Middle English poetry of Digby 86 covers a heterogeneous range of topics, religious to secular, from the most moral and frightening of warnings about hell-fire, to the most debased yet comic worldly ethics of guileful humans and animals in fabliau and fable. I offer here a summary assessment of the English corpus, not wishing to separate it from its trilingual setting so much as simply to establish its place as belonging to our growing understanding of the medieval English lyric sequence. MS Digby 86 holds status as one of the few rare and iconic miscellanies deemed worthy of facsimile treatment by the Early English Text Society and, among such manuscripts of Middle English, it is the only one harkening back to the thirteenth century – hence, it is precedent to the very important early fourteenth-century Harley and Auchinleck manuscripts and long precedent to the late fourteenth-century Gawain and Vernon manuscripts.

THE scribe of Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86 sometimes expressed himself in pictures as well as in whatever French, English and Latin works he selected for new combinations and purposes in his idiosyncratic making of a household book. The result of his overall effort across 207 folios is a medieval manuscript utterly singular in its ‘extravagantly heterogeneous’ nature. In it, his occasional drawings are frequently labelled with tags, almost as if they are designed for pedagogy in reading Latin: ‘femina’ (woman) beside a woman's head with free-flowing locks (fol. 80r), ‘homo’ (man) beside a man's head in a pointed hood (fol. 79v), ‘bibo’ (I drink) beside a similarly hooded man sipping from a goblet (fol. 34v), ‘ipocras’ (Hippocrates) beside the head of a bearded man of wise countenance (fol. 8v) – this last example being an author-portrait designed to accompany the medical treatise Letter of Hippocrates.

In the bottom margin of fol. 205v, the last folio of the scribe's original book, the scribe signs off his large production with a self-portrait, another cartoonishly sketched head, now in a close-fitted hood, with a manicule pointing at this head as if to say ‘look, it's me’, and with an inscription: ‘scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus’ (I wrote the book in a year and three months). According to one scholar, this inscription ‘surely’ displays ‘an amateur's expression of pride in having completed a long and arduous task which would doubtless have been accomplished much more quickly by a professional’. This statement typifies how the Digby scribe has been viewed as something of an amateur at scrivening even though his hand bears likeness to that of other scribes from the period. By all indications, however, what was most new for him was the activity of making an anthology, and in many of matters of codicology and design his novice skills show.

And yet the final product is one of the most important miscellanies to survive from medieval England – a trilingual marvel of a compilation, with quirky combinations of content that range from religion, to science, to literature of a decidedly secular cast.

IN TRIBUTE TO JULIA BOFFEY'S MANY IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS to the study of Middle English poetry, I examine here a pleasing alliterative poem for which little modern analysis exists, despite obvious signs that its poet was accomplished and that his poem was widely read in England for close to a century beside such major texts as Piers Plowman. The Pistel of Swete Susan has been taken by modern critics to be little more than a paraphrase of the story of Susanna and the Elders in Daniel 13, which, though now apocryphal, was included in the medieval Vulgate Bible. The alliterative poet cared, however, about more than rendering a sacred text with a facade of vernacular ornamentation. Creative endeavours inevitably reflect the ideology of the culture for which and in which they are produced. The changes made by the poet are so delicate as not to alter the original story, yet they quietly impart a doctrinal lesson to a fourteenthcentury audience: that God in Trinity abides as the supreme third party in a sanctified Christian marriage. While foreign to the Vulgate original, this message distils ideas found in later patristic exegesis and liturgy.

As an exemplum on faith and married chastity, the biblical story of Susanna was universally recognized for how it features a miraculously efficacious prayer uttered at a dire moment. To revere the essence of this act, the Middle English poet constructs Susan so as to promote and reward a devout person's prayerful absorption of it: he encrypts into the poem the names and actions of the Triune Presence, unveiled progressively. Reading worshipfully, the meditant will feel that she has gained an affirming, divine response. Alexandra Barratt has detailed how women in religion were exhorted to undertake ‘hertely redyng’: ‘Clene and chast soules euer desiren so forto rede tat tei myght feele it sauourly with-in forth. Hertly redyng is a gracyous mene to gostly feling.’ The reading experience of Susan operates along similar lines. In detecting the enigma hidden plainly in Susan's lines, as would a medieval reader, we may glimpse the concerns of a society that sought such art for its edification.