Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (The New Middle Ages)

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Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney

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Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

LYDGATE MATTERS POETRY AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

LYDGATE MATTERS

Copyright © Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7674–1 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7674–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lydgate matters : poetry and material culture in the fifteenth century / edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7674–0 1. Lydgate, John, 1370?–1451?—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Lydgate, John, 1370?–1451?—Aesthetics. 3. Material culture in literature. 4. Literature and society—England—History—To 1500. I. Cooper, Lisa H., 1971– II. Denny-Brown, Andrea, 1969– PR2037.P64 2008 821.2—dc22

2007014505

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Lydgate Matters Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown 1

Lydgate and London’s Public Culture Claire Sponsler

1 13

2 Lydgate’s Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache Andrea Denny-Brown

35

3

Sovereignty and Sewage Paul Strohm

57

4

Lydgate’s Worst Poem Maura Nolan

71

5 “Markys. . .off the Workman”: Heresy, Hagiography, and the Heavens in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man Lisa H. Cooper 6

Lydgate, Lovelich, and London Letters Michelle R. Warren

89 113

7 St. George and the “Steyned Halle”: Lydgate’s Verse for the London Armourers Jennifer Floyd

139

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165

Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption John M. Ganim

Afterword: Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When D. Vance Smith

185

List of Contributors

197

Bibliography

199

Index

215

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INTRODUCTION LYDGATE MATTERS

Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

[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

he 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. While “mundanity” often carries with it a sense of prosaic mediocrity—the “dullness,” in several senses, that has been said to characterize Lydgate’s work—it is through the meaning of its root, mundus (the world) that this book establishes its perspective. In their contemplation of worldly matter and its relation to medieval and

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modern literary taste, the essays collected here also reconsider the place and function of “materiality,” “mediocrity,” and the “mundane” in our own scholarly paradigms. As the above epigraph suggests, Lydgate’s use of the term “mater(e)” in his works offers a stimulating lens through which to understand the poet’s own material concerns, concerns that reflect his life both as a Lancastrian court poet and as monk of the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds.3 The majority of these references are to details of plot or other content, what we think of as subject “matter”—something about which Lydgate, whose extant works tip the scales at over 140,000 verses in countless forms and genres, knew much.4 Often suggesting that such matter possesses an almost tangible weight and poses a practically physical obstacle, he uses the word itself as a way of moving forward through his voluminous output. We find him, for example, informing his readers of his desire to “conclude breeffly in this mater,” admonishing them and himself “[i]n this mater lat ws [sic] not tarye,” or, more bluntly, insisting that “[o]f Qis mater no more telle I can.”5 He also, however, frequently uses the term to describe physical matter, especially the mortal body and its worldly attachments. All men, according to Lydgate, were created out of one material—they “forgyd wern of O [one] matere”6—and often spend their lives trapped within that material burden. “‘Consider of what mater Qou art ewrought,’” says the soul to the body in one of his shorter poems, adding “ ‘[i]f Qou canst see Qyn owen wrecchednesse / Pou hast no mater but of hevynesse. . ..’”7 For such a fleshly burden there are seemingly two cures, the greatest of which is provided by (or in Lydgate’s words, “conceived” by) the body of Christ himself—he who “[t]horugh skyn & flesh conseyved Qe matere,” and who, describing his salvific wounds, tells the reader to “[r]olle vp this mater, grave it in Qi resoun.”8 But a second potential cure for mundane “hevynesse” might, Lydgate suggests, be found in poetry itself. Lydgate’s poetry, as he was well aware, is on the one hand just as matter-bound as the body—it is, for example, inscribed upon “good parchemyn” (itself made from the “skynnes off dede bestis”)9 and it is often invested in depicting the things of this world in great, even loving, detail. On the other hand, it also always seems to reach for something more, for matter of a much more abstract kind: “dar I seyn, it happeth so somen while,” Lydgate hopefully remarks, “Vnder writyng rude of apparence / Mater is hid of grete intellygence.”10 “Matter” for Lydgate, then, is a term that stretches to encompass not only the details of many and various poetic projects but also the body that weighs us down and holds us back; the objects, both necessary and less so,

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with which we furnish our everyday lives; and the intellectual and spiritual illumination that we urgently seek to find and strain toward when it seems within our grasp (and, quite often, even when it does not).11 “Matter,” in short, is not simply an individual poet’s problem but in fact a fundamentally human concern. As such—and as our epigraph further suggests—matter is something that we struggle to control and to understand; something often so turned “vp se doune” by our needs and desires that our reason, if it can, must “preue it out.” How and why poetry, bodies, and objects make meaning together—how and why they “matter,” to Lydgate, and to us— is the subject at the heart of this book. In the context of recent scholarly interest in material culture in the medieval and early modern eras as well as in others, the mundane issues of daily life have enjoyed a critical resurgence, and in that context alone, the enormous volume and variety of Lydgate’s work can be said to provide a veritable wealth of analytical possibilities.12 The central role of the material in Lydgate’s poetics—his consistent interest in using poetry to interrogate the role of matter and materiality in human daily life, whether in outlining city plumbing, advising laundresses, translating saint’s lives, or creating tapestry poems—is ripe for critical reevaluation. So, too, is the role of the material in Lydgate’s poetic self-consciousness. Twenty years ago David Lawton used the term “dullness” to characterize not the quotidian subject matter of much fifteenth-century verse but rather its humble, indeed Boethian, posture.13 We contend, however, that the authorial trope Lawton brought so clearly into view should be understood as part of what might be called a larger “material aesthetics” intrinsic to Lydgate’s poetic self-perception. The term “dullness,” after all, in both its medieval and modern uses, collapses the distinction between mental and physical insensibility to connote the inanimate and objectified—literally, the matter left over when the sense or senses take(s) leave.14 Lawton’s influential study worked to clarify the dynamic of poet and public world, resituating the rhetorical posture of Lydgate and his contemporaries within the larger culture of the fifteenth century, in all its social and historical complexity.15 This book explores another aspect of the connection of literature to culture by addressing the equally crucial dynamic of the poet and the tangible material world. Lydgate’s verse—with its manifest interest in (and complex negotiation of ) the practical as well as political impact of Lancastrian hegemony, the mercantile patronage of verbal and visual works of art, the fashioning of urban identities through the purchase and display of commercial goods, the construction of spiritual and social order by authorities both religious and secular, the ramifications of linguistic and cultural translation for writers and readers—demonstrates that for the poet, just as

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for today’s medievalists, culture was clearly an amalgam of the material and the abstract, twin poles of human experience and expression that nevertheless cannot be easily cleaved from one another. While rehabilitating Lydgate’s much-maligned verse from a number of angles, recent scholars have refrained from fully considering the place of the material in the poet’s oeuvre, choosing to focus for the most part on the politics and public sensibility of his poetics. James Simpson sees Lydgate through his complex relation to various forms of authority, placing the poet’s work firmly within the jurisdictional diversity and disunity of the fifteenth-century’s “culture of ‘reform.’ ”16 Likewise, the recent collection of essays coedited by Simpson and Larry Scanlon claims for Lydgate the status of a major poet based largely on his authorial intentionality and his focus on inherently public, institutional concerns.17 Nigel Mortimer’s book on the Fall of Princes similarly contributes to our understanding of Lydgate’s poetry of counsel in both its immediate political context and the international speculum principis tradition.18 Previous studies by Maura Nolan and Claire Sponsler have come closest to revealing the Lydgate of this volume. While Nolan grounds her work in the rhetorical positioning of Lydgate’s “hybrid texts,” aimed simultaneously at both politically powerful contemporaries and post-Chaucerian literary audiences, her discussion of the instrumentality of these texts and the “sedimented content” of their forms also gestures toward a certain material effect or “surplus.”19 Sponsler’s pioneering examinations of neglected forms such as the mumming, dietary, and tapestry poem reveal more explicitly how Lydgate’s work—especially that composed for the London bourgeoisie—has much to tell us about the fifteenth-century material world.20 In earlier studies, Lydgate’s contemplation of materiality itself played a role in his general marginalization, for it was usually cited either as part of his excessively descriptive style and overwhelming productivity, or else appropriated as a metaphor to explain his mere functionality as a poet. Yet in this way these same studies, often despite themselves, can be said to have been attuned to Lydgate’s attention to the material world. Walter F. Schirmer, for example, who saw Lydgate as a poet predominantly interested in conveying abstract spiritual, political, and moral sententiae, nevertheless remarked upon his impressive ability to materialize the objects he depicts: “[Lydgate] decks out his descriptions with such lively illustrative details that the modern reader gains the impression of something actually perceived at first hand.”21 Alain Renoir found Lydgate a “competent craftsman” whose “aureate” style (a term Lydgate introduced into the English language) was a harbinger of Renaissance humanism.22 Though Renoir clearly meant his artisanal metaphor to be taken as little more than that, one cannot help but think that he was in part reacting to the kind of

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linguistic reification that interested Lydgate himself. After all, just as “dullness” implies some kind of tangible affectlessness, when words are said to be “aureate”—gilded, illuminated—or, as Lydgate calls them at other moments, “goldyn,” they are being conceived of as malleable and precious artifacts to be admired in and of and for themselves as well as conveyors of meaning.23 For Derek Pearsall, too, Lydgate’s poetry often carries “the sense of a well-made artefact.”24 Pearsall saw Lydgate in the guise of a “highly skilled craftsman. . .working like a mason or a sculptor or a mural painter,” a simile that points—as Pearsall intended it to—toward Lydgate as a maker of public poetry, but in the most materially specific of ways.25 For Pearsall the concept of artisanry was additionally useful as a way of explaining away the poetry in Lydgate’s corpus that he did not feel rose to the level of high art: “Every craftsman has his off days,” he off-handedly observes.26 But Pearsall, despite his frequently dismissive comments in what otherwise remains a foundational study, nevertheless finds ways to praise Lydgate precisely for aspects of his work upon which many of the essays in this book concentrate, including the way the poet sometimes “introduces a mass of original material” into a translation, or the way many passages of his verse contain “an accumulated richness of reference which in itself is a reward.”27 The chapters in this book offer fresh insights into this “accumulated richness” of Lydgate’s material references. Claire Sponsler’s “Lydgate and London’s Public Culture” presents a path-breaking understanding of Lydgate’s role as poet and shaper of fifteenth-century metropolitan culture. Sponsler challenges earlier notions of Lydgate’s poetry as connoting a type of Habermasian “public sphere” in which a shared civic discourse generates cultural and literary unity and stability. Rather, she argues, a close examination of the historical and material context of Lydgate’s public poems for Londoners reveals a poet whose work rarely circulated beyond a small group of elite readers, and who, moreover, proves skillful at providing what his urban elite audience wanted while at the same time distancing himself from them and from any broadly public “voice.” Ultimately Sponsler’s chapter questions the long-held scholarly view that fifteenthcentury literary practice shifted to create works that embraced a wider public audience, and in so doing she suggests a new direction for the critical understanding of the notions of “public” and “private” in regard to Lydgate’s “civic” verse and to his poetry as a whole. While Sponsler addresses critical misperceptions about Lydgate’s civic entertainments more generally, Andrea Denny-Brown’s “Lydgate’s Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache” explores the medieval and modern perceptions of one particular London poem in Lydgate’s corpus. Denny-Brown argues that this bovine fable’s focus on the theme of material appetite has been obscured by its critical reception as

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a spirited misogynist tale of marital conflict. Lydgate’s version of the infamous cannibal cows in fact presents a rich contemplation of one of his favorite moral themes—the excess and discord of temporal life—in the guise of a mocking beast fable. Thus while the poem speaks to a particular cultural anxiety about “beastly” immoderation in regard to material desires, it also reveals Lydgate’s exploration of poetic excess, and particularly the tension between seemingly frivolous, secular poems and religious as well as more generally didactic verse. At the heart of the poem’s dialectic between indulgence and asceticism, carnival and lent, and fat and thin, DennyBrown shows, is a renewed correlation between material prosperity, conspicuous consumption, and death—a sense that it is material objects of desire (more than the marital conflict they engender) that consume us in the end. Paul Strohm’s “Sovereignty and Sewage” addresses the correlation between objects and bodies from yet another perspective. While DennyBrown’s chapter considers the material mortality of the individual, Strohm investigates Lydgate’s novel program for the preservation of London—via Troy—as an urban whole. Strohm argues that what he calls Lydgate’s “penchant for amplification” results, in the Troy Book, in a vision of a city that is grander, cleaner, and above all more technologically current than that imagined in Lydgate’s source (Guido delle Colonna’s Historia Destructionis Troiae). Lydgate’s Troy is in fact a model for the London that, as the civic records demonstrate, its late-medieval citizens themselves most earnestly desired. This “new” Troy comes complete with sheltered walkways, rain gutters, and sewage pipes—all tools, Strohm notes, that preserve and protect the body politic by preserving and protecting individual bodies from the depredations of weather and disease. In this reading, the city as a body, and the human body, in turn, take center stage as objects in constant need of oversight and upkeep. For Lydgate, Strohm suggests, and most trenchantly through his reading of the literally “aureate” process that preserves the body of the fallen Hector, this most materially fundamental of concerns inescapably undergirds even the most abstract conceptions of political power. Maura Nolan’s chapter, “Lydgate’s Worst Poem,” also engages with a versified program of purification, albeit one meant for souls rather than cities. Revisiting some of Lydgate’s most discounted verse—a short set of instructions in effective stain-removal—Nolan finds that the poem is far from a superficial exercise in didacticism. In fact, it is a marvelous example in microcosm of the way Lydgate’s work so often crosses and complicates what contemporary literary criticism still rather rigidly considers the discursive divide between the factual and the figural, or, to put it another way, between the trivial and the transcendent. Working against the grain by

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displaying the veil of allegory to our view rather than stripping it away to reveal the illusory “real” beneath, Nolan is able to show us how our current aesthetic and interpretive categories cannot sufficiently account for the way Lydgate’s “Treatise” (and, by extension, any number of other similar instructional pieces) was received as equally poetic and practical by readers with much more flexible conceptions of the “literary” than our own. Nolan’s argument, supported by a scrupulous attention to the poem’s several distinct manuscript contexts, suggestively points toward a new paradigm within which to evaluate the serious play of the material and the metaphorical in the Lydgate canon and in fifteenth-century poetics more broadly. Like Nolan, Lisa H. Cooper explores the tension between matter and spirit in Lydgate’s religious verse in her “ ‘Markys. . .off the workman’: Heresy, Hagiography, and the Heavens in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man”; unlike Nolan, however, she does so through an analysis of one of Lydgate’s explicitly spiritual works, his translation in c. 1426 of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (1330; revised c. 1355). Despite its insistence on the peril of worldly entanglements, Lydgate’s source—one of the most popular vernacular allegories of the later Middle Ages—is itself supremely entangled in the things of this world, squeezing spiritual metaphor from an amazingly wide range of secular realities. Most important among these is artisanry, as the poem relies upon multivalent images of craft labor both to structure its plot and provide its moral lessons. Lydgate found the concept of craft to be as productive and (paradoxically) as problematic a metaphorical system as had Deguileville, but for different reasons. By asking us to read Lydgate’s changes to key moments in his source text as part of an attempt to fashion what she calls a “post-Lollard production,” Cooper shows us not only Lydgate’s struggle to transform a fourteenthcentury French poem into fifteenth-century English verse, but also the struggle of two writers to negotiate between the materiality of the world at hand and the abstraction toward which their poetry aspires. In the process, her chapter suggests that a closer attention to the material foundations of even the most abstract of allegories provides a neglected point of entry into the nature of penitential instruction in the later Middle Ages. The intertwined practices of craft and literary translation in the fifteenth century also provide a starting point for Michelle R. Warren in “Lydgate, Lovelich, and London Letters.” For Warren, material culture provides critical access to issues of corporate identity and communal belonging in fifteenth-century poetic production. By placing Lydgate in dialogue with the skinner and amateur poet Henry Lovelich, Warren investigates the period’s broader, associative contemplation of the “material promises” of poetry. Her interest lies in the material and especially mercantile

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circumstances of verse-making, and particularly in how late medieval texts construct conceptions of urban community well outside of learned, clerkly circles. Chronologically parallel to Lydgate’s laureate, often Lancastriansupported crafting of an English poetic tradition, Lovelich’s two lengthy Arthurian romances, commissioned by the politically foremost skinner of the age, are usually dismissed outright. Yet Lovelich’s poetry has much to say about London letters and even about Lydgate if one chooses the right critical lens. Warren’s examination of the intersections of poetry and material culture allows us to see not only the fundamental role of urban citizenship in London letters, but also how materialist readings can help set aside stylistic hierarchies and literary lineages to reveal a broader network of common interests in and among greater- and lesser-known poets and texts. Jennifer Floyd is similarly interested in the mercantile networks that brought English verse into public prominence in fifteenth-century London. Her essay, “St. George and the ‘Steyned Halle’: Lydgate’s Verse for the London Armourers,” explores the way in which some of Lydgate’s most public (because most literally visible) poetry was designed immediately to become a part of the material fabric of the capital city itself. Floyd argues that the Armourers’ commission of what the copyist John Shirley called “Qe devyse of a steyned halle” as well as “balades” from the “Munk of Bury” was a multimedia attempt at self-promotion on the part of one of London’s once minor but increasingly prominent guilds. As Floyd reveals, the Armourers set out—with Lydgate’s help—to insert their craft visually and verbally into both the sacred history of the English nation and the secular market of its capital. She opens a new perspective upon a little-studied poem by convincingly arguing for its inscription on a set of moveable wall hangings designed for prominent and proud display in the Armourers’ new guild hall; in the process, she asks us to reassess the very nature of “text” (and particularly of “poetry”) and its availability for material as well as ideological deployment in the urban spaces of the fifteenth century. John M. Ganim’s “Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption” also engages the interpretive indices of places, patrons, politics, and poetics. Ganim positions Lydgate’s narratives of social space and urban landscape in relation to both his monastic context and his patron John Carpenter, London City Clerk and compiler of one of the most important historical documents about the early city of London, the Liber Albus. Focusing on Lydgate’s Life of St. Edmund and his London poems, Ganim traces the poet’s careful attention to the physical and material landscape of the city in relation to its people. In his emphasis on urban topography in these texts, Lydgate seems to suggest that civil society has much to learn from the united purpose at the heart of ideal monastic society. Such a focus on the

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role of space and place in communal life also underscores the way in which Lydgate’s works often take on a surprisingly tangible materiality of their own, whether in the form of the St. Edmund as a literary object that simultaneously narrates and commemorates a king’s visit, or in the form of the poet’s mummings and other works meant to be displayed on the walls of the city’s halls and parlors. When he documents historical moments, such as Henry VI’s 1432 entry into London, Lydgate’s privileging of the material over the performative culminates in the presentation of urban spectacle as frozen in timeless perfection. This collection closes with D. Vance Smith’s afterword, “Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When.” Smith examines the way in which the recent critical recovery of John Lydgate (of which this book is a part) responds to a type of Lydgatian pathology for languorous amplification that has until now stymied Lydgate scholarship, miring it in a rhetoric of apology. Ironically, Lydgate’s infinite poetic extensions, his impulse to catalogue at length rather than analyze in brief, to endlessly accumulate, sort and resort his matere, results in a style that works to negotiate the inherent finitude of the material—a style that is “the product of his refusal to see the world passing away.” The matter of death is perhaps the definitive example of the relation between the material and the abstract in Lydgate’s poetry, and as such offers a fitting conclusion to this book. Notes We would like to express our gratitude to our prompt, patient, and insightful contributors. 1. Our reference is of course to Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 2. 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

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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. “An Holy Medytacion,” The Minor Poems, I:45, 46, ll. 51 and 107–8. “The Fifteen Ooes of Christ,” l. 260; “A Prayer Upon the Cross,” l. 21, in The Minor Poems, I:247, 253. “The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” The Minor Poems, II:554, l. 367; The Pilgrimage, l. 22282. “The Legend of Seynt Margarete,” The Minor Poems, I:173, ll. 5–7. 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. 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. See OED, s.v. “dull,” esp. 2a and MED, s.v. “dul,” esp. 3. Lawton, “Dullness,” esp. 771 and 775. 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.

