Lydgate’s Chaucer

This chapter explores the ways in which the fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate read and used Chaucer’s writing. Lydgate was crucial to the construction of Chaucer’s reputation, but the terms of Lydgate’s praise are ambiguous. This chapter explores three specific moments and different modes of Lydgatian emulation: in ‘The Mumming at Bishopswood’; the Prologue to The Siege of Thebes; and in poems written for and about Thomas and Alice Chaucer (Geoffrey Chaucer’s son and grand-daughter). I show how closely Lydgate worked with Chaucer’s work, but I also argue that Lydgate’s formal and lexical emulation of Chaucer does not equate to uncritical borrowing: Lydgate repeatedly finds new ways in which to imagine, and reshape, Chaucer’s poetic oeuvre.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.

Last Words

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book will reveal where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. This book will include documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and will introduce a new life record for Hoccleve, identify the author of a significant political poem, and reveal the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England

This article examines a manuscript poem composed by the seventeenth-century author John Lane. Writing in what is now London, British Library, Harley MS 5243, Lane revives the medieval poet John Lydgate in order to re-tell the story of Guy of Warwick, famous from medieval romance. In Lane’s poem, Lydgate returns from beyond the grave to proclaim the historicity of Guy’s legend and simultaneously preserve his own reputation as a chronicler of English history. While some scholars suggest that Lydgate’s popularity declined in the post-Reformation period due to his reputation as the ‘Monk of Bury’, and while it is true that significantly fewer editions of Lydgate’s poems were published in the decades after the Reformation, Lane’s poem offers another window into Lydgate’s early modern reputation. I argue that Lane’s historiographic technique in his Guy of Warwick narrative mirrors Lydgate’s own poetic histories. Both Lane and Lydgate grapple with existing historical resources and compose their narratives by compiling the accreted traditions of the past, supplementing these traditions with documentary sources and artefacts. This article, thus, complicates existing scholarly narratives that align Lydgate with medieval or monastic traditions, traditions perceived to be irrecoverably transformed by the events of the Reformation in England.