Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (review)

Late medieval writers drew upon a rich and varied set of temporal referents, locating events in time by means, inter alia, of kings’ reigns, the changing months and seasons, the ecclesiastical calendar, astronomical phenomena, and, within each day, by bells, cock-crows, liturgical horae, mechanical clocks, and by measurements of the position of the sun. At the same time, authors were engaged with larger timescales of dynasties and empires, as well as the macrocosm of salvation history itself. Karen Smyth’s book explores this complex understanding of the temporal, focusing in particular on English literary sources from the first half of the fifteenth century. She investigates the role played by small-scale time-markings in shaping poetic narratives and explores larger-scale time structures within texts (for example, authorial and readerly awareness of the interrelationship of past, present, and future). A lengthy survey chapter is followed by five chapters that consider both narrative time-referents and larger temporal organization in works by John Lydgate (Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Fall of Princes) and Thomas Hoccleve (Regiment of Princes, Series), as well as in minor works by these two authors.

Smyth’s initial overview of “cultural narratives of time” (15) in late medieval English sources is divided into eight sections (some as short as two paragraphs). It is a wide-ranging discussion, providing much of interest in passing. Yet the treatment of any one aspect is piecemeal and at times superficial. Although Smyth stresses the need for any study of time-consciousness to be context-dependent, her own analysis disregards on occasion differences of genre, date, or purpose, or extrapolates unpersuasively from limited evidence. At times the scholarship appears to be on shaky ground. For example, Smyth cites comments purportedly from John Trevisa’s translation (completed in 1387, but here labeled “mid-fourteenth century”) of Higden’s Polychronicon as evidence of self-conscious justification of the use of time-markers as organizational structures in historical narrative (25). Yet the Trevisa quotation comes in fact from his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, the comment in question being attributed, by Trevisa and by Bartholomaeus, to Isidore of Seville (see Etymologiae III.iv.4). Seventh-century comments on the essential role that calculation and computation play in understanding and knowledge cannot serve as fourteenth-century testimony to the role of time-markings in historiography. Elsewhere, Smyth compares a three-line time-marker from Troy Book (I.1517–19) with the much more elaborate time calculation that begins the introduction to Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale (II.1–14), finding in Lydgate’s concision evidence that astronomical reckonings were, by the time of Troy Book, a normalized, expected, and hence less elaborate feature of what she somewhat bafflingly calls “vernacular English” (38). Yet the former is a moment of brief scene setting, describing the activities of royal servants as they prepare a midday meal, while the latter is a playfully self-conscious, much-amplified chronographia that precedes a warning from the Host about the dangers of wasting time. It may well be, as Smyth asserts but does not demonstrate, that what for Chaucer is novel and diverting has become commonplace and functional for Lydgate (at least in main narrative rather than in his prologues), but the shorthand presentation of evidence makes one doubt some of the sweeping conclusions drawn in this first chapter.

The subsequent chapters exploring literary texts in depth are more profitable. There are suggestive and useful summaries of how time-markers in Lydgate’s Troy Book unify action or create comparisons between events and of how references to characters’ ages operate thematically in both Troy Book and the Fall of Princes. The chapter on Hoccleve’s Series explores issues of memory, identity, and reading, demonstrating in respect of temporality Lee Patterson’s observation (quoted on 137) that the framing strategies of the Series are experimental and evolving rather than fully planned and coherent. Smyth is well read in...