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17. 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). 18. Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 3, 27, 29. 20. “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. 21. 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. 22. 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. 23. 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]. 24. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 115; the emphasis is Pearsall’s. 25. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 5. 26. 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. 27. Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 118 and 137.

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CHAPTER 1 LYDGATE AND LONDON’S PUBLIC CULTURE Claire Sponsler

inus the word “London,” the equation in my title harks back at least to H.S. Bennett, who argued that in the fifteenth century patronage (i.e., writing for a narrow audience) began to give way to the creation (by writers such as Lydgate and Hoccleve) and dissemination (witness the career of John Shirley) of literary works for a broader public. But even as this equation has gained new energy in recent studies and has beneficially expanded the prevailing view of Lydgate as a religious, Chaucer-imitating, royalist poet, it remains somewhat problematic. On the “Lydgate” side, as Bennett himself revealed in his assessment of Lydgate as the worst product of an inbred monastic system of textual production, there are difficulties in viewing the monk from Bury as the wielder of a public pen.1 Can a writer deprived of real-life experience, someone who, as Bennett thinks, may have spent his whole career in the monastery or in the priory of Hatfield Broadoak, be taken as the voice of England? Even if we read the evidence so as to construe a Lydgate who spent more time away from the cloister, as I am inclined to do, to what extent can we envision his poetry as speaking for a broad public? On the “public culture” side, there are similar obstacles, including the degree to which the groups for whom Lydgate wrote can be said to represent the “public” in any meaningful way. How far did Lydgate’s “public” poems—those balades, mummings, disguisings, and other texts connected to some sort of performance or display—move (in real or symbolic/conceptual terms) beyond the elites who commissioned them and formed their original audience? These stumbling blocks have generally been surmounted by invoking the third term in my title, “London,” a place that is often and not inaccurately posited as the de facto center of medieval England in government,

M

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trade, and hence culture, and thus is seen as capable of fashioning and dispersing a public culture throughout the city and the realm. London is at the root of Anne Middleton’s influential formulation of a new Ricardian public poetry that, in her words, is “neither courtly, nor spiritual, nor popular.” Instead, such poetry is “pious, but its central pieties are worldly felicity and peaceful, harmonious communal existence. It speaks for bourgeois moderation. . ..This poetic voice is vernacular, practical, worldly, plain, public-spirited, and peace-loving—in a word, ‘common,’ rather than courtly or clerical, in its professed values and social allegiances.”2 And London is similarly at the center of Maura Nolan’s forceful argument for Lydgate as a maker of public culture and of C. David Benson’s persuasive identification of a civic voice in Lydgate’s London poems. As both Nolan and Benson recognize, the poetry Lydgate wrote for people, places, and occasions in London does not entirely fit the pattern Middleton finds in Gower, Langland, and Chaucer. True, Lydgate’s public poetry is pious, but that piety comes with an antiheretical emphasis on orthodoxy. True, Lydgate’s public poetry stresses happiness and harmony, but only of a strongly hierarchical sort. As for the other qualities Middleton attributes to Ricardian verse, Lydgate’s London poetry is, while thoroughly vernacular and frequently peace-loving, only intermittently practical, seldom worldly, never plain, and public-spirited only from an establishment perspective. Perhaps most problematically, few would describe Lydgate’s poetry as “common,” since its values and allegiances remain firmly clerical and courtly. Nolan carefully circumvents the problem of lack of a “common voice” by arguing that Lydgate’s public poems, while designed for a coterie audience of elites (the king’s household, nobles, the civic establishment), construe that audience as representing “the only public that matters: the ruling elite.” Lydgate differs from the Ricardian public poets, Nolan suggests, in that he asserts the sovereignty of the king in place of “common profit,” thus replacing the Chaucerian sense of the social whole as diverse and inclusive with an understanding of it as hierarchical and exclusive.3 Although Benson similarly acknowledges that Lydgate’s London poems are not socially engaged in the way that Piers Plowman is, he nonetheless argues that while Lydgate channels the “official, public voice of London” and suppresses the voice of rebellion or alienation, the poet also includes, even if only indirectly, some of the criticisms and concerns that found expression in contemporary criticism, and thus does indeed adopt a broadly civic diction.4 It would be misguided, I believe, to suggest that Lydgate is not in some fashion at least some of the time a public poet, in Middleton’s sense of the term, and I am in agreement with Nolan and Benson that Lydgate’s poetry is capable of constructing an imaginary public that, while strongly

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establishmentarian, can speak with a civic voice that does not entirely ignore critiques of power. But the essential question remains: to what degree can poetry written by a monk for elites be considered public? In this essay, I would like to pursue this question in two ways: first, by moving beyond the idea of imagined publics to an examination of the actual audiences for Lydgate’s public poems, both primary (those spectators who were present for the recitation or performance of Lydgate’s verses on the ceremonial or festive occasions for which they were originally designed) and secondary (those readers who encountered Lydgate’s poems once they circulated in written form); and, second, by looking more closely at the voice of those poems, including at Lydgate’s positioning of himself in relation to those to and for whom he speaks. Benson comments that the Triumphal Entry, written to commemorate the pageants devised by Londoners for Henry VI in 1432, is Lydgate’s “most prominent civic work,” not only because in it we can see a civic voice, but also because the pageants involved the whole city and because the Entry contributed to later chronicles and royal entries;5 that claim is perceptive, but the Entry is not typical of Lydgate’s public poetry for Londoners, most of which did not involve anything like the whole city, most of which had little effect on other cultural or literary productions, and most of which wears only a light civic accent. If one marker of public poetry is its influence and another is its ability to speak “as if” to the entire community, as Middleton suggests, then we might ultimately need to qualify our claims for Lydgate’s London verses as formative examples of it.6 Lurking behind and powerfully influencing any discussion of Lydgate’s public poetry is of course Jürgen Habermas’s historical and theoretical description of the public sphere, made particularly relevant to late medieval culture by David Lawton’s important essay on “dullness.” Working from Terry Eagleton’s adaptation of Habermas’s ideas in The Function of Criticism, Lawton maps the contours of a fifteenth-century public sphere in which poetry was not yet an autonomous discourse, but rather part of a broader ethical humanism that was at heart not literary but cultural. Fifteenthcentury poets, Lawton argues, posit a freely exchanged discourse, despite the actualities of power relations, and in good Habermasian form redraw the boundary between social classes as a line between those who engage in rational discourse and those who do not. Since cultural discourse and social power inevitably overlap, discourse became a political force for writers, and truth—not authority—was its ground. The result in the fifteenth century was the cementing of a new power bloc whose interests were religion, virtue, good policy, civil government, and good manners, all of which were set out in discourse itself. The audience for this discourse, Lawton suggests, was not just the court but society as a whole, as the public voice

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of poetry engaged in “constructing a public sphere parallel to and connected with the structures of power,” thus helping to create continuity and unity where there had been division and disunity. Although the fifteenth-century public sphere was small, “it reached across council and parliamentary factions,” Lawton claims, bridging “the party divide between court, administration and country, household and household, with a common culture and a uniform discourse.” While the public sphere in any historical period is largely an ideological construct, in the fifteenth century it was in Lawton’s view a “genuine institution” with a real force.7 Lawton’s discovery of a Habermasian public sphere in fifteenth-century England pushes back the starting point and ground of Habermas’s model by a couple of centuries, but leaves intact its assumptions about premodern culture, assumptions that tend to encourage an overemphasis on notions of cultural unity and harmony.8 Habermas’s critique attacks the modern (that is, twentieth-century), instrumental order of mass media, with its ideological agendas and commercial orientation, which in his view has turned public opinion away from rational debate and toward manipulation. His goal is to account for the demise of an (idealized) public sphere, a sphere whose emergence he locates in early modern society and which he envisions as a place where individuals can come together as a public in order to share knowledge and opinions through commitment to a notion of critical reason that negates the divisive effects of social status. The danger of the Habermasian view of the public sphere is that the notion of a shared public culture can hide real social divisions and dissent, and can incline us to forget the constructedness, and therefore interestedness, of the public sphere—a public sphere that was open to manipulation long before the advent of modern mass media. Recognizing that there is a gap between imagined and actual public discourse—between an idealized and a real public sphere— seems a necessary first step for considering fifteenth-century public poetry, particularly in the case of poetry like Lydgate’s aimed at groups within a fragmented city like London, which as Caroline Barron has put it did not “speak with a single voice” but was instead a commune of many people with diverse interests, all competing for a share in the public sphere.9 That the two fullest early accounts of the public culture of London do not contradict Habermas’s view of the premodern public sphere speaks perhaps less to their accuracy as social descriptions than to the perennial allure of an idealized and harmonious urban culture. William FitzStephen’s famous account of the public pastimes of London’s twelfth-century residents includes schoolboy rhetorical competitions on feast days, horse races, plays featuring miracles of the Holy Confessors and sufferings of the martyrs, cock-fighting and ball games, jousts on weekends during Lent, naval tourneys at Easter, and feats of skill such as wrestling and javelin

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throwing. No other citizens, FitzStephen boasts, deserve more approval for their “church-going. . .keeping of feast-days, giving of alms, entertainment of strangers, ratifying of betrothals, contracts of marriage, celebration of nuptials, furnishing of banquets, cheering of guests, and likewise for their care in regard to the rites of funeral and the burial of the dead”—a litany of activities whose portrayal of London as an ideal society rather obviously overlooks seaminess, discord, and unruliness as aspects of urban life.10 John Stow’s Survey of London (1598), which draws heavily on FitzStephen, presents a similarly idyllic picture of a medieval London characterized by “charity, hospitality and plenty,” and not yet ruined by population growth and religious reform.11 Stow’s account in fact anticipates Habermas’s critique, lamenting a kind of “structural transformation” in the late sixteenth century as new urban practices replaced collective rites of civic life with idiosyncrasy, novelty, and commercialism, all of which Stow associates with acquisitive individualism and the secular bureaucratic state, and which he sees as a diminishment of the vitality of the medieval city.12 But fifteenth-century London offers little support for the accounts of either FitzStephen or Stow. As Sheila Lindenbaum observes, late medieval London is best seen as a Bourdieu-like “cultural field” or site of social practices “where discourses not only converge but are strategically deployed by interested parties competing for power, status and resources.” While the years from 1400 to 1500 can be described as a period of “normative discourse” during which the city relied on clerks (such as John Carpenter, the city’s common clerk from 1417–38, compiler of the Liber Albus, and apparent friend of Lydgate) and poets to craft a common history by using a totalizing and uniform discourse, such efforts were driven by anxiety on the part of the merchant corporations about their hegemony and should be seen as the product of conflict as much as consensus. Like the Lancastrians, Lindenbaum notes, London’s leaders needed to legitimate their regime and could not rest assured of their dominance. The merchant corporations who exercised control over the city may, in the years after 1390, have had a monopoly on high civic office and may have presented a united front against the artisan guilds and other contenders, but such events as the rising of Londoners under John Oldcastle in 1414 could not help but raise the specter of an artisan revolt, and citizens of lesser guilds, in Lindenbaum’s words, “remained capable of mounting a challenge to the merchants as late as 1444.”13 The partially precarious grip on power held by London’s merchants extended to their influence over the city’s public culture, with Lollard bills and other forms of protest writing competing with civic-sponsored “normative discourse” and with parish affiliations exerting a centripetal pull away from craft and corporate structures.14 In the case of the most

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visible forms of public culture—city-wide ceremonies, festivities, and entertainments—London did not follow the pattern found in cities like York, where a civic oligarchy oversaw play cycles collectively organized by guilds for the moral good and economic profit of the whole city. Apparently not feeling the need for a centrally organized ceremony that would dominate the public sphere, London’s leaders left the entertainment needs of its citizens to private groups.15 While the mayor and aldermen of London were to all appearances individually pious, they did not take part in a city-wide Corpus Christi procession or sponsor a drama cycle associated with that feast as did the leaders of other towns.16 Instead, London’s civic entertainments tended to take the form of street pageantry devised for the entry into the city of royalty and other important visitors, an expected part of the city’s relationship to the crown that by the fifteenth century was occurring almost every seven years.17 Such pageantry, while no doubt requiring the assistance of many artisans, craftsmen, and performers, was planned and executed by the city government, offering small scope for participation by other groups. In other words, London’s public sphere was not defined by any large-scale communal entertainment of broadly shared responsibility, to which many groups might contribute and which might be expected to express their concerns. The Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well play offers an instructive example of the limited success in London of the kind of city-wide biblical plays found in provincial towns. While the evidence is too slight to let us form a complete picture, it appears that by the late fourteenth century a religious play at Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well (apparently interchangeable names by this date), just outside the walls of the city, seems to have been a major event, perhaps an annual (if we believe Stow) or at least a recurring one, which was watched by many Londoners.18 The performance of a “play of the Passion of our Lord and the Creation of the World” as it is called in a record of royal reward for the 1390 performance, which Richard II and his queen may have attended, apparently combined Old and New Testament material and was presented over the course of three to five days in the summer. From the early fifteenth century Clerkenwell was the site of the priory of St. John, headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller in England, a wealthy and powerful religious house, and just to the south was the priory of St. Bartholomew; Anne Lancashire speculates that St. John may have decided “to make its mark in England in part by sponsoring” major religious plays for London and Westminster, perhaps along with St. Bartholomew. The only mention of the Clerkenwell play in the fifteenth century is in 1409, when it appears to have been a multiday event that may have been watched by Henry IV. While civic London may have had a hand in the 1409 production, since there was a close association between St. John’s

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Priory, which was dedicated to John the Baptist, and the merchant tailors (then just the tailors) who were also closely associated with court (Henry IV and Henry V were members), Lancashire suggests that the play was not organized by the city government but by parish and other clerks. Whatever the precise reasons for the abandonment of the Clerkenwell play after 1409—the financial troubles of the priory of St. John or the city’s nervousness about large gatherings in one place (during royal entries and processions, everyone was spread out and livery companies lined the streets in part as crowd control)—it appears that by the fifteenth century a public/private division of London performances had come to seem desirable, as livery companies began to entertain their own members and guests (including royalty and nobility) at feasts in their halls, while London’s civic leaders seem to have focused on street pageantry.19 The history of the Clerkenwell play suggests that after 1400 London’s public culture was increasingly split between civic-sponsored, top-down events expected by the crown (one of which Lydgate commemorated in the Triumphal Entry) and private, coterie-audience entertainments of the sort Lydgate produced for various Londoners. Although these coterieaudience entertainments are the texts that are usually cited as instances of Lydgate’s shaping of a public culture, it is important to note that not only were they intended for private occasions, but they were also directed at elite members of the London establishment. Moreover, at least two, and possibly more, of these entertainments may have been exceptional, as Lancashire argues, in that they appear to have been special commissions made during a period of heightened festivity following the English coronation of Henry VI in November of 1429. According to Shirley’s rubric, both the Mumming for the Mercers and the Mumming for the Goldsmiths were written in honor of William Estfield for performance on Twelfth Night and Candlemas, respectively. Estfield was mayor in 1429–30 and again in 1437, but it must be the earlier date that is meant by Shirley since the manuscript in which the mummings are copied was completed well before 1437. That would place the two mummings in January and February of 1430. Lancashire suggests that the undated Mumming at Bishopswood, which Shirley tells us was written for performance before London’s sheriffs on May Day, should also be assigned to 1430, on the grounds that it, too, makes sense within these celebratory months.20 The royalist focus of this special-commission status seems even stronger given that Estfield appears to have had an unusually sympathetic relationship with the crown in a period when, as Barron has noted, London was often cool toward royal affairs; it was Estfield who apparently orchestrated large loans for the campaigns of 1430–31 and it was Estfield who, atypically among Londoners in the fifteenth century, was later knighted by Henry VI.21

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While there is no reason to conclude that entertainments inspired by hopes based on the king’s recent coronation could not contain a civic voice or work to shape a public culture, Lancashire’s conjecture, if correct, should at least remind us that these two (or three) mummings were perhaps “uncommon” in more than one way. Whether exceptional or not, we can say with some certainty that these three mummings were commissioned for small, exclusive audiences and were performed in nonpublic places. Internal evidence (e.g., “Certein estates, wheche purveye and provyde / For to vysyte and seen the noble Mayr” [Mercers, ll. 101–2], and a promise to the mayor that the Ark brought by the “Levites” “Shal stille abyde with you in youre hous” [Goldsmiths, l. 91]) as well as the pattern of Ricardian mummings (in which mummers processed to the king’s residences to offer gifts) suggest that the mummings for the mercers and goldsmiths were presented in the mayor’s hall, although they might also have been performed in the goldsmiths’ own hall or in a hall in the church of St. Thomas of Acre, which by 1391 the mercers had adopted as their meeting-place.22 Shirley claims that the occasion of the Mumming at Bishopswood was a dinner at Bishops Wood, a place owned by the Bishop of London outside London in what is now Stepney and while the occasion was thought by Walter Schirmer to have been an outdoor picnic, the mumming was probably performed indoors in a hall for the two sheriffs (who on May Day in 1430 were a goldsmith and a merchant tailor) and “theire bretherne,” as Shirley says.23 The audience and occasion of the Disguising at London, which according to Shirley was performed for “the gret estates of this lande, thane being at London,” are less clear, although Derek Pearsall believes it was intended for a meeting of parliament.24 If the disguising is also the product of the heightened ceremonial season of 1429–30, that would place it in the parliament that met at Westminster from September 22, 1429 to February 23, 1430, although, as Lancashire notes, the disguising need not be associated with that, or with any other parliament.25 Lines in the London disguising mention Christmas (l. 280) as well as “this housholde” (ll. 335 and 337) to which the four sisters have brought their Fortune-tempering gifts, and the entertainment concludes with a song by the four sisters around the fire, suggesting once again a seasonal household performance. As for the rest of the London public poems, Bycorne and Chichevache and the Legend of St. George—like the Danse Macabre—appear to have been designed to accompany some sort of wall-hanging or painting, although they might also have been recited or even enacted. Bycorne, for example, includes stanzas of direct speech from various characters and in one manuscript is referred to in running titles as resembling a disguising or mumming.26 Bycorne, according to Shirley, was “deuysed” for “a werthy citeseyn of

