The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)

PCMEP Text Information



Body and Soul

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About the text:
Text name: Body and Soul
Alternative names: The departing soul's address to the body; Soul's Address to the Wicked Body; Debate between Body and Soul; The second Worcester fragment
Content: A soul reproaches its sinful body after its death.
Genre/subjects: death, debate
Dialect of original composition: Southern
"The Dialect [of the original] is Southern, outside the Kentish area, and probably Middle South, with forms deriving from a Saxon patois" (Hall 1920: 232).
Date of original composition: 1125-1175
11th or 12thcentury (Buchholz 1890: lxxvi)
"[T]he original [...] may have been fifty or sixty years earlier [than the late twelfth / early thirteenth century manuscript date]" (Hall 1920: 232)
Suggested date: 1160
PCMEP period: 1a (1150-1200)
Versification: mostly alliteration, sometimes rhymes with or without alliteration, sometimes neither rhymes nor alliteration (Buchholz 1890: lxii)
Index of ME Verse: not included because too early
Digital Index of ME Verse: 2684.5
Wells: 9.1
MEC HyperBibliography: Body & S.(2)


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Buchholz, Richard. 1890. Die Fragmente der Reden der Seele an den Leichnam: In Zwei Handschriften zu Worcester und Oxford. Leipzig: Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1-10.
Manuscript used for edition: Worcester, Worcester Cathedral Library F.174, f. 63v-66v
Online manuscript description: LAEME
The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (item 3)
Manuscript dialect: West-Midlands
"The text thus shows essentially South-Western forms. That it originated in South-West England does, of course, not follow from this [translated from the German original]" (Buchholz 1890: lxi). For evidence for a West Midlands manuscript dialect, see ibid. (lx-lxi).
The [manuscript of the] poem may have been written [...] in or near Winchester. The orthography belongs to two distinct stages of development, the latter showing the copyist's practice towards the end of the twelfth century, the more primitive being that of the original" (Hall 1920: 232).
Manuscript date: s. xii-ex, s. xiii-in
"The handwriting is of the second half of the twelfth century, perhaps about 1180. A.D." (Hall 1920: 223)
The Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript a1200 in its print and c1225 in its online version.
"s. XIII1" (Ker 1957: 466)


About the file:
File name: M1a.BodySoul
ID: BodySoul,w.x.y.z: w=token, x=page, y=line, z=fragment {FragA-G}
The text is divided into seven fr
Word count: 2,781
Token count: 300
Line count: 349


Other:
General notes: More recent editions of the poem are Moffat (1987) or Conlee (1991).
Remarks on parses: The line breaks in the electronic text file follow Buchholz's edition (1890: 1-10).
The parse in based - with some minor exceptions - on the German translation provided by Buchholz (1890: 20-27).
The soul's monologue is tagged as direct speech.


References

Buchholz, Richard. 1890. Die Fragmente der Reden der Seele an den Leichnam: In Zwei Handschriften zu Worcester und Oxford. Leipzig: Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung. (available online)
Conlee, John W. 1991. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology. Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press.
Hall, Joseph. 1920. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Oxford: Clarendon. (Part I: Texts - available online), (Part II: Notes - available online)
Ker, Neil R. 1957. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon.
Moffat, Douglas. 1987. The Soul's Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments. East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press.