Author Description

When the first edition of The Early English Carols was published in 1935 it was recognized as a work of major importance in medieval literary studies. For the last 42 years, Professor Greene has continued to explore this field, in which he is the acknowledged master, and this expanded second edition is the crowning achievement of a life of scholarship. It will be welcomed not only by research students already used to finding rich quarries of material in ‘EEC’, but by the many his friends, who know him both as one of the great American medievalists, and as a man of great humanity and wit. And, like the first edition, it will bring pleasure to readers interested in medieval lyric poetry. Many of the texts have been given new musical settings by Benjamin Britten, Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and others. This revised edition adds to the collection 36 new carols (and conversely deletes three poems printed earlier) and reports 17 newly discovered variant versions together with a number of additional occurrences of texts already presented in 1935. The numbering of the first edition has been preserved, with the new items inserted in the proper places. The texts have been once more collated against the manuscripts, and both introduction and notes have been brought up to date, with special attention given to the scholarship that has been devoted to the carol between 1935 and the mid-’70s. Richard Leighton Greene (1904-1983) is credited by scholars with defining and establishing the medieval English carol as a poetic genre and musical form. Greene was Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor of English at Wesleyan University where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 1972. He began his teaching career at the University of Rochester in 1929 and stayed there until 1946. He was president of Wells College from 1946 until 1950. From 1950 until 1954 he was a visiting professor at Purdue, the University of California and the California Institute of Technology.