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London,” while the Legend was made at the request of the London armorers for their feast of St. George. The Pageant of Knowledge and the Sodein Fal of Princes, which appear to be tableau-performances, may also be associated with London, although there is no clear evidence linking them to the city. All of this evidence suggests that Lydgate’s public poems for Londoners were private, seasonal entertainments that probably resembled the kinds of entertainments various groups in London were accustomed to sponsoring on guild feast days or during a holiday season, with many of Lydgate’s poems representing exceptional, special versions commissioned in the months after the English coronation of Henry VI. Most, though not all, of the entertainments written by Lydgate for Londoners exhibit a stylistic uniformity in which classical and biblical material is presented through an ornate and self-consciously literary language that aims to flatter and instruct those who are listening.27 That stylistic uniformity extends to Lydgate’s royal entertainments as well, which are in a number of ways similar to his civic verses, and in which the “bourgeois” values of prosperity, health, and happiness, which Benson rightly notes in the civic entertainments can also be found.28 The appeal of Lydgate’s ornate style for both city elites and the court is not hard to see. What John Norton-Smith describes as Lydgate’s distinctive “East-Anglian Asiatic” poetic line seems to have been designed as an alternative to the writings of the Lollards; Lydgate’s high style deliberately tries to claim the vernacular for orthodox religiosity and established structures of power in the face of the Lollards’ use of English for dissenting purposes.29 Rather than being disjunctive, Lydgate’s frequent conflation of biblical and classical examples is evidence of a synthesis of religious orthodoxy and humanistic learning that reinforces the aims and desires of city elites and court alike, whatever their other differences (of which there certainly were some in the years of Henry VI’s minority). The pervasive Boethianism of Lydgate’s entertainments, which frequently dwell on the problem of capricious Fortune, also addresses a concern shared by Londoners and Lancastrians alike.30 The crossover appeal of Lydgate’s public poetry is understandable given that, as Lancashire points out, the court was an obvious influence on London civic theatre: Westminster, Eltham, Kennington, and Windsor were all located near London; acting troupes from London seem to have performed in royal mummings; players from royal households apparently sometimes performed for London guilds; and the audiences for royal and civic entertainments to some degree overlapped.31 It is likely that Londoners who commissioned Lydgate did so because he had a reputation as a writer of verses suitable for ceremonial occasions; it is also possible that some Londoners had been among the invited guests who watched

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Lydgate’s mummings for the royal household. We do not know who acted in Lydgate’s civic entertainments, but whether amateur or professional, adult or child, the actors’ services were probably not restricted to just one sphere, civic or royal; as Lancashire observes, “whatever was performed before royalty and nobility was doubtless also performed in civic halls, where royalty, nobility and important church men also were often guests.”32 In terms of their actors and audiences, then, Lydgate’s civic poems cannot be seen as entirely separate from his verses for royal ceremonial occasions. When we turn from performance venues to the voice of Lydgate’s public poetry, we can see that while Lydgate demonstrates an awareness of and sympathy for the concerns of his civic audiences, as Benson and Nolan have shown, in speaking to Londoners Lydgate rarely speaks “as if” to the entire community, as Middleton argues Ricardian public poets do, and often remains distanced from the urban groups for whom he is writing.33 This distancing is particularly visible in Lydgate’s tendency to address Londoners less intimately than he does Henry VI and Queen Katherine in the royal entertainments. Every stanza of the Mumming at Eltham, for instance, in which this intimacy is most pronounced, directly speaks to either Henry or his mother, liberally using “you” to create a sense of closeness between the speaker and those addressed. This verbal intimacy has the effect of personalizing the promise of “Pees with youre lieges, plente, and gladnesse” that the mumming promises to Henry and the increase of “ioye and gladnesse of hert” that is the wished-for gift for Katherine.34 The Disguising at Hertford, which seems to contain a deliberate or inadvertent insider’s reference to Katherine’s amorous liaisons with Edmund Beaufort and Owen Tudor, includes a part scripted for the young king, who is asked to decide the merits of the rustic husbands’ complaint against their wives, while the Mumming at Windsor is a detailed explanation for Henry’s benefit of the legend of the anointing of French kings and is obviously aimed at Henry’s own upcoming coronation in France. Of the London entertainments, only the Triumphal Entry and the Mumming for the Goldsmiths include any moments of intimacy with those citizens being honored: in the former case, Mayor John Wells, who may have commissioned the commemorative verses for the 1432 entry, and in the latter, Mayor Estfield. The Triumphal Entry contains moments of reported direct speech in the form of the “scriptures” on the pageants, the mayor’s address to the king, and the roundel sung by the seven virgins, but Lydgate consistently uses the third person to refer to Londoners, the mayor, the king, and the city (though he uses direct address to the city in the stanzas of praise to it, praise that emphasizes its relation to the king). The Mumming for the Goldsmiths contains an address near the end of the poem to the mayor (“O noble Mayre” [l. 74]) who is urged to heed the writ that is in the ark the

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goldsmiths are giving him and to use it as a guide to governing the city. The mumming also directly addresses the “Levites” who are acting in it (“O yee Levites” [l. 29]), while frequently referring to “this town” and “this noble city.” The Mumming for the Mercers, in contrast, contains no direct address and no clear invocation of an audience, although it ends by mentioning “this cytee” (l. 103). The Mumming at Bishopswood, while presenting a visions of a well-ordered society in which each estate performs its proper role so as to banish discord and extortion is also vague as to audience, making reference to “thestates wheoche that nowe sitte here” (l. 6), “alle thestates of this regyoun” (l. 34), and “yowe alle” (l. 109), and speaking to an unspecified “Youre Hye Excellence” (l. 80; perhaps Mayor Estfield, who had been a sheriff in 1422–23, as invited guest, if the mumming dates to 1430). Bycorne and Chichevache directly addresses an assembled, but not clearly defined audience (“O prudent folkes” [l. 1]), as does the Legend of St. George (“O yee folk that heer present be” [l. 1]). Among the London entertainments, only the Disguising at London includes sustained reference to a “you” who is being addressed (“yee may see” [l. 1], “in youre presence” [l. 139], “which yee heer see” [l.213]) and is additionally unusual in being one of the rare instances in which Lydgate explicitly uses the language of “common profit” (directly mentioned at l. 251) that Middleton views as the essential component of Ricardian public poetry and that she notes is the usual phrase for translating res publica or “the public.”35 While London speaks of the “communalte” that Fortitude will establish on a ground of truth and of the “goode comune” she will help maintain (ll. 236–39), Lydgate does not extend that expression of a common voice to his other London entertainments. Tellingly, Lydgate always holds himself apart from the urban commonalty he addresses and it is only in one of his royal mummings—the Mumming at Windsor—that Lydgate includes himself in the collectivity he is imagining, referring at one point to “oure” realm of France (l. 4). Where Lydgate does adopt a “comun vois,” albeit not quite of the sort described by Middleton and Lawton—a voice that includes himself as well as those he addresses—is in the Procession of Corpus Christi. What exactly the Procession of Corpus Christi is remains uncertain. Shirley calls it “an ordenaunce of a precessyoun of the feste of corpus cristi made in london by daun John Lydegate” (he also describes the Triumphal Entry as “ordenaunces”), phrasing that is ambiguous as to whether it was the procession or the writing of the poem that took place in London. The first stanza, which functions as a kind of introduction, announces that “gracyous misteryes” that are “grounded in scripture” shall be “fette out of fygure” in “youre presence” and “declared by many unkouth signe,” and the final stanza repeats that “theos figures” have been “shewed in your presence,”

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suggesting that the poem ushered in a series of tableaux of mostly biblical or ecclesiastical figures.36 Some of the stanzas contain what may be instructions for or descriptions of the figures and their tableaux (e.g., Ecclesiastes with his castle enclosed by a red cloud; Zacharia holding a censer), but it is difficult to say more about the procession, if indeed Shirley is right in his ascription. Lancashire has suggested that the skinners might have commissioned Lydgate to record their annual Corpus Christi procession through London.37 According to Stow, the processioners carried a hundred wax torches and there were over two hundred clerks and priests singing, followed by sheriffs, mayor, aldermen, and others; the minstrels in the procession were apparently outfitted with wings.38 Whatever kind of performance the Procession points to, Lydgate’s pronouns implicate him in it. While “youre” and “I” both make appearances, the consistent perspective is that of “us” and “oure,” pronouns that address a community united by a shared religiosity and that include the poet as well. The Procession suggests that Lydgate is most comfortable speaking “as if ” for an orthodox spirituality (the Procession has some unsympathetic words for heretics), a mode of expression by no means inconsistent with a “common voice” speaking for a broad public or with the comforts of traditional belief that Lydgate offered his royal and civic patrons along with his elevating and classicizing themes. But the use of the first-person plural in the Procession perhaps signals Lydgate’s strongest affiliation—with an imagined orthodox religious community—to whom he speaks “as if” to the entire public and “as if ” he himself is also included. What the civic entertainments reveal is an attempt on Lydgate’s part to craft verses that would suit the needs of those Londoners who commissioned the poems and wanted to use them to honor specific guests (particularly the mayor) or to mark occasions (a royal entry, a guild feast, the installation of wall-hangings). It seems clear that Lydgate has an understanding of what those citizens want and has the talent to envision the needs and desires of the civic world, or, at least its upper reaches. But a close reading of Lydgate’s London entertainments suggests that he in most instances distances himself from his audience, with results that diminish his effectiveness at speaking “as if ” for a broad public, a public that, given the actualities of the coterie settings of most of these civic entertainments, could in any event only remain imagined. If the evidence shows that the primary audience for Lydgate’s civic poetry was a fairly narrow group of elites, for whom Lydgate adopted a civic voice that nonetheless was less direct, sympathetic, and all-encompassing than the voices of his royal and religious entertainments, what of the secondary audience that encountered his performance pieces when they circulated in written form? With the exception of the Triumphal Entry,

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Lydgate’s civic entertainments survive, often uniquely, in copies made by his contemporary, John Shirley. There was apparently a close relationship between Lydgate and Shirley, as is evident in Shirley’s bantering references to Lydgate’s poverty and his running commentary on the monk. The two moved in the same circles: like Lydgate, Shirley had connections with the upper bourgeoisie (probably through his residence in London and service as controller of customs in the port of London from 1432–33) and with the aristocracy (as secretary to the earl of Warwick).39 Aage Brusendorff thinks that Lydgate occasionally gave Shirley autograph copies for insertion in his collections, since more than thirty items by Lydgate (including the mummings and disguisings) are found exclusively in Shirleian copies and about a dozen others are attributed to Lydgate by Shirley alone.40 It is also possible that Shirley may have witnessed some of the royal mummings, since he was in attendance with Warwick when the earl was tutor to Henry VI in 1428–30 and is mentioned in John Merston’s 1428 accounts as having received a gold livery collar from the king that holiday season.41 In any event, Shirley seems to have had an interest in making sure that Lydgate’s poetry—particularly the short, ephemeral pieces such as the mummings and disguisings—was preserved and disseminated. With very few exceptions, then, it is through Shirley alone that we know about most of Lydgate’s royal and civic entertainments. There are three extant Shirlean miscellanies (BL MS Add. 16165; an anthology now dispersed in Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.44, BL MS Harley 78, and Trinity R.3.20; and Bodley MS Ashmole 59). Shirley wrote the first two miscellanies while in the employ of the earl of Warwick, and the third after taking up residence in the close of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital north of St. Paul’s after the earl’s death in 1439. Scholars disagree about the nature of Shirley’s scribal activity after he settled in St. Bartholomew’s and apparently rented four shops from the hospital, but whatever his own status—amateur or professional scribe, antiquarian or commercial stationer—at least some of his manuscripts passed to professional scribes after his death.42 Linne Mooney suggests that Shirley’s three surviving miscellanies “owe their survival to their usefulness as exemplars for the book trade in London and their intrinsic interest to bibliophilic antiquarians in London in the century when many paper manuscripts were being discarded for the more ‘modern’ printed copies of the same texts.”43 Trinity R.3.20, which is made up chiefly of poems by Lydgate, contains unique copies of all of the royal and civic mummings and disguisings except Bishopswood (which is in Ashmole 59) as well as copies of the Legend of St. George, Bycorne and Chichevache, and the Procession of Corpus Christi.44 Trinity R.3.20 is thus the key source for the mummings and its probable completion date of 1432 (it lacks the Triumphal Entry and so was probably

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compiled before Lydgate wrote those commemorative verses), suggests that the readers of Lydgate’s mummings would have encountered verses made for fairly recent performances—performances that they themselves might in some cases have attended. While the reminders to return the book home to Shirley in the two “Tables of Contents” of British Library Add. MS 29729 and Add. MS 16165 have been interpreted to suggest that Shirley ran a lending library that reached a large readership, that picture may be somewhat misleading.45 Cheryl Greenberg, for instance, believed that prosperous members of the clergy and laity residing in St. Bartholomew’s Close would have formed part of Shirley’s clientele, and notes that the annual Bartholomew’s fair (August 22–25) in existence since Henry II, may have sold books.46 But Margaret Connolly has argued convincingly that until his last anthology Shirley worked within a context shaped by the “culture of service” that he encountered in the course of his career in the household of the earl of Warwick and that he compiled his anthologies with the assumption that they would be read by “bothe the gret and the commune” of that household, as Shirley states in the preface to the first of his anthologies.47 If Connolly is correct about the household focus of Shirley’s anthologies (with the exception of Ashmole 59, which assumes a different and broader audience), then Lydgate’s readers hardly comprise a broad public. Although Ashmole 59 shows signs of sloppiness, perhaps the result of Shirley’s advanced age when he made it, Shirley’s anthologies are in general attentive to the needs of readers, while also taking care to attribute and describe poems—especially Lydgate’s—whenever possible. Shirley added headnotes giving information about the texts that follow, made annotations (such as for all the learned allusions in the Mumming for the Mercers), and organized the contents into a clear and readable form. The impression is of a compiler looking in two directions at once: to the reputation of the poets he copies, especially Lydgate, and to the reading pleasure of those among whom his anthologies would circulate. What matters for the present discussion is that the manuscript evidence suggests that Lydgate’s public poems for Londoners, with the exception of the Triumphal Entry, did not circulate widely beyond those readers who may have used Trinity R.3.20, and that those readers comprised a fairly small group that probably overlapped with the original audience for Lydgate’s entertainments.48 Significantly, the mummings and disguisings appear never to have been copied, or at least no surviving copies exist until Stow, which would seem to suggest that they never reached much beyond a coterie secondary audience—one that was not unlike their coterie primary audience—and that Lydgate’s entertainments, with the exception of the Triumphal Entry, did not participate in a “widening” of readership of

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the sort that Paul Strohm has identified for Chaucer in the fifteenth century.49 While Shirley clearly thought that the mummings and disguisings deserved preservation and took pains to present them accessibly, they seem never to have had a wide appeal or to have attracted a broad readership. It is perhaps significant that Lydgate’s performance pieces had the greatest lasting impact on royal entertainments as his mummings were absorbed into the masque in the sixteenth century.50 That most of Lydgate’s entertainments for Londoners speak only falteringly in a common voice and, when performed and later circulated as written texts, reached fairly small coterie audiences, should give pause to those of us who wish to argue for his importance as a shaper of public culture. While claims that Lydgate speaks for the upper reaches of urban society in an imaginative projection of a civic voice that evokes the idea of a broad public are compelling, the circumscribed nature of the actual audiences for those verses should remind us that “official” and “public” are not necessarily synonymous, not even in Lancastrian England. Lawrence Clopper’s comment that Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings “illustrate the taste shared by their monastic author, the court, and members of the ruling oligarchy in London in the early fifteenth century” seems a reasonably accurate assessment of the scope of Lydgate’s entertainments.51 Given that scope, it should not be surprising if a genuinely “comun vois” is not always easy to find in those entertainments. For such a voice and a broadly public culture to which it is linked, we may, paradoxically, have to look to other of Lydgate’s writings, those that are private, religious, and located outside London, rather than those created and performed within the city.52 Notes 1. H.S. Bennett, “The Author and His Public in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Essays and Studies 23 (1938): 19 [7–24]. Bennett rather unsympathetically views Lydgate’s career as showing how a man with a safe harborage, coupled with the support of rich patrons, could find the leisure to energetically string together “words and phrases into collocations which had all the appearance of verse” (p. 13). 2. Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 95–96 [94–144]. 3. Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 4–5. Nolan argues that Lydgate is caught up in the same historical shift as the Lancastrians, who in the 1420s had to surrender to broader ideas of a public in order to legitimate the child-king Henry VI, but who nevertheless tried to limit the notion of “publicness” by stressing the representativeness of the king.

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4. C. David Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 151 [147–68]; the quotation is from p. 154 and the discussion of Lydgate giving indirect voice to contemporary criticism is from p. 164. 5. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” p. 159. 6. Middleton claims that public poetry “speaks ‘as if ’ to the entire community. . .rather than ‘as if ’ to a coterie or patron. By its mode of address and diction it implies that the community is heterogeneous, diverse, made up of many having separate ‘singular’ interests” (“The Idea of Public Poetry,” p. 96). 7. David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” English Literary History 54 (1987): 793 [761–99]. 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 9. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 160, and Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 10. 10. For a discussion of early descriptions of London, see John Ganim, “Urbanism, Experience and Rhetoric in Some Early Descriptions of London,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens, ed. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 77–96. 11. Ian Archer, “The Nostalgia of John Stow,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 21 [17–34]. Stow would have encountered FitzStephen in a fourteenth-century London custumal, the Liber Custumarum, into which Andrew Horn, the City Chamberlain, inserted FitzStephen before items included for 1321. 12. See Lawrence Manley, “Of Sites and Rites,” in The Theatrical City, pp. 35–54, esp. p. 50. 13. Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 285, 293 [284–309]. 14. See Caroline M. Barron, “The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London,” in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. Caroline Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1985), pp. 13–37. Parish guilds were separate from craft guilds and were, Barron points out, basically communal chantries that were mainly middle class and artisanal (few members of Great Companies joined parish fraternities), and were markedly female; they were also “expressions of parish, neighbourly solidarity” (p. 34) that, if bequests can be taken as evidence, were more important than any other civic ties.

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15. See Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Time to 1558 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 39–40. 16. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, p. 2. The closest London seems to have come to public drama of the sort found in provincial cities was the London puy of c. 1300, a social and religious society devoted to the Virgin Mary and to musical composition and performance in her honor and with membership drawn from royalty, nobility, clergy, and urban elites, evidence of which is preserved in the Liber Custumarum; see Anne F. Sutton, “Merchants, Music and Social Harmony: The London Puy and its French and London Contexts, circa 1300,” London Journal 17 (1992): 1–17. 17. While expensive, such pageantry must have provided work for artisans, laborers, and provisioners, and attracted crowds that generated business for inns, taverns, and other purveyors of goods, so much so that the prevalence of pageants and processions may explain why Londoners did not need the sorts of play festivals put on in York, Coventry, or Chester; see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, p. 22. 18. References to a play at Clerkenwell/Skinner’s Well appear in 1384, 1390, and 1391; the play was apparently also scheduled for 1385 but the city cancelled it, due to fears of invasion by France during the military undertakings of Richard II in Scotland; see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 60. 19. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 57–70. 20. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 121–22. Pearsall dates Bishopswood to May Day of 1429, on the ground that it might have accompanied the mummings for the mercers and goldsmiths earlier that year in honor of William Estfield (John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography, English Literary Studies 71 [Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1997], p. 51); if Pearsall is correct, the actual date would have to be May of 1430, since Estfield was mayor from October 29, 1429 to October 29, 1430, as Lancashire notes (London Civic Theatre, p. 121). Arguing against a dating of May 1430 is the theme of the mumming, which presents springtime as driving away the troubles of winter, raising the question of whether the celebratory months after Henry’s coronation would be seen in that light. 21. G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 206–7, assigns the massive borrowing from Londoners for the 1430–31 campaigns, to the efforts of Mayors Estfield and Wooton. Estfield was knighted in 1439, but Barron notes that his seals were not armorial, which she interprets as evidence that London merchants in the fifteenth century developed a distinctive culture, separate from royalist chivalry; see her “Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture in Medieval London,” in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), pp. 219–41, esp. p. 239. 22. For the quotations see 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), II:695–98 (Mercers) and 698–701 (Goldsmiths);

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23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

all future references to Lydgate’s verses are to Vol. II and for ease of reading, I have changed MacCracken’s thorns to “th.” For the halls of mayors, see Betty R. Masters, “The Mayor’s Household Before 1600,” in Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Jones, ed. A.E.J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), p. 108 [95–114]; cited in Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 274 n8. See The British Atlas of Historic Towns, Vol. 3: The City of London: From Prehistoric Times to c. 1520, ed. Mary D. Lobel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Gazetteer, s.v. Goldsmiths’ Hall, and Jean Imray, The Mercers’ Hall (London: London Topographical Society, 1991), p. 6. Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (1952; London: Methuen, 1961), p. 103; Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 186, locates it indoors. For the sheriffs in May of 1430, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 276 n32. Pearsall, Bio-Bibliography, p. 28, assigns the Disguising at London to the parliament that opened on October 13, 1427. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 122–23, n33. Pearsall argues that the St. George verses were read aloud when the murals were presented to the armorers guild (John Lydgate, p. 181); a much later record from 1585 at an election feast of the armorers and brasiers refers to an armed boy representing St. George and a lady leading a lamb accompanied by some sort of recitation (see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 105–6, and p. 263 n37). The running titles in Trinity R.3.20, which identify Bycorne as “the fourome of desguysinges. . .the maner of straunge desgysinges, the gyse of a momynge” [my transcription]. MacCracken, in The Minor Poems, II:433, misidentifies these titles, which he transcribes slightly differently, as appearing in Trinity R.3.19. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 73. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” pp. 148–49; one might add that the theme of proper rule is also shared between court and city, with the Disguising at Hertford operating in part as instruction in decision making for the young Henry VI and the Mumming for the Goldsmiths, with its writ contained in the ark of the covenant, acting as persuasion for Mayor Estfield to discharge his duties in the right way. John Lydgate: Poems, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 195. Norton-Smith notes that Lydgate’s “highly pointed art language” derives from liturgical or Vulgate Latin and is “as richly celebratory” as the original (pp. 194–95). Phillipa Hardman offers an analysis and defense of Lydgate’s diffuse and complex style in “Lydgate’s Uneasy Syntax,” in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 12–35, noting that what is often seen as “faulty construction” and other defects may be the product of “stylistic devices, intended to create specific effects” (p. 30). Pearsall, BioBibliography, p. 19, links Lydgate’s elaborate style, visible as early as the Life of Our Lady, with Henry V’s “desire to encourage quasi-liturgical English composition in the high style, and of his understanding that such writing struck at the claims of the Lollards to own the religious vernacular.”

