The Shropshire Redemption: John Audelay’s Carols, Repetition, and Confessional Authority

In this essay, I analyze the extent to which repetition can be considered creative in the context of penitential poetry, and what the ramifications are of that pairing for our own understandings of that poetry. When sin is inherited and confessions were guided by eminently repeatable formulae, how does penitential poetry come into being for the first time and enter penitential discourse as a “makyng” that is created or made yet already received, already repeated and circulating at the moment of its birth? The carol, I argue, presents a good place to address that question: its idiosyncratic formal components present a site of creativity and repetition between text and audience, a conjunction which anticipates the dynamics of filmic montage as conceived by Sergei Eisenstein. This aspect of the carol also invites us to explore how authority is created and received in the present moment, bereft of the difference from the present moment so often involved in constructing auctoritas. In conversation with Eisenstein, the medieval penitential carol ultimately becomes a site to reconsider how poetic form can simultaneously uphold and dismantle hierarchical relationships between creators and audiences. In so doing, the penitential carol invites us to re-approach our own critical “makyngs,” which effectively channel the work of medieval poetic form from centuries past.