Poems from BL MS Harley 913, 'the Kildare Manuscript'

"British Library MS Harley 913 is known as the 'Kildare Manuscript' from the authorship of one of the poems by Friar Michael of Kildare. This important Anglo-Irish anthology of English, Anglo-Norman and Latin was compiled by a Franciscan, perhaps in Waterford in the 1330s. It is best known for two poems, often anthologized: 'The Land of Cockaygne,' a fantasy of a sexual and culinary paradise, and the mordant lullaby 'Lollai, lollai, litel child', but others are equally fine. The poems are presented here for the first time in their literary and cultural context. The collection offers the earliest evidence for the English language in Ireland, as well as texts dealing specifically with Irish affairs , the Franciscan order, and Goliardic satire. The English and Anglo-Norman poems are edited complete, with detailed annotation and glossaries, and full descriptions are given of the Latin texts. An appendix gives details of a seventeenth-century copy in BL MS lansdowne 418 of eleven of the texts, including five now lost from Harley 913."--