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30. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 13, and Lawton, “Dullness,” pp. 771 and 773. 31. For London companies performing at court, possibly even in Lydgate’s royal mummings, see the accounts of John Merston from February 12, 1428, which include payments to Jakke Travaill and his London players for performing “diverses Jeuues & Entreludes” during the previous holiday season (P.R.O., E.404/42/306; E.404/44/334; printed in Foedera, 20 vols., ed. Thomas Rymer (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1704–35), 10:387–88); for royal household players (including the players of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester) performing for civic audiences, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 82–83. 32. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 127. Also see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 9, for the shared tastes of court and city elites. 33. One cause of this distancing might be that Lydgate may be working in the role of “deviser,” providing bespoke verses to be used as part of larger entertainments planned by guilds and other groups; see 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 am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 73–101. 34. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:672–74. 35. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry,” p. 96. The Mumming at Bishopswood also contains an image of commonalty, making mention of “truwe comvnes” (l. 55) and “the people” (ll. 39, 49, 62, 64). 36. Lawrence M. Clopper disagrees, arguing that the verses were not linked to a procession or tableau-performance, but that Lydgate is writing “a sermon, or ‘process,’ centered on imagined figurae or pictures of them”; see Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 164. 37. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 124, 247 n184, and 277 n43. Schirmer thought that the poem was a description in verse of the meaning of the London festival and was probably commissioned by his monastery (John Lydgate, p. 175), Gail MacMurray Gibson notes that records suggest that there was a Corpus Christi procession in Bury; see her “Bury St Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle,” Speculum 56 (1981): 56–90, where she cites a Weaver’s Craft Ordinance of 1477 specifying payment to support a pageant in the procession of the feast of Corpus Christi that had been “customed of olde tyme owte of mynde yeerly to be had” (pp. 60–61). 38. John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1:230–31. 39. A.I. Doyle, “More Light on John Shirley,” Medium Aevum 30 (1961): 94–95 [93–101]. 40. Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 467.

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41. See Foedera, 10:387–88. 42. See the summary of evidence about Shirley’s scribal activities in Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in FifteenthCentury England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 2–4 and 191–95. 43. Linne R. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 197 [182–98]. Also see Mooney’s “Scribes and Booklets of Trinity College, Cambridge, Manuscripts R.2.19 and R.3.21,” in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A.J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 241–66. 44. Connolly argues that Shirley stayed in London while Warwick went to France for the coronation of Henry VI and copied what is now Trinity R.3.20 then, in the early 1430s, completing it by the end of 1432 or thereabouts; see John Shirley, p. 77. Connolly notes that the manuscript contains poems attributed to Suffolk that cannot be earlier than 1430 and notes that the Triumphal Entry is not included, which perhaps suggest the MS was completed before Lydgate wrote his commemorative verses (p. 80). 45. Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927), pp. 191–97, prints Lydgate’s “Kalundare” and discusses Shirley’s scribal activities. 46. Cheryl Greenberg, “John Shirley and the English Book Trade,” The Library 6th ser., 4 (1982): 369–80, esp. p. 376. 47. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 191. 48. Hammond thinks Lydgate did not retain the texts of his mummings, personal poems, and addresses and that they did not circulate; see “Two British Museum Manuscripts,” Anglia 28 (1905): 1–28, esp. 24. 49. Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition,’” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3–32. 50. Where Lydgate does seem to have had an influence is on court entertainments. As has often been noted, Lydgate’s mummings and disguising established a pattern that would be followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the court masque. Purely in terms of influence, then, Lydgate looks more royal and less “public.” For Lydgate’s influence on court entertainments, see P.H. Parry, “On the Continuity of English Civic Pageantry: A Study of John Lydgate and the Tudor Pageant,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 15 (1979): 222–36. 51. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, p. 161. 52. See, for instance, the “Complaint for my Lady of Gloucester and Holland” not attributed to Lydgate in Trinity R.3.20 (just to “a solitarye persone”) and remarkable for its inclusion during the height of Gloucester’s power and perhaps suggesting that the Warwick circle “was not uncritical of Gloucester’s influence” (Connolly, John Shirley, p. 83); Shirley later assigns the poem to Lydgate, in Ashmole 59 (ascribing it to “a Chapellayne of my lordes of Gloucestre Humfrey” and giving Lydgate’s name in the margin on fol. 57r and in the running header on fol. 57v, perhaps because after the death of Gloucester in 1447 caution was no longer needed). The poem makes reference to the formal complaint of the women of London to Parliament

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in 1428 against Gloucester’s affair with Eleanor Cobham and the author of the poem stresses he is speaking for public opinion (“The peoples menyng for tacquyte / was cause why thaat he did it wryte” [ll. 97–98]) and claims to speak for 3,000 people; while Lydgate’s authorship has been doubted (Pearsall, Bio-Bibliography, p. 45 n44, but Connolly argues for the accuracy of Shirley’s attributions [Connolly, John Shirley, p. 83]). Another example might possibly be the N-Town plays, which Gibson has linked to Lydgate; see “Bury St Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle,” pp. 85–90.

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CHAPTER 2 LYDGATE’S GOLDEN COWS: APPETITE AND AVARICE IN BYCORNE AND CHYCHEVACHE Andrea Denny-Brown

icorn and Chichevache are inherently “medieval” beasts. They emerge in fourteenth-century European culture distinct from any previous mythical monster, and for this reason, perhaps more than inherited classical, biblical, and Celtic animals that populate other texts from this period, they have the potential to more fully embody the late medieval imaginary. As the fable goes, these cannibal creatures feed selectively on either patient husbands or patient wives, and thus the relative proportions of their body masses serve as a markers for the gendered demographics of social and marital conduct: Bicorn is “fatte” because good men are so prevalent, while Chichevache is “leene” because good women are so scarce.1 The overt misogyny of the story retains its humor through a series of cultural inversions—for example, in Lydgate’s version, on which this essay will focus, the wives are not only more fierce than the beasts, but the man-eating brutes sing eloquent ballads that invoke sympathy for their own plights. At the heart of these reversals is the tale’s mock-moralizing tone, in which women are “warned away” from certain forms of behavior, such as treating their husbands with patience and respect, lest the dread Chichevache catch them in her maw. Critical reception of the tale has been dominated by its interest in the tale’s treatment of gender conflict; of the two sustained studies written on Bicorn and Chichevache in the last thirty years, both use “Monsters of Misogyny” as their title phrase.2 Yet these beasts offer more than stock misogyny; as I will suggest, in its English versions especially the appetitive register of the fable can be understood more specifically in regard to the managing of desire and the innate mortal hunger for material (as opposed to spiritual) goods.

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In an attempt both to clarify the little-known literary sources for this fable in England and to explore its cultural associations, the first section of this chapter introduces the two earliest extant French interpretations of the tale and examines the way in which Chaucer’s version develops their themes of beastly appetite. The second section explores the way in which Lydgate’s subsequent version of the tale offers an even wider window onto the multifaceted theme of appetite in both the secular and spiritual realms in the late Middle Ages, from avarice and material consumption to carnival feasts and religious fasts. In its attempt to evaluate the discord and excess of desire, I argue, Lydgate’s poem contemplates the poetic production of what might be called beastly “matere”—the intersection, that is, of the body and that which it consumes (and that in turn consumes it); of the literary realm of the imaginary and the material realm of reality; and of the divine portent and the secular fable. Battling Beasts in the Fourteenth Century The fable has its origins in the independent figure called Chincheface (skinny-face or miser-muzzle), a beast that first appears in two fourteenthcentury French texts that are possible sources for Chaucer’s reference to the animal in the Envoy to the Clerk’s Tale.3 The first is an anonymous poem of sixty-eight lines in octosyllabic couplets dubbed the “Dit de Chincheface.”4 In this poem a mal marié narrator tells of a time two years ago when he was riding through a forest in Lorraine, France, and came across a ferocious beast, a creature so wild (“si sauvage” [l. 24]) that no man had ever seen its like. The poet describes “la chincheface” in typical bestial terms—ugly (“laide” [l. 11]) and enormously tall, with teeth as long as roasting spits, eyes like glowing coal, and the unique ability (with the help of the devil) to shed its skin daily. But he also includes a few unique and telling details, such as the description that “[c]ele beste n’est pas cortoise / Ne debonere por jouer” [This beast is not courtly / nor debonair to play with (ll. 18–19)]. The use of keywords cortoise, debonere, and jouer enhances the humor of the tale—with the same ironic mock-horror we are told that the beast not only sheds its skin, but is also socially unrefined—and simultaneously suggests its underlying meaning. Why would anyone expect a fierce beast in the woods to be cortoise and debonere? Why would anyone want to “play” with such a beast? The answer lies in the beast’s prey: we are told that this decidedly uncourtly beast feeds on refined, courtly women— only those who know how to speak properly (“Qui sagement savent parler” [ll. 28]) and she who bears fealty to her lord (“Qui son seignor feute porte” [l. 44]). It is tempting in this light to read the daily shedding of the beast’s skin in the same courtly terms, for moralists complained vociferously about

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the numerous changes of indecent attire enacted by the most fashionable courtiers in this period.5 Furthermore, the poet states that because of the ravenous Chincheface, such refined, courtly women no longer exist in (fashion-forward) Tuscany or Lombardy (ll. 39–41). At the end of the poem he proclaims his fear that the beast may come to this land (“en cest pais” [ll. 55–56]) and warns the ladies present that they should protect themselves by showing great pride and dissension toward their husbands at every turn. If we take into account the female gender of the beast (la Chincheface) and the fact that both she and the wives who survive her are characterized in terms of their orgueil, pride (ll. 42, 58), we can see a rather concrete binary emerge here: proper, modest women are being symbolically devoured by their wilder, prouder, greedier, foreign, and fashionconscious counterparts. While the first French poet imagines Chincheface as embodying an insurgence of contrary wives, the second offers a related but decidedly different interpretation. Jehan le Fèvre’s infamous Lamentations de Mathéolus, a loose French translation of the acerbic thirteenth-century Latin text by Mathieu of Boulogne, takes up the same basic stance as the “Dit de Chincheface,” expounding, from the point of view of the hen-pecked husband-poet, on the bestial nature of rebellious wives.6 Written in 1371–72, this overtly and famously misogynist text could very well have been one of the sources for Jankyn’s Book of Wicked Wives and thus provoked Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to tear up that famous fictional anthology;7 more historically, it is the text that Christine de Pizan cites as the impetus for having written the City of Ladies in defense of women.8 Curiously, however, while Le Fèvre’s text includes a veritable plethora of bestial, often hybrid epithets for evil women, including “cruel viper,” “basilisk,” “she-wolf in heat,” “monstrous hermaphrodite,” and “chimera with horns,”9 and also includes several passages that seem to echo the “Dit de Chincheface,”10 its brief reference to Chincheface actually alludes to the poor husband-poet, rather than his bestial wife: “Je suy comme une chicheface, / Maigre par dessoubs ma peaucelle” [“I am like a Chincheface, / thin beneath my skin”], proclaims the poet near the end of Book III.11 With these words he uses the fabled Chincheface to underscore his own emasculation and devastation: his monstrous wife has not only humiliated him (in the original Latin the name is actually written as a double diminutive, Matheolusus, rather than Matheus),12 but also turned him into a most pathetic and feminized monster himself. Thus on the surface what these French poems passed on to Chaucer (and later Lydgate) was a beast fable concerning rebellious wives whose central character could be read in two distinct ways: as a ferocious female beast representing what bad wives could become, or as a piteous,

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emasculated beast representing what bad wives turn their husbands into. In this respect one can see why the critical attention to this fable has centered on its gender implications; indeed, the basic formulation of the fable, especially when Chichevache’s “spouse” Bicorn is added in the fifteenth century, seems to breed gender confusion.13 In it, two sets of mismatched, competing spouses (one human, one bestial) battle both one another and the same-sex spouse of the other couple for their very survival. On the one hand this situation suggests that marriage of any kind is a mutually exclusive (and thus self-canceling) union: because no marriage can be imagined without a sovereign and a subordinate party, one spouse will always suffer the threat of destruction and one beast will always suffer the threat of starvation. On the other hand, the structure also suggests that on some level we are meant, like Le Fèvre, to associate each beast with the offending spouse: just as the emaciated Chichevache can represent the piteous, henpecked husband unable to dominate or “devour” his wife, so the obese Bicorn can represent the all-consuming wife who easily dominates and devours her husband.14 While both of these French works clearly establish the tale’s gender dynamics, their divergent interpretations of Chincheface also point to another more subtle function of this beast in the period’s literary and cultural imagination. If we look beyond the complex gendering of these animals we see a different, equally time-honored quandary: is the beast external or internal, Other or self? Does it represent the beast in the woods that the husband-poet fears, or the monster he fears turning into? As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s work has taught us, medieval monsters often negotiate the space between the two; they can represent both “a morally and physically deformed creature arriving to demarcate the boundary beyond which lies the unintelligible, the inhuman” and “a figure whose indomitable corporeality suggests the difficulty of being merely human in a world that demands the austere discipline of minute self-regulation.”15 The unequivocal materiality of these beasts, especially their overbearing somatic presence and their extreme diets, suggests that they offer a lesson in human self-understanding that goes beyond marital typecasting. In particular, the trope of consumption at the heart of the fable provides a useful means through which subsequent medieval poets were able to explore the deeper ramifications of mortal appetite in all its bestial glory. Chaucer, for his part, situates the fable of Chichevache in a text concerned in its own way with notions of monstrosity and material appearances.16 The Clerk’s reference to Chichevache in his Envoy comes shortly after his address to the Wife of Bath “and al hire secte” (l. 1171), and directly after he mentions the death of Griselda “and eek her pacience”

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(l. 1177), which, he claims, are both buried together in Italy. He states: O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence, Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille As of Grisildis pacient and kynde, Lest Chichevache yow swelwe in hire entraille! (Envoy, ll. 1183–88)

In the greater context of Chaucer’s Griselda tale, this allusion to Chichevache could be read in connection with either of the French fables: as a reference to a great insurgence of rebellious “archewyves” who have replaced all the patient Griseldas of the land, or as a figure for the embattled husband-poet. In the case of the latter, the obvious correlation to the emaciated creature would be the ascetic Clerk himself, who is not merely “nat right fat” (GP, l. 288), but so thin as to look “holwe” (l. 289), with a horse that is also “[a]s leene. . .as is a rake” (l. 287). Aesthetically contrasted to his bony frame is the bodily girth of the Wife of Bath (to whom the Clerk’s envoy is of course addressed), with her “hipes large” (GP, l. 472), and that of the other battle-ready “archewyves” of the Envoy, whom he describes as “strong as is a greet camaille” (l. 1196). As I suggest elsewhere, the Envoy to the Clerk’s Tale can be read as part of a larger discourse of consumer conduct in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one particularly associated with the Clerk’s tale of (antimaterial) Griselda as a response to the bourgeois consumer habits of the Wife of Bath, among others.17 The inclusion of Chichevache works well as part of this dynamic; for one thing, the Middle English word “chinche,” or “chiche” refers not to a skinny person, as the usual translation of “skinny cow” suggests, but to “a person who is stingy, miserly, or greedy; a niggard, miser.”18 The closest synonym to our beast’s name, a word very close in spirit to chincheface, is “chinchehede,” which was used as a term for greediness.19 Commonly employed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English texts, “chinche” is usually associated with avarice and coveitise. Chaucer’s Prudence, for example, uses the term several times to lecture Melibee on the proper way to use wealth. For instance, she quotes Cato as saying: Use. . .thy richesses that thou has geten / in swich a manere that men have no matiere ne cause to calle thee neither wrecche ne chynche; / for it is greet shame to a man to have a poore herte and a riche purs. /. . .The goodes that thou hast ygeten, use hem by mesure. (Melibee, ll. 1601–4)

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Like Chichevache, misers and other avaricious figures were often represented as emaciated, such as Langland’s Coveitous, “So hungrily and holwe. . .hym loked.”20 The miser constitutes one half of a two-fold medieval understanding of avarice: on the one hand, as Chaucer’s Prudence states, avarice entails excessive hoarding or spending: “For right as men blamen an avaricious man by cause of his scarsetee and chyncherie / in the same wise is he to blame that spendeth over-largely” (ll. 1599–600; emphasis mine). On the other hand, as Chaucer’s Parson makes clear, avarice is “a likerousnesse in herte to have erthely thynges,” and entails simply coveting as well as actually purchasing material things: “Coveitise is for to coveite swiche thynges as thou hast nat; and Avarice is for to withholde and kepe swiche thynges as thou hast, withoute rightful nede” (Parson’s Tale, ll. 740, 743). In addition to her appearance, then, Chichevache could be said to embody both types of avarice in other ways: while her name seems to connote miserliness, Chichevache’s appetite—her desperate need to consume patient women, something she cannot have— seems to represent coveitise. While tensions over avarice and material gain implicitly inform many of the marital battles of the Canterbury Tales, the Clerk’s Envoy is especially provocative in this regard. The Clerk explicitly addresses the theme of excessive spending by wives—“If thou be foul, be fre of thy dispence,” he tells the arch-wives in the last stanza (l. 1209)—and in this way seems to counter in his final words the Wife of Bath’s attack on miser-husbands, those “olde and angry nygardes of dispence” (l. 1263), at the close of her own Tale.21 If, according to the Wife of Bath, among others, the stereotypically “bad” husband is the miser, a chiche, then according to the Clerk, the stereotypically “bad” wife is extravagant and wasteful. With the trope of gendered consumer habits already buried in the marital debate in this way, the introduction of Chichevache, a miser-cow that threatens to “swelwe” women like Griselda, serves the added purpose of associating alimentary with other forms of material consumption. As Chaucer’s Prudence states (quoting Augustine this time): “the avaricious man is likned unto helle, / that the moore it swelweth the moore desir it hath to swelwe and devoure” (ll. 1616–17). Even Chaucer’s changing of the name “Chicheface” to “Chichevache,” miser-cow, which adds a new level of comedic domestication to the beast, can be seen in terms of its connection to avarice. Chaucer’s exhortation to turn away from temporal goods in his popular Boethian poem “Truth” (also known as the “Balade de Bon Conseyl”), for example, includes a telling pun on the word “vache” in the envoy. Here the word can refer either to the prosperous courtier Sir Philip de la Vache, or to a more universal vache––the materialistic human as “beste” trapped in his worldly “wildernesse,” which is also his cage: “Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth beste, out of thy stal!”

