John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England

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

"As a commentator on trends of Fortune, Lydgate would have enjoyed the surge of affirmative attention his poetry has begun to attract. This revisionary book radically revalues this previously maligned poet's accomplishments." —Paul Strohm, Columbia University

Essays in this volume argue for a powerful reassessment of John Lydgate's poetic projects. The preeminent English poet of his own century, Lydgate (ca. 1370-1449) addressed the historical challenges of war with France, looming civil war in England, and 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 both as poet and as monastic historian to shape a challenging literary space and to underline the treacherousness of history. Despite his exceptional cultural significance, Lydgate has, for different reasons, been marginalized by many literary historical movements since the sixteenth century. John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England is energized by the challenge of a substantial oeuvre in need of reevaluation. Each essay makes a decisive contribution to an aspect of Lydgate's work and opens fresh perspectives for further investigation.

Contributors write about Lydgate from a variety of critical perspectives and emphasize the diversity of the poet's writings beyond the city-state tragedies of Troy and Thebes. Genres discussed include beast fable, mumming, hagiography, devotional poetry, and civic pageant. The essays also reassess crucial themes in the field of Lydgate studies, including Lydgate's unofficial laureateship, his relations to his patrons, his syntax, and his relationship to Chaucer.

320 pages, Paperback

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.