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A Critical Companion to John Audelay

By (author) Susanna Fein

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The first comprehensive study of Audelay's life, manuscript, patronage, and musical background. All the extant writings of the fifteenth-century poet John Audelay are preserved in what is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, compiled at Haughmond Abbey, east of Shrewsbury, c.1426. In it, Audelay often signs his texts and proclaims himself the book's author and compiler. His eclectic body of verse includes devotions and prayers crafted in a variety of English metrical forms. A poem on clerical abuses echoes Langland's Piers Plowman, while another on death evokes the high style of the Gawain-poet. Carols designed for Christmas festivities sing of holy topics and praise England's king, women's virtues, and youthful innocence. Poems addressed to saints include two Lancastrian favourites, Bridget and Winifred, and culminate in a vision of God's face on Veronica's shroud. This Critical Companion explores the many enigmas of Audelay, who paints himself as a visionary moralist who is blind, a musical chantrist who is deaf, a cloistered priest who serves secular elites, a reformer who repudiates Lollards, a humble penitent who must be named. The essays place Audelay within his historical, religious, and aesthetic contexts, and examine the content of the manuscript itself.