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(ll. 17–18).22 In either case, Chaucer counsels the beste or vache in this poem to “look up” (l. 19) from worldly distractions, to “[h]old the heye wey” and “[d]istreyne thy lust” (l. 20), and to turn instead to “hevenlich mede” (l. 27).23 In this way the poem follows Boethius’ theory about the transformative power of human vices (and particularly the love of material goods): in the words of Chaucer’s Boece, “he that forleteth bounte and prowesse, he forletith to ben a man; syn he ne may nat passe into the condicioun of God, he is torned into a beeste” (IV.pr.3.123–26).24 Lydgate’s Golden Calf A popular and influential poem in its own right, Lydgate’s Bycorne and Chychevache, the earliest extant version of the fable to include an explanation of Chichevache’s “spouse” Bicorn, shows potential influence from all three fourteenth-century sources and possibly a missing fourth.25 Like the French “Dit de Chincheface,” Lydgate’s version opens with a public address at the beginning of the poem and speaks of the “debonayre” (l. 27) women that make up the beast’s food; like Le Fèvre’s text, the sympathy invoked for the wretched Chichevache in the face of women’s “vyolence” (l. 126) directly correlates to the sympathy for the “cely housbandes” who are married to such women (l. 124). Lydgate also continues with Chaucer’s impulse to domesticate the animal(s): first by keeping the bovine name “Chichevache” and changing the French “Bigorn” to “Bicorn,” or “two horns,” a more appropriate name for a cow (or bull) and one found in other medieval texts,26 and second by repeatedly identifying the patient men and women as the beasts’ “pasture” (ll. 12, 17, 83, 101). Lydgate draws a clear connection between his text and that of the Clerk’s Tale, mentioning Griselda twice in his brief (133-line) ballad, and seeming consciously to echo the Clerk’s language in several places, including his warning to women that Chichevache will “You. . .swalowe in hir entrayle” (l. 77). With the addition of Bicorn as Chichevache’s mate, however, the fable becomes more overtly invested in the double-bind—or what the poet calls the “double cheyne” (l. 133)— of the meek husband (rather than the disobedient wife), who must choose in the end between facing the “cruweltee” of his wife and being devoured by the “cruell beste” Bycorne. Aside from Bycorne, Lydgate’s most obvious addition is the mixedmedia form of the poem, one of the few elements that has received apt critical attention.27 One of a series of so-called “London” poems that Lydgate wrote for Henry VI’s court and other powerful laypeople in the late 1420s and early 1430s, the poem, according to John Shirley’s rubrics in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, was commissioned by a “werQy citeseyn of London” to be displayed on a painted or “desteyned” cloth and

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placed in a hall, chamber, or parlor.28 While the images no longer exist, Shirley’s notes attempt to describe what they would have looked like.29 Despite these notes, however, as Claire Sponsler has pointed out elsewhere, and as Jennifer Floyd discusses more fully in this book, the intended medium of Lydgate’s poem in relation to the images is far from clear. It could, for example, have been either included along with the images in textile form or read aloud in a public presentation; whereas one manuscript has running titles that associate it with Lydgate’s disguisings and mummings, scholarly consensus seems to be that the poem was probably not meant to be performed by actors in this way.30 The mixed form of the poem concerns this study in two main ways. First is the link to consumer demand and consumer objects. For example, what exactly constitutes a “werQy citeseyn,” what value system is being referred to with these words, and how does that “worth” correlate to the poem’s own value?31 Undoubtedly the worthiness connotes the wealth and social status of the person commissioning the poem, reminding us that this type of poem, certainly more than those without a (verbalized) commission, carries the residual evidence of consumer expectations and purchase and points to the worth of the poem itself as an object of exchange. Informing this literary economy, of course, is the considerable cost the textile or painting would have incurred, and the aesthetic value of the poem—its ability, that is, to be moved and “shown” as a purchased marker of education, status, aesthetic taste, courtly and literary connections, and wealth.32 Along with this commodified aspect of the poem, the obvious need or desire for visual aids as supplements to the fable is also of particular interest for my purposes here. Pictorial representations of Bicorn and Chichevache seem to have had a certain popularity later in the fifteenth century; one French poem of 1480, for example, describes buying Chichevache prints on the Palais de Justice in Paris; taverns from the period also apparently used the images in their painted signs. In addition, two early-sixteenth-century wall paintings with brief verses explaining their mythography attest to the later popularity of the image in larger forms.33 Sponsler discusses Lydgate’s tapestry poems and other visual mediums in terms of his attention to “the power of visual stimulation,” suggesting that Lydgate and his generation were more interested in the possibility of graphic and other media provoking knowledge and inspiration than has been previously considered.34 That visual representations of Bicorn and Chichevache were also used in their moral capacity has been suggested by M.D. Anderson, who tentatively identifies the beast Bicorn in a series of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English misericords that depict man-eating monsters, and who further suggests that the fable might have begun as a sermon story.35

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The mixed medium of Lydgate’s poem also amplifies certain themes in the text itself. Unlike the earlier versions of the poem, for example, Lydgate includes six distinct voices or perspectives on the beasts, all of whom are also displayed visually: the poet, Bicorn, “a companye of men,” a woman (Griselda?) in Chichevache’s maw, Chichevache herself, and “an olde man” (Walter?) who has lost his wife to Chichevache. The multiple voices in the poem seem to contradict each other at times; for example, just before Chichevache complains she has not eaten in thirty years (“thritty Mayes” [l. 96]), she is shown in the act of devouring someone (as Shirley writes, “Qen shal Qer be a woman deuowred ypurtrayhed in Qe mouQe of Chichevache cryen to alle wyves” [p. 433]). (In contrast, the “fatte beest” Bicorn is depicted, according to Shirley’s description, not eating but merely singing his three ballads [p. 434]). The plurality of voices and images that describes these beasts underscores Lydgate’s larger interest in aesthetics and interpretation in this poem, in how one should “treat” the “matter” of such a curious fable, and in whether doing so is a question of medium, hermeneutics, form, or tone. It also seems to address the poet’s own “consumption” of his source material; the thirty years since Chichevache last ate coincide nicely with the roughly thirty years since Chaucer wrote about her one and only meal, Griselda.36 Like its form, the content of Lydgate’s Bycorne and Chychevache seems positioned to test the boundaries between mediums and perspectives that do not stereotypically agree. Part of this consists of Lydgate’s familiar use of binary oppositions—the poem roots its humor in things that literally and figuratively do not “acorde” (l. 5), such as fat and skinny, dominant women and feeble men, prudence and ignorance, and simultaneously terrifying and pitiful beasts. Yet Lydgate adds another element to this formula, an apparently ironic but persistent parallel between the beast fable as a commentary on worldly, material appetite and as a commentary on spiritual bounty.37 In a self-consciously sententious tone, his introductory stanza (with “an ymage in poet-wyse” accompanying it), not only asks his listeners to remember the story in their daily lives, but also connects it to the larger cycle of life and death of which the quotidian is but a small part: O prudent folkes, takeQe heed And remembreQe, in youre lyves, Howe Qis story doQe proceed Of Qe housbandes and Qeyre wyves, Of Qeyre acorde and of Qeyre stryves With lyf or deeQe, which to derrain Is graunted to Qees beestis tweyin. (ll. 1–7)

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With a clever use of enjambment between lines five and six, Lydgate seems to play with the idea that this is not merely a light, humorous poem about husbands and wives and their alternate harmony or discord with each other; it is also a poem about their “acorde” and “stryves”—their reconciliation and conflict—with mortality, with “lyf or deeQ.” The vague use of a demonstrative to introduce the two animals—“Qees beestis tweyin”—in the final line further emphasizes the possibility that the “beasts” in this poem, not clearly identified as Bicorn and Chichevache until the following stanza, could easily refer to the husbands and wives themselves.38 Are these creatures, then, like the “beste” and “vache” of Chaucer’s “Truth,” merely metaphors for the mortal condition, the attachment to temporal goods in the face of the one Good? As Claire Sponsler notes in this book’s previous chapter, Lydgate’s concern with “worldly plentitude” seems to pervade his corpus. Indeed, in blurring the boundary between monster and mortal, hunter and prey, satire and sententiousness in his opening stanza of Bycorne and Chychevache—and before the “actual” story has even begun—Lydgate effectively sets up a hermeneutic dialectic for reading these hungry beasts as anything but the characters in the silly misogynist fable they at first seem. Yet while Bicorn and Chichevache do make appropriate vessels for the theme of appetite in general, what Lydgate offers is a more subtle and complicated interrogation of how to understand appetite as a type of intersection between two worlds: myth and reality, visual and textual, and spiritual and material. Appetite, in its various manifestations, becomes in this poem the tool through which one can better comprehend the incomprehensible. A more overt meditation on this disjunction between material and spiritual appetites can be found in Lydgate’s “Ryme without Accord,” a poem in one of the same anthologies as Bycorne and Chychevache (British Library MS Harley 2251). The poem begins: All thyng in kynde desirith thyng i-like, But the contrary hatis euery thyng, Save only mankynd can neuer wele lyke, Without he have a volumus livyng, Flesshly desire, and gostly norisshyng, In oone persone can neuer be wrought, Fuyre and water, to-gyder al brennyng, It may wele ryme, but it accordith nought. (ll. 1–8)

A series of lists of the discordant elements of English life and society with the recurring refrain “It may wele ryme, but it accordith nought,” this poem represents nicely Lydgate’s interest in aesthetic accord—rhyme— versus material, temporal (and spiritual and social) discord. Unlike the poet,

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who can bring apparent order to anything through his use of rhyme and meter, the poem seems to say, life itself brings only disorder. All things naturally desire, the poem further suggests, but the sustenance humans require and the sustenance they seek are far from reconciled: humans will never find harmony, let alone “gostly norisshyng,” without their “[f]lesshly desire” and “volumus livyng” getting in the way. Lydgate’s representation of inappropriate appetite is especially evocative here because it suggests that a poet’s primary purpose (and primary futility) is to make things “accord” in fiction that do not in life. Lydgate’s interest in exploring inherently incongruous things—in this case, attempting to read decidedly secular material through a spiritual lens—is amplified in Bycorne and Chychevache’s second stanza, when he tells his listeners: Of Chichevache and of Bycorne TreteQe hooly Qis matere, Whos story haQe taught vs here to-forne Howe Qees beestis, boQe in feere, Haue Qeyre pasture, as yee shal here, Of men and wymmen, in se[n]tence, Thorugh souffraunce or thorughe inpacience. (ll. 8–14)

To speak of “hooly. . .matere” that has “taught vs”; of the corresponding “beestis” in their “pasture” (a term repeated four times in the poem); of men and women learning “in se[n]tence” and “[t]horugh souffraunce,” is undoubtedly, in Lydgate’s world as monk of Bury, to speak of the Christian experience. Lydgate uses the term “pasture” elsewhere, for example, to refer to Christ’s flocks as well as the spiritual sustenance he provides with the Eucharist.39 More directly, the biblical text of Ezekiel relies on the metaphor of God’s flock and pasture to explain his renewed relationship with his scattered followers after the “shepherds of Israel,” the princes and secular leaders, “fed themselves” instead of his sheep; he states, “As the shepherd visiteth his flock in the day. . .I will feed them in the most fruitful pastures. . .and I will feed them in judgment” (34:12–16).40 A few verses later God explicitly speaks of his herd of followers in terms of their relative strength or weakness, girth or leanness: “I myself will judge between the fat cattle and the lean” (34:20). The biblical references certainly exist, therefore, to introduce a possible religious subtext for Lydgate’s beasts. But this is far from spiritual allegory; Lydgate’s instruction that his listeners should “tretethe” the fable of Chichevache and Bicorn, with its contrary spouses, singing cows, and mock-moral warnings, as this kind of “hooly. . .matere,” is another subject altogether. While this type of inversion is certainly the

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domain of satire—the poem is still at its heart a beast fable that ridicules human failure—Lydgate’s preponderance of spiritual references at the head of the tale also seems to beg a larger question. What is “holy matter” after all, if not a didactic work on how to avoid a (or the) “Beast” bent on one’s destruction?41 If not an ostensibly “good” person literally or figuratively “consumed” by a monstrous appetite? The holy matter that needs interpreting here, in other words, is matter itself and how a good Christian (a patient Griselda) negotiates the innate human appetite that comes with a material body. Much more than his precursors, Lydgate’s discussion of the beasts throughout the rest of his poem consists almost entirely of references to their quests for human fodder and their corresponding bodily appearance. Scarcely a single stanza (out of nineteen) fails to mention the food or the feeding of the beasts, or fails to contain words such as “foode,” “pasture,” “ete,” “vitayle,” “deuoure,” “swalowe,” or “feding.” In the few places where the poet puts aside the overtly alimentary to discuss bad women and their oppressed men more generally, his language and imagery still reflect what Freud would call “oral fixation” in both its receptive and aggressive modes (clapping tongues; words and their relative forbearing or gainsaying, a woman who sings her ballad of warning while literally “in the mouQe” of Chichevache). The governing metaphor throughout is the trope of dearth and excess, famine and feast, and “lak or plente”: For Qis Bicorne of his nature Wil noon oQer maner foode But pacient men in his pasture; And Chichevache eteQe wymmen goode; And booQe Qeos beestes, by Qe roode, Be fatte or leene, hit may not fayle, Lyke lak or plente of Qeyre vitayle. (ll. 15–21)

“Lack” and “plenty” were moral keywords in the Middle Ages for a variety of social and cultural “excesses,” a subject that Lydgate, as a tireless champion of measure in all things (the poems “A Song of Just Mesure” and “Mesure is Tresour” are a mere sampling), touches upon often. This passage in Bycorne and Chychevache also invites a moral reading in its seemingly offhand (but what I imagine to be a carefully chosen) inclusion of a “blasphemous” oath on Christ’s crucifixion—“by Qe roode.” An expression decidedly out of place for Lydgate’s narrative voice in his short poems (he uses it nowhere else in the minor poems), this phrase must surely be understood as another ironic allusion to how frivolous fables make meaning (especially in the face of “hooly. . .matere”), and how one chooses to “treteQe” such fables.

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Lydgate’s concern about lack and plenty merges with his interest in how poetry makes meaning in a telling passage of the poem “A Song of Just Mesure,” in which he discusses the way a poet “usyth his tonge”—or, more precisely, how a poet needs to balance his use of truth or fiction (“sooth or ly”) when creating poetry: Who that presumythe to make in mytar or prose, Or to accomplyshe matters of poetry, Withe-oute mesure to endyte texte or glose, Or usyth his tonge in truthe or flaterye, Oute of mesur, for to say sooth or ly, Whan over-mykile is, and grett scarsete, A mene is best eche man his witt to plye What-evar he doo, that it in mesure be. (ll. 49–56)

According to Lydgate, then, even the poet, when creating “matters of poetry,” must avoid elements that are “over-mykile” and of “grett scarsete.” (This is especially true when a benefactor is involved, which calls for a measure of “truthe or flaterye,” a point to keep in mind when considering the “werQy citiseyn” behind the poem). The basic truth of Bycorne and Chychevache is that each beast lacks the necessary moderation; not only does each have an extremely restrictive “diet” for no apparent reason, but also one beast excessively fasts while the other excessively binges— practices, incidentally, expressly warned against in Lydgate’s well-known Dietary.42 This excess makes them both repulsive and attractive, both beastly and provocative—perfect fodder (so to speak) for the practiced “mesure” of Lydgate’s poetry. The dependence of Bicorn and Chichevache on the related concepts of lack and plenty has led at least one scholar to explore the fable’s relation to the iconography of Carnival and Lent in Jacobean England.43 Yet the potential relationship of these hungry beasts to those annual feasts and fasts in medieval England—particularly in English textual culture—starts much earlier, as we can see in Lydgate’s poem. Indeed, throughout the poem Chichevache’s plight is repeatedly referred to as a “faste.” As she states: For my feding in existence Is of wymmen Qat beon meeke, And lyche Gresylde in pacyence, Or more, Qeyre bountee for to eeke; But I ful longe may goon and seeke Or I cane fynde a gode repaaste A-morowe to breke with my faaste. (ll. 85–91)

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As we have heard in other sources, here Chichevache cannot eat because she cannot find a “gode repaaste” in the form of meek and patient women, a trope Lydgate takes one step further by specifically connecting the food with women’s “bountee,” a word often associated with inner spiritual goodness.44 The sole temporal reference in the poem is a suggestion of springtime, the time of Lent: it has ostensibly been “thritty Mayes” (l. 96), remember, since Chichevache last had nourishment. While initially the beast is portrayed as fasting until goodness and bounty reappear, however, eventually she threatens to give up altogether, foreseeing no change in the future: For more pasture I wil not stryve Nor seeche for my foode no more, Ne for vitayle me to enstore; Wymmen beon wexen so prudent Qey wol no more beo pacyent. (ll. 99–105)

What giving up on this search means exactly we are not told, aside from the later suggestion that women will cause the beast to “faste longe, / And dye for all hire cruweltee” (ll. 120–21). But certainly the concept of Chichevache breaking her fast because of social ills—with possible tragic implications—would have struck a familiar chord. The breaking of fasts was associated with particular vices in the Middle Ages; in Piers Plowman, Gluttony and Sloth both confess to ignoring Lent and other “fastyng dayes” (V.378, 410) for their drinking, eating, and lechery; as well, the life of vices that Haukyn’s filthy coat depicts, including “coveitise and unkynde desiryng,” completely ignores the Christian calendar: “as lef in Lente as out of Lente, alle tymes yliche” (XIII.356, 350). In addition, the breaking of fasts had become a somewhat contentious issue in late medieval England because of its association with Lollardy.45 One fifteenth-century Lollard sermon written for Sexagesima directly before Lent discusses how fasting itself can create avarice and, specifically, “Chyncherie”: If Qe word of God be prechid, Qat of fastynge spekiQ to fi{te wiQ hire foule flesche Qat is so fayne to falle, Qat him QynkeQ reasonable, and QenkeQ to rule him Qerafter. But Qenne springeQ up Qornes of Chyncherie, and spredeQ aboue, and seiQ “Faste ofte, and spende litil, and Qe more maist Qou spare.” Qus Auarice ouergoQ Abstynence and vnableQ it to frute.46

The Lollard belief in the breaking of fasts, like the Lollard calls for stripping corrupt clergy of their wealth, was often presented by anti-Lollards as a

