Medieval English Lyrics: 1200-1400 (Penguin Classics)

This volume opens with the first lyrics in English to celebrate love as romantic devotion to a woman. Some Chaucerian and all other Middle English love lyrics from before 1400 are included. Devotional lyrics portraying the tenderness of the later medieval response to Christ as lover and beloved and to the Virgin Mary are fully represented along with lyrics on penitential and moral themes and 'miscellaneous' lyrics such as drinking and dancing songs, ballads, satires and poems of wit, humour and sexual innuendo.These Middle English lyrics, edited anew from the original manuscripts, are presented in a readily readable form. Grammar and spelling have been normalized to accord with the dialect of late fourteenth-century London ('Chaucerian English'). An extensive glossary is provided beside the texts to aid readers who have little or no acquaintance with Middle English. Thomas Duncan provides a full commentary on textual and linguistic issues, and in his introduction he gives an illuminating appraisal of the lyrics, their forms, themes and context.