EVERYONE READING THIS volume, or so I imagine, knows that addictive pleasure of looking up a word in a dictionary and emerging, perhaps hours later, with any number of paths taken, redoubled, veered from, and lost along. Online tools have made that all the easier, and more swiftly immersive. The activity is both current and dredged in history: search engines have long existed, just in different forms and media. The implications for reading, for hermeneutics, for epistemology have again long been recognized to be at the core of pedagogy, and hence of what it is to study, and of what one studies and why. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae sive origines (Etymologies or Origins) compiled in the early seventh century and the OED's online riches belong to a history of word study in which a kind of obsessive curiosity about lexical connections passes down centuries. If modern historical linguists think about etymology in different ways from Isidore, with their careful scientific tracking of phoneme shifts back some 5,500 years to proto-Indo-European, then modern literary scholars and theorists of language perhaps share more of the playful enjoyment of puns, linguistic oddities and solecisms, strange histories of meaning and extrapolation that characterize Isidore's voluminous musings. They also develop architecturally complex theories and terminologies to describe lexical connectivity, of which intertextuality and deconstruction are perhaps the most intensely self-questioning yet mundanely collapsible.

The four words explored in this section, consent, entente, pite, and slider, inhabit many forms of connectivity. Each essay explores patterns of meaning traced through Chaucer's writings in slightly different ways though with a similar methodology: the use of dictionaries and concordances. Somerset's tracking of consent finds it to be part of an assonantal pairing with assent: at key moments in the Canterbury Talesand in Troilus and Criseyde, characters are shown to be put under various kinds of pressure to agree or assert, yet without seeming to show due caution for where such assent might lead them. It turns out that Chaucer repeatedly plays with the sound not only of assent and consent but also with the further rhyme entente; a neat trio of chiming, colliding proximities that draws the audience's attention to a web of fluctuating situations playing off coercion and acceptance, resistance and compliance.

More, it seems, than any other of Chaucer's works, the Book of the Duchess epitomises citation. The density of its textural tissue is noted by many of the contributors to this volume. It is possible to track three-quarters of its lines to other poems, largely French verse narratives. So well known a fact hardly bears repeating; yet there is surprisingly little discussion of what this might mean to our sense of how and why Chaucer composed the poem in this form. For although most of his poems draw directly or indirectly on what have traditionally been called ‘sources’, none does so with quite the kaleidoscopic abandon of the Book of the Duchess over such a concentrated stretch of writing. Traditional source study, by meticulously identifying the detail and range of these borrowings, and labelling them thematically and line by line, has been as distorting as it has been illuminating. We are left puzzling over the simultaneously thick stuff of reference and the minute detail of its cross-hatched character, of the way individual ‘source’ texts seem broken up into pieces and intricately recombined with utter disregard for their original linearity. Chaucer appears to veer from text to text, at one moment through word-by-word translation and at another through large-scale structural amplification or compression, and then back to the word-by-word translation. It's not the allusiveness per se, but the seemingly random character of the citational process that catches our attention.

For this reason, the Book of the Duchess also epitomises why source study fails. A list of parallels does not make sense of either a reading or a composing process. If we were to take the list at face value, then we would have to imagine Chaucer in a great modern library or, as Ruth Evans has wittily described, in cyberspace, as if he had (like his modern critics) too many windows open on his laptop and was cutting and pasting from his internet searches as he wrote. In fact, as Evans also points out, the uncanny (and of course unlikely) appropriateness of this model to Chaucer's compositional methods should not be dismissed too swiftly.

“Enchanting” is the word used by Peter Dronke of this much anthologized ballad- like song:

His reading declares the “maiden” a water sprite from German folksong, a creature who appears mysteriously “at village dances in the guise of a beautiful human girl” and then at an appointed time returns to the moor where she feeds on flowers and drinks the water from a spring. Perhaps, says Dronke, writing with his typical passion and imagination, this English song represents a mime with the girl playing queen of the dance while her admirers offer her food and drink before she vanishes.

