'I Have a Yong Suster'

This study explores the relationship of the Middle English lyric (primarily, though not exclusively, the secular lyric) to the various forms of folksong and popular song for which we have manuscript evidence or testimony from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The author interprets the poems in their cultural and manuscript contexts, but also applies structuralist and semiotic analytical methods as tools for a more systematic interpretive approach to material not immediately accessible to the prese…