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I looked around my acumulated medieval texts and realized that nearly all the medieval poems I know, and especially of which I have copies, are rather long.
I'd never really thought about length as a determining genre element. I have many short poems by Shakespeare or Donne or later poets, but only a very few Anglo-Saxon exemplars, and a few fifteenth-century contributions by "Unknown" grace my shelves from the medieval period. Is this an idiosyncracy of the sort of material I work with, or is there really a paucity of short poetry surviving from the Middle Ages?
And if there is plenty of shorter poetry, where would I go looking for it? I can think of the Carmina Burana. Perhaps collections of marginalia. Any other particular instances of fairly short poetry from the period (one or two pages or less)?
I'd never really thought about length as a determining genre element. I have many short poems by Shakespeare or Donne or later poets, but only a very few Anglo-Saxon exemplars, and a few fifteenth-century contributions by "Unknown" grace my shelves from the medieval period. Is this an idiosyncracy of the sort of material I work with, or is there really a paucity of short poetry surviving from the Middle Ages?
And if there is plenty of shorter poetry, where would I go looking for it? I can think of the Carmina Burana. Perhaps collections of marginalia. Any other particular instances of fairly short poetry from the period (one or two pages or less)?
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