(Findern Anthology)
(ca. 1456)
Cambridge University Library MS. Ff. 1.6 is commonly known as the “Findern Manuscript” because it is believed to have belonged to the Findern family and to have been produced at their country house in Derbyshire in the middle of the 15th century, perhaps around the year 1456. The text is an anthology containing a number of poems by GOWER, by CHAUCER (including The PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS and The LEGEND OF GOODWOMEN as well as the short lyrics The Complaint of Venus, The Complaint Unto Pity, and The COMPLAINT TO HIS PURSE) and by other authors copied by various hands. The manuscript also contains what are probably original compositions by a variety of poets.
Of particular interest to scholars have been the names of women appearing mainly in the margins of the manuscript: names like “Anne Schyrley,” “Margery Hungerford,” “Fraunces Crucker,” “Elisabeth Coton,” and “Elisabeth Frauncys.” All are surnames of well-known families living in the immediate vicinity of the Findern household, suggesting that a number of women from the area were united in their literary interests, and that the manuscript was a cooperative production of a group of women who were the audience as well as the scribes of the poems. It is possible that the Anne Schyrley (or “Shirley”) mentioned is the daughter of the well-known copyist and book lender John SHIRLEY (1366–1454).Many of the patrons of John Shirley’s bookshop were women, and scholars have conjectured that the Findern manuscript was produced by a group of women who gathered together to share poetry, and that they copied into the book favorite poems that they came across in borrowed manuscripts. The manuscript is thus evidence of the literacy and taste of women in the 15th century.
Perhaps more important, it is quite possible that the poetic interests of the women who produced the Findern manuscript was not limited to the reading of other people’s verse, but that many of the lyric poems preserved in the manuscript were composed by the women themselves to share with one another.Though not unlike COURTLY LOVE poems by male authors who assume a female persona, some 15 lyrics from the Findern manuscript have been proposed by scholars as the work of women poets. If this attribution is true, these poems would be among the earliest in English written by women poets. The best-known of these poems occur on folio 135r of the manuscript: Here is a cycle of four lyrics beginning “Come home, dere herte, from tareing,” expressing a woman’s lamenting the absence of her lover and ultimately rejoicing when he returns. Each poem of the cycle uses a 13-line structure, with stanzas of five, three, and five lines, rhyming aabba aab aabba. The situation is certainly one that would have been common to women of the time, and the formal aspects of the poem suggest the poet’s sophistication, but it should be noted that without other evidence, it is impossible to be certain that the author was one of the women that produced the manuscript, or even that the author was female. That attribution remains an interesting but unproven theory.
Bibliography
■ Beadle, Richard and A. E. B. Owen, eds. The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library ms. Ff. 1. 6. New York: British Book Centre, 1977.
■ Hanson-Smith, Elizabeth. “A Woman’s View of Courtly Love: The Findern Anthology,” Journal of Women’s Studies in Literature 1 (1979): 179–194.
■ McNamer, Sarah. “Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-Versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript.” Viator 22 (1991): 279–310.
■ Robbins, Rossell Hope. “The Findern Anthology,” PMLA 69 (1954): 610–642.