William A. Quinn, An Introduction to Middle English Lyrics. Gainesville, Tallahassee, et al., FL: University of Florida Press, 2025, xx, 341 pp.

Lyric is the Cinderella of Middle English literature. It has no Cavalcante or Dante or “even a Rutebeuf”; just “anonymous craftsmen” (or craftswomen?), as Douglas Gray observed in J. A. W. Bennett’s Middle English Literature (1986), p. 364. Yet Professor Quinn of Arkansas does good service for those practitioners, male and female. His book (with ninety-nine medieval English poems in its remit) has eight chapters, taking in verse that is variously sad, glad, religious, amorous (or its opposite), and artless (an issue tackled in the last chapter with an account of “negative reviewing”). After this main part come appendices on Petrarch’s lyrics and what Chaucer and Wyatt made of them. The author well brings out the charm or power or even mystery of the poems discussed, the last quality due to their (often) fragmentary state or obscure origins.