Reading lyric before lyric : English religious poetry among its late medieval readers

The late medieval English religious lyric, immensely popular in its time but neglected in contemporary literary scholarship, offers an under-explored site for examining the ties between evolving religious and textual practices. This study challenges scholarly understandings of the entanglement of literary and religious history by examining the late medieval English religious lyric through the lens of reading practices. By integrating two previously isolated approaches to the medieval religious lyric, I address a gap in scholarly understanding of the place of these texts in early English reading cultures: my project draws textual and literary scholarship on the early English religious lyric together with recent scholarship that searches out correlations between developments in late medieval religious culture and textual culture (e. g., through increasing literacy and the laicization of devotional culture). I argue that through both the reading practices in which these texts engage their readers and the construction of the imagined reader within them, as much as through their content, religious lyrics were read to effect ethical, affective, volitional, and epistemic change in a growing array of medieval readers. Lyrics like the widely-proliferated “Nou goth sonne under wod” (DIMEV 3742) and “Let fal downe thyn ne and lift up thy hart” (DIMEV 3054), carved across a fifteenth-century rood screen rail in a Yorkshire church, were believed to properly serve these formative functions by their authors, advocates, and readers. In narratives like The Storie of Asneth, we see this understanding of the place of verse within religious practice confirmed through the literary construction of a lay, female penitential subject performing religious lyric. The particular and functional cultural vitality of the late medieval English religious lyric illustrates the interconnectedness of literary and religious history across the period. By taking an approach to the lyric centered on its reading, my project re-examines the genre in a justly historicized manner and joins it to the concerns of the contemporary study of lyric. Analysis of Middle English religious lyric poetry as it was read and transmitted across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveals its centrality to late medieval religious and reading cultures and how these texts reshape our understanding of the age’s complex forms of socio-religious change.