The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Maximian
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | Maximian |
| Alternative names: | Le Regret de Maximian; Harken to my ron As I you tellen can; Maximion; Maximon; Lament of Maximian |
| Content: | This piece is a free paraphrase of the Latin First Elegy by 6th century poet Cornelius Maximianus Gallus. The poem begins with praise of Maximian's qualities in his youth. It then laments the loss of youth, power and friends in old age. |
| Genre/subjects: | lament, approach of death, mutability, elegy, sorrow |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The assertion that the poem was written "originally in a Midland dialect" (Wells 1916: 393) seems to be based on rhyme evidence in Varnhagen (1880: 277). He lists five rhymes that are indicative of a Midlands dialect. He raises the possibility that the rhyme hit ges : pes (line 3/6) may indicate more specifically a West-Midlands original. Further, he believes that the rhyme þenne : wenne (lines 67/68) was introduced by the scribe of the manuscript, who was supposedly from the South-East or Kent. Unfortunately, the original dialect of the poem has not received further scholarly attention. It seems at least possible that Varnhagen's dialects of the original and the manuscript could be inverted. Rather than a West-Midlands original copied by a scribe from the South-East, the text could be a South-Eastern original, the "many Kentish forms [translated from German original]" (Varnhagen 1880: 277) persisting as remnants, with subsequent translation into a West-Midlands scribal language. |
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1275 The oldest manuscript witness of Maximian, Digby 86, has been dated to c. 1271-1283. This date may function as the approximate terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem. It is likely that the text was composed earlier rather than later in the 13th century. This becomes clear, firstly, from certain differences between the Digby manuscript and the second witness of the poem, Harley 2253, which are best explained "by supposing that the text was transmitted orally" (Brown 1932: 206) for some time. Secondly, the fact that function words and even some lexical items often show case endings (e.g. l. 41: þissen (accusative -en), l. 94 Hounten (accusative plural -en), l. 184 þan (dative singular)) may attest to the relative conservativeness of the text. The poem was therefore grouped into PCMEP period 1b (1200-1250). |
| Suggested date: | 1240 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | 23 twelve-line stanzas - aabaabccbccb, 1 nine-line stanza (ll. 145-153); alliteration is relatively frequent rime couee with uneven stanzas (Böddeker 1878: 244) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1115 (IMEV), 1115 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1769 |
| Wells: | 7.41 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Maximian |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon. 92-100. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86 (SC 1687), ff. 134v-136v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 47) 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, Laing 2000). LAEME localizes the manuscript more specifically to "Redmarley D’Abitot, N[orth]W[est] Glouc[ester]s[hire]" (LAEME item 2002). Scholars previously held different views about the scribal dialect. Varnhagen (1880: 277) identifies the copyist as a man from the South-East or Kent. Kennedy (1915: 15) and Wells (1916: 393) describe the manuscript language as broadly Southern (probably signifying any non-Northern dialect). |
| 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." |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.Maximian |
| ID: | Maximian,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 1,338 |
| Token count: | 157 |
| Line count: | 273 |
Other:
| General notes: | No. [51] in Brown's 1932 edition. The Regret of Maximian is preserved in two manuscripts, Digby 86, used for the parsed file, and Ms. London British Library, Harley 2253, ff. 82r-83r. The second manuscript witness distorts the regular 12-line stanzas and badly confuses the sense of the poem. The scribe of the Harley manuscript most probably recorded the poem from memory. Since there "is virtually no narrative thread by which to preserve the proper sequence, [...] variations in order [in the Harley manuscript] are not surprising" (Brown 1932: 206). The core of this text file was created by Ronald Hoffman in his capacity as a free-lance annotator. His help is hereby gratefully acknowledged. |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow Brown's (1932: 92-100) edition. The 3rd person narrator and Maximian's 1st person lament shift fluently. Therefore, the text is not indicated as speech (-SPE) except for lines 244-6, which are introduced by quotation marks. Lines 257-8 are completely garbled. For an emendation, see Laing (2008: 15-18). |
References
Bödekker, Karl. 1878. Altenglische Dichtungen des Ms. Harl. 2253: Mit Grammatik und Glossar. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. (available online)
Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kennedy, Arthur G. 1915. The Pronoun of Address in English Literature of the Thirteenth Century. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Laing, Margaret. 2000. 'The Linguistic Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. ' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101. 523–569.
Laing, Margaret. 2008. 'The Early Middle English Scribe: Sprach er wie er schrieb?' In: Dossena, Marina, Dury, Richard and Gotti, Maurizio (eds.) Selected papers from the fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Volume III: Geo-Historical Variation in English. Amerstdam: John Benjamins. 1-44.
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.
Varnhagen, Hermann. 1880. 'Zu mittelenglischen Gedichten. VI Zu dem Klageliede Maximian's.' Anglia 3.2. 275-284. (available online)
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)