John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England

by Larry Scanlon (Editor), James Simpson (Editor)

Essays in this volume argue that it is time for a powerful reassessment of John Lydgate's poetic projects. The pre-eminent poet of his own century, Lydgate (c. 1370-1449) addressed the historical challenges of war with France, of looming civil war, and of new theological forces in the vernacular. He wrote for household, parish, city, monastery, Church, and state. Although an official poet of sorts―perhaps the first major official poet in the English poetic tradition―he was not by any means a merely celebratory or sycophantic writer. Instead, he drew on his authority as monk to shape a contestative poetic space, underlining the grief and treacherousness of power. Despite his exceptional cultural significance, Lydgate has, for different reasons, been marginalized by many literary historical movements since the sixteenth century. John Lydgate is energized by the challenge of an oeuvre so large and so ripe for reevaluation. Each essay here makes a decisive contribution to an area of Lydgate's corpus, and opens fresh perspectives for further investigation.

Contributors write about Lydgate from a variety of critical perspectives and underscore the poet's diverse writings, which included beast fables, mummings, hagiographical and devotional poetry, and civic pageants. The essays also reassess better-known works and themes in the field of Lydgate studies, including Lydgate's unofficial laureateship, his relations to his patrons, and his relationship to Chaucer. This book makes an important contribution to medieval scholarship and it will be welcomed by scholars and students alike.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2006

Reviews

[. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tradition is repressive, a repository of dead conventions; those few, singular authors still worth reading are the ones whose genius enabled them to transcend tradition. This notion is one of modernity's most characteristic convictions."

A conviction which this collection of essays attempts to overturn; and if Lydgate is in fact to be taken seriously as a major poet then his oeuvre opens out as, perhaps, the largest unexplored terrain of Middle English literature.

The first hurdle to his work however is this 'uneasy syntax', a misunderstanding which seems largely to have arisen as a result of the misplaced grammatical expectations of his Victorian compilers: far from being hopelessly prolix, Lydgate's verse has a great connectiveness which makes use of far larger units of sense-making than can easily be translated into our modern stanza format. His syntax is simply parataxic (using adjacent clauses) rather than hypotaxic (using subordinate and relative clauses), a style which cannot always be readily discerned without the use of semi-colons and other tricks of modern punctuation.

"Had Lydgate's poems been as widely read and as frequently edited as Chaucer's, no doubt his texts would now benefit from more refined presentation."

Other important aspects of his work this book considers are: his aesthetics, his civic interests, his mumming plays, his hagiographies, his relationship with the monastic Library of Bury and the humanist library of Duke Humphrey, his reputation for being a propagandist and the 'ironic gap' we actually discover, and finally his role as a poet laureate - uniquely situated between politics and culture.