Lyric Anonymity: Songs of Love and Pastoral Care in Lambeth 853

In addition to his biblical exegesis and contemplative treatises, Richard Rolle was arguably the first named lyric poet writing in Middle English and certainly the first to achieve a wide readership. Yet, in part because his poems can be tied to a larger authorial program, they have tended to be read apart from other Middle English religious lyrics, interpreted instead in terms of the stages of contemplative progress outlined in his prose, with different lyrics offering meditative material appropriate to different stages. This essay offers a fresh approach to the hermit's poetry, focusing on a series of lyrics that circulated apart from his treatises, and considering, in particular, their place in a single manuscript, London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 853. Rather than showing any concern for Rolle's status as an elite contemplative, the scribe of Lambeth 853 copied these poems without attribution, and he seems to have been drawn to them because of their continuities with the larger collection of verse he was assembling. This essay traces the various formal features and intertextual reflexes shared by the poems assembled in Lambeth 853, thereby recovering a new facet of Rolle's appeal as poet, the degree to which he could be read within a tradition of specifically pastoral verse. Indeed, the Lambeth compiler seems above all to be highlighting Rolle's place in this larger, preexisting, and anonymous body of verse, one which the hermit adapted to suit his own contemplative purposes.