Stirps Anne Beate: An Unpublished Middle English Poem.

The editio princeps of an alliterative poem of devotion to the mother of the Virgin, first noted by R. H. Robbins from Aberdeen University Library MS. 123, fol. 131v. The poem is in eight nine-line stanzas featuring four long lines (with internal and end-rhyme aaaa, bbbb, respectively), a single-stress “bob,” three shorter lines corresponding to the halves of the longer lines (rhyming ccc), and a final two-stress line which rhymes with the “bob.” The language is that of the Northwest; the subject matter is drawn largely from the medieval tradition of St. Anne as recorded in the Legenda Aurea.