Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (review)

Even ten years ago it would have been unusual to find the words “Lydgate” and “matters” occurring in close proximity, unless perhaps they were quickly followed by the words “very little.” Much has changed in the last decade, and this collection of essays earns a distinguished place alongside the other recent studies that have changed our understanding of John Lydgate’s importance to English literature: the work of James Simpson, Nigel Mortimer, and Maura Nolan and the essays collected by Simpson and Larry Scanlon. The value of this collection lies in its focus on material culture and materiality in a more abstract sense. In a lucid introduction, Lisa Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown explore the range of meanings that “mater(e)” can have in Lydgate’s poetry: subject matter, inner meaning, “but also the body that weighs us down and holds us back; the objects, both necessary and less so, with which we furnish our everyday lives; and the intellectual and spiritual illumination that we urgently seek to find and strain toward when it seems within our grasp” (3). This generous definition provides a framework for a collection of essays that differ in their interpretation of materiality, and consequently in the vision of John Lydgate that they offer. Instead of being a weakness, this diversity offers the reader a nuanced exploration of the contribution that attention to material culture can make to the study of medieval poetry. The essays in this volume offer new insights into Lydgate’s poetry and confer new importance on texts that had previously seemed unpromising objects of analysis.

Three of the essays focus on the material form of Lydgate’s poetry, or the material relationships out of which individual poems emerged. Collectively, they contribute to our understanding of Lydgate’s relationship with London’s elites, specifically the corporations and individuals for whom he executed commissions during the late 1420s and early 1430s. As Michelle R. Warren puts it, “‘material Lydgate’ is essentially ‘London Lydgate’” (114). Claire Sponsler offers an essential caveat to the developing view of Lydgate as a contributor to an emerging public culture. Responding to recent assertions of Lydgate’s ability to project a civic voice that constructs an imaginary but representative public, Sponsler reminds us that the actual public for which Lydgate deployed his voice comprised a tiny elite. Lydgate’s London poems participate in “civic-sponsored, top-down events expected by the crown . . . and private, coterie-audience entertainments” (19); the manuscripts such as Shirley’s anthologies that preserve these poems achieved a limited circulation among the same elites. Sponsler’s cogent essay portrays Lydgate’s London poems as part of an official culture. While this culture can imagine itself as public and representative, the material contexts of its performance and circulation narrowly circumscribe the extent to which Lydgate’s poetry can be understood to participate in an emerging public sphere. Michelle Warren also explores Lydgate’s relations with his elite London patrons, and uncovers remarkable similarities between his London productions and the Arthurian translations of Henry Lovelich. While Lovelich’s circle of patronage and readership was dominated by the Skinners’ Guild, and was thus narrower than Lydgate’s, both authors envision a public function for their writing that links civic interests to a vision of community, and cultivate comparable poetic styles that assert their literary quality through dilation. Warren offers an illuminating comparison of Lovelich’s awareness of “the materiality of textual production and reception” (126) with that of John Shirley, who played such an important role in preserving Lydgate’s London poems: both understand writing as a physical activity that produces material objects. Among the most spectacular objects linked to Lydgate’s poetry is perhaps the “steyned halle” commissioned by the Armorers’ Guild. Jennifer Floyd makes a convincing case that this “halle” was a series of large-format painted textiles on which Lydgate’s Legend of St. George appeared in...