Originally published in 1972, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric discusses themes and images in religious lyric poetry in Medieval English poetry. The book looks at the affect that tradition and convention had on the religious poetry of the medieval period. It examines the background of the lyrics, including the Latin tradition which was inherited by medieval vernacular and shows how religious lyric poetry presents, through a rich variety of images, the significant incidents in the scheme of Christ's redemption, such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Passion and the Resurrection. It also considers the lyrics which were designed to assist humanity in the task of living in a Christian life, as well as those which prepared them for death.
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It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Latin background of medieval vernacular literature. For the modern reader, Latin is normally a remote language; for the educated medieval reader (and only the educated were readers) it was immediate. It was the bearer of the Western European literary tradition; its writings dealt with every known area of human experience; its rhetorical handbooks described the craft of oratory and poetry; it was the language of the liturgy, and the language of the Bible. Especially in the field of religious writing, medieval Latin was the mother of the vernacular literatures.
The English religious poets of the Middle Ages inherited an impressive and complex ‘imaginary museum’, the fruit of twelve centuries of Christian tradition — hymns, religious poetry, commentaries, sermons, and of course, the Scriptures, the Psalter, and the Western liturgy. The tradition was a Western European one, though its roots were in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and its spirituality was sometimes fed by the piety of the Eastern Church. From it the poets inherited an elaborate and developed theology, and various sophisticated symbolic or allegorical modes of thought. In it they could find not only ideas and themes, words and phrases, but also a rich array of visual images. In some of its aspects, the inherited tradition had severe limitations: the extremes of austere otherworldliness, the rigid absolutes of some of the homilists, or the frenzied enthusiasms of some popular movements would seem at first sight to suggest a decidedly barren field for poetic inspiration. Yet this was fortunately not the case. It proved to be a tradition of surprising variety, which gave scope for the exploration of human emotions, a tradition which could be (though it was not always) learned, tolerant, and humane.
Our poets’ most obvious inheritance from this tradition was the liturgy of the Western Church. Even the most unlettered and unlearned priest was obliged to say Mass and to repeat the Divine Office. It is easy for us by looking at passages of the liturgy simply as ‘sources’ for later religious poetry to forget the essential fact that it contains, in its own right, an amazing richness of imaginative material. If we look at the Introits, Offertories and Graduais we find that they are often single verses from the Bible, which, when they are abstracted from their prose contexts to stand alone, become virtually lyrics in miniature. Like this:
Signum magnum apparuit in caelo:
Mulier amicta sole
et luna sub pedibus ejus
et in capite ejus
corona stellarum duodecim.*
from the book of Revelation (chapter 12),which was used for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a vivid and striking image which particularly appealed to the medieval illustrators of the Apocalypse. Two examples must suffice. On the seven days before the vigil of Christmas were sung the Great Antiphons (they are now seven in number, but in the Middle Ages there were sometimes as many as twelve). This is one:
Ο oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol Justitiae:
veni et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis†
which we find used in English literature already in pre-conquest times, in the Advent section of the poem called ‘Christ’.1 Here again the single (and simple) thought is isolated, giving a lyric power, and making it an obvious base for a meditation or a poem. The exclamatory style, too, is very distinctive (this we find continually in the lyrics, especially those which are in the form of prayers). In prayer, it very frequently takes the form of an address to God, followed by relative clauses which describe his attributes or acts of grace, and ending with a request for favour. In this form it commonly occurs in prayers in medieval secular literature. Thus Roland, on the point of death, beseeches God, who has never lied, who has resurrected Lazarus, who has saved Daniel from the lions, to save his soul from all perils :
Veire Paterne, ki unkes ne mentis,
Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis,
Ε Daniel des leons guaresis,
Guaris de mei l’anme de tuz perilz
Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis!2
So, in a humbler English context, the author of Havelok is moved to pity for his heroine Goldeboru, as she lies in prison:
Jesu Crist, that Lazarun
To live brouhte fro dede-bondes,
He lese hire with his hondes. …3
And the prayer with which Chaucer ends Troilus and Criseyde uses the same formula, echoing Dante, and mentioning only the attributes of the Trinity:
Thow oon, and two and thre, eterne on lyve,
That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon,
Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive,
Us from visible and invisible foon
Defende. …
The second example, from the Easter liturgy, is even more interesting. In the Paschal Vigil,4 the procession bearing the Paschal candle enters the darkened church, and the words lumen Christi (the light of Christ) are repeated three times. There follows the Exultet, a praise of Easter, and a commemoration of God’s works in the Old Testament thus (the passage is long, so I give only an abbreviated translation):
For this is the Paschal solemnity, in which that true Lamb is slain, by whose blood the doorposts of the faithful are hallowed. This is the night in which Thou didst first cause our forefathers, the children of Israel, when brought out of Egypt, to pass through the Red Sea, with dry feet. This, therefore, is the night which purged away the darkness of sinners by the light of the pillar. This is the night which at this time throughout the world restores to grace and unites in sanctity those that believe in Christ, and are separated from the vices of the world and the darkness of sinners. This is the night in which, destroying the bonds of death, Christ arose victorious from the grave. For it would have profited us nothing to have been born, unless redemption had also been bestowed upon us. Ο wonderful condescension of thy mercy towards us ! Ο inestimable affection of charity: that thou mightest redeem a slave, thou didst deliver up thy Son! Ο truly needful sin of Adam, which was blotted out by the death of Christ ! Ο happy fault, that merited so great a Redeemer ! Ο truly blessed night, which alone deserved to know the time and the hour in which Christ rose again from the grave ! This is the night of which it is written, And the night shall be enlightened as the day: and the night is my light in my enjoyments. … Ο truly blessed night, which despoiled the Egyptians and enriched the Hebrews ! A night in which heavenly things are united to those of earth and things divine to those which are human. …5
There are a number of ideas in this passage which occur in the English lyrics: that of the ‘happy fault’ (O certe necessarium Adae peccatum … Ο felix culpa), for instance, is the basis of the poem ‘Adam lay iboundyn’. Although by the standards of the Western liturgy this is an unusually extended and poetic section, its rhetoric is quite uncomplicated; it relies largely on simple repetition (haec nox est) and exclamation (o vere beata nox). The imagery of light and darkness (which we have already seen in the antiphon Ο oriens, splendor) which is fundamental to this passage (and to its dramatic liturgical context of darkened church and Paschal candle) is used in an interesting way. Towards the end, the image of the ‘night’ becomes first the ‘truly blessed night’ (vere beata nox), then the night to which may be applied the scripture ‘the night shall be enlightened as the day’ (nox sicut dies). Finally, with the loss of the connective sicut, and, presumably, with the implication of supernatural reversal of nature, we arrive at the paradox ‘the night is my light’ (nox illuminatio mea).
In this passage the events of the Old Testament are seen as prefigurations or types of the Redemption: ‘this is the Paschal solemnity, in which that true Lamb (verus tile agnus) is slain, by whose blood the doorposts of the faithful are hallowed … this is the night which purged away the darkness of sinners by the light of the pillar’, etc. This is much more than taking phrases from the Bible and putting them into new liturgical contexts, but depends upon a general principle of interpretation.6 It is sometimes given rather quaint inconographical expression — in the great south rose-window of the cathedral of Chartres we can see four prophets (Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) carrying the four Evangelists upon their shoulders. In Malvern, a window (the ‘Creed window’) shows the twelve apo...
