The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
An Orison of the Five Joys
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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Other:
| Text name: | An Orison of the Five Joys |
| Alternative names: | Hail be thou Mary mild queen of heaven; Heyl be thou, Marie, milde quene of hevene |
| Content: | The poem An Orison of the Five Joys is a prayer to Mary to ask her for forgiveness and for eternal bliss. The five joys of Mary are the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Assumption. |
| Genre/subjects: | prayer to the virgin Mary, religious praise |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The dialect of the original has not been investigated in detail. |
| Date of original composition: | 1300-1325 The early fourteenth century date of the manuscript, Cambridge St. John’s College S. 30, functions as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the text. Brown (1924) prints the text under the section heading "Miscellaneous Lyrics before 1350" and not under "Lyrics of the beginning of the century." The language of the poem does not appear to be much older than c. 1300. |
| Suggested date: | 1320 |
| PCMEP period: | 2b (1300-1350) |
| Versification: | fourteen stanzas, the first twelve are in monorhyming quatrains, aaaa, the last two stanzas in alternate rhymes, abab |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1030 (IMEV), 1030 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1688 |
| Wells: | 13.184 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Heil beo þou Marie Mylde |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Brown, Carleton F. 1924. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon. 29-31. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Cambridge, St John’s College S.30 (256), ff. 268r-269r |
| Online manuscript description: | Library of St. John's College, S.30 |
| Manuscript dialect: | (South) East-Midlands The manuscript language has been localized to Essex (McIntosh et al. 1986: 64). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiv-in The French "copy of Lornes of Orleans, Somme le roi, [the main text of the manuscript] [was] produced in London in the 1320s" (Hanna 2005: 6). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as a1325. |
About the file:
| File name: | M2b.OrisFiveJoys |
| ID: | OrisFiveJoys,x.y.z: x= token, y=page number, z=line |
| Word count: | 560 |
| Token count: | 49 |
| Line count: | 56 |
Other:
| General notes: | No. [26] in Brown's 1924 edition. Each of the fourteen stanzas has a Latin rubric heading, "Aue maria gracia plena dominus tecum." These Latin interjections are not included in the word, token and line count numbers (there would 644 words, 52 tokens and 70 lines with the Latin material). The poem has been transmitted in four manuscripts: St. John's College Cambridge S.30 (used for the edition, early 14th century), the Vernon manuscript (late 14th century), Lambeth 559 (early 15th century) and British Library Royal 17.A.27 (early 15th century) (Saupe 1997: §75, Notes; DIMEV). |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow the rhyming scheme as in Brown’s (1924) edition. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Brown, Carleton F. 1924. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon. (available online)
Hanna, Ralph. 2005. London Literature 1300-1380. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Saupe, Karen. 1997. Middle English Marian Lyrics. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (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)