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The Middle English religious lyrics are a diverse group of texts, spanning the turn of the twelfth century to the first decades of the sixteenth. These largely anonymous poems are notable for their thematic diversity and acute textual instability, surviving in a variety of forms and contexts. Notwithstanding their disparate nature, they have been regarded as thematically and devotionally simplistic and low in literary status. This negative assessment assumes they were written for a predominantly illiterate laity to explain in plain English the mysteries of the Christian faith. However, this study of key motifs and images from a selection of lyrics challenges this generalisation. It reveals that the iconography of these lyrics is far from arbitrary, but draws on an erudite catalogue of motifs also discernible in the contemporary visual arts. Chapter one considers the influence of the Christian tradition on the lyrics, particularly the influence of Latin hymnody and liturgy, and the origin and development of Christological iconography. Chapter Two examines the thirteenth-century Wenne hic soe on rode idon, often cited as a typical example of a Passion lyric, before turning to On leome is in þis world ilist, distinguished by an iconographic complexity generally overlooked by scholars. Chapter Three discusses the late fourteenth-century Fadur, sone & holi gost, particularly its use of penitential and Christological motifs. It then revisits one of the best known lyrics, In a valey of þis restles mynd, and its complex imagery that still puzzles commentators. Chapter Four focuses on the fifteenth-century Ihesus woundes so wide, particularly its manuscript context, before moving on to Brother, abyde: an account of Christ’s earthly life which has never before been examined in detail. Finally, we reflect on how the Christological motifs found in the religious lyrics are reanimated in the short poems of the early modern period.

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In this thesis I argue that in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer explores the way in which different notions of truth conflict with one another just as the various groups within the society he portrays have different and often warring values and concerns. In my Introduction and Chapters I and II I consider the problems posed by a work which is distant in time, ironic and unfinished. In my Introduction I discuss the value of the notion of intention; in Chapter I the problem of linguistic meaning; its relation to literary meaning and to its wider social context; in Chapter II, the problem of the text of the Canterbury Tales, concluding that El expresses Chaucer's purposes most clearly. In Chapter III I argue that the form of the Canterbury Tales, developing from that of earlier works is subversive in its dethronement of its author of any authoritative truth. In Ch IV I seek to show that such a stance is tied to the conditions of fourteenth century life, and in Chapter V establish that a concern with truth expresses itself linguistically in a semantic shift from soth to trouthe with an attendant alteration in the conception of truth. In Chapter VI I consider Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to this semantic change, and in Chapter VII show how, throughout the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer causes different notions of truth to play off against one another. In Part II I show how, logically tied to the idea of truth as a function of the knower, individual tellers of tales give prominence to different moral terms or, where they use the same terms, do so to express different values. In Chapters VIII and IX, I consider some terms in the Knight's and Parson's Tales; in Chapter X I compare the two tales. In Chapter XI I discuss the Clerk's Tale. I conclude that the authoritarian values of the Knight's and Parson's Tale are not supported within the work, but that finally the demand made upon the reader is that he, too, should recognize his necessary partiality in his reading.

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