This short lyric is extant in a single manuscript dated after 1461 to 1500 (based on its inclusion of a chronicle mentioning Edward IV: see “Detailed Record for Harley 116” in the British Library’s online manuscript catalogue), which also includes Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, a frequent manuscript companion to Lydgate’s Dance of Death.

The poem is an address by Death to young women who pay attention to their good looks. To underscore the transitory quality of their beauty, Death implicitly compares the young women to ephemeral creatures, whose time on earth is fleeting (“Sone shalte thu flytte . . . Shorte is thy sesoun here . . . ,” lines 4–5). In the second and third stanzas, Death’s relentlessness emerges in stark contrast to the fragile beauty evoked in the opening stanza, as Death describes his actions and attributes in increasingly violent terms: “I marke thee with my mace . . . I manace . . . my lace [snare] . . . I smyte, I sle . . . ” (lines 6–14), which we also see in the danse macabre tradition. The use of “pray” in line 9, in address to the young women, further underscores Death as a predator or hunter stalking after defenseless animals about to be caught in his trap. In this way, articulating the familiar characterization of women as prey before a predator, the lyric evokes connotations of sexual violence, suggesting that Death here is being gendered male. The lyric goes on to exhort the young women to “awake” from their vanity and pay heed to their eternal salvation (line 15).

The lyric’s French rubric is noteworthy given its explicit address to a female audience. Its use of French speaks to the preponderance of Frenchlanguage conduct literature aimed at women that was composed and consumed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of which Watriquet de Couvin’s Miroer as dames (1324), Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (1371–72), and Le Menagier de Paris (c. 1393) are prime examples. For discussions of these and other texts see, in particular, Medieval Conduct, ed. Ashley and Clark; and Burger, Conduct Becoming.

The French rubric of our English poem also points to the French cultural context of the danse macabre tradition. As Francis Utley notes, the French rubric to this poem evokes a French poem on similar themes, which opens with the lines, “Mirez vous cy, dames et damoiselles, / Mirez vous cy et regardés ma face. / Helas! pensez, se vous estes bien belles, / Comment la mort toute beauté efface” (lines 1–4: Behold yourselves here, ladies and maidens, / Behold yourself here and look at my face. / Alas! consider, if you are very beautiful, / How death effaces all beauty) (Crooked Rib, pp. 190–91, for full text of poem see Söderhjelm, “Le miroir des dames,” pp. 31–35, translation our own). This similar French poem features a female speaker mourning the imminent progressive decomposition of her body in a French iteration of the Signs of Death genre. It is, furthermore, found in a manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, naf. 10032) that also contains the Danse macabre and the Danse macabre des femmes, which opens with almost the same wording.

Our English work is further distinguished by its formal complexity. Unusually, the lyric inverts its rhyme scheme in the second stanza, thus abbba-baaab-abbba (see further Cutler, “A Middle English Acrostic,” pp. 88–89). Through this inversion, the lyric fosters a sense of the middle stanza’s being caught by the tight framing of stanzas 1 and 3, thus formally mirroring the lyric’s claustrophobic theme of Death as a hunter seizing his prey. In keeping with the notion of catching or binding and its formal reflection within the lyric’s structure, the entire work itself is an acrostic evidently intended to spell out MORS SOLVIT OMNIA, or “death loosens all,” although the lyric’s only manuscript substitutes a “B” for the necessary “N” in OMNIA. Cutler notes that this phrase is also associated with the well-known lyric “Erthe upon Erthe,” similarly a work that treats the transitory and fleeting nature of earthly possessions (“A Middle English Acrostic,” p. 89). Thus, this lyric’s content emphasizes the capture of living creatures in the tight grip of Death, as mirrored on the metapoetic level by the lyric’s internal rhyme structure. Meanwhile, in contrast, the lyric’s superstructure of the acrostic highlights the notion of death as the ultimate release from earthly bonds.

Manuscript:

• London, British Library, MS Harley 116, fols. 128r–v

Editions:

• Brown, Carleton Fairchild, ed. “A Mirror for Young Ladies at their Toilet.” In Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1939. P. 241.

• Cutler, John L., ed. “No. 2136, A Mirror for Young Ladies at their Toilet.” In “A Middle English Acrostic.” Modern Language Notes 70.2 (1955), 88.

• Silverstein, Theodore, ed. “Cest le Myrroure pur les Iofenes Dames.” In Medieval English Lyrics. London: Edwin Arnold Ltd., 1971. Pp. 121–22.