The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
The Harrowing of Hell
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| Text name: | The Harrowing of Hell |
| Alternative names: | Lief friend now beeth still; Hou ihesu crist herowede helle / Of harde gates ich will telle; How Jesu Christ harrowed hell |
| Content: | The Harrowing of Hell narrates Jesus' visit to the underworld. He binds Satan and frees his loyal servants, who can leave hell only now after the Crucifixion.
From now on, Christ's followers shall live with him blissfully in Heaven after their death, but unbelievers shall remain forever with Satan in Hell.
After a short narrative introduction, Jesus speaks to Satan, the Gatekeeper, Adam and Eve, Abraham, King David, St. John and Moses in that order.
A prayer closes the piece. Hulme's (1907) introduction offers a good overview over the poem's content and origin, as well as the influence of the Harrowing of Hell on the medieval drama. |
| Genre/subjects: | hell, harrowing of hell, legend, Christ, dialogue |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The probable dialect of the original has not been discussed in considerable detail. |
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1250 The piece was "composed not later than 1250" (Wells 1916: 327). "[T]he original manuscript of this piece (which is not in existence in the present day) could hardly have been written later than the middle of the thirteenth century" (Hulme 1907: vii-viii). The online version of the MED lists the date of the original as a1250. |
| Suggested date: | 1240 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | two-line, aa "four-stress verses in couplets" (Wells 1916: 327) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1850.5 (IMEV), 1850.5 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 3070 (formerly 0.1258) |
| Wells: | 5.74 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Harrow.H. |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Hulme, William H. 1907. The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus. EETS e.s. 100. Berlin: Asher & Co. 2-22. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86 (SC 1687), ff. 119r-120v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 38) Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 1687 |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The manuscript language has been localized to Gloucestershire or Worcestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 197). Support for the view that the manuscript is from the West-Midlands is also provided by external evidence surrounding a kalendar of saints from the diocese of Worcester, the occurrence of the place names Ridmerley and Pendock, and references to three Worcestershire families (Brown 1932, Miller 1963, Tschann and Parkes 1996: lvii–lviii, Laing 2000). LAEME localizes the manuscript more specifically to "Redmarley D’Abitot, N[orth]W[est] Glouc[ester]s[hire]" (LAEME item 2002). The large amount of language mixture between the dialects of the scribe, the immediate examplar and the original composition has resulted in the exclusion of the text from the LAEME corpus. |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript has been dated to 1272–1282 based on a list of kings on f. 205v ending with Edward I, who ruled from 1272, and the Roman numeral .x., interpeted as the tenth year of his reign, 1282 (Tschann & Parkes 1996: xxxvi–xxxvii). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "?a1300." With respect to the text The Harrowing of Hell specifically, scholars have suggested, for example, that the manuscript was "probably written during the last years of the thirteenth century" (Hulme 1907: viii). |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.HarrowHell |
| ID: | HarrowHell,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 1,461 |
| Token count: | 145 |
| Line count: | 256 |
Other:
| General notes: | There is a later version of the Harrowing of Hell extant in two manuscripts, London, British Library Harley 2253, and the Edinburgh, Auchinleck MS, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1 ((N)IMEV 185, DIMEV 334). Hulme's (1907: 2-23) edition prints the poem of the Digby manuscript on the even page numbers and the Harley and Auchinleck versions on the facing odd page numbers. Since there is a lot of dialogue in the poem, it is possible that it was written for dramatic performance. However, there is little positive evidence to substantiate this supposition. The text in the later Auchinleck manuscript prefaces lines with direct speech with Latin phrases like Satanas dixit 'Satan spoke.' |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow Hulme's (1907: 2-22) edition. The majority of the poem is dialogue between Jesus and the inhabitants of hell. These passages are indicated as direct speech, -SPE, but sentences by the speaker are not. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.
Hulme, William H. 1907. The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus. EETS e.s. 100. Berlin: Asher & Co. (available online)
Laing, Margaret. 2000. 'The Linguistic Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. ' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101. 523–569.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Miller, Brian D. H. 1963. 'The Early History of Bodleian Ms. Digby 86.' Annuale medievale 4. 26-56.
Tschann, Judith & Parkes, Malcolm. 1996. Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. EETS s.s.16. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)