Discover Middle English...

Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Eds) 

The Epitaffe of the moste noble & valyaunt Iasper late duke of Beddeforde is a late fifteenth- century verse elegy for Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII, who died in December 1495. It survives in a single, undated, printed copy in the Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge, very probably produced in London by Richard Pynson shortly after Jasper’s death. The Epitaffe appears to be the earliest piece of English verse by a living poet to be printed. It combines eulogy of Jasper with a lament for his death and with more generalized reflections on human loss and suffering. One unusual feature is the wide range of verse forms that it employs: in number and elaborateness these far exceed those appearing together in any other single Middle English poem. It is also notable for the variety of its rhetorical techniques, identified in the printed edition by marginal annotations without precedent in the presentation of English verse. This is the first critical edition of the Epitaffe.