S. Worthen | Weblog

Oooh--can't resist. I'm *really* interested in religious lyric & in its fortleben in 16th/17th c. That was the dissertation I wanted to write and was advised against--too religious :-/

On the vernacular front, I use the Oxford UP/Carleton Brown collections (13th, 14th, 15th c.) a fair bit--religious and secular lyric--because IMO they help to gauge a moral culture. Pretty much everything from those and other collections is on LION , which I'm assuming U of T has. I get them using text searches a lot, and I use them accordingly.

Lydgate wrote tons of short lyrics, picking up from Chaucer. These are mostly edited, but again, I use LION like every two minutes to find citations within his vast repertoire. The lyrics are often moral or religious (lots of fodder for the *mesure* mill there), and I use them writing about *Fall of Princes* because I think they're defensible evidence for his moral theory what he's trying to teach princes.

As a matter of fact, this is a big question for me as I feel my way toward genre issues: if Lydgate's lyrics fulfill the function of moral teaching, why write a work of epic quality (*Fall of Princes*) that basically teaches the same thing? What does that say about a conception of genre--which again I think is fluid and highly distinct from ours??

I think lyrico-narrative theory (take Sylvia Huot or my own teacher, Maureen Boulton) is highly interesting. There's definitely something to it when you think about the *Vita Nuova* or Machaut (obviously!), but I think you can carry it out to other kinds of texts.

Late secular lyrics ARE just high-class songs, fwiw. And anon. religious lyrics are proximate to carols--though when you get to Lydgate's lyrics they're highly formal, highly not settable to music.

Not writing very well this aft, sorry ;)