In studies of medieval literature, nostalgia often attaches itself to lyric poetry. From Sir Philip Sidney's misty fondness for the corpus in his Defense of Poesy to Thomas Percy's sanctifying medieval lyrics as "reliques" in his 1765 collection, the often-anonymous medieval short poem has for centuries attracted admirers as much for its connection to the past as for its verbal art. In this new collection of "readings" of Middle English lyric poetry, such nostalgia adheres to a critical tradition of lyric reading, centered on the work of Rosemary Woolf, Douglas Gray, and Peter Dronke, that reached its pinnacle in the 1960s and 70s. The afterword, "The Study of Medieval Lyrics in 1960s Oxford and Today," by John C. Hirsh, describes this history in an entertaining triple intellectual biography of these critics, before turning to a laudatory summary of the volume's essays.

As the placement of this summary at the end of the collection suggests, Middle English Lyrics is a volume that seems uncertain of the logic of its organization and indeed its critical intervention. The editors' introduction summarizes recent focal points of medieval lyric studies, including voice, form, affect, sound, and visuality, but most cogently it argues for close reading single poems as the best critical approach, with the closing hope that such a collection will "prove useful" (p. 11). Newer critical work, although duly summarized, seems undigested by the editors and many of the contributors. The format of the essays, which each begin with a full lyric or extensive excerpt, keeps the focus squarely on textual analysis and lends itself to the pleasures and pitfalls of close reading, a methodology whose critique need not be reiterated here.

The editors ask, "How has our close reading changed from the groundbreaking lyric readings of Woolf and Gray, to whom we remain indebted?" (p. 9); yet this debt is the most prevalent feature of the introduction as well as many (but not all) of the collected essays. Although the collection is divided into four subsections—"Affect"; "Visuality"; "Mouvaunce, Transformation"; "Words, Music, Speech"—many of the essays under a given heading have only a loose connection to their topic. Further, only four of nineteen essays focus on secular lyrics, begging the question of why this was not conceived as a volume dedicated to affective readings of religious lyrics, which comprise many of its entries. Secondarily, the volume seems to be a Festschrift of sorts for dedicatee Thomas Duncan, who authored the lead essay, "Editing Issues in Middle English Lyrics," which compellingly argues for a less stemmatic and more interventionist approach to editing these poems, [End Page 421] grounded in principles of Middle English poetics. The examples at the end of his essay offer intriguing possibilities for this approach and connect to some other essays in the volume addressing the lyrics' material contexts.

If the volume's framing disappoints, many of the essays themselves reward readers interested in particular medieval English lyrics or the genre as a whole. Among the standouts, Anne Marie D'Arcy's essay, "'Written in gold upon a purple stain': Mariological Rhetoric and the Material Culture of Aureate Diction," concerns Lydgate's poem "The infinite power essenciall." The essay compares this Marian lyric to the fifteenth-century joyaux art objects, demonstrating homologies between enameling techniques and aureate diction. Katherine Zieman's "Compiling the Lyric: Richard Rolle, Textual Dynamism and Devotional Song in London, British Library Additional MS 37049" draws on Ardis Butterfield's idea of lateral lyric in dialogue with Rolle's concept of canor, or spiritual song, to describe devotional lyrics as mediators between audience, author, text, and image. Zieman posits the Rollean lyric not as an object but rather a "medium of relation" (p. 167), an insightful characterization. Susanna Fein's contribution, "All Adam's Children: The Early Middle English Lyric Sequence in Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 (II)," compellingly...