“Cantelena Reprobanda”: A Sixteenth-Century Remembrance of a Secret Love

The “Cantelena Reprobanda” is a short poem written in the early sixteenth century on a blank leaf in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s copy of The Boke of Saint Albans (printed in 1486). The poem memorializes a forbidden love that is unchanging due to the death of the beloved. Acrostics and cipher writing in the poem identify the subject and the author as Elizabeth Basset and Thomas Berkeley. This article provides an edition of the poem, discusses its rhetoric in relation to late medieval courtly lyrics, and proposes that it was written by Thomas Berkeley, 6th Baron Berkeley, shortly before his death in 1534.