Anyone who has followed the fortunes of this song will know that it became an icon of mid-twentieth-century attempts to “negotiate the past.” Caught between the Scylla of Robertsonian exegesis and the Charybdis of Donaldsonian New Criticism, the maiden found herself metamorphosing back and forth from sprite to holy virgin. Less conspicuously, another metamorphosis was taking place. In each reprinting, in each new anthology, the maiden was set within a fresh text: there are some twenty editions. Yet the controversy of the poem's textual form has attracted far less attention than the battle over its sacred or secular meaning. This essay, in homage to perhaps the first and best New Critic of medieval literature, will offer an exegesis, not of the poem's spirituality but of its “living form.”

The Maiden in the manuscript

Our first and last recourse is the unique manuscript.

Equivalence and Competence

Translation is often associated with equivalence. The goal of the translator in modern times is to create a seamless transition between a text and its translation, which is supposed to be marked by the ‘absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities’. ‘All that is foreign or strange’ should be ‘deleted, every rough corner smoothed’. Such an emptying out of the translator's role as a writer brings the reward of a reader who imagines that he or she is actually reading the original work. But this assumed achievement is impoverished by what many perceive as vitiating costs. Nabokov, while he was engaged in translating Pushkin, passionately exclaimed that the claim that ‘so-and-so's translation reads smoothly’ sent him into ‘spasms of helpless fury’. A ‘readable’ translation has merely ‘substituted easy platitudes for the breath taking intricacies of the text’. As well as Nabokov's amour propre about the kind of respect that should be offered to a great writer's work, there has been much passionate objection on ethical grounds. No translation is innocently neutral, nor should seek to be. Every lexical choice, every syntactic choice, is freighted with social and cultural assumptions that shape the resulting prose or poetry, sometimes in ways that work against or even betray the original text: traduttore/traditore [translator/traitor].

Prima lamusica, poi le parole: this assertion, the title of an opera by Antonio Salieri, wittily alludes to the conundrum faced by any poetic and musical collaboration. In the story of the opera the music is already written and the harassed poet is told he must write the verse to fit the music in just four days. It is not important, according to the musician, for the music to convey the meaning of the words. But of course this is a joke that works by inverting the usual expectations of any text–music relationship, especially in opera. One of the primary aims of this chapter will be to assess the character of this relationship in its earliest formation in the medieval period. Poetry and music come together in vernacular song to create some of the most subtly exquisite survivals of medieval music. The art of the troubadours in the twelfth century, closely followed by that of the trouvères in the thirteenth, persists in our time as one of the most vividly enduring images, not only of the medieval singer, but also of song tout court, and of the Middle Ages in general.

Yet many questions remain about the character of this art. It seems not only paramount but impossible to decide which comes first, the poetry or the music. In communicating so strongly across the centuries, medieval song teases us with the question of what it is communicating and whether what we hear or perform as we re-create it bears any relation to what was heard or performed in the Middle Ages.

This famous brief song, which has caught the imagination of many modern readers, encapsulates both the attraction and the complexity involved in interpreting medieval lyrics. The direct, lightly ironic first-person voice speaks so clearly across the centuries that we hear its tone and feel its desire as if the speaker were within hailing distance. This song functions perfectly as a modern lyric: it is short and condensed, it is personal and erotic, it even swears with a modern expletive accent and emphasis. Yet for many readers there will be a nagging doubt about the validity of this description: can a medieval writer really have been as frankly secular as this, so individual, so mockingly post-modern? “Westron wind” must surely be more medieval than it looks. Sure enough, some of these suspicions are confirmed by its sources. Only one copy survives, as it happens with music, in a sixteenth-century Tudor song book (BL MS Royal Appendix 58, fo. 5): it must date from earlier than this, but we have no way of telling how much. All we know is that it also crops up in settings of the mass by the sixteenth-century composers John Taverner, Christopher Tye, and John Sheppard. Such premodern liturgical contexts seem a powerful corrective to any sense of the song's self-sufficient erotic secularity.

How then should we read “Westron wind”? Much twentieth-century criticism has been rebuking: assuring us that “late Middle English love lyrics were seldom, if ever, purely literary distillations of moments of intense, private emotion.” Medieval short verse is essentially practical, formulaic, devoid of intellectual ideas, imagery, or paradox, and above all, religious. The problem is that “Westron wind” and others like it have proved stubbornly resistant to such rebukes: however much they demand to be interpreted historically in one way, they seem to speak in another.