Between my undergraduate and graduate degrees I worked in trade and academic book publishing. I also taught English as a Foreign Language in Thailand and Burma, and English, Business, and Technology in secondary schools. In my free time I like to take photographs.
Dissertation Abstract
Middle English Lyrics: Lyric Manuscripts 1200–1400 and Chaucer’s Lyric
Emma Gorst, 2012
This thesis endeavours to understand late medieval lyric poetry and song from two ostensibly separate contexts: insular manuscript witnesses of English lyric from 1200 to 1400; and the narrative effects of lyric in Geoffrey Chaucer’s longer poetry, including the Canterbury Tales, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Book of the Duchess. These two contexts yield new insights about the medieval lyric. First, an overview of the manuscripts of medieval lyric from 1200 to 1400 in England suggests that about half of anonymous lyrics in this period exist in multiple witnesses and are thus in some sense connected, providing us with the insight that lyric at this time was not so much fragmentary as embedded in rich networks of meaning. The first chapter of the thesis uses network mapping software to represent some of these networks, and discusses the relationships among lyrics that appear in Maidstone, Maidstone Museum MS A.13 and related manuscripts, such as Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, and Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 27.
Subsequent chapters of the thesis draw out connections between lyrics and narrative events in Chaucer’s poetry, showing in a very different sense that lyric as a literary form reaches outward from the speaker to the narrative world itself, inviting narrative events to take place. Such an insight is markedly different from views of the lyric which think of it as making nothing happen. Lyric is a force for change that drives narrative, and a force for change in Chaucer’s imaginary social worlds; Chaucer’s lyric and late medieval lyrics are embedded in networks of meaning, both in the narrative poetry in which they appear, and in the manuscripts in which they are copied.
