Laments

As I suspected 'The Lament of the Last Survivor' had nothing to do with AS poetry, but I think was a humourous reference to himself and the state of English studies. It was an extremely entertaining send up of some of the more bizarre and awful trends in modern medieval scholarship and compare and contrasting the present state with the 'good/bad' (delete as appropriate) old times when he was an undergraduate, of having DS Brewer come to Bermingham and seeing him as at the cutting edge of criticism, invigourating the study of the subject there. He then went on to propose a rehabilitation of an appreciation of the 'poetry' of Chaucer, and to see just how good it is. We are so afraid to say that now aren't we? And we are so afraid to say that Lydgate is simply not as good. That simple.

I'm off to see a 14th C Ovid MS in Balliol.