Abstract
This chapter is part of an occasional project that tracks the discourses of urbanism, landscape, space, and place in medieval literature, and it admittedly takes Lydgate as an occasion to further that project. 1 Nevertheless, as I hope will be clear, Lydgate and Lydgate studies are central to such a project. In what Edward Casey famously called The Fate of Place, Lydgate plays an interesting role.2 His most famous epics, the Siege of Thebes and The Troy Book, convert historical and memorial place into space, into readable moral landscapes, and much of their action occurs in liminal spaces outside of, beyond, or in between identifiable “places.” His minor poems, and particularly his mummings, are so localized, so much part of an idea of place that they verge on the unreadable without that recognition. As several commentators have observed, the mummings, and some of the other poems edited by MacCracken as the Minor Poems, have been until recently overlooked, and are now at the center of some of the most interesting critical attention being paid to Lydgate. 3 This is at least partly because they position the poet in his most significant role for our post-New Historicist moment, that of the negotiator of power and patronage.
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Notes
See John M. Ganim, “Recent Studies on Literature, Architecture and Urbanism,” MLQ 56 (1995): 363–79; “Cities of Words: Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature,” MLQ 63 (2002): 365–82; “The Experience of Modernity in Late Medieval Literature,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens, ed. James J. Paxson (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 77–96.
See Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). A major rethinking of Casey in relation to medieval and early modern cultures is, of course, David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
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, 1934). See, for instance, Claire Sponsler, “Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings for the Mercer’s and Goldsmiths,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 229–42, and Robert Epstein, “Lydgate’s Mummings and the Aristocratic Resistance to Drama,” Comparative Drama 36 (2002): 337–58.
William FitzStephen, Norman London, trans. H.E. Butler (New York: Italica Press, 1990).
John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 4 vols., ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27), IX, ll. 3431–51.
See Antonia Gransden, “The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds,” The English Historical Review 394 (1985): 1–24.
Lydgate’s emphasis on Bury St. Edmunds’ exceptionality is noted by Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Anne Keep (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 14–15: “Its first time of greatness was under Abbot Baldwin (1065–97), who in accordance with a papal breve placed the monks directly under the authority of Rome.”
See The Lives of St. Edmund and St. Fremund in Altenglische Legenden, ed. Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Gebr. Henninger, 1881), pp. 376–440, Book I, ll. 165–67. A splendid facsimile is available as John Lydgate, The Life of St. Edmund, King and Martyr, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (London: British Library, 2004). The present chapter was inspired by a gift of the facsimile edition from Mr. Tony Luu, for which I am grateful. I am also grateful to Dr. Anthony Bale for sharing with me his own forthcoming study of The Miracles of St Edmund and for pointing out errors in Horstmann’s text.
On exemptions, immunity and related issues, see the recent study by Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Arnold, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores 96 (London: Printed for H.M.S.O. by Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1890–96), offers a number of examples. Abbot Leofstan attempts to remove the head from St. Edmund’s body, to which it had been reattached after its decapitation and loss, but his hand is paralyzed as a result (Arnold I:54); a knight and a steward who attempt to seize a manor belonging to the Abbey are driven insane (Arnold I:79–80); Prince Eustace dies horribly after attacking lands belonging to the Abbey in the mid-twelfth century (Arnold I:357–58). Right before William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich, is condemned for falsely challenging Bury St. Edmunds’ charters, a monk has a vision of the Saint punishing his enemies (Arnold III:324).
An excellent case study is Jane Zatta, “The Vie Seinte Osith: Hagiography and Politics in Anglo-Norman England,” Studies in Philology 96.4 (1999): 367–93.
