The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Pater Noster
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About the edition and manuscript base:
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| Text name: | Pater Noster |
| Alternative names: | Our Father that in heaven is that is all soothful iwis; Pater noster qui est in celis; A Metrical Exposition of the Pater Noster |
| Content: | The poem is a rhymed exposition and interpretation of the prayer 'Pater Noster' with Latin bible quotations. It is homily no. [6] of the Lambeth Homilies and one of the earliest Middle English poems to consistently use rhyme (in short couplets). |
| Genre/subjects: | prayer to the lord, exposition of The Lord’s Prayer, creed |
| Dialect of original composition: | South-East Pater Noster and the originally South Eastern Poema Morale show some commonalities, "e.g. they alone have the pronoun hes 'it, them'" (Sisam 1952: 109). "hes occurs in none of the other homilies and so probably represents an unadapted form of the original dialect" (Wilson 1935: 33). Hence, this feature probably indicates a South-Eastern provenance of Pater Noster. Stadlmann (1921: 2-5) investigates imprecise rhymes of the poem. He argues that the imprecise rhyme þenne : wunne 'then : joy' indicates an originally clear rhyme þenne (frequent and fixed variant of þanne and þonne) : wenne in the vorlage manuscript, the latter of which is the Middle English Kentish continuation of its cognate, West-Saxon wynn. The scribe thus appears to have imposed his own pronunciation of the word 'joy' as wunne [y] on a copy of a South Eastern original (ibid.: 3). However, not all imprecise rhymes of the poem support this view. |
| Date of original composition: | 1150-1200 Sisam (1951) argues that the Lambeth Homilies were copied from two different exemplars with different orthographies, earlier X, which may include at least some homilies of Old English origin (the exemplar for Group A), and later Y (the exemplar for Group B). "These group divisions are well defined except for Sermon VI, the rhyming Pater Noster. This piece, sandwiched between sermons from Group A and Group B, has orthographical affinities with both" (ibid.: 107), but may accord better with Group B (ibid.: 108). "It is unlikely that any of the sermons from Group B [hence probably also Pater Noster] was derived from an Old English version (some were perhaps translated from Latin in the twelfth century)" (ibid.: 110). The "rhyming 'Creed' [...] is certainly of Middle English origin" (Wilson 1935: 24) and not based on Old English material. |
| Suggested date: | 1170 |
| PCMEP period: | 1a (1150-1200) |
| Versification: | couplets, two-line, aa |
| Index of ME Verse: | 2709 (IMEV), 2709 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 4305 |
| Wells: | 5.12 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Lamb.Hom.Pater N. |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Morris, Richard. 1868. Old English homilies and homiletic treatises (Sawles warde, and þe wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and of Ure Lefdi, &c.) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. EETS 29,34. London: N. Trübner & Co. 55-71. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | London, Lambeth Palace Library 487, ff. 21v-25r |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (item 6) |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands "The dialect agrees closely with the characteristics of the West Midland dialect" (Wilson 1935: 39) "[I]f the predominant linguistic forms in the Lambeth Homilies are studied and compared with those of Laȝamon A and then with those of MS. Bodley 34 of the 'Katherine Group' or the Corpus Ancrene Wisse, [which are all West Midlands manuscripts] the result is conclusively in favour of a western provenance: [...] Staff[ordshire] [...] S[outh] [Shropshire], N[orth] Herefordshire or N[orth] Worc[estershire] would [...] be possible." (Samuels 1955: 58) |
| Manuscript date: | s. xii-ex, s. xiii-in "It was written c. 1200. [footnote 2:] The late J.P. Gilson, Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, dated it tentatively 1185-1225, in a note at the beginning of the manuscript." (Sisam, 1951: 105) "in a hand of before 1200" (Wells 1916: 278) |
About the file:
| File name: | M1a.PatNost |
| ID: | PatNost,x.y.z: x=token, y=page z=line |
| Word count: | 1,906 |
| Token count: | 155 |
| Line count: | 304 The eight Latin bible quotations that are interpreted in the poem are not included in the line count. |
Other:
| General notes: | The poem is part of the Lambeth Homilies, the prose pieces of which can be found, fully parsed, in the PPCME2. |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks in the electronic text file follow Morris' edition (1868: 55-71). The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Morris, Richard. 1868. Old English homilies and homiletic treatises (Sawles warde, and þe wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and of Ure Lefdi, &c.) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. EETS o.s. 29, 34. London: N. Trübner & Co. (available online)
Samuels, Michael L. 1955. 'Review of A.J. Bliss, Sir Orfeo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).' Medium Ævum 24. 56-60.
Sisam, Celia. 1951. 'The scribal tradition of the Lambeth Homilies.' The Review of English Studies, New Series 6. 105-113. (available online)
Stadlmann, Alois. 1921. Die Sprache der mittelenglischen Predigtsammlung in der Handschrift Lambeth 487. Vienna and Leipzig: Braumüller.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Wilson, Richard M. 1935. 'The Provenance of the Lambeth Homilies with a New Collation.' Leeds Studies in English 4. 24-43. (available online)