The Life of St Edmund King and Martyr: John Lydgate's Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI (review)

When I was a graduate student working in Middle English literature, the younger contemporaries and successors of Geoffrey Chaucer were, for the most part, ignored if not downright shunned. I only remember one occasion on which it was suggested that I might read something of Lydgate, and throughout four years of Cambridge the names of Hoccleve, Usk, and Bokenham were never mentioned. Much has changed since the 1960s and most students of Middle English now have at least a passing acquaintance with all of these. The unfortunate Thomas Usk's execution for treason in 1388 has even prompted a t-shirt reading 'Usk Was Framed.'

Lydgate is now read with some frequency. The standard biography remains that of Walter Schirmer, first published in 1952 and issued in English translation in 1961, though Derek Pearsall's John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography, published by the University of Victoria in 1977, goes some way to remedying this neglect. Lydgate travelled in high circles. A Suffolk native, he was ordained at the large and wealthy monastery of Bury St Edmunds in 1397. While at Oxford, he came to the attention of the Prince of Wales (later Henry v) and wrote his immense 'Troy Book' for Henry. After a life substantially in royal service, Lydgate retired to Bury St Edmunds in the early 1430s, where he remained for the rest of his life. At Christmas 1433, Henry vi, the son of Lydgate's late patron, visited the monastery, and, at the instigation of the abbott, Walter Curteys, the poet composed a celebratory life of the abbey's patron saint for presentation to the king. The presentation volume now survives as British Library ms Harley 2278, and the present volume is an extraordinarily beautiful facsimile of that manuscript. Lydgate's text is enlivened with 120 superb illustrations, including wholly delightful pictures of the well-known events of St Edmund's tale: his beheading at the hands of the Danes, the protection of his severed head by a wolf, and the head's instructions to the English concerning its location. The facsimile is splendidly presented on paper of very high quality, with gilt ornamentation that appears to be gold leaf.

A.S.G. Edwards contributes a brief but comprehensive introduction, supplying the relevant information on Lydgate himself and the occasion which prompted both the poem and the manuscript, the background of the Life and the twelve manuscripts in which it survives. Edwards also discusses the range of medieval versions of the story, ranging from the brief entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 870 to Lydgate's poem, some 540 years later. The volume does not contain a transcription of the text, but the hand is very readable and it is a considerable pleasure to read Lydgate's poem without the intervention of a modern editor. For those preferring modern typography, a critical edition may be found in H.N. MacCracken's The Minor Poems of John Lydgate EETS ES 107 (1911), though a new edition would be very welcome.