Multiple “Sayings”

Accumulation of Meaning in “The Sayings of St. Bernard”

The short lyric “The Sayings of St. Bernard” appears in several late-medieval manuscripts. There is, therefore, significant dialect variation between the poem’s extant copies: Oxford, Bodleian, Digby 86 (SC 1687); London, British Library MS Harley 2253; Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1; Oxford, Bodleian, Eng. Poet. a. 1 (SC 3938); Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Misc. 108 (SC 1486), and Oxford, Bodl. Add. E6(a) (SC 30314). Moreover, since the Digby 86 copy has been called the “archetypal text,” it is intriguing that this copy appears to cut the poem short. A rubricated title in Digby 86 is, to some critics, a sign that the second part of “The Sayings of St. Bernard” is an entirely new poem: the “Ubi sount qui ante nos fuerount.” In addressing this controversy, I deploy techniques of dialect analysis that Frances McSparran uses with the Harley 2253 manuscript. By analyzing differences in the forms of the pronouns “them” and “their,” I suggest that the Digby 86 scribe considered the “Sayings” and the “Ubi Sount” to be separate poems. I also argue that the poems were circulated in the north of England prior to being copied into Digby 86. My question is how these two poems came to be considered as one. To this end, I propose to uncover a literary relationship between body-and-soul dialogues and the ubi sunt topos which exists in other body-and-soul poems. By evaluating the poem’s literary forms, dialectal evidence, and manuscript evidence, I work to reveal a multiplicity of textual origins in the poem. If a word is “a bridge thrown between myself and another,” then the poems’ pronouns, like its imagery and titles, are bridges between multiple places, times, and meanings.

[Abstract for a talk at the Conference on Editorial Problems, Toronto, Canada, November 6-8, 2009]