John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England [Paperback]

Larry Scanlon (Editor), James Simpson (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press; 1 edition (February 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0268041164
• ISBN-13: 978-0268041168
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,633,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A judicious and timely revaluation of Lydgate's work, August 12, 2007

By 

Nigel Mortimer (Edinburgh, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Paperback)

This impressive and significant collection (the first such on the `angel-mouthed' poet so revered by the fifteenth century) situates itself at the forefront of the current whirlwind rehabilitation of the Monk of Bury that was kick-started so decisively by David Lawton in his 1987 essay `Dullness and the Fifteenth Century'. *John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England* is certainly timely: four book-length studies appeared on the poet in the three decades after the publication of the first (in German) in 1952, yet the last twelve months alone have seen the publication of another three. And whereas critical discussion of Lydgate's work has traditionally been distracted by sterile debates about literary merit, these refreshing essays, free from such tendencies, fix our attention squarely on the poems themselves.

Individual poems (notably the *Fall of Princes* John Lydgate's Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford English Monographs), the *Temple of Glas*, the autobiographical *Testament*, and `The Churl and the Bird') receive extended consideration. Attention is given to Lydgate's various voices: his civic poetry, mummings, and royal entries (C. David Benson and Maura B. Nolan) and hagiographical verse (Fiona Somerset and Ruth Nisse) are sensitively explored. However, as its subtitle suggests, the linking theme of the collection is the issue of Lydgate's compliancy with the unstable Lancastrian dynasty. The degree to which the Monk was subservient laureate and naïve propagandist or, instead, politically astute and subversive commentator is revisited by several contributors, but none probes the complex relationships between political power and textual culture more convincingly than Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Scott-Morgan Straker.

Although codicological work would have strengthened this collection and certain arguments can feel a touch strained, these essays (all but one of which here appear for the first time) are as valuable as they are judicious: blinking in the unfamiliar glare of the centre-stage, Lydgate is now being brought from the shadow of Chaucer and dyspeptic Reformation stereotypes before an audience that is at last prepared to read him on his own terms.