The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
The Eleven Pains of Hell
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About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | The Eleven Pains of Hell |
| Alternative names: | The Vision of St. Paul; Unseely ghost what dost thou here; The XI Pains of Hell |
| Content: | The poem The Eleven Pains of Hell describes various forms of torture of damned souls in Hell and what kind of sinners suffer them. Visions of the underworld were a favorite theme of the Middle Ages. The eleven pains are: I hell fire (ll. 33-40), II various forms of torture by devils (ll. 41-66), III a wheel of steel with spikes (ll. 67-74), IV a boiling pit of poison (ll. 75-118), V a deep, dark fen where women are tortured (ll. 119-144), VI men and women are cut in half, gnawed at by vultures and cast in fire or ice (ll. 145-162), VII a water stream mixed with blood (ll. 163-175), VIII old men are gnawed to pieces by adders but ever regrow to undergo the torture again (ll. 176-219), IX a jail and underneath a hot pool where more than ten thousand devils torment souls (ll. 220-232), X a pit with seven locked doors (ll. 232-250), XI an iron wall filled with souls that were beheaded or hanged (ll. 251-260). |
| Genre/subjects: | Hell, description of the underworld, torture |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The West-Midlands dialect of the scribe copying the manuscript is not the language of the original composition because the manuscript contains many linguistic forms that are incompatible with this dialect but are explainable as relics found in its exemplar. The same state of affairs is true in the second witness of the poem, Ms. Digby 86: |
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1275 The late thirteenth century manuscript date can serve as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem. Thus, the text could plausibly fall into PCMEP periods 1b (1200-1250) or 2a (1250-1300). The language seems quite archaic. For example, there are weak plurals in -n (treon 'trees', l. 33), past participles usually retain the i-prefix (ischriven 'shrived' l. 189) etc. The piece has therefore been grouped into period 1b. The poem was composed "c. 1250" (Hein 1893: 54, 195). |
| Suggested date: | 1250 |
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) |
| Versification: | couplets, aa |
| Index of ME Verse: | 3828 (IMEV), 3828 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 6112 |
| Wells: | 5.79 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | 11 Pains(1) |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscelany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. 147-155. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II, ff. 198r-200v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME (the text itself is not included in the LAEME corpus) Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 28) |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The manuscript dialect is "South-Western" (Wells 1916: 332). The scribal dialect has been localized to Herefordshire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 199). A large number of linguistic forms in the text do not conform to a West-Midlands dialect. They are explainable as retentions of the exemplar from which the Jesus College 29 manuscript was copied. The second witness of the poem, Ms. Digby 86, shows a similar degree of mixture between the exemplar and scribal languages. While language mixture of this kind is a frequent phenomenon in Middle English manuscripts, it appears to be particularly strong for the Eleven Pains of Hell since it resulted in the exclusion of the text from the LAEME corpus. |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript dates from "c. 1275" (Wells 1916: 332). The manuscript was made in the late thirteenth century (Ker 1963: ix, xvi). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript as a1300. |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.ElevenPains |
| ID: | ElevenPains,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token Line numbers are not indicated for Incipit, Amen and Exlicit. Morris edition indicates in Roman numerals the beginning of the passages for each of the eleven pains in the margin. These numbers are not indicated in the ID. |
| Word count: | 1,706 (of those, 96 in French or Latin) |
| Token count: | 151 (of those, 4 in French or Latin) |
| Line count: | 290 + 2 lines French incipit + 3 lines Amen and Latin explicit |
Other:
| General notes: | The idea of the Eleven Pains of Hell goes back to the apocryphal Greek Apocalypse of Paul from the second century. It was then translated into Latin at various times. Subsequently, several of those Latin redactions were rendered into the vernaculars of Europe (e.g. Anglo-Norman, Middle English). The Vision of St. Paul thus formed the basis for the medieval genre of visions of the other world. For a comprehensive bibliography, see Easting (1997). There is a second witness of the poem in manuscript Digby 86 (1272-1283). In this version, it consists of 308 lines in short couplets. The text includes a fair amount of French text. There is an Anglo-Norman Implicit. French is also found in lines 1-6, 11-16, and 281-282. For background information on the French element in the poem, see Stanley (1956). Lines 283-289 identify the author or the copyist of the poem as "Hugh." For discussion, see Stanley (1956). |
| Remarks on parses: | The French and Latin material has been parsed as one token even if it consists of several French sentences. Every word within a French token is tagged as "foreign word" (FW) even if the word category is clearly discernible for example as an ampersand sign (otherwise CONJ) or proper name (otherwise NPR). The line breaks follow Morris' (1872: 147-155) edition. Line breaks are not indicated for the French incipit or the Latin explicit. Accent signs in the edition have been removed both from French and English words, e.g. gó in line 30. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Easting, Robert. 1997. Visions of the Other World in Middle English. Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature Vol. 3. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Hein, Julius. 1893. Über die bildldliche Verneinung in der mittelenglischen Poesie. Halle (Saale): E. Karas. (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.
Laing, Margaret. 2004. 'Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in Historical Dialectology.' In: Dossena, Marina & Lass, Roger (eds.) Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang. 49-96. (available online)
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscellany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Stanley, Eric G. 1956. 'Die Anglo-Normannischen Verse in dem mittelenglischen Gedicht "Die Elf Höllenpeinen."' Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 192. 21-32.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)