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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)

PCMEP Text Information



The Dispute between Mary and the Cross

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About the text:
Text name: The Dispute between Mary and the Cross
Alternative names: Our Lady free on Rood tree made Her moan; The Disputation between the Virgin Mary and the Cross
Content: The Dispute between Mary and the Cross is a debate between Christ's grieving mother and the Cross. The poem opens with a third person narrator. Then, the debate starts. Mary accuses the Cross for torturing and defiling her son. The Cross defends itself by saying that it bore Christ for a greater good, to save man, and to tame the devil. In the end, as the poet writes again in the third person, Mary agrees with the Cross and gives it a kiss.
Genre/subjects: Mary and the Cross debate, Mary and the Cross, virgin Mary, lament of Mary, the Cross, Holy Rood, debate, dialogue, dispute, proto-drama, lament
Dialect of original composition: unknown (perhaps East Midlands)
The dialect of the original has not been discussed in detail. The West Midlands manuscript dialect is unlikely to reflect the dialect of the original because of spoiled rhymes. For instance, the copyist quite possibly updated the word frendes 'friends' instinctively to his preferred western spelling freondes (stanza 10, l. 130) only to arrive four lines later at the rhyming word endes (l. 134) 'end' for which the eo vowel did not present itself, leaving a spoiled rhyme. An e in 'friend' was common in the Northern East and West Midlands and the North (LALME item 146). Another example is the set of rhymes world : swerd : gerd 'world : sword : struck' (stanza 9, ll. 118-120). The original of the first element suggested by the rhyme, werld, is predominantly found in London, the East Midlands and the North (LALME item 49), and may have offended the senses of the West Midlands scribe so much that he saw himself compelled to change the vowel, causing another spoiled rhyme. Furthermore, before ending in n, fixed in rhyme in the poem, beo-forn : born 'before : born' (stanza 29, ll. 377, 381), is a dialectal form predominantly found in the East Midlands (LALME item 85).
Date of original composition: 1325-1380
The date of the original has not been discussed in detail. It must predate its primary witness, the well-known Vernon manuscript of about 1390-1400, because this witness already contains several spoiled readings resulting from the copying process (Holthausen 1900: 26), pushing the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem to c. 1380. The language of the text does not comport with a date much earlier than the first quarter of the fourteenth century, placing its terminus post quem at c. 1325. For instance, temporal subordination is based on when not then and there are only a few remnants of negation with the negative particle ne (e.g. l. 244).
The poem is "of about 1350" (Wells 1916: 416).
Suggested date: 1350
PCMEP period: 3 (1350-1420)
Versification: 40 stanzas; stanzas 2-39 of 13 lines with the rhyming scheme abab abab cdddc and usually 3-4 stresses; the framing stanzas 1 and 40 of 17 lines rhyming on aab aab aab aab cdddc, where the a and b verses are shorter with only two to three stresses, the rest as in the remainder of the poem. There is much alliteration (Furnivall 1901: 612, Wells 1916: 416).
Index of ME Verse: 2718 (IMEV), 2718 (NIMEV)
Digital Index of ME Verse: 4319
Wells: 9.6
MEC HyperBibliography: Disp.Virg.& Cross


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Morris, Richard. 1871. Legends of the Holy Rood: Symbols of the Passion and Cross Poems. In Old English of the Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. EETS o.s. 60. London: Trübner & Co. 131-149.
Manuscript used for edition: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Eng. poet. a.1 (SC 3938-42) [Vernon MS], ff. 315vc-316vc
Online manuscript description: Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 3938-3942
Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Vol. 3, no. 676)
A catalogue of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and selected Oxford colleges
Manuscripts of the West Midlands 1300-1475 (item 340)
Digitized manuscript at the Digital Bodleian
Manuscript dialect: West-Midlands
The two scribes of the Vernon Manuscript have been identified as Worcestershiremen. Specifically, the manuscript may have been produced near Bordesley Abbey, a Cistercian house (McIntosh et al. 1986: 249-50).
Manuscript date: s. xiv-ex
The Vernon manuscript is dated c. 1390-1400.
The manuscript was produced in "Saec. XIV ex. (after 1382)" (Pächt & Alexander 1973: 61).
The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript to "c1390."
The manuscript had previously been dated somewhat earlier, "1370-1380" (Wells 1916: 416).


