Abstract
The pun of this volume’s title encapsulates at once both its basic subject (the treatment of material culture in the poetry of John Lydgate) and its basic argument (John Lydgate is important). But in its Butlerian polysemy it goes one step further, since in fact this book argues that Lydgate’s significance stems, in part, from what his poetry has to teach us about the role of the material—in quite a number of senses—in the later Middle Ages.1 In many ways the chapters in this book reflect the multifaceted nature of current scholarly interest in “material culture” in relation to literary discourses. They reach across disciplines and methodologies to make use of, for example, the archeological and anthropological study of material artifacts; the materialist philosophy of Marxism; the documentary experience and politicized economies of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism; and the contemporary sociological theories of practice, place, and space in everyday life.2 In speaking to the way Lydgate’s poetry considers the role of material goods and the material world in the formation of late-medieval identity and culture, this collection demonstrates that his verse, once dismissed for both its pedestrian content and mediocre style, is in fact fascinating in its very mundanity.
[I] tourne the matere vp se doune, and preue it out by good reson
John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ll. 18273–74
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Notes
Our reference is of course to Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
For recent work that engages many of these same issues in other medieval and early modern texts see Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Medieval Culture and Cultural Materialisms, ed. Curtis Perry, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Kellie Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
For a concise overview of Lydgate’s life and works, see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography, English Literary Studies 71 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1997).
Lydgate’s prolific output lasted almost fifty years, and his generic reach was both expansive and vast. As Paul Strohm observes in his “Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Lancastrian Court,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 652–53 [640–61], the Lydgate “canon” includes not only the epic-length Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Fall of Princes, but also “hymns, works of instruction…saints’ lives, prayers, Marian poems, calendars… satires, debates…fables, exempla…mummings, petitions, inscriptions, moral dicta, and a dozen other narrative and lyric forms.”
The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, 2 vols., ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 and o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911 and 1934), “Benedictus Deus in Donis Suis,” I:9, l. 57; “That Now Is Hay Some-Tyme Was Grase,” II:812, l. 121; Troy Book, 4 vols., ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935), l. 926. There are numerous examples of such uses throughout the corpus.
John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 3 vols., ed. F.J. Furnivall and Katherine B. Locock, EETS e.s. 77, 83, 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899–1904), l. 4988.
All of these meanings were current by Lydgate’s time; see, The Middle English Dictionary, (henceforth MED), 13 vols., ed. Hans Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), s.v. “mater(e.” Available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. 12. See n3, above.
David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” English Literary History 54 (1997): 761–99, esp. 762 and 769. For some earlier thoughts on Lydgate’s “dullness” as symptomatic of his cultural moment (and our inability to comprehend it because of changed literary taste), see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 11–14.
James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 2; Simpson elaborates this idea in terms of Lydgate’s poetry specifically in his second chapter, “The Energies of John Lydgate,” pp. 34–67, esp. pp. 62–67.
John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), esp. p. 7. While several of the individual chapters in this collection subtly challenge the literary-material divide, Maura Nolan’s statement that “our engagement with [the poems’] ‘writtenness’ or ‘literariness’ does not undermine their status as artifacts of practice” is perhaps the most direct (p. 192).
Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 3, 27, 29.
“Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 229–42; “‘Eating Lessons: Lydgate’s ‘Dietary’ and Consumer Conduct,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 1–22; “Text and Textile: Lydgate’s Tapestry Poems,” in Medieval Fabrications, ed. Burns, pp. 19–34.
Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: Ein Kulturbild aus dem 15 Jahrhundert (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1952), trans. Ann E. Keep as John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 71, 46–47. Thorough overviews of the historiography of Lydgate criticism can be found in both Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 38–50 and John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 1–6.
Alain Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. viii and 143; on Lydgate as a transitional poet see esp. pp. 73 and 136.
On the way Lydgate uses “aureat,” “goldyn,” and other terms related to poetic embellishment see Lois A. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 22–32, esp. pp. 25–27; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 44–51, 173, 186–87; Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 20–21; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, “Lydgate’s Laureate Pose,” in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 41–43, 48–49 [36–60]; and Ruth Nisse, “‘Was it not Routhe to Se?’: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom,” in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 286–88, 292–94 [279–98].
Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 6; for the argument that Lydgate saw himself as an artisan of verse, responsible for ordering both language and, through language, society, see Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), pp. 18–19 and her Illuminator, Makar, Vates, pp. 19–48.
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© 2008 Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown
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Cooper, L.H., Denny-Brown, A. (2008). Introduction Lydgate Matters. In: Cooper, L.H., Denny-Brown, A. (eds) Lydgate Matters. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610293_1
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