Poems in Persons

"And Never Know the Joy"

“…A more drastic switch from formal to informal pronouns of address occurs in the speech of the old lady who is charged with adultery by the Summoner. The lady addresses the Summoner with "ye" as long as she is talking to him respectfully but when she grows angry with him because of his false 7 Ibid., 21; on page 20 Burnley provides a flow chart that illustrates the various situations that "thou" and "ye" may be used and, in particular, the reasons that a switch may be made from one pronoun to the other. 8 Norman Nathan, "Pronouns of Address in the 'Friar's Tale'", Modern Language Quarterly, 17 (1956), 39. accusations, she switches to "thou".…”

“…They had sex acts, but they did not have sexual identities. 5 They had discourses of the flesh and of desire, but their sexual identities were not separable from the imperative of procreation. Sexual identity was further denied by the clerical criticism of marriage and extolling of virginity, based on St Jerome's strictures in his writing against Jovinian.…”

“…The act had "very different ethical ramifications" for the two parties, to which a double standard was applied. 7 If she is correct in assuming that "there is little hint of sexual desire on the part of the woman" in the more courtly literature, Dunbar's "Tretis" is something of a rogue text -although the double standard is clearly visible in it. Spearing also denied a female speech-act performance, stressing that the "female language" was actually written by a male poet: "Dunbar, consciously or unconsciously, has unmasked not the truth about women but the truth about the nature of male fantasy about women in a patriarchal society."…”

“…The correct answer is an item of domestic In he pult, and out he drow, And ever yc lay on lym y-low: "By Godus deth, you dest me wow Vpon this hey holyday!" 5 As John Plummer has noted, "there is no conceivable motivation for such self-exposure" on the part of a real historical woman, 6 and therefore there is no reason to think that songs like this contain any real female subject -in effect, they are not meant to be read as women's voices at all, but as the voices of male poets mimicking women. This poetic crossdressing by male poets is in itself a reflection of the riddling principle in the lyric tradition: the male poet is speaking an "I" that is clearly "not I".…”

“…7 The riddling of eroticism in courtly love, and of the identities of those who participated in the tradition, is further evidenced by some books from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Manuscript evidence shows that collecting courtly lyrics was a literary and social parlour game with strong erotic undertones.…”