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type of avarice itself. As Lydgate writes in “A Defence of Holy Church,” such people seek to deprive the Church “of hir ornamentes. . ./ For thay hemsilff the riches wolden use” (ll. 128, 133). Ironically, Chichevache’s fasting seems both excessive and pious; she does mention in passing the desire to “enstore” (l. 103) her victuals, which seems to undercut her claims about historic lack of food, but overall Lydgate presents her fasting as a heroic quest for proper nourishment and her potential break of the fast as a piteous ordeal that she has been forced to undergo. In the larger homiletic context, Lenten fasting was said to actually generate not merely carnival feasts, but also springtime indulgences of all kinds. The sermonizer John Bromyard, for example, discusses springtime excess as the forceful return of the Devil’s powers in response to his followers’ period of brief abstinence: “To the contrite sinner he displays the pageants, games, dances and the like which, by the Devil’s own instigation, begin everywhere about Eastertime, to annul the contrition which they had in Lent.”47 Unsurprisingly, Bromyard focuses his castigation on women’s finery, which he describes as part of the Devil’s post-Lenten army “in mightiest array”: For if all the knights of Christ and his whole army, namely the apostles, martyrs, and all holy men. . .were to march through the city of God, ready to fight for him by teaching and preaching His Commandments, and in another procession were to march the women in their wanton array, frolicking, dancing, or stepping out with their signs of levity, I do believe for certain that these latter would attract after them far more hearts and ears and eyes more readily and more intently than the former.48

Such secular material excess not only outperforms religious pageantry, suggests Bromyard, but also mocks the religious mass: “In place of the clerk who rings the bell to call the people to worship, they have a flute-player: for the Devil’s and Hell’s altar and for their altar stone they have a fashionably attired body and head.” Again, it is women who make up this altar, ornamented as if for feast day services: “Today is a great feast,” they are told, “many folk will see you. Adorn yourself, therefore, that you may be reputed beautiful and that those who behold you delight in your loveliness.”49 Bromyard’s parallel between the secular worship of material ornament and the spiritual bounty offered in religious services may be a little early for direct comparison to Lydgate’s work in Bycorne and Chychevache, but his sermon’s interest in how “signs of levity” of various kinds, especially material acquisition and adornment, are received by the public is certainly echoed in Lydgate’s own dialectic of material and spiritual “lak or plente.” Such moral discussions of social and material indulgences center on the sin of avarice, which becomes, in these contexts, a type of idolatry, a worship of false gods through false goods. Like the fabled story of the Golden Calf,

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Bromyard’s ignorant public is imagined accumulating its objects of adornment to create and celebrate a beautiful “god” for its false altar. Chaucer’s Parson makes a similar connection when he discusses the sin of avarice; quoting Exodus 20, he states: “ ‘Thou shalt have no false goddes bifore me, ne thou shalt make to thee no grave thyng.’ Thus is an avaricious man, that loveth his tresor biforn God, an ydolastre, / thurgh this cursed synne of avarice” (ll. 750–51). In their links to avarice, Lydgate’s beasts create a similar connotation— a type of twofold “golden cow” that represents insatiable mortal appetite as a bestial “god” in charge of life and death. For if Lydgate’s emaciated Chichevache represents fasting in its various cultural associations, including chincery and coveitise, then his obese Bicorn represents the secular feasts and festivities that so concern Bromyard. Not only does Bicorn describe his food outright as his “cherishing” (l. 36), but also the “two horns” that identify this brute correlate quite nicely to women’s fashionable horned headdress, also at times dubbed “Bicorn,”50 and which embodied for many moralists in this period both the fierce nature and the excessive materialism of contemporary women. Bromyard explicitly mentions these “horns” as part of the “curious finery” of women’s bodies that is meant to “capture souls.”51 For his part, Lydgate singles out the headdresses for condemnation in his “Dyte of Womenhis Hornys” in very familiar terms, for their opposition to womanly “pacyence” (l. 47), and for their “bestial” nature: “Hornes wer yove to bestys ffor dyffence,” he says, “A thing contrarie to ffemynyte” (ll. 34–35).52 In closing, let me point out that Lydgate’s most explicit description of Avarice, found in his Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, depicts her as another beast in the woods. Avarice is the final vice to confront the narrator in this text, a monster that reflects the pilgrim’s own mental state: “I, by gret owtrage, / Was off my port, wylde and savage, / Dyuers off my condycïoun” (ll. 17125–27). After entering “a woodë ful savage” (l. 17134), the pilgrim finds himself in a valley where he sees one of the forest’s many “wylde bestys”(l. 17145) standing in his way: Old and owgly, off array Dysguysed wonder queyntëly, Off port and chere ryht vngoodly, Semyng to me (yt ys no faylle) That she woldë me assaylle; Yt semptë so, as by hyr cher; And al my lyff, fer or ner, Radde I neuer, in book nor geste, Off so merveyllous a beste; Nat in the Book off Danyel,

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Nouther in Ezechyel, Nor in Thapocalyps off Iohan, Swych a bestë fond I noon. I was abaysshed a-noon ryht, Whan fyrst off hyre I hadde a syht. (ll. 17150–64)

The narrator goes on in more detail to describe Avarice’s appearance as a series of lacks (“In hyre I fond so many a lak. . .” [l. 17165]), and with these deficiencies—disguising clothing, broken back, a bag weighing down her neck, tongue hanging out of her mouth—she describes her own plurality: her two names (avarice and covetousness) and her six hands (ravine, cut purse, forgery, usury, simony, and lying). Avarice’s lack of a singular, stable existence is underscored by Lydgate’s attention to the pilgrim trying to “read” and understand the curious figure in front of him. The beast seems rather than is; it is a beast for which neither “book nor geste” has prepared him; no biblical or fictional character can compare to the material reality of the beast in his “syht.” But she does of course have a precedent. Lydgate’s Avarice is the emblematic beast of human appetite, always looking down at the earth instead of the heavens (“With bak and chynë courbyd lowe” [1. 17242]). When she finally describes the jurisdiction of her golden idol, a marmoset,53 near the end of her long section in the text, she makes clear that this figure, like Boethius’ worldly goods, has the power to turn people into beasts: “‘[He] causith hem, ageyn resoun, / To caste her lokës lowë down / In-to the erthe, ageyne nature’ ” (ll. 18384–85). Importantly, this beastly vice concerns not only material appetite; Avarice claims to labor at all types of pastimes, a long list that begins with tale-telling: “‘with lesynges and with ffablys’” (l. 18425). In this way Lydgate suggests that it is not merely the appetitive beasts that are life’s golden cows; the fable of Bicorn and Chichevache itself, with its entertaining banter and misogynist inversions, with its visual display and rich patron, is also a type of false god, reminding us that we will always be tied to our desire for new forms of literary entertainment. This poetic excess is one that Lydgate, with his ultimate production of over 140,000 lines of verse, could well understand. Notes 1. Quotations from Lydgate’s Bycorne and Chychevache, l. 20, in 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), II:433–38. The same wording can be found in Shirley’s rubrics alongside the text, p. 433. All quotations from Lydgate’s short poems are from MacCracken’s volumes.

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2. Neither of these studies deals in depth with Lydgate’s poem; the earlier deals primarily with the French poems, while the latter follows the iconography of the beasts. See Steven M. Taylor, “Monsters of Misogyny: The Medieval French ‘Dit de Chincheface’ and the ‘Dit de Bigorne,’” Allegorica 2 (Winter 1980): 99–124; and Malcolm Jones, “Monsters of Misogyny: Bigorne and Chichevache––Suite et Fin?” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2002), pp. 203–21. Also see A.S.G. Edwards, “John Lydgate and Medieval Antifeminism and Harley 2251,” Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 32–44. Second to its misogyny, critics have paid the most attention to its visual and performative genre and medium. See Claire Sponsler, “Text and Textile: Lydgate’s Tapestry Poems,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textile, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 19–34, esp. 26–29; and Jennifer Floyd’s article in this volume. See also the brief mentions in Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), pp. 179–80; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 106 n2; and Larry Scanlon, “Lydgate’s Poetics: Laureation and Domesticity in the Temple of Glass,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 97 n96. 3. On the names of these beasts, see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927), pp. 113–15; and Robert J. Menner, “Bycorne-Bygorne, Husband of Chichevache,” Modern Language Notes 44 (1929): 455–57. To underscore the distinction between the French and English versions of these beasts, I use the name “Chincheface” when discussing the French poems and “Chichevache” when discussing the English versions. 4. Found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français, ms. 7218. Published in Achille Jubenal, Mystères inédits du XVe siècle (Paris: Techener, 1837), Vol. I, pp. 390–91; reprinted, with translation, in Taylor, “Monsters,” pp. 111–13. Taylor suggests that an extant sixteenth-century printed “Dit de Bigorne” may have been inspired by a lost fourteenth-century original, but does not go into detail (p. 102). The sixteenth-century “Dit de Bigorne” is published in Anatole de Montaiglon, Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: P. Jannet, 1855), pp. 187–203; reprinted, with translation, in Taylor, “Monsters,” pp. 114–19. Quotations in this article are from Taylor; translations are my own. Malcolm Jones points to an early argument made by Jean Avalon that another French beast, “Dame Tigre” of Le Roman de Renard le Contrefait (section 2, ll. 40,013–019), composed sometime between 1328–42, is meant to be the same animal as Chincheface. See Jean Avalon, “Bigorne et Chicheface,” Le livre et ses amis 2 (1945): 29–32; and Jones, “Monsters,” p. 211. 5. Moreover, such sartorial changes were often likened to changes of skin. For example, the Grandes Chroniques de France not only blames new fashions for the

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

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French defeat at Crécy in 1346, but also compares the undressing of fashionably-tight clothing to being literally “skinned” (escourchoit). See Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1999), p. 10. Le Fèvre’s translation (c. 1371–72) is of the Liber lamentationum Matheoluli, written around 1295 by Mathieu of Boulogne. See A.G. Van Hamel, “Les Lamentations de Matheolus” et “Le Livre de Leesce” de Jehan le Fèbre, de Resson (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1892–1905). On Chaucer’s use of Le Fèvre’s text, see Larry D. Benson’s introductory notes to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Riverside Chaucer, 3d edn. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 864 and subsequent notes. See Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982) I.1.1, p. 4. See Karen Pratt’s translation excerpted in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C.W. Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 177–97; quotations from pp. 183 and 195. See Taylor, “Monsters,” p. 108 n2. Van Hamel, 3.3320–21, mistakenly numbered as line 3220 in printed edition of text and subsequent citations (pp. 251–52). Noted in Woman Defamed, p. 177. Shirley, for example, also uses the male gender at one point for Chichevache, referring to “his body.” See MacCracken, p. 437. Walter F. Schirmer’s misidentification of the respective genders of the beasts (he states that Bicorn in female and Chichevache is male) is typical of the critical confusion surrounding their gender. See Schirmer, John Lydgate. A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 98. The sixteenth-century poem adds a new twist to this, having the henpecked husband beg Bicorn to eat him immediately so that his wife, who has threatened to eat him all raw (“Elle me mangera tout cru” [l. 51]) in the morning, will be foiled. See edition in Taylor, “Monsters,” p. 116. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xiv. Chaucer’s mention of the beast here arguably invokes both French poems: it carries the same twofold purpose as the “Dit de Chincheface” (it is both a tongue-in-cheek warning to good wives who favor Griselda’s patience and kindness and a “lessoun” [l. 1193] for bad wives on how to successfully combat their husbands); likewise, any allusion to Le Fèvre’s Lamentations by the Clerk would be entirely in keeping with his antagonism toward the Wife of Bath, whose Prologue explicitly challenges such texts and the clerks who read and write them. For the most recent article on the longstanding question of the tale’s monstrosity, see J. Allan Mitchell, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity,” Studies in Philology 102.1 (2005): 1–26. See my article “Povre Griselda and the All-Consuming Archewyves,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 77–115, esp. pp. 104–112.

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18. MED, s.v. “chinche.” 19. MED, s.v. “chinchehede.” 20. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman. A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1995), V.72. 21. I address this more fully in my SAC article, pp. 105–7. 22. On the meaning of “Vache” in this poem and its connection to Sir Philip de la Vache, see Edith Rickert, “Thou Vache,” Modern Philology 11 (1913–14): 209–25. For interpretations of the word in terms of biblical allegory, see David E. Lampe, “The Truth of a ‘Vache’: The Homely Homily of Chaucer’s ‘Truth,’” Papers on Language and Literature 9 (1973): 311–14; Alfred David, “The Truth about ‘Vache,’” The Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 334–37; and Heiner Gillmeister, Chaucer’s Conversion: Allegorical Thought in Medieval Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 1–59. 23. “Distreyne thy lust” replaces “Hold the heye wey” in London, British Library MS Cotton Otho A.XVIII. See Benson, “Textual Notes,” p. 1189. On the possibility that the envoy of “Truth” is a later addition, see Benson, “Explanatory Notes,” p. 1084. 24. See also Boece IV.m.3, and II.pr.5. 25. On the possibility that Lydgate’s poem was inspired by another French original, see Victor Le Clerc, “Poésies Morales,” in L’Histoire littéraire de la France (Paris: l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1862) Vol. XXIII, p. 247; and Jones, “Monsters of Misogyny,” pp. 208–9. On the possible existence of a fourteenth-century “Dit de Bigorne,” see n4 above. 26. See Hammond, English Verse, p. 114. 27. See n2 above. 28. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography, English Literary Studies 71 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1997), pp. 28–29. 29. Aside from the misericords discussed at the end of the following paragraph, no examples of the visual tradition of these beasts before or during Lydgate’s lifetime appear to have survived, though several examples exist from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including wall and ceiling paintings and printed woodcuts. See Jones, “Monsters,” pp. 205–7. 30. See Sponsler, “Text,” pp. 28–29; and Nolan, John Lydgate, p. 106 n2. 31. On the related “craft” elements in this poem and the possibility that this “worthy citizen” was a guild member, see Michelle Warren’s article in this volume. On Lydgate’s literary representation of his merchant patrons, see Nolan’s work on the “Mumming for the Mercers,” in John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, pp.100–6, and “The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate’s Mummings,” in Scanlon and Simpson, John Lydgate, pp. 169–206, esp. pp. 186–92; also Simpson, “For al me body. . .weieth nat an unce”: Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird,” pp. 129–46 in the same volume. 32. While such tapestries were luxury goods available to only the wealthiest of patrons, the painted or “stained” cloths were less expensive, thus suggesting that the “peynted or desteyned clothe” of Bycorne and Chychevache would

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

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have been a bit more accessible. See Sponsler, “Text,” p. 21. Floyd discusses at more length the medium and mobility of such textiles in her article in this volume. On the prints and tavern signs, see Jones, “Monsters,” pp. 205–7. The better known of the murals, a wall painting in the castle of Villeneuve, in Puy de Dôme, is reproduced in Roger Sherman Loomis, A Mirror of Chaucer’s World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), Figs. 161–62. The second example, a ceiling painting of Chichevache alone, can be found in the chateau at Plessis-Bourré, in the Loire Valley. See Annie Regond, La peinture murale du XVIe siècle dans la région d’Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’Etudes du Massif Central, 1983), pp. 45–53, esp. p. 52; and Charles Urseau, Les peintures du plafond de la salle des gardes au Château du Plessis-Bourré (Paris: Plon Noiret, 1909), p. 5. See discussions in Taylor, “Monsters,” p. 100, and Jones, “Monsters,” pp. 207–8. Sponsler, “Text,” p. 32. Pearsall notes the same focus on the border between word and picture in Lydgate’s work, but declares it to be unconscious on the poet’s part. See Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 179–80. On Lydgate’s visual project see also James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–24, esp. pp. 20–22; and Michael Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguilleville’s Idolatry in France and England,” pp. 151–71, esp. pp. 161–71, in the same volume. See M.D. Anderson, History and Imagery in British Churches (London: John Murray, 1971), pp. 154–55; also George L. Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain, with an essay by M. D. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 210. As Jones points out, this beast is more likely to be Chichevache than Bicorn. See Jones, “Monsters,” p. 210. That is, if scholarly dating is correct about Chaucer’s (1390s) and Lydgate’s (1420s) respective poems. On Griselda as a more general symbol of laureation for Lydgate, see Scanlon, “Lydgate’s Poetics,” pp. 61–96, esp. pp. 80–91. It is possible that Lydgate also meant his use of rhyme royal for this fabliaulike fable to enhance the sacred-secular tension; Chaucer uses the form for works of sentence only. In his Troy Book, Lydgate briefly mentions “Bycornys,” along with satyrs, more generally as one of the “Diuerse goddis of Qe wodis grene” (2.7702). Bicorn’s link with the satyr, a hybrid man-beast, further suggests that the beasts in Bycorne and Chychevache should be seen as representative of humans and their “beastly” behavior. See for example his “Letabundus” (Minor Poems II.49–59), l. 179, and 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. 5356. The Holy Bible, Translated from the Latin Vulgate. . .at Douay A.D. 1609. . .at Rheims, A.D. 1582, ed. Richard Challoner (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1989).

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41. Ezekiel 34 also mentions “beasts” that feed on the Lord’s flock: “And I will make a covenant of peace with them, and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land” (34:25). 42. On the need for moderation from “excesse or scarsete” in diet, see especially lines 77–80 of Lydgate’s Dietary. On the larger discourse of moderation in this poem, see Sponsler, “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. 43. On the sixteenth and seventeenth-century woodcuts of “Pinchbelly” and “Thingut,” and their connections to the French saint of gluttony, “St. Panchart,” see Jones, “Monsters,” pp. 211–16. 44. MED, s.v. “bounte.” 45. See for example the recorded confession of one William Chivelyng, whose recanted “heresies” include the belief “that no man is obliged to fast at Lent, the Ember Days, Fridays, nor the eves of saints days, when priests command fasting.” See the “Register of William Alnwick, Bishop of Norwich,” in Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. Norman Tanner, Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th series, Vol. 20 (March 1978), pp. 185–87. 46. Lollard Sermons, ed. Gloria Cigman, EETS o.s. 294 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 98. According to Cigman the sermon is based on Luke 8:5–15. This biblical passage discusses Christ as the sower of the seed of faith, including the following: “And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection” (Luke 8:14). 47. Summa Predicantium, s.v. “Contritio.” Unfortunately, John Bromyard’s Summa Predicantium remains unpublished. Quotations are from G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 393–95. 48. Summa Predicantium, s.v. “Bellum.” 49. Summa Predicantium, s.v. “Chorea.” 50. See Le Pardonneur, Le Triacleur et La Taverniere, in André Tissier, Recueil de farces (1450–1550), tome 5 (Geneva: Droz, 1989), 247, no. 29, l. 35 and note. This is discussed in Jones, “Monsters,” p. 205. 51. Summa Predicantium, s.v. “Luxuria.” 52. This poem is found in two of the anthologies that contain Bycorne and Chychevache: London, British Library MS Harley 2251, and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19. See Lydgate’s Minor Poems, II.662–65. For this poem’s allusions to Griselda and the Wife of Bath, see my aforementioned SAC article. 53. On the understanding of this marmoset as “Mahomet,” see Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire,” p. 158.

