While music is perhaps the most obvious indicator of lyric performance, other performance structures also influenced lyric practice. A significant part of the surviving corpus of Middle English lyrics appears in the form of carols, refrain-driven poems that once accompanied a round dance but in the later Middle Ages had an existence independent of the dance form. Guests at fifteenth-century banquets were often asked to sing carols.41 Other lyrics also have their origins in dance songs, especially those taking the French forms of the balade, roundel, or virelai that started to appear in England in the second half of the fourteenth century. The sermon lyrics mentioned above were, of course, influenced by a rhetorical tradition that placed as much emphasis on performance as on the composition of the written text.42 Preachers sometimes drew on the very popularity of performed lyrics, taking them as the texts of their sermons and explicating their moral meanings. In the thirteenth century, one friar built his sermon around an English carol, “Atte wrastlinge my lemman I chese.” Another, Stephen Langton, took the French carol “Bele Aelis” as his theme.43 Evidence of lyric performance, possibly apocryphal, also survives in chronicles like the Liber Eliensis that records Cnut’s boat song, as well as in Pierre Langtoft’s Chronicle, later translated by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, which records invective lyrics of Scottish “flyting.”44
The plural forms of lyric survival and transmission have implications for the widely discussed concept of auctorite, the idea that material textual apparatus confers or reifies authorship and authority in medieval English literature.45 While some critics have argued that particular poets—Chaucer, Gower, and Richard Rolle—developed a kind of authority based on the lyric form, medieval English lyrics more often tend to be, as Rosemary Woolf says, “genuinely anonymous”: authors’ names were lost not through the vagaries of archival survival but rather because of their unimportance to contemporary scribes and readers.46 Indeed, practices of lyric composition—from the mouvance and variance of a lyric’s multiple versions, to the citation of known lyrics in new poems, to the composition of contrafacta—meant that it was often meaningless to speak of a single lyric author.47 Further, the legal and scholastic institutions that produced the written texts of the auctores seldom copied vernacular literature, and in England, short poems were even less likely than longer works to be framed with the apparatus of auctorite.48 And while the scholastic prologue’s well-defined taxonomy of forms offers a structure for reifying auctorite that was deployed by some vernacular authors, if we survey a broad range of vernacular prologues, we discover a more expansive and open-ended literary theory.49 As Emily Steiner points out, “Authority is something that one is always in relation to, that one is never absolutely identical to, and that one can only provisionally be said to possess.”50 The editors of a collection of English literary prologues note, “Latin theorizing is often too far removed from the situation in which vernacular texts came into being to provide a satisfactory governing template for understanding these prologues or the texts they introduce.”51 With their diverse material contexts and performance practices, insular lyrics require reorienting our “governing template” for literary analysis away from Latinate models, which are too often taken as foundational in the study of medieval English literature, and also away from the hegemonic authority presumed to be the aim of this literature and its composers. What these lyrics demonstrate, instead, is a vital tradition of the literary as a component of community, in which a text’s range of potential practices defines and shapes its social and literary existence and importance.
The written records and performance contexts of medieval English lyrics reveal their distinct constellation of practices across the institutions of documentary production and cultures of performance. Further, these lyrics’ formal features, especially their (relative) brevity, their mutability (via mouvance, variance, citation, and contrafacture), and their reliance on rhetorical topoi, which I discuss in the next section, differentiate them from other performed texts like romances or plays. These formal features distinguish lyrics as a particularly nimble and modular group of texts, able to insinuate themselves into and around longer narrative or didactic texts, or into the literal blank spaces of the manuscript page, as marginalia or filler. Lyrics also traverse the distinct yet not isolated categories of French and English vernacularity, of writing and performance, of official and popular practices. In sum, what unites these shorter poems as a genre is not only their formal features but also the ways in which these features permit and encourage a set of practices that navigate later medieval England’s specific textual and performative cultures.
Lyric Tactics
The brief survey of lyric survival above reflects the complexity of textual and performative cultures in later medieval England. What has been described as a culture in “transition” from orality to literacy can be understood instead as a culture of generative hybridity, in which written texts and performance practices intersect in the corpus of short poems we now call lyrics. Such poems are deeply implicated in, but not entirely of, a range of institutional forms and practices. Yet, by and large, they are not characterized by their resistance to or subversion of such forms and practices; indeed, lyrics frequently emerge from and circulate within institutional contexts. Thus, a participatory and interdependent account of the encounters between lyrics and the institutions of textuality is needed. In particular, the social theorist Michel de Certeau’s admittedly speculative and incomplete concept of “tactics” offers a way to describe the practices surrounding medieval lyrics. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau makes a distinction between the strategic and tactical uses of institutional forms. A strategy is “the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’” Such a strategy defines an “other” by defining an institutionally controlled space, which Certeau calls a “proper,” and generating a set of authorized relations between subjects within and without the proper. By contrast, a tactic is a practice of this “other” subject, a “way of operating” within the structures of power that does not necessarily obey the determinate relationships of strategy. Tacticians seize “opportunities” in order to manipulate events to their advantage, follow “wandering paths” (lignes d’erre) through and around the defined trajectories of the proper, and are alert to changing circumstances that might alter their operations. Tactics are, then, the “practices of everyday life,” the mundane and irreducible actions of the “others” that are informed by without conforming to institutional procedures.52 In Certeau’s most famous example, from the essay “Walking in the City,” strategies and tactics are illustrated with the example of an urban pedestrian. Certeau’s walker, a tactician, navigates the fixed forms of an urban landscape to create “pathways” that elude the disciplinary force of the power structures