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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Fragment of a Mary Passion
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| Text name: | Fragment of a Mary Passion | ||||||||
| Alternative names: | Stod ho; Stood she there nigh; Compassio Marie; A Middle English Compassio Mariae | ||||||||
| Content: | The Fragment of a Mary Passion is a rendition of the hymn Stabat iuxta Christi crucem '[She, Mary] Stood by the Cross of Christ.' The first three Middle English stanzas are missing and the fourth stanza only has part of the last line. Mary suffers as she beholds her son at the cross. May she bring us to eternal life. The poem is set to music and follows the same metrical pattern as the Latin original. The congruence in sense and metre between the Middle English and Latin is illustrated in the following excerpt (Napier's (1894) Middle English stanza III, Latin stanza VI):
For some literary criticism, see Greentree (2009: 393), Wenzel (1986: 42-8). | ||||||||
| Genre/subjects: | hymn, religious lyric, lyric, Virgin Mary, Jesus and Mary, legend, death, the cross, Mary passion, compassion Mariae | ||||||||
| Dialect of original composition: | (Northern) West Midlands Napier (1894: 83-6) presents a number of linguistic arguments in favor of provenance of the original in the West Midlands dialect. Those concern inflectional verb endings (e.g., 3rd singular indicative haues 'has'), "ui and u side by side with i-forms" (ibid.: 83), the u in luue 'love' and the form ho 'she.' Napier suggests that "the poem itself, as well as the existing copy, may have been written in Cheshire, perhaps in Chester itself, to whose monastic library the fragment once probably belonged" (ibid.: 85). | ||||||||
| Date of original composition: | 1200-1250 The poem was written in the first half of the thirteenth century. "[T]he language can hardly be later than the middle of the [13th] century" (Brown 1932: 167). Napier (1894: 83-6) provides linguistic arguments for this conclusion, such as the "diphthongic spelling in bearnes, dead, schead, and leor" (ibid.: 86) and the poet's retention of long a, which was in the process of changing to long o at the time, based on the rhyme þrehes (< þrāwu) 'throes' : lahes (< lăgu) 'laws' (ibid.: 84). | ||||||||
| Suggested date: | 1230 | ||||||||
| PCMEP period: | 1b (1200-1250) | ||||||||
| Versification: | The fragment consists of seven complete six-line stanzas with the rhyming pattern aabccb. The poem includes much alliteration (e.g., I þat blisful bearnes buirde). The a and c rhymes consist of four trochees. This is a common rhythm in medieval Latin poetry. The bracing b rhymes have two trochees and a final dactyl. The piece is set to musical notes. | ||||||||
| Index of ME Verse: | 3216.5 (IMEV), 3216.5 (NIMEV) | ||||||||
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 5038 | ||||||||
| Wells: | 13.129 | ||||||||
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Stod ho... |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Napier, Arthur Sampson. 1894. History of the Holy Rood-tree. EETS o.s. 103. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 77-9. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 169* (SC 9995), p. 175 [inserted page from a different manuscript] |
| Online manuscript description: | Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 9995 A catalogue of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and selected Oxford colleges, MS. Tanner 169* (Part 3) |
| Manuscript dialect: | (Northern) West Midlands, Chester The core of manuscript Tanner 169* was written at St. Werburgh's Abbey in Chester. The leaf of the poem did not originally form part of the manuscript and may thus have originated elsewhere. However, Napier asserts that this leaf too originated from the same institution. "[I]ts present position renders it likely that the binding out of which it was taken, was that of MS. Tanner 169* itself, in which case the fragment must have belonged to the library of the Chester monastery and is probably a remnant of some manuscript written there" (Napier 1894: 75). "[T]he existing copy may have been written in Cheshire, perhaps in Chester itself, to whose monastic library the fragment once probably belonged" (ibid.: 85). The electronic LAEME assigns the text to "St Werburgh's Abbey, Chester." |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-mid, xiii-ex The manuscript was written "soon after the middle of the thirteenth century" (Napier 1894: 77) in "the third quarter of the thirteenth century" (ibid.: 85), "in a hand of the third quarter of the thirteenth century" (Brown 1924: 167). |
About the file:
| File name: | M1b.FragMary |
| ID: | FragMary,w.[Stanza_x].y.z: w=page, x=stanza number 4-11, y=line, z=token The stanza numbers follow the Latin original printed in the right column in Napier (1894: 77-9). |
| Word count: | 256 |
| Token count: | 20 |
| Line count: | 44 |
Other:
| General notes: | The text is a Middle English version of the Latin Stabat iuxta Christi Crucem hymn and has the same rhythm as the Latin original so that the Middle English and Latin can be sung to the same music, which accompanies the piece. "The translation does not closely follow the original; indeed the choice of the same metrical form necessitated considerable freedom in the translation" (Napier 1894: 76). Napier's edition prints the Latin original and the Middle English rendition side by side. The poem is a fragment, the first four stanzas having been lost. The manuscript does not divide the text into lines but writes it as one prose block. There is an independent, later Middle English paraphrase of the Latin Stabat iuxta Christi Crucem hymn in manuscript Arundel 248, Iesu cristes milde moder. |
| Remarks on parses: | The parses are generally unproblematic. Some translations are indicated as comment CODEs in the parsed file. |
References
Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.
Greentree, Rosemary. 2009. 'Lyric. ' In: Brown, Peter (ed.) A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350 - c.1500. Chichester: Wiley and Blackwell. 387-405.
Napier, Arthur S. 1894. History of the Holy Rood-tree. EETS o.s. 103. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 77-9. (available online)
Wenzel, Siegfried. 1986. Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press.