“The Twenty-five Joys of Our Lady” is a study, examination, and critical edition of an unpublished fifteenth-century Middle English prose devotion preserved in Bodleian Library MS Don. d. 85. It is here associated with twenty-five “Joys of Our Lady” and presented as a vernacular Marian rosary, the first such to be identified in the period. The introduction to the edition considers early liturgical influences upon what became the tradition of Our Lady's Joys, their late-medieval development both across Europe and across England, and the circumstances that usually indicated fewer in number than is present in the devotion printed here. The introduction also concerns itself with the presence and practice of the rosary itself in late-medieval England and elsewhere and the limited evidence that has come down to us for its presence and circulation in England, including woodcut evidence in Caxton and allusions in other Latin devotions. It further indicates an ambiguity in this devotion's treatment of Christ's passion and concludes by considering the role and importance of joy as a pervasive, if often ignored, Christian attitude present in late-medieval English devotion.

Paul Kavanagh's recent article on Robert Lowell's ‘For the Union Dead’ clearly shows the relevance of Colonel Shaw's sacrifice to the poem and usefully emphasizes its Civil War associations. What is perhaps less clear in his investigation is Lowell's debt to the present, and the extent to which that debt ultimately defines the direction of the poem. Early in his study, for example, Kavanagh remarks ‘Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw’: it may be added that the two structures are physically present on Beacon Hill above Boston Common where the garage was built, and, although contrary to the implication in the poem they were not propped up because of the excavation, they do face each other across Beacon Street in dramatic – or ironic – contrast. Yet there are many such contrasts in the poem, expressed or implied. From the ‘Sahara of snow’ and the boarded windows of the second line, to the ‘savage servility’ of the next to last, the whole city seems locked in an aura of unresolved opposites and stifling contradictions. Chief among these is the opposition between Colonel Shaw and the narrator, neither of whom emerges as either heroic or objectively ‘right’.