CHAPTER 3 SOVEREIGNTY AND SEWAGE Paul Strohm

odernist opinion disparages medieval cities as random, unplanned, clogged, complicit in their own filth-choked self-strangulation, and unheeding in their courtship of contagion and disease. Arch-modernist Le Corbusier offers a low estimate of the medieval capacity for city planning. The harum-scarum cities of the Middle Ages allowed themselves, in his account, to grow up according to the “pack-donkey’s way,” the unplanned meander of the unreflective brute: “The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.”1 Even the most sympathetic modern commentators have been unable to resist moralization about this “fetid, messy town,”2 and to hint that its inhabitants brought its woes— including contagion and plague—upon themselves. I want to suggest, in rebuttal, that medieval cities were not sordid because people wanted them that way; that, in fact, medieval persons thought a great deal about the conditions of town life, and were unceasing in their attempts to achieve clear sightlines, rational planning, cleaner streets, and better sanitation. Commoners no less than kings had a legitimate interest in flushing out their city, and the wish to have access to a good latrine or garderobe emptying into the Thames needs no symbolic explanation. One might say that this was a subject of some urgency, or even of public passion. Given its affective urgency, the whole discussion of good plumbing and a cleaner city had an inevitable symbolic, as well as practical, side. Medieval sovereigns—so much of whose authority and efficacy relied upon their mastery of the symbolic—could hardly be oblivious of the political advantages of a high profile in relation to this area of concern. This is where

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Lydgate—rarely a city dweller himself—comes in: for in his Troy Book he not only reveals himself as a kind of proto-city planner, but also as something of a theorist about the deeper linkages between sovereignty and good plumbing. Lydgate’s Purified City Before turning to Lydgate, let me say that the subject of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London’s continuing attempts to cleanse itself has its own modern laureate, Ernest L. Sabine of Muncie, Indiana, who wrote three brilliantly researched essays on medieval London’s unceasing efforts to dig itself out of its own muck: “City Cleaning in Mediaeval London,” “Butchering in Mediaeval London,” and my first, revelatory introduction to his works, “Latrines and Cesspools of Medieval London”—all published in Speculum between 1933 and 1937.3 I encountered “Cesspools” when I was writing on the incident when Hochon of Liverpool became enraged at Hugh Fastolf for exiting the Guildhall, cutting across the common ground of the city, and urinating against the side of St. Lawrence’s church. My surmise was that Hochon could not have become nearly so annoyed had other, publicly accessible privies, latrines (ME gongs, Lat. cloacae) not existed close at hand, and I learned from Sabine that late medieval London possessed many: some within a few yards of St. Lawrence’s church, and, most notably, a number of commodious latrines built upon London Bridge in order to take advantage of purgative tides.4 Sabine concludes that “[t]aking the evidence in its entirety, one gets the impression that latrines on London Bridge were conveniences of no inconsiderable size and importance.”5 London enjoyed a minimum of thirteen documented public latrines, together with a plethora of private arrangements: conduits brought water to numerous interior garderobes throughout London and Westminster, underground sewers carried away filth, drainpipes extended to cesspools, to ditches and rivers, and to the Thames itself, and other garderobes were built over Walbrook and the Fleet. In addition to problems of human ordure, particular sanitation problems emerged from the butchering and tanning trades. The former were addressed by parliamentary legislation and the king’s Council itself, including the Statute of Westminster (1391–92) designed to move most slaughtering (and thus certain forms of death itself) outside the City. When complaints about inconvenience and rising prices led to the reentry of butchering trades to the City, special arrangements for cartage and disposal of waste mitigated complaint about “infection of the air.”6 A final arrangement involved extended piers on the riverfront, whence offal was taken at ebb-tide to the center of the river where the influx of waters would carry it away.7 Ingenuity and technical innovation

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were at every point esteemed, especially with respect to the removal of impurity through plumbing and running water. As concerned persons of means, England’s monarchs were traditional innovators. Sabine reminds us, for example, of plumbed sewers ascending into the palace of the king for voidance of royal garderobes into the Thames, and notes that privies were built within towers, including the Tower of London; within chambers corbelled out over moats; within chambers over flowing water; with pipe drains to rivers and moats; and with drainage into cesspools.8 All of which brings me to Lydgate’s view of a purified city, a city of grand vistas and improved thoroughfares. This city is described in the midfifteenth-century editorial headnote of British Library Royal MS 18.D.ii as “so large & so wyde that tofore ne siche was nevere none it lyke [fol. 33r],” and, in Lydgate’s own words, as “most royal in byldyng, / Brod, large, & wyde.”9 Lydgate’s city is, of course, based on that of Guido delle Colonna’s Historia Destructionis Troiae.10 The two accounts agree on such points as the city’s six gates, its provision of special quarters for the crafts and trades, and the presence of a river (likened by Guido to the Tiber) running through it. Of course, London had multiple main gates, trade quarters, and a noble river, but we can hardly yet say that Lydgate is telling us anything in particular about fifteenth-century English urban life. In other respects, though, Lydgate’s penchant for amplification does encourage him to elaborate what I have called a “city planning” agenda. Some of these amplifications involve minor matters of updating, as when the towers of the city are found suitable for emplacement of “grete gunnys” (II, l. 614), a regular feature of fifteenth-century urban assault and defense. Others adapt the city to London politics, as when Lydgate replaces Guido’s “nobles” and “commoners” with “cytezeyns,” in London’s more English or northern European frame. Still other amplifications reveal what I have described as Lydgate’s utopian dream. Guido has his own brief against pack-donkey streets, observing that Troy’s “avenues extended in a long and straight line, in the midst of which the brisk and invigorating air of dawn poured forth sweet and varied breezes” (Meek, V, ll. 140–42). But Lydgate elaborates considerably, reiterating Guido’s point and rather lusciously dwelling upon it: And of the toun the stretis large & wyde Wer by crafte so prudently prouided And by werkemen sette so and deuided, That holsom eyr amyddis myght enspire Erly the morwe to hem that it desyre And Zephirus that is so comfortable For to norysche thinges vegetable In tyme of yere thorugh oute euery strete

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With sugred flavour so lusty & so swete most plesantly in the eyr gan smyte, The cytezeyns only to delyte; And with his brethe hem to recomfort, Whan thei list walke hem siluen to recomfort. (fol. 28b; II, ll. 668–79)

Lydgate’s frame here, including his embrace of the Chaucerian Zephirus with his recomforting “brethe,” is recreational in thrust. At the same time, though, he seems implicitly to imagine an avenue of escape from that noxious and infected air, the threat of which so properly concerned Londoners of his day. More so, when he elsewhere describes “holsom eyr” to be the objective of the “maysters” who planned the city, as well as the replacement of “defoulit” soil (fol. 27c; II, ll. 542–46). Visionarily—although with an implicit indebtedness to the architecture of the monastic cloister11—Guido broached a predecessor of the nineteenthcentury Parisian “arcades project,” involving “countless vaulted arches on marble columns.” Accordingly, “a free passage which had been made under the shelter of these arches was available every day to pedestrians, so that as they walked they were not vexed by. . .unwished-for drenchings from storms of rain from the sky” (Meek, V, ll. 143–47). Lydgate recasts Guido’s arcades, again with an implicit ecclesiastical undertone, as “deambulatories” (II, l. 690), likewise sheltering walkers, but then, thinking about those rains, adds: And euery hous cured was with led And many gargoyl & many hidous hed With spoutis thorugh & pipes as thei ought From the stonwerke to the canel raught, Voyding filthes low into the grounde Thorugh gratis percid of yren percid rounde. (fol. 28b; II, ll. 695–700)

This matter of plumbing concerns Lydgate greatly. Speaking of the river, Guido mentions that it “purified the city by prearranged floods, by means of skillfully made canals and underground sluices, and by these baths the accumulated impurities were cleaned away” (Meek, V, ll. 177–79). But now here is Lydgate’s elaboration, in which he introduces the new technology of conduit pipes, and links them to the purging of streets and gutters. He imagines the river deflected Thorugh condut pipis, large and wyde with al, By certeyn meatis [passages] artificial

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That it made a ful purgacioun Of al ordure & fylthes in the toun, Waschyng the stretys as thei stod a rowe, And the goteris in the erthe lowe, That in the city was no filthe sene; For the canel skoured was so clene, And deuoyded in so secre wyse, That no man myght espien nor deuyse By what engyn the filthes fer nor ner Wern born awey by cours of the ryuer So couertly euery thing was cured.

Furthermore, in Lydgate’s post-plague elaboration, the reason for all this ingenuity is not just aesthetic, but involves crucial matters of public health and the preservation of human life. Wher by the toun was outterly assured From engenderyng of all corrupcioun, From wikked eyr & from infeccioun, That causyn ofte by her violence Mortalite and gret pestilence. (fol. 28c; II, ll. 747–64)

The well-engineered city can, in other words, preserve the life of subjects, can play an energized role in the prevention of corruption, infection, mortality, and pestilence. Moreover, in the case of Troy and, ultimately, London as well, a campaign on this scale, with its affiliation to the urgent subject of mortality, cannot remain a matter of simple individual initiative, or even the sole province of city agencies and officials. Ultimately sovereign initiative sparks the association of good planning and preservation of life. Although Priam enlists an army of planners and craftsmen, it is he, we are told, who “edefyede” (headnote to MS Royal 18 D.ii, fol. 33a) Troy, who conceived and executed the plan. Similarly, in England, especially in the aftermath of 1348–49, the problem of urban filth as a breeding ground for contagion became a matter not just for urban but also for sovereign concern. As we learn from Edward III’s order to the City, enrolled April 8, 1349, To the mayor of London. Order to cause the human feces and other filth lying in the streets and lanes of that city and its suburbs to be removed with all speed to places far distant from that city and to cause the city and suburbs to be cleansed from all odour and to be kept clean as it used to be in the time of preceding mayors, so that no greater cause of mortality may arise from

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such smells, as the king has learned how the city and suburbs, which are under the mayor’s care and rule, are so foul by the filth thrown out of the houses both by day and night into the streets and lanes where there is a common passage of men that the air is infected, the city is poisoned to the danger of men passing, especially in the mortality by the contagious sickness which increases daily.12

The plague fears of the city dweller, from the inception of the Black Death well into the seventeenth century, meant that clean and sluiced streets were no matter of simple aesthetics, but were implicated in matters of public policy and, finally, in urgent matters of survival itself.13 In the foregoing passage, the normal requirement that the City scrounge for itself, at the ward or household level, is superseded by an order from the king himself. For the cleanliness and well-being of the city cannot be divorced from issues of royal prestige. An order of 1357, bearing on the removal of dung and filth from the streets of the city and banks of the Thames, makes this point clearly. A past time is imagined when cleanliness was observed and increased honor was the consequence: “. . .in the time of the king’s progenitors the streets, lanes, and other places in that city and its suburbs used to be cleansed of refuse and filth, and to be kept from corruption thence arising, whereby no small honour accrued to the city and those dwelling therein.”14 As all this royal interest would suggest, a well-flushed city is finally a matter of politics as well as hygiene. The self-cleansing city is likewise a self-perpetuating city, a city that escapes the taint of terminal illness. Purging itself of rot and ordure, the city maintains itself as a healthy body politic. What we have here is a relation drawn between the civic body and the human body, the well-plumbed city and the well-regulated human body, the health and endurance of both supporting long duration and robust continuance of the realm itself—all falling within the purview and sponsorship of the king. After all, the problem of regal authority—as Maurice Bloch explains it—consists in solving problems of duration, regulating exchange between closely related symbolic regimes, and negotiating finitude and death.15 For death—whether of subjects or cities—threatens authority unless properly euphemized and managed, unless shown to be nonarbitrary and subject to royal control. What is required is nothing less than a dramatization of what Bloch calls the “victory of order over biology,” a victory that suppresses “the specificity and contingency of the event itself. . .so that death can be represented as part of a repetitive social order.”16 Good plumbing, to put it baldly, is death-denying, and asserts the continuity of the social order.

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Cleansing the Body Politic Lydgate’s source-text, Guido’s Historia, as well as Lydgate’s Troy Book itself, abound in analogies between the cleansing and care of the city and the cleansing of the well-regulated self. Recall, for example, the city’s cleansing river waters, channeled through . . .condut pipis, large and wyde with al, By certeyn meatis artificial That it made a ful purgacioun Of al ordure & fylthes. (fol. 28v; II, ll. 747–50)

Lydgate imports these meatis from Latin meatus (“ways” or “paths” or “channels”) directly into Middle English as what the Middle English Dictionary defines as “passages for fluids,” as well as “conduits” and “pipes.” Moreover, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has observed to me, Latin meatus is a term frequent in medieval medical contexts, as attested by her own work on medieval medicine and virginity. Additionally, the use of these meatis for the purgation of ordure creates a point of metaphorical relay between all that we read of the city and all that we know about the problem of expelling and disposing of human waste. The thoroughly plumbed and channeled city is implicitly homologous with the human body of Galenic medicine—implicitly, that is, in the passages we have seen so far, but fully available for more explicit analogy. Guido and Lydgate are not slow themselves to pursue this very analogy, specifying and celebrating the connection between the monarchic conquest of death through good plumbing and the monarchic supervision of the subject’s body elsewhere in their Troy Books. This celebration, and the linkage it celebrates, in turn exposes some of the concealed argumentative dynamics that propel public health into so prominent a place on the royal agenda. I am thinking of Guido’s description—and Lydgate’s considerably elaborated description—of death’s negation by the preservation of Hector’s body. For Homer, the Trojans need to regain Hector’s body so that they can achieve its paradoxical perpetuation by burning it; by (again in Bloch’s terms) “achieving the eternal fixing of the memory of the uncorrupted body of the hero by cremation, and the association of this perfect strong body with that of its successors by means of the funerary games which follow.”17 But Guido and Lydgate go another way, toward preservation of the body, not by burning away its corruptible part, but by the technology of what we would today call “life support”—and, moreover, technology

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with a remarkable resemblance to that which enabled the cleansing of the city. After Hector’s death, Lydgate tells us (in a passage that begins with Guido but carries on in his own words) that King Priam sought his preservation by all available technological means: Aboue the grounde yif the body lie, . . .of resoun it mvt putrefie, But [unless] yif crafte be a boue nature, Vncorrupte it myght nat endure, Wherefore the kyng shope him to ordeyne To preserue it hool fro thinges tweyne: From odour and abomynacioun, And ther with eke, by crafty operacioun, That it in sight be not founde horrible, But that it be lifly and visible To the eye, as be apparence, Like as it were quyk in existence What it cost the kyng wil spare nought. (fol. 97d; III, ll. 5587–99)

And here are the means of preservation: Thorugh smale pipes wrought & made of gold, That be mesour wern embowed doun To an entre makyd in his crown, Be grete avys and subtylite, To eche party and extremyte Of his body lineally porrect [distended], Thorugh nerfe & synwe drive & direct, Be secre poris craftily to extende, Wherby the licour myght doun discende To kepe hym hool fro corrupcioun, With outen any transmutacioun Of hyde or hew, in any part to tourne. And at his hede of gold was an ourne, That was filde with bawme natural That ran thorugh pipes artificial, Thorugh nekke & hed into many a place, Penytrable by veynes of the face. . .. (fol. 98b; III, ll. 5664–80)

Lydgate also adds an elaboration entirely his own, according to which Hector becomes a sort of perfect subject: alive but without independent

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volition. His “virtue” is now that of a plant or flower: . . .Comparysownyd, as it were semblable, To a sowle that were vegetable, The whiche, with-oute sensibilite, Mynystreth lyf in herbe, flour, and tre, And semblaly, in-to euery veyne Of the cors the vertu dide atteyne. (fol. 98b; III, ll. 5685–90)

Lydgate’s venture into plant physiology underpins a comparison with the distribution of life-giving fluid or “vertu” through every “veyne” of Hector’s body. In Galen and Galenic theory, the plant may be said to possess a “vegetative” soul (Lydgate’s “sowle that were vegetable”), so long as the soul in question is understood to lack feeling and voluntary motion (“with-oute sensibilite”) and to be limited to a capacity for growth (or, in this case, persistence) and nutrition.18 The corruption-defying and nourishing flow of balm or liquor, descending down through Hector’s body by distended or porrect veins that operate out of sight to preserve nerve and sinew,19 might seem almost to exceed Galen and to become a precocious anticipation of Harvey’s theories of circulation, until we remember that, like those ancients who knew all along the world was round, Galenic physicians were always much closer to a theory of circulation than casual or popular modern conceptions of ancient and medieval science customarily allow. Opposing Erasistratus’ supposition that blood was drawn through the body by vacuum, Galen himself introduced a composite theory of blood’s purifying movement through veins and arteries, emphasizing principles of attraction, elimination, and flow. To be sure, Galen lacked a complete description of the heart’s pumping action and did not fully understand the divergent functions of arteries and veins, but he nevertheless did understand that the heart “draws and sends” blood through the body and supposed that “the arteries possess a power which derives from the heart, and by virtue of which they dilate and contract.”20 The body is sustained, in his system, when “the actual bringing up of nutriment from the veins into each of the parts takes place through the activation of the attractive faculty,” even as “the veins. . .conduct the unpurified blood, from which, in the first place, the [bile-receiving] passages take over the bile, and secondly the [branches] of the vena cava [or chief vein] take over the purified blood.”21 Here and elsewhere, Galen’s emphasis is constantly upon the multiple operations by which the body cleanses itself, clears and expels waste, and eliminates impurities. I am hardly qualified to conclude on this matter of Galen’s

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proximity to a theory of circulation;22 but, fortunately, my need to do so is lessened by the fact that Galenic theories of flow and attraction suffice to explain the distribution of nourishment and the elimination of waste from Hector’s body.23 The Sovereign Decision More important than the technology of Hector’s life support is, however, the nature of its sponsorship. So great is Lydgate’s deference to the sovereign that he endows Priam with the capacity and right to make life-anddeath decisions, as epitomized in this decision involving the greatest of the Trojan warriors—casting him not just as a grief-stricken father but as the sovereign arbiter of the now-passive Hector’s continuance. Here exposed is a deep logic of kingship, in which Priam enacts the sovereign task as described by Giorgio Agamben (following and modifying Benjamin), that of deciding on the reduced and passive subject’s very right to live.24 In Agamben’s formulation, the subject reduced to “bare life” (Benjamin’s bloße Leben) now lives on at the sovereign’s behest or as a result of a sovereign decision. This subject is no longer even capable of sacrifice, because he has already been sacrificed to the sovereign will, as had Hector in the defense of Troy. Having placed his destiny in his sovereign’s hands, he is now fit only to be killed, or spared, according to sovereign design. The point, you see, is that the sovereign installs himself as the arbiter over life and death decisions. Here Priam fulfills the sovereign imperative by asserting his sway over life and his right to continued rule—if not by conquering death at least by delimiting death’s dominion. Priam’s rights of life-and-death decision are metonymically restated, or at any rate reprised at another imaginative level, within Lydgate’s poem. The occasion—or, actually, multiple occasions—of this restatement involve Lydgate’s own relation to an exemplary figure, Chaucer, and the postmortuary power-position in which Lydgate finds himself as successor-poet and potential inheritor of Chaucer’s poetic legacy. We have already seen a number of indications that Chaucer haunts this poem, as he does most of Lydgate’s poetry—but as a spirit to be summoned or laid to rest at Lydgate’s initiative, in ways that have the effect of securing the laureate position to which Lydgate imagined himself ascending after Chaucer’s death. In a redoubling of the deceased Hector’s own dependency upon Priam for the position of honor and esteem he continues to enjoy, Chaucer is treated as an epigone whose present existence depends on Lydgate’s own memorial attentions. Lydgate’s proprietary and revisionary designs upon Chaucer have been fully identified and illustrated in the writings of Derek Pearsall,25 but I might briefly reprise them in relation to Lydgate’s description

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of Hector’s life support, by the “licour” that descends “in-to euery veyne” throughout a “cors” that “the vertu dide atteyne.” These lines can hardly help but evoke Chaucer’s own meditation on the liquorous bathing of “every veyne” of the earth by the rains of April, and the plants and crops that accordingly spring to life. The more so, since Chaucer’s passage is brought into close proximity with the cors of the deceased martyr and the problem of cyclical continuance. Yet Lydgate’s lines not only reiterate but also diverge from Chaucer’s depiction of the cycle of death and life at the commencement of the Canterbury Tales. There, the alternation of death and life was dictated by nature and natural rhythms, augmented, perhaps, by the master-spirit figured in Zephirus’s sweet breath. But here, the prolongation of a kind of life—a life lacking only in sensibilite—is a consequence of specific, and royal, intervention. Chaucer in Lydgate’s hands is like Hector in Priam’s; wholly subject to the forms and regimes within which Lydgate chooses to treat him. For example, Lydgate’s own emphasis on architectural ingenuity, and artifice, and the prolongation of life touches on themes of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” but with differences that signal Lydgate’s now-dominant poetic position. I refer to that other triumph of good planning and ingenious construction, the royally decreed amphitheatre in which the adjudicatory encounter of Palamon and Arcite is to occur. But, in the case of Arcite’s death, all the architectural and scientific ingenuity had already been expended in the superb engineering feat of construction; once Arcite receives his mortal wound, ingenuity fails and death must ensue, Theseus’s sorrows notwithstanding: . . .neither veyne-blood, ne ventusynge, Ne drynke of herbes may ben his helpynge. The vertu expulsif, or animal, For thilke vertu cleped natural Ne may the venym voyden ne expelle. The pipes of his longes gone to swelle, And every lacerate in his brest adoun Is shent with venym and corrupcioun. (I, ll. 2747–54)

