The Poems of Laurence Minot, 1333-1352
Medieval Institute Publications
1996
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Little is known about fourteenth-century poet Laurence Minot, though his political convictions and proximity to military information suggest a position in the courts of King Edward III. Minot’s eleven Middle English poems celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and the continent between 1333 and 1352, in a conflict that would become the Hundred Years’ War. Together, these poems—seemingly written immediately after the battles—form a propagandistic chronicle of military feats that ultimately glorify the English army. Minot’s verse is animated by an ardent patriotism that often manifests as denigration against the enemy Scots and French. Richard Osberg identifies the dialect as Lincolnshire, and links the texts’ alliteration, prosody, and lexicon to political lyrics found in MS Harley 2253. Osberg pieces together the extant evidence about Minot into a speculative biography and brings to light a series of poems that has been largely neglected.
