Among genre studies, studies of the lyric are perhaps the easiest to spot as topics under active investigation. Partly this is the result of studies and announcements indicating that formalism is rebounding; what more promising focus for that than a short, intricate, seemingly self-sufficient genre? Partly, too, this is because prominent critics have returned to a genre offering the best claims to define what “the literary” is, thus what the discipline of literary studies (that open territory) might essentially be. Recent years have seen Virginia Jackson's challenge to anachronistic impositions of the genre, in Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005), but also Jackson's and Jopie Prins's The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014), followed by a magisterial survey by Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (2016), which (in sharp contrast to Jackson's study, for instance) upholds the utility of the category “lyric” across the centuries, showing the poetry's own awareness of traditions beyond narrow contexts.

But it is harder for us to find such bearings for medieval short poems, and for those and other reasons the new lyric studies have rarely lingered on the Middle Ages. Culler's eight pages (64–72) are not dismissive (chronological periods are not his focus anyway), and Petrarch figures repeatedly. But it is evident that what Culler seeks is found more clearly in ancient Greek and Roman and, especially, post-medieval English and French literature, in all of whose terms Petrarch's rime sparse fit better than the poems, carols, and songs that fill anthologies of the “medieval English lyric,” wrenched from their sermons, music, narratives, and manuscript settings. Slow to absorb the set forms of short poetry on the Continent, more fully dominated intellectually by clerics than those medieval regions, and supporting three languages—with English itself disseminated in widely diverse dialects and, before the later fourteenth century, deeply subordinate socially—medieval England was unlikely to produce a Petrarch, even when medieval English poets, beginning with Chaucer, began to read him.

In Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England, Ingrid Nelson seizes on this variety acutely and illuminatingly, selecting an exemplary series of instances of short poems, mostly from the fourteenth century that allow a range of consideration of contexts and thus a range of lyric “tactics,” that is, the short poems' performative, adaptive responses to their powerful institutional or ideological or material contexts, whose workings Nelson distinguishes as “strategies” (4–5). The reader is well served by the flexibility and learning Nelson shows in choosing her cases, allowing her to display a wide range of tactics of her own. Her treatment in the first chapter of the love lyrics in the famous lyric collection copied c. 1330–40, Harley MS 2253, acutely approaches those in relation to their multilingual manuscript anthology, in which poems in one language balance, qualify, and redefine poems in others. Yet Nelson's study as a whole is not (as she reminds us) a study of lyric book collections. That important focus is given its due, then followed in the next chapter by an equally agile and precise inquiry into a different kind of interaction between lyric and setting. Thus in chapter two Nelson discusses how the fourteenth-century Franciscan William Herebert used English “hymns” (as Nelson carefully calls Herebert's short poetic effusions) to navigate between the pleasures of rhetoric and material sensuality and the didactic point of their contexts, his sermons.

These opening chapters provide keys to a large proportion of medieval English lyrics. If many a medieval lyric falls into the first category, owing its survival to its collection in a medieval anthology made for particular purposes and with particular effects, many others fall into the second, surviving only because a preacher saw fit to include it in a sermon or compose it to enliven one. Nelson's remaining two chapters are dedicated to two narrative poems by Chaucer incorporating lyrics, Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) and the Legend of Good Women (c. 1388–1396), the latter prefaced by discussion of the uses of lyric in the exemplary stories of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne (1303). Chaucer is preeminent among English poets in weaving nearly stand-alone lyrics into narrative poems, and Nelson offers a sophisticated appreciation of the effects this achieves. Troilus and Criseyde uses the isolated self-expression of “songs” to assert the increasing personal “absolutism” of Troilus's desire, eventually overmastering the principle of social “negotiation” visible elsewhere, as in the lyrics Criseyde hears. The discussion might be fruitfully applied to consider lyrics in narratives by Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate. Mannyng's earlier Handlyng Synne, a guide for confessors that expands its source's illustrative tales, allows Nelson to discuss how the medieval lyric negotiates exemplary ethical narratives. The result, she argues, is that Mannyng creates from a rigid guide a sense of open-ended ethical comparisons and questions. The discussion includes an excellent meditation on how narrative in general both supports and undermines exemplary uses, a problem that medieval authors often seem to invite.

If one virtue of this study is that its choices for case studies give it rich potential for further applications, another, paradoxically, is that it limits its selections severely. This allows Nelson to provide intensely close and careful consideration of the tactics each of these intriguing poems, codices, and authors display. The focus substantiates Nelson's deeper point, that practice is more productively examined than form, in narratology. What any poem “does” in its negotiations with contexts is the premise of a historically informed and acutely argued set of well-chosen examples. Given the range and mixtures of kinds and genres in medieval English writing generally, such a premise offers a model for studying and appreciating many more kinds of medieval writing than lyrics, whatever we choose to call them. But whether the range of tactics Nelson acutely articulates will make this excellent treatment of “lyrics” seem relevant to the longer history of the genre, as Nelson urges in her conclusion, is less certain. The medieval English lyric or short poem remains different enough from later English lyrics that, for most critics, something more than isolated instances seems necessary to bridge the divide. Perhaps only a fuller history of these tactics, following their changes and transformation into the kinds we recognize as lyric, would show the wider critical world what it is missing.