John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (review)

Scanlon and Simpson have done a fine job in bringing together a range of essays on Lydgate and his works, which challenge our preconceived notions of the quality and nature of Lydgate's writing, and open up questions about literary culture in fifteenth century England. The essays include: 'Lydgate's Uneasy Syntax' by Phillipa Hardman, 'Lydgate's Laureate Pose' by Robert J. Meyer-Lee, 'Lydgate's Poetics: Laureation and Domesticity in the Temple of Glass' by Larry Scanlon, 'Propaganda, Intentionality, and the Lancastrian Lydgate' by Scott-Morgan Straker, '"For al my body…weieth nat an unce": Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate's Churl and the Bird' by James Simpson, 'Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London' by C. David Benson, 'The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate's Mummings' by Maura B. Nolan, '"Stable in Study": Lydgate's Fall of Princes and Duke Humphrey's Library' by Jennifer Summit, 'Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the late Middle Ages' by Rita Copeland, '"Hard is with seyntis for to make affray": Lydgate the "Poet-Propagandist" as Hagiographer' by Fiona Somerset, and '"Was it not Routhe to Se?":Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom' by Ruth Nisse.

Each of these essays presents a reassessment of Lydgate's writing, and poses questions regarding Lydgate's literary status. Lydgate as monk, civic commentator, scholar and writer are each explored in a range of contexts across his writing. Each author makes an explicit attempt to understand Lydgate's work without reliance on 'nineteenth century aesthetic ideals' (Scanlon and Simpson, introduction, p. 2). The lively quality of the writing is captured in the types of questions that are asked: 'Was Lydgate a terrible, heavy-handed fool? Or was he a light-footed poet, taking risks?' (Simpson, p. 142), and the ways in which assumptions are challenged: 'Because we know a priori that Lydgate was congenitally subservient and a bit thick, we must attribute any inconsistencies in his work not to his volition but to the intractability of his task' (Straker, p. 107).

The question of Lydgate's volition is particularly well explored, especially in the essays by Hardman, Straker, Simpson, Benson and Nolan. Each of these authors, in their own way, asks us to view Lydgate's work from within the context of the fifteenth century and the political, literary and social environment in which he wrote, rather than applying nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of structure, culture and aesthetics. Hardman's essay is a very satisfying reassessment of Lydgate's use of syntax. She argues that Lydgate's so-called 'uneasy syntax' is in fact 'the result of stylistic devices, intended to create specific effects' (p. 30). Her essay, appearing early in the book, offers the reader a gateway into understanding many of the ideas and themes that emerge in the following studies. Straker's study is typical of the reassessment of Lydgate, which favours the assumption that he was clever and skilful, rather than 'monumentally stupid' (p. 116). This positivist interpretation opens up the opportunity for the reader to see 'the ironic gap between Lydgate's utterance about his patron and his intentional state' (p. 116).

Propaganda and the notion of Lydgate as 'poet laureate' are also well explored by Meyer-Lee, Scanlon, Straker and Benson. This theme is further explored by Somerset's examination of Lydgate's awareness of the role of hagiography in the community as a religious genre, as well as its potential for use as 'propaganda' by skilful, informed writers. Nisse's study of Lydgate's representation of martyrdom, particularly child martyrs, is a fascinating account of the interaction of hagiography, politics and the writer's use of text as a way to connect with both the past and present. Lydgate as scholar and intellectual, drawing on numerous texts and ideas of writing, and the place of his scholarship in fifteenth-century thinking, is explored by Summit and Copeland. These two...