From John Shirley’s chatty incipits to the petitionary envois of courtly poetry, medieval lyrics often come down to us attached to specific situations. By situation we mean both the immediate rhetorical occasion that a poem addresses and the broader social circumstances that give rise to it. Responding to the recent renewal of scholarly interest in Middle English lyric (e.g. Ingrid Nelson’s Lyric Tactics [Penn] and What Kind of Thing Is Middle English Lyric?, ed. Nicholas Watson and Cristina Cervone [Penn]), this panel will explore the critical affordances of the situation, as opposed to broader frameworks such as context or history, in the study of vernacular lyric. What social, religious, and/or political pressures do these situations mediate? What strategies do poems use to formally constitute scenes of address while remaining embedded in networks of patronage and circulation? How do situations hold lyric poems apart from, or bind them more firmly to, the material structures that preserve lyric? And how should lyric situations be incorporated into new editions of Middle English poetry?