Chaucer's Death, Lydgate's Guild, and the Construction of Community in Fifteenth-Century English Literature

This essay excavates a buried "pray for Chaucer" tradition threading throughout fifteenth-century English literature and argues that taking these prayers seriously in their pre-Reformation context shifts how we might think about the first century of Chaucer reception. Early in the century, Scogan and Hoccleve use their prayers to emphasize personal connection with the dead poet; prayers are the tools through which living friends must work to ease his purgatorial suffering. By contrast, Lydgate, in his prayers for Chaucer, moves away from claims of personal intimacy. In so doing, he develops a theory of literary history that does not depend on patrilineal, inheritance-based rivalry. Instead, Lydgate imagines literary community as a guild in which the living voluntarily bind themselves to the dead through the ongoing performance of prayer. Lydgate's guild metaphor has such power that subsequent writers from James I to Caxton must contend with it, choosing whether to elevate Chaucer as uniquely deserving of prayer or to include other poets beside him in their literary bede-rolls. Across the fifteenth century and beyond, later writers use prayers for the dead to take positions in a slow-boiling debate over where literary greatness lies—in individual, peerless genius, or in collective excellence.