Medieval Lyric

Medieval Lyric is a colourful collection of lyrical poems, carols, and traditional British ballads written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, together with some twentieth-century American versions of them.

• A lively and engaging collection of lyrical poems, carols, and traditional British ballads written in between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, together with some twentieth-century American versions of them.
  
• Introduces readers to the rich variety of Middle English poetry.
  
• Presents poems of mourning and of celebration, poems dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and to Christ, poems inviting or disparaging love, poems about sex, and more.
  
• Reader-friendly - uses modernized letter forms, punctuation and capitalization, and side glosses explaining difficult words.
  
• Opens with a substantial introduction by the editor to the medieval lyric as a genre, and features short introductions to each section and poem.
  
• Also includes an annotated bibliography, glossary, index of first lines, and list of manuscripts cited.

John C. Hirsh is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His previous publications include Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (Blackwell, 2003), The Boundaries of Faith: The Development and Transmission of Medieval Spirituality (1996), The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England (1989), and Hope Emily Allen: Medieval Scholarship and Feminism (1988). He has also edited Barlam and Iosaphat (1986) for the Early English Text Society.