The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
The Letter of Cupid
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About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | The Letter of Cupid |
| Alternative names: | Cupido unto whose commandment; Lespistre de Cupide |
| Content: | The poem The Letter of Cupid was written by Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368 - c. 1426). Written in 1402, it is probably the earliest, precisely datable poem in the English language. The text is a loose adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'Amours and has slightly more than half of the French text's length. The poem defends women against anti-female satire and attacks by men. For a more comprehensive assessment of the poem's content and attitude towards women, see Fenster & Carpenter-Erler (1990: 165-167). |
| Genre/subjects: | love, men and women, feminism |
| Dialect of original composition: | East-Midlands Thomas Hoccleve worked as a civil servant in London. Quite a lot of details are know about Thomas Hoccleve's life. For background information on his life and dated poetry, see for instance Knapp (2009) or Furnivall (1892: vii-xxix). |
| Date of original composition: | 1402 The last two lines of the poem indicate the year of composition and are generally taken as authentic: "the yere of grace / Ioyful and Iocunde A thousand and foure houndred / and secounde." (The year of grace so joyful and jocund A thousand and four hundred and second.) |
| Suggested date: | 1402 |
| PCMEP period: | 3 (1350-1420) |
| Versification: | sixty-eight stanzas in rhyme royal |
| Index of ME Verse: | 666 (IMEV), 666 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1092 |
| Wells: | - |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Hoccl.Cupid |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Furnivall, Frederick J. 1892. Hoccleve's Works: I. The Minor Poems. EETS o.s. 61. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 72-91. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library Fairfax 16 (SC 3896), ff. 40-47 |
| Online manuscript description: | Late Medieval Scribes Oxford, Bodleian Library (MS. Fairfax 16) |
| Manuscript dialect: | East-Midlands "London" (Arn 2000: 66, footnote 13) |
| Manuscript date: | s. xv-med "1450s" (Fenster & Carpenter 1990: 172) The online version of the MED dates the manuscript c1450. |
About the file:
| File name: | M3.LetterCupid |
| ID: | LetterCupid,w.x.y.z: w=page, x=line, y=token, z={Stanza 1-68} The last two lines are a Latin explicit. The ID indicates "Explicit" instead of a line number and has no number for a stanza. |
| Word count: | 3,522 |
| Token count: | 232 |
| Line count: | 476 (+ 2 lines Latin explicit) |
Other:
| General notes: | There are ten complete manuscript witnesses of The Letter of Cupid (Fenster & Carpenter 1990: 172). It also survives in early print versions and sixteenth century editions. Furnivall's edition rearanges the stanzas of the base manuscript, Bodleian Library Fairfax 16, to match the order in the text's preferred manuscript, San Marino, Huntington Library HM 744 (formerly Ashburnham 133) (Fenster & Carpenter 1990: 172). The syntax of the poem is very complex and includes a fair number of rare constructions. Furthermore, the word order of the text frequently seems unnatural. For example, main and auxiliary verbs are often inverted, as in the following verse: An olde proverbe seyde ys in englyssh: (Cupid,80.183.83.[Stanza_27]) These patterns are probably due to poetic licensing, rhyming considerations, or archaisms. Researchers interested in macro-structural word order patterns should handle this text with care. |
| Remarks on parses: | There is a loose translation of the Middle English poem into Modern English in Fenster & Carpenter-Erler (1990: 176-204). Some of the more complicated parses are based on its proposed interpretation. The edition uses slashes to indicate half-lines, which are ignored in the parsed file. Cupid is the narrator of the poem and frequently uses the word I. However, his words are not tagged as direct speech unless they are direct quotations. The line breaks follow Furnivall's edition. They are based quite naturally on the text's regular metre in rhyme royal. In a few places, the parsed file includes variants from manuscripts other than the base manuscript as found in the textual apparatus in Furnivall's edition. All such emendations are indicated as comment CODE in the electronic file. |
References
Arn, Mary-Jo. 2000. Charles D’Orléans in England, 1415-1440. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Fenster, Thelma S. & Carpenter-Erler, Mary. 1990. Poems of Cupid, God of Love. Leiden: Brill.
Furnivall, Frederick J. 1892. Hoccleve's Works: I. The Minor Poems. EETS o.s. 61. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. (available online)
Knapp, Ethan. 2009 . 'Thomas Hoccleve.' In: Scanlon, Larry (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500. 191-204.