Moral Love Songs and Laments

Illustrates how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings from the intimately personal state of being God's created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love.

This edition compiles seven obscure Middle English lyrics which each illustrate how Christian doctrine can channel high emotion. Susanna Fein argues that these lyrics were meant to be meditated over as devotional objects, which would help readers unlock a heartfelt response to God, through contemplation of the Incarnation or Passion. Dating from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, these poems explore various kinds of love: eroticized attraction to Christ, Mary’s maternal compassion for her suffering son, the Incarnation as a sign of God’s love for mankind, and divine mercy. Highlights include “cross-poems” like Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune, The Four Leaves of the Truelove, and The Dispute between Mary and the Cross, in which the crucifix becomes an enigma for readers to decipher. Fein ends with a newly discovered version of the penitential poem, The Sinner’s Lament. Taken together, these poems make the signs of God’s love visible, palpable, and affectively moving to the receptive soul.