Abstract

A most excruciating handicap for the understanding and appraisal of medieval poetry, especially lyric poetry, is our limited knowledge of its context. In many cases we know nothing at all about the author, about his or her character and the situation in and for which a poem was written, about the intended audience, or about the way in which a text, say the Corpus Christi plays, was presented. Now and then the manuscript environment may furnish a hint, or another text may provide a clue , but by and large the available information is minimal, to the point that an ingenious critic has been forced to reconstruct the context of “poems without context” from the texts themselves