About the file:
File name: M2b.DisMaryCross
ID: DisMaryCross,w.x.y.z: w=page, x=line, y=token, z=stanza {[Stanza_1]-[Stanza_40]}
The Latin title and explicit have "Title" and "Explicit" instead of a line number and no stanza number.
Word count: 3,237
Token count: 327
Line count: 528, plus two unnumbered Latin lines, a title and an explicit


Other:
General notes: The poem The Dispute between Mary and the Cross is preserved in three manuscripts:
(i) The Vernon manuscript, the basis for the edition used for the parsed file.
(ii) the Simeon manuscript, London, British Library Addit. 22283, ff. 124vb-125vb (British Library Online). The Simeon manuscript is closely related to the Vernon manuscript in terms of production, date and content.
(iii) London, British Library Royal MS 18 A.X. This version of the text is less complete, comprising only 372 lines, and was copied later, around 1450. The text of Royal 18 A.X has been edited by Morris (Morris 1871: 197-209, Appendix A). It includes 2.5 new stanzas and omits 14.5 others stanzas. Fein (1998: 123) presents a table with the correspondences between the manuscript witnesses and includes all variant readings from Royal 18 A.X in the textual apparatus of her edition.
The version of the poem in Royal 18 A.X includes speaker indications for Mary and the Cross in the margins. Perhaps it was read out aloud. If so, the text could be a proto-drama intended, for instance, for performance during a church service (Fein 1998: 89).
Holthausen (1900) has identified the 98-line Latin poem Crux, de te volo, conqueri by Philippe de Grève (died 1236) as a source for the Middle English poem in Vernon ll. 1-147. He prints parallel sections in the Latin and Middle English versions side by side (ibid.: 23-25).
Pickering (1997) argues that the poem was written by an author who can also be identified in another three Middle English texts based on similar style and verse form. The other texts potentially written by the poet are:
(i) Alle ʒe mouwen (DIMEV 410)
(ii) Church Feasts (DIMEV 5831)
(ii) Whon Grein of Whete (DIMEV 6315)
The poem belongs to a large group of extant "Laments of Mary" (Wells 1916: 515, Yeager 1981). Versions exist, for instance, in Middle Dutch, Provencal, Latin and Anglo-Norman.
The poem features a remarkable symmetry between the speeches of Mary and the Cross. The two characters "speak in balanced turns, three speeches each: eight stanzas for Mary, nine for the Cross, three for Mary (first half); then, three for the Cross, nine for Mary, and eight for the Cross's winning position (second half) [resulting in] a mirrored ratio, 8:9:3|3:9:8" (Fein 1998: 89).
The text may be based on a Latin apocryphal source: In ll. 499-507, the poet claims that he himself witnessed the Crucifixion. It is not clear what that means, but one possible interpretation, other than meditation or a vision, is that he had as a source an early Christian apocryphal text (Yeager 1981: 65).
Literary scholarship on the pieces is provided, for instance, by Fein (1998) on the symbolism of the cross and its associations with other Middle English texts and Kisha (2021) on faulty memories.
Remarks on parses: The long speeches by Mary and the Cross are tagged as direct speech, -SPE. This comprises the majority of the poem. Only the sentences by the third-person narrator are not tagged as speech.
The Roman stanza numbers (I, II etc.) in the edition have been removed. The stanza numbers are indicated in the IDs.
The text includes many interpuncts, also called middots (·) to separate lines. They have been removed.
ll. 188-190 are particularly hard to parse. The Cross says:

Wiþ nayl and brede on bord is smite;
Rede lettres write be lyne,
Bluwe Blake among men pite.

'With nail and tablet on board is stuck;
red letters written by line,
blue, black among man tacked.'

The meaning seems to be that a tablet with a pardon note, mentioned in the previous line, is stuck on the board (i.e., the Cross) with a nail. The parse therefore uses an empty subject NP-SBJ (*con*) referring to this 'pardon' from the previous token. However, that makes the instrumental PP semantically odd, 'with (by means of) nail and a tablet (?).' Fein (1998) suggests an adverbial reading of and brede, 'abroad, (spread) broadly.' The subsequent line is annotated as NP-ADT meaning 'with letters.' The adjectives Bluwe Blake are annotated as ADJ-SPR. The rest of the last line is annotated as IP-PPL since it is difficult to extract a reduced relative clause out of an empty subject. The whole token means, '[The pardon] is stuck on the Cross with nail and tablet [(?)], with red letters written by line, blue and black, tagged on by [among (?)] men.'
The line breaks in the electronic file follow Morris' (1871: 131-14) edition.


References

Fein, Susanna G. 1998. Moral Love Songs and Laments. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Furnivall, Frederick J. 1901. The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS. Part II. (With a few from the Digby Mss. 2 and 86). EETS o.s. 117. London: Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. (available online)
Holthausen, Ferdinand. 1900. 'Der mittelenglische Disput zwischen Maria und dem Kreuze.' Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 105. 22-29. (available online)
Kisha, Tracy G. 2021. 'Maternal Lament and Misremembering in Dispute between Mary and the Cross.' In: Templeton, Lee (ed.) Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages: Knowing Sorrow. Leiden: Brill. 37-52.
Morris, Richard. 1871. Legends of the Holy Rood: Symbols of the Passion and Cross Poems. In Old English of the Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. EETS o.s. 60. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Pächt, Otto & Alexander, Jonathan J G. 1973. Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Volume 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (available online)
Pickering, Oliver S. 1997. 'Middle English Metaphysical Verse? Imagery and Style in Some Fourteenth-Century Religious Poems.' In: Pickering, Oliver S. (ed.) Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Poetry. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer. 85-104.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Yeager, Peter. 1981. 'The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross: Debate Poems of the Passion.' Christianity & Literature 30. 53-69. (available online)