The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, ed. Rodney M. Thomson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press for Suffolk Records Society, 1980); Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Arnold, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores 96 (London: Printed for H.M.S.O. by Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1890–96); Jocelyn of Brocelande, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, trans. Jane E. Sayers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
See Robert S. Gottfried, Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis, 1290–1539 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Bury was the site of an infamous slaughter of fifty-seven Jews in 1190, and the Jews, to whom the monastery had been deeply indebted at various times, were expelled shortly afterwards. In 1181, the Jews were accused of murdering a boy, and this event is recounted in Lydgate’s poem, To Robert of Bury. Ruth Nisse, “‘Was It not Routhe to Se?’: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 279–98 relates this poem to the larger themes of virginity and martyrdom that runs through Lydgate’s longer works, including The Life of St. Edmund, and associates the exclusion of the Jews with an attempt to define a community, an attempt that is writ large in Lydgate’s concern with “the writing of founding narratives at the intersection of historical and sacred time––that is, with the textual tradition that defines Bury St. Edmunds’ in relation to both the English nation and the church” (p. 281).
In one of the first extended discussions of this poem, Kathryn A. Lowe relates the various sections of this poem to the privileges accorded to Bury and to Lydgate’s working sources. See Kathryn A. Lowe, “The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versifcatae,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 50 (2007): 134–48. I am grateful to Dr. Lowe for providing me with a prepublication version of this helpful article. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) also points to evidence linking Abbot Curteys and Lydgate, particularly the Legend of Seynt Gyle, which she describes as containing “emphatic verse propaganda about the jealously guarded ‘franchises’ of the Liberty of St. Edmund” (p. 33).
See Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
See Karen Winstead, “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Alban: Martyrdom and Prudent Policie,” Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 221–41.
See C. David Benson, “Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, pp. 141–68. Benson seeks to connect Lydgate’s civic voice to the influential thesis of Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–114, but Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005) finds Lydgate’s voice in another register. Nolan argues that Lydgate’s poetry addresses an elite that results in a public viewed as “hierarchical and exclusive,” a public culture of a power elite, though one that could be reconfigured according to the issue at hand (pp. 4–5). She notes that the resulting “paradox creates a very deep, very difficult cultural contradiction that we see Lydgate attempting to negotiate and articulate” (p. 6) as he moves from advising the prince in his early work to addressing the city in his later commissions.
See Wendy Scase, “Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s ‘Common-Profit’ Books: Aspects of Book Ownership and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century London,” Medium Aevum 61 (1992): 261–74.
The most widely available translation is still John Carpenter, Liber Albus: The White Book of the City of London, trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Richard Griffin, 1861).
On London writing at this time, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 284–309.
For a skeptical view, see M.C. Seymour, “Some Lydgate Manuscripts: Lives of SS. Edmund and Fremund and Danse Macabre,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5 (1985): 10–24.
Lydgate’s rhetoric of negotiating shared claims might be understood through the argument of Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) that Lydgate contributes to something like a premature Machiavellianism in fifteenth-century British political discourse. From a somewhat different perspective, Maura Nolan, “The Art of History Writing: Lydgate’s Serpent of Division,” Speculum 78 (2003): 99–127, argues that Lydgate inherits distinct traditions concerning historical causation, one deterministic and one that allows for human agency, putting the “wise governor” in something of a pickle. See also John M. Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), which described Lydgate’s style as an attempt to deal with opposing monastic and aristocratic conceptions of history in The Siege of Thebes. I stand corrected by such recent studies as Scott Morgan Straker, “Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer and The Siege of Thebes,” Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 1–21.
An engaging and thorough description of child rescue miracles is available in Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). See pp. 106–7.
Lydgate’s Danse Macabre is brilliantly related to its physical setting in James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 53–62. See also the description of the architectural setting of Lydgate’s verse at Holy Trinity church, Long Medford, in Gibson, Theater of Devotion, pp. 86–90. Gibson’s description of the relation of Bury St. Edmunds to local patrons is invaluable.
See Henry Noble MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry into London, Lydgate’s Poem, and Carpenter’s Letter,” Archiv 126 (1911): 75–102. For more recent discussions of this pageant, see Richard Osberg, “The Jesse Tree in the 1432 London Entry of Henry VI: Messianic Kingship and the Rule of Justice,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986): 213–31 and Gordon Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly, ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 73–101.
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© 2008 Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown
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Ganim, J.M. (2008). Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption. In: Cooper, L.H., Denny-Brown, A. (eds) Lydgate Matters. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610293_9
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