Three Alliterative Saints' Hymns: Late Middle English Stanzaic Poems

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2006 by Margaret Connolly

Three Alliterative Saints' Hymns: Late Middle English Stanzaic Poems, ed. Ruth Kennedy, EETS, OS 321 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). cx 120 pp.; 4 plates. ISBN 0-19-722324-9. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. When editing minor pieces, such as the three odes to popular saints presented by Ruth Kennedy, finding a publication outlet can be problematic. Individually too short to justify a monograph (even collectively these poems amount to only 686 lines), and too long to tempt journal editors, there is a danger that such texts will remain inaccessible. A combined approach is therefore sensible, even though each of these differently authored Middle English hymns survives uniquely in a different codex: St Katherine in Bodleian Library, MS Bodley Rolls 22; John Evangelist in Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91 (the 'Thornton Manuscript'); and John Baptist in British Library, Add. MS 39574. Kennedy furnishes reasons beyond convenience for associating the three, arguing that they comprise a particular subgenre in Middle English verse: fourteen-line stanza alliterative and rhyming poems produced circa 1400. Most compellingly, she locates their production to north Yorkshire and south Lincolnshire, challenging the received view that the alliterative tradition was a purely West Midland phenomenon.

Kennedy's extensive introduction dwarfs the text and discusses codicological, textual, metrical, and linguistic issues in competent detail. Editorial policy is carefully tailored to each text but consistent; the glossary is comprehensive. A glitch in production has transposed the images of plates III and IV; fortunately this is quite apparent from plate IV itself. In the textual notes Kennedy treats the Katherine hymn most fully, an imbalance repeated in the discussion of sources and affiliations. Here she identifies an image shared with the life of Katherine in Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen, but cannot trace the two John legends to distinctive English sources. It would be interesting to see if the link with Bokenham could be taken further, given the recent discovery of a more extensive legendary by him in the Abbotsford manuscript. This might also support Kennedy's tentative suggestion of mendicant interest in the propagation of these legends. These texts have been edited before, but not more recently than 1921 and not always in English. Critically they have been largely overlooked; Kennedy's elegant triptych will help redress this. [Margaret Connolly]