Once, Middle English popular romances were derided as trite mediocrities. They were written by hacks or minstrels, aimed at an unsophisticated audience who would have been unable to appreciate anything of higher literary value. They were unworthy of serious critical attention. But since the late 1980s, they have come back into fashion. The 1988 Gregynog conference on Medieval Romance in England has been repeated every other year, and studies by Susan Crane and Helen Cooper, and collections edited by Nicola McDonald, Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter, to name just a few, bear witness to what is now a thriving academic field. The artistry of many of these romances has been demonstrated, and they have been recognised as political texts, responding to the issues of the day and challenging and reinforcing medieval ideologies and social relations. This book proposes that Middle English biblical poetry has been similarly unfairly derided and overlooked, and is due its turn in the spotlight. Because they adapt biblical material, the poems have been thought of as nothing more than ‘paraphrases’, a term that suggests little creativity and even less interest, and editorial titles such as A Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament have not helped these unfortunate texts. But many are as rich, lively, interesting and creative as any of their romance contemporaries. They also have just as much to say as do the romances about their own historical moment: lineage, family, marriage and reputation are prominent concerns.

This book will explore six biblical poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; another Adam poem, the Canticum de Creatione; Iacob and Iosep; A Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet’s Patience and Cleanness. Together with two fifteenth-century poems, The Storie of Asneth and The Life of Job, which I have discussed elsewhere, these constitute all the extant Middle English poems that retell individual narrative episodes from the Old Testament. The six poems in this book were all written between the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which mandated the vernacular instruction of the laity, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–09, which sought to control and limit biblical translation into English. So, although in most cases their exact dates are unknown, and their immediate writing contexts seem to have differed, they share a certain cultural moment.