"The Owl and the Nightingale" and the English Poems of Jesus College MS 29 (II)

Made in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century, Oxford Jesus College, MS 29 (II) provides an anthology described by volume editor Susanna Fein as “the most abundant, most persistently English assemblage of imaginative short poems to turn up in the period between the tenth-century Old English Exeter Book and the mid-fourteenth-century Harley Lyrics.” Moralizing, witty, assertively English, and pragmatic about life and the afterlife, the anthology reflects the personality, erudition, and interests of its lone scribe; it includes the learned debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale”; Thomas of Hales’s “Love Rune,” the first known English Franciscan lyric; “The Proverbs of Alfred,” collected wisdom attributed to Alfred the Great; and twenty-five additional works, many of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript. Fein’s edition presents all of Jesus 29’s English materials in facing-page translation, supplementing their challenging early Middle English with modern English translations for students and advanced scholars alike.