. . . if not a name.
Thanks to the skilled, diligent, and ingenious scholarship of the late Carter Revard, we know where (Ludlow and Hereford) and when (1314-1349) the Harley scribe was working (see in Fein, ed. [2000], pp. 21-109).
Most Middle English MSS and their texts are anonymous, and usually only through internal evidence (local dialects of the texts, historical references) can we historicize them to some degree. For example, by the mid-twentieth century Brook, ed. (1948, 1956) could confidently assert: “The West Midland origin of the manuscript suggested by the dialect is supported by the occurrence in it of the Latin lives of three saints who have associations with that area” (p. 3). Ker, ed. (1965) provided a more detailed paleographical analysis and content analysis to locate the MS’s origins in the cathedral city of Hereford (pp. xxi-xxii).
Although in my green and salad days as a baby scholar in the waning of the New Criticism the lack of a historical context might not have bothered me, this geographic and chronological attestation gives us useful information by which to explore the purposes and meanings of this collection, as well as understanding how it might have been experienced in the scribe’s time.
Since the Euro-American Romantic period, lyric poetry (and indeed the “lyricization” of all poetry) has been largely assumed to be ahistorical or resistant to historicizing (in ways that fiction and drama are not). Poetry is transcendent of time and place, so the sentiment goes. This assumption has been rejected by the Marxian critics (like Cary Nelson) in the second half of the twentieth century and increasingly so among the advocates of “historical poetics.”
V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen in introducing a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ) (vol. 77. no. 1):
For American historical poetics, this is achieved by showing that both formalist and historicist methods have been hobbled by overreliance on the model of subjective, overheard expression that J. S. Mill described in “What Is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry” (1833).They argue that this type of poem emerged as “lyric” late in the eighteenth century and slowly colonized all verse genres, including previously distinct lyric subgenres, to the extent that by the twentieth century there was no longer a clear line between “lyric” and poetry.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article/77/1/1/19873/Reading-Historical-Poetics
And in that issue, Yopie Print argues that: “I believe that we cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. I am committed to a historical poetics that works recursively as a loop, reading simultaneously from inside out and from outside in.” (p. 14). https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Prins_What_Is_Historical_Poetics.pdf
This historical poetics and historicizing of lyric poetry have already produced some interesting scholarly work: Birkholz (2020) exploring the “geography” of Harley 2253; Scase, ed. (2007) assembling chapters on the “geography” of vernacular manuscripts of the West Midlands from the Conquest to the sixteenth century (including Fein and Revard on Harley 2253).
The social, political, and ecclesiastical history of Hereford in the early fourteenth century will illuminate the Ludlow scribe’s work.
BL MS Harley 2253 
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