John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame by Mary C. Flannery (review)

Students of late medieval English literature who have not yet jumped onto the Lydgate bandwagon may raise their eyebrows at the appearance of another monograph devoted to the fifteenth-century poet and Benedictine monk, joining the recent studies by Maura Nolan and Nigel Mortimer (which both appeared in 2005). They may be especially skeptical of what may seem this present study’s narrow thematic focus on “the poetics of fame,” in contrast with Nolan’s more capacious investigation of fifteenth-century public culture or Mortimer’s exhaustive treatment of Lydgate’s mammoth Fall of Princes (written during the 1430s). Yet, as Flannery astutely points out, fame lies at the heart of how ambitious late medieval poets like Lydgate understood the nature and purpose of their public artistic enterprise, and in this central role the concept (and practice) of fame carried a set of problems that connected it to larger cultural, political, and judicial issues, which in turn vexed the poetic vocation as much as empowered it. The therefore only apparently narrow point of departure of Flannery’s study is her recognition of the semantic breadth and fluidity of the concept of fame in this period, how it took in, much more potently than it does today, a range of meanings from “renown,” “reputation,” “rumor,” to that which we now call “news” or even just “information.” In short, in the fifteenth century, fame denoted mobile speech, and poets like Lydgate were culturally positioned to capture this speech in some semidurable, positively or negatively evaluated form, producing texts that would in turn become mobile in respect to their authors’ intentions and artistic statures.

The touchstone for these ideas, for both Lydgate and us, is of course Chaucer’s House of Fame (ca. 1380), and Flannery’s basic argument is that Lydgate’s attitude toward the poetic potency of fame—as especially evident in the Fall of Princes—differs profoundly from the one that Chaucer displays in this work and elsewhere. Flannery contends that for Chaucer fame in all its forms is a remorselessly, inescapably, uncontrollably contingent force, and all a poet may do in confrontation with this force is to thematize the many dimensions of one’s helplessness before its power and perhaps wistfully imagine one’s transcendence of it. In contrast, Flannery argues, Lydgate—while he was certainly aware of fame’s capriciousness, mobility, and volatility—understood it as both the fundamental matter and aim of the poet laureate (in the Petrarchan sense of that role), whose agency in respect to this force defined the poet’s value and purpose. As Flannery states in her concluding sentences, “In his laureate ambitions and his refiguring of the poet’s relationship with contingency, Lydgate proved himself to be an anti-Chaucerian poet, subjecting fame to his will. His poetic of fame enabled him to fashion a new role for himself: that of a poet capable of reaching not just for the laurel crown, but for the very throne of Fame herself” (p. 157).

This attractive account of Lydgate’s sense of poetic agency and of his contrast with Chaucer valuably advances existing arguments about Lydgate, particularly those put forward by Paul Strohm in Politique (2005) and Lois Ebin in Illuminator, Makar, Vates (1988) (and indeed the overlaps between Flannery’s study and these two, especially the latter, are somewhat broader than Flannery acknowledges). John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame thus succeeds at moving Lydgate studies forward, expanding our understanding of the complexities and distinctiveness of Lydgate’s literary achievements. As a monograph-long study, however, it has a couple of shortcomings, one practical and the other conceptual.

The former problem pertains to how Flannery has chosen to fit her argument to the size of a monograph. Oddly, for a relatively short book, this one feels overlong, and this impression derives from Flannery’s tendency, rather than to deepen her argument by complicating it conceptually, to broaden it by seeking support in historical...