John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture by Maura Nolan (review)

REVIEWS 270 impurity”: an apologia for including all the messiness of history. He has made an excellent case. In fact, the way in which Moran ends the book leaves this reader wondering if Moran doesn’t feel that even today, the messiness continues : that our laboratory chemists are still practicing the art of Alchemy. ERIC CASTEEL, History, UCLA Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) ix + 276 pp. In a pronounced departure from established trends in Lydgate scholarship, Maura Nolan offers a nuanced reconsideration of the poet’s literary output during the minority of Henry VI. She successfully challenges the prevailing view of these works as superficial and propagandistic, asserting that these apparently instrumental texts are formally complex and fundamentally grounded in Chaucerian literary practice. Nolan identifies this textual hybridity with the conflicting notions of the “public” in the precarious years of the childking ’s reign. A broadening public sphere, which resulted in a growing audience for elite cultural material, was at odds with the Lancastrian devotion to a “publicness” of representation centered in the person of the king. These diverging views of the “public” emerge in Lydgate’s work, which addresses a narrow fictional audience of London elite even as it reaches a growing body of consumers. Lydgate manages his acrobatic shifting between these views of the “public” through a transformation of the conventional forms he uses: the envoy, the mumming, the disguising, the exemplum. Nolan argues that “literary and dramatic forms are continually deployed as a means of creating unity and stability, only to mutate as they are placed in new contexts or filled with new content” (27). While she acknowledges the historical topicality of Lydgate’s works during the minority, she resists a rigidly historicist reading of these texts on the grounds that “Lydgate’s writing during this period transcends the localities of time and place” (26). Recognizing the tension between the historical circumstances from which Lydgate derives his content and the traditional forms that he uses, Nolan insists that the history be approached through an analysis of form. Arguing through this lens, she detects under Lydgate’s conventionality an anticipation of incipient modern textual practices. Nolan arranges her analysis of Lydgate’s texts in a roughly chronological fashion, framing her discussion of Lydgate’s performative texts with two texts that neatly frame the historical moment. Her first chapter, “Tragic history: Lydgate’s Serpent of Division,” focuses on Lydgate’s 1422 prose tract of that title. Nolan deliberately turns to this text first, citing its apparent simplicity and its lack of “the protective coloration of verse embellishment and ornamentation ” (22) as reasons for using it as proving ground for her overarching argument . Nolan devotes this chapter to an analysis of Serpent of Division in light of its historical commentary and use of sources. Beginning with the latter, Nolan seeks to complicate the accepted view of Lydgate “as both being slavishly devoted to authority and as an incompetent compiler, afflicted with debilitating hero worship” (39–40), a view she suggests even Lydgate has encouraged to some extent. She gives a convincing demonstration to the contrary by focusing REVIEWS 271 on several specific instances in which she sees Lydgate prioritizing sources according to a self-fashioned hierarchy. She goes on to consider how Lydgate orients his story of Caesar in the Gowerian tradition of moralizing exemplar while maintaining a Chaucerian interest “in the potential operation of contingency in history” (51). Lydgate is indebted to Gower for his “association of ‘division’ with epistemological inquiry into the origins and causes of strife and dissension” (44), but he adds complexity to this structure of causation when he interweaves history into the moral narrative. The chapter concludes its layerings of analysis with a meditation on Lydgate’s formal reasons for layering texts. Nolan cleverly maps Lydgate’s construction of history in Serpent of Division onto his own historical moment as she identifies the issue of contingency as the disruptive factor in both. She concludes by recognizing the text’s “investment in form, in its own status as literary art, and in the contingent pleasure that calls art out of history” (64), though her concluding remarks...