And so here, expulsive virtue fails and corruption prevails. In the contrary case of Lydgate’s poem, this apparently hopeless point is when sovereign intervention can most prepossessingly occur: after death itself, but at a juncture when the sovereign can seize an unprecedented opportunity for self-aggrandizement, by forestalling apparent death and by asserting his own exceptional power over Hector’s utterly physically dependent body. Even as Chaucer records a sovereign failure—at least on the medical, as

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opposed to diplomatic, front—Lydgate trumps him with an instance of singular royal and administrative success. Lydgate’s job—the job of the utopian visionary “in service”—is to assist in imagining the material and technical realization of the sovereign imperative. The well-plumbed city, and the well-irrigated colon, are not to be thought separate from the higher imperatives of state. The present book’s interest in Lydgate’s materiality is here addressed by his insistence that sovereignty begins in material accomplishment: in the sovereign’s capacity to command forward-looking urban design, as well as in his futuristic retrofitting of Hector’s circulatory system. Of course, Chaucer too was “in service.”26 As attested by his responsibility for overseeing the Smithfield bleachers while serving as Clerk of Works, Chaucer himself knew something about the material foundations of sovereign aspiration; the ensuing Smithfield tournaments of 1390 were essential to Richard II’s sovereign program.27 But, as imaginatively conceived in the “Knight’s Tale,” events within the most splendid of amphitheaters still pose some resistance to sovereign desire. Unhindered by practical considerations, Lydgate’s material imaginings are more fully bent to fulfillment of the sovereign behest. Notes I gave an early version of this paper at Kalamazoo in May 2005, and received helpful suggestions from Vance Smith (who tellingly described Lydgate as “the great pathological poet of the fifteenth century,” constantly bringing death— including deaths of cities and deaths of predecessors—before us), and from Suzanne Akbari (who reminded me of Chaucer’s own architectural interests in his “Knight’s Tale”). A session at the University of York in March 2006 (where I learned to my surprise and pleasure that Lydgate’s vision of New Troy is an M.A. set text) led to other stimulating conversations, several of which are noted below. 1. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929), p. 5. 2. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 28. 3. Ernest L. Sabine, “Butchering in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 8 (1933): 335–53; “Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London,” Speculum 9 (1934): 303–21; “City Cleaning in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 12 (1937): 19–43. On the bibliography of medieval sewage, and in particular application to Lydgate, I wish also to mention an admirable study, compatible in many respects with my own, brought to my attention by John Ganim: David N. DeVries, “And Away Go Troubles Down the Drain: Late Medieval London and the Poetics of Urban Renewal,” Exemplaria 8.2 (1996): 401–18, dealing with the conjoined subjects of sanitation and sovereignty in the case of Lydgate’s royal entries for the young Henry VI in 1432.

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4. See my Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Another set of latrines was located within a hundred yards of the Guildhall yard. 5. “Latrines and Cesspools,” p. 307. 6. Sabine’s translation, from “Butchering,” p. 307. 7. With regard to city cleaning generally, Sabine points out that the LetterBooks are devoted mainly to horror stories of infraction, but that the unit of sanitary enforcement was actually the ward mote, of which few records have survived. There, under the broad oversight of the mayor, aldermen, and common council, officials were appointed at the ward level including scavengers, beadles, rakers, and sergeants of channels, employing carts, tumbrils, and dung-boats (“City Cleansing,” pp. 19, 21–23). 8. “Cesspools,” p. 305. 9. John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 125 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935), Vol. I, Book II, ll. 532–33. This and subsequent quotations are from Bergen’s edition, compared and corrected with British Library MS Cotton Augustus A.iv. 10. Ed. N.E. Griffin, Mediaeval Academy of America Publications 26 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1936); quotations drawn from Historia Destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974). 11. As suggested by Linne Mooney at the University of York. 12. Calendar of Close Rolls (henceforth CCR), 1349–54 (London: Stationery Office, 1906), pp. 65–66. 13. Sabine cites a special incentive for all this concern about sanitation, which was that “in the minds of the mediaeval citizens. . .the presence of obnoxious filth was constantly associated with the spread of disease (“City Cleaning,” p. 28). 14. CCR, 1354–60 (London: Stationery Office, 1908), p. 422. 15. Death and The Regeneration of Life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 42. 16. Bloch, “Introduction,” p. 15. 17. Bloch, “Death, Women and Power,” p. 228. 18. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur J. Brock (London: Loeb Library, 1968), pp. 2–3. 19. Nicholas Havely has pointed out to me the derivation of Lydgate’s word choice from Latin porrectus (ppl. of porrigere): “stretched out,” “extended.” 20. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, pp. 120–21 and 314–15. See also, in this regard, Galen’s “De usu pulsuum,” in Galen: On Respiration and the Arteries, ed. and trans. D.J. Furley and J.S. Wilkie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 185–228, esp. pp. 211–15 (“The arteries are themselves active, just as the heart is, contracting and expanding by turns by the same power as does the heart” [p. 215]). 21. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, pp. 222–23 and 146–47.

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22. Though a forceful argument on Galen’s behalf has been conducted by Rudolph E. Siegel, “Galen’s Description of Pulmonary Bloodflow and Circulation,” in his Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine (Basel: S. Karger, 1968), pp. 47–56. 23. This brief discussion of “flow” and “circulation” in relation to Galen grows out of a stimulating discussion with Mark Jenner, History, University of York—though I should note his likely disagreement with my comments on Galen’s anticipation of some elements of circulation theory. 24. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 82–86. Benjamin’s discussion of “bare life” occurs in Gesammelte Schriften, II.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), pp. 199–203. 25. Beginning with his John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 26. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10–21. 27. On Chaucer’s responsibility for constructing scaffolds for the Smithfield tournament, see Chaucer Life-Records, ed. M.M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 472; on the significance of the tournament in Richard II’s movement toward autocratic rule, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “The Smithfield Tournament of 1390,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 1–20.

CHAPTER 4 LYDGATE’S WORST POEM Maura Nolan

f any poem could make Lydgate the object of jokes, it would be the “Tretise for Lauandres.” It is hard to take a poet seriously who seems in all earnest to have written a guidebook for washerwomen; hard to maintain our faith in the high tone and claims to historical significance of such texts as Troy Book and Siege of Thebes while reading recommendations for stain removal and whitening processes. But one wonders how to reconcile the seeming banality of this poem with what we know about Lydgate as a poet—and what we know is that Lydgate takes himself very seriously indeed. The traditional explanation for the lavenders poem is that it was written for a patron, Lady Sibille Boys of Holm Hale, Norfolk, and that it simply reflects Lydgate’s desire for monetary gain and a patron’s approval, functioning as an illustration of what Derek Pearsall calls “a comprehensive concept of poetry which thinks nothing alien to itself.”1 Having spent a good deal of my time reading and thinking about Lydgate, I began to ponder the lavenders poem and to wonder why he really wrote it. Could the standard explanation be the real one? It seemed unlikely to me that the same poet responsible for the sheer literary complexity of his writing during the minority, or of The Fall of Princes, or of his religious lyrics, would simply have decided to please a patron by educating her servants. Pearsall’s comment that the poem reflects an almost avaricious literary sensibility that assimilates even the most mundane matters to its “sober and business-like tastes” suggests that we should consider certain broader issues at work in contemporary critical practices of reading. There are several different ways of determining whether or not the “lavenders” poem was a “literary” text or not, all of which helpfully contribute to a broader discussion of what the category “literary” might mean, both during the late medieval and early

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modern periods and for medievalists now.2 But rather than assuming that the mundane literality of the poem works against more modern understandings of “literariness,” we might profitably explore how the discourse of the lavenders poem actually functions. We might, for example, search out other uses of its chief images as metaphors rather than as recipes—that is, wonder whether “lye of beene” (l. 19) has a poetic meaning apart from its literal one—as well as examine the manuscripts in which we find the poem, and look at what else appears there for a hint of what medieval readers and copyists thought of the poem.3 If we find that a stanza from the lavenders poem appears near a poem about the Virgin, for example, does that tell us anything about its literary status? Finally, we can look for other poems: are there analogues for Lydgate’s venture into the world of washerwomen? How do these analogues treat the topic, and how do lavenders signify there? These are all methods that proceed from two main assumptions about what the term literary means: first, that a text is literary if it uses figurative language, and second, that the idea of the literary implies a notion of “tradition,” of a group of texts joined together somehow by a common theme or purpose. As medievalists, we have various ways and means of identifying figurative language and literary traditions. What happens if we apply these methods to Lydgate’s poem? It is worth quoting the poem in its entirety here: Tretise for Lauandres Yee maisteresses myne, and clenly chamberys, That haue to doe with my Ladis atyere Atendythe ay as honest officers, Sith youre fee, youre wages, and youre hyre Is duly paide, than sette youre desyre How to doo youre godely obseruaunce Wayt all be well & that may you avaunce.

(2) Loke well youre lawne, youre homple, & youre Lake Plesaunce, Reyns, & eke the fin Champeyn, Ye washe cleyn fro mole, and spottes blake, That wyn, nor oyle, nor yit non inke distyen Keuerchif or cloth aboute youre souerayn. Bot wasshe hem clene, & yf ye lust to lere, How ye schall doo thes verses techen here.

(3) Vinum lacte lava oleumque licore fabarum Incaustum vino cetera mundat aqua.

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(4) Of wyn away the moles may ye wesshe, In mylk whyt; the fletyng oyly spott Wyth lye of beenes make hit clene & fresshe. Wasshe with wyn the feruent inkes blot, All oder thynges clensed well, ye wot, Wyth water cler, is purged & made clene, But thes thre clense, wyn, mylkes, and beene.4

Perhaps the first question to be asked is whether or not “lavender” has any literary resonance whatsoever in medieval culture. Surprisingly, perhaps, it did—and unsurprisingly, that resonance was biblical. Psalm 50 includes the well-known line, “multum lava me ab iniquitate me et a peccato meo munda me” [wash me of my iniquity and cleanse me of my sin], which functions as an authorization for poets to use “washing” and other images of cleansing in a metaphorical, or figurative way. One Middle English example appears in Piers Plowman, Passus 15 of the B-text, in which we see Charity wash man’s thought and pride with tears in his “lauendrye.”5 In his revision of this passage in the C-text, Langland explicitly quotes Psalm 50, “lauabis me & super niuem dealbabor” [you will wash me, and I will be made whiter than snow].6 This turn to scripture transforms a mundane task into a figurative act of spiritual cleansing, allowing Langland to elaborate the image and to construct a fairly complex allegory of Charity’s “lauendrie.” Similarly, Lydgate describes Christ as a “lauender” in his “A Seying of the Nightingale”: “Of oure synnes as cheef lauender / Out of his syde he gaf vs water cleere.”7 He uses the term once again in his translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, in which Dame Penance describes herself as a “lavendere”: “ ‘I am vn-to the myghty kyng / Callyd sothly the lavendere, / And also ek hys chaumberere.’”8 By themselves, of course, these examples are not proof that Lydgate intended his “tretise” to be read allegorically or metaphorically; what they show is that the poem is embedded within a devotional discursive network, in which images of washing, cleansing, spots and stain removal, all signify more broadly as figures for sin, penance, purification, and forgiveness. Indeed, as we read further in the “Tretise” we find not only that Lydgate has used obvious images of washing, stains, and whitening—all of which, it might be argued, have a purely literal meaning—but also that he has appropriated specifically religious imagery in order to make his point. His use of “licore fabarum,” or lye of beans, for example, while it does have a very clear literal meaning, also points to devotional writing, in which we find “lye” used in a spiritual sense to mean a purgative that washes away sin, as in the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, in which Dame Penance makes a “lye”

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to “To wasshen a-way al ordure” (ll. 21855–56), or in Ayenbite of Inwyt, in which Christ’s blood is a “le{e” that washes all Christians.9 Even more striking is Lydgate’s description of the task of the lavender as doing “youre godely obseruance” (l. 6). If the preceding examples were all illustrations of ways in which literal washing, purging, cleansing, and spots were commonly used in a figurative and spiritual sense, here we find a phrase that literally refers to devotion being used figuratively to refer to the tasks of the lavender. “Obseruance,” according to the MED, means in its broadest sense, “to conform to prescribed rules, principles and customs,” but its most common use is to refer to religious practices, rites, laws, ceremonies, and doctrines.10 Indeed, many of the examples given in the MED entry come from religious texts—from Wycliffite texts in particular, but also from such works as the Orchard of Syon, Pecock’s Reuele of Crysten Religioun, and a rule for Minoresses of St. Clare—and typically refer to following the laws of the Church or of God.11 This importation of a specifically religious word into a seemingly domestic and mundane context is doubly suggestive. First, as I have been arguing, it enforces a figural interpretation of the poem’s images of washing and cleansing, spots and blots, by defining the actions of lavenders as a kind of religious observance. It thus acts as a hermeneutic key to the poem, a trigger for figurative reading and proof positive that Lydgate’s lavenders are not merely fancy washerwomen. Second, and more importantly in some ways, Lydgate’s appropriation of this word helps to define, at a very basic level, what a literary text is and what a poet does. Central to the poetic project, in other words, are these acts of linguistic appropriation and substitution—and even if we limit our reading of the lavenders poem to its literal meaning as a lesson in stain removal, the very fact of Lydgate’s use of a word like “obseruance” distinguishes it from a purely prosaic or functional instruction manual. “Obseruance,” it turns out, is not the only unusual locution in the text, nor is it the only reason I have been insisting on the poem’s aesthetic character. But it does signal to readers that they must bring to the poem interpretive skills developed in reading both devotional and secular literary texts. It further suggests that medieval readers and writers were capable of the same sensitivity to the multidimensional, the fluid, the flexible, and the polyvalent that characterizes modern notions of textuality. Am I suggesting that the lavenders poem is a heretofore unappreciated work of literary genius? Of course not; there is no way of proving such an assertion, and the poem itself does not aspire to such a status. What I am arguing, however, is that it is characterized by a certain playfulness with language, a polyvalent quality, that is deliberate and intentional, and that was recognized by medieval readers and scribes. This polyvalence is not, I will hasten to add, purely a product of the essentially slippery character of language, or of signs

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themselves, not a generalized linguistic indeterminacy that we could locate anywhere we liked, in any kind of text, from laundry list to chronicle account to Skeltonics. It is specific to the discourses with which the lavenders poem engages, and from which it was constructed: devotional writing and secular poetry. I have already shown how we might read Lydgate’s poem as participating in a devotional metaphorics of washing and cleansing, sin and forgiveness. Given this engagement with metaphor, it is instructive to examine the manuscript context for the “Tretise” for evidence of how readers might have approached the poem or what their motivations for reading or copying it might have been. The “Tretise for Lauandres” appears, in whole or in part, in six manuscripts. The most important of these is the “Findern Manuscript,” Cambridge University Library Ff. 1. 6; it is a mid-fifteenthcentury manuscript that is the product of a provincial country house environment pieced together over time by amateur copyists—and it is the only manuscript in which a complete copy of the lavenders poem survives.12 No other scribe has copied the whole poem, in any manuscript; in all other cases, what has been copied is all or part of the final stanza, “Of wyn away the moles may ye wesshe” (l. 15). Three of the five manuscripts, dating from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, include the lavenders stanza as part of a generally miscellaneous aesthetic; for example, in British Library MS Lansdowne 762, we find such items as “the properties of a good horse” and, just prior to the lavenders stanza, a “method for taking the altitude of a church steeple.” In British Library MS Harley 3528, which dates from the seventeenth century, we find the first two lines of the stanza surrounded by alchemical material; it is obviously the chemistry of stain removal that was of interest to the compiler. In these examples, the poem has obviously been “taken straight” and has been copied for its functionality. The fifteenth-century manuscript, British Library MS Royal 17 B 42, contains largely legal and dictaminal material, but begins with Lydgate’s “Dietary,” after which the Latin couplet and final stanza of the lavenders poem has been added in a later hand along with other random bits of verse. Here we see a classic example of miscellaneity, in which a reader or scribe has added what seemed like relevant material after the main composition of the manuscript.13 But taking into account the two remaining medieval manuscripts, British Library MS Harley 2251 and British Library MS Additional 34360 (which was copied from the same exemplar), a different picture of the interpretive possibilities for the poem emerges. In both, the entire final stanza of the poem has been copied, itself not an entirely surprising fact. But what is remarkable is which other texts the scribe chose to copy in proximity to it. Both of these manuscripts date from the latter part of the fifteenth century, and both were copied in part by the so-called

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“Hammond scribe,” probably from a lost Shirley manuscript as exemplar, along with other Shirley exemplars such as Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20.14 Both include the Latin couplet and the final stanza of the lavenders poem, beginning with “Of wyn awey the moles may ye wesshe.” The shorter of the two manuscripts, Additional 34360, was written by two hands; the Hammond scribe’s portion (which includes the lavenders poem) stretches from folio 58r to 77v. This section of the manuscript repeats many of the poems to be found in Harley 2251 and seems to my eyes designed to demonstrate the full range of Lydgate’s poetic capacities: it includes devotional poetry, political poetry, love poetry, aphorisms, and his “Dietary” and the lavenders poem, in no particular order and seemingly without any meaningful juxtapositions or connections. It appears to function as a kind of grab-bag of Lydgate’s verse collected together on the principle of diversity more than anything else. Harley 2251, however, works differently. Folios 1–143r, including the lavenders poem on folio 77v, are written by the Hammond scribe, and betray a far more thematic approach to copying than that found in Additional 34360. The first eleven entries parallel the first eleven entries of the Hammond scribe’s contribution to Additional 34360, from folio 1–13v, and like them constitute a wide-ranging selection of Lydgate’s poetry. But following this group we find a series of thematic groupings of poems, with the addition of some Chaucerian verse, on such subjects as Fortune, human nature, the Blessed Virgin, and devotion. For example, on folios 20v to 30r, we find the a series of poems on human nature: “Trete euery Man like has he is disposed”; “How shulde he thanne be Stable in livynge”; “Alle thynge in kynde desirethe thyng ilike”; “The hasty Man failithe neuer Woo”; a poem on moderation, “If it in mesure be”; and a poem on the inability of man to comprehend divine providence.15 This group is followed by a group of five poems on the Blessed Virgin, which is followed by a group of poems alternating between passion lyrics and meditations on the world’s instability and on Fortune. The scribe’s habit of grouping short poems together thematically continues throughout his portion of the manuscript, and helps to shed light on how a medieval reader might have interpreted the lavenders poem.16 Lydgate’s poem on laundresses appears on folio 77v, immediately following several poems in honor of the Blessed Virgin. In and of itself, this is a significant fact; as I have observed, the poem takes part in a devotional metaphorics of washing, cleansing, and stain removal, and finding it embedded within a devotional context confirms my sense that those metaphorics would have been evident to medieval readers. But the particular devotional poems that the Harley 2251 scribe has chosen (or copied from a Shirley exemplar) are instructive. The first of these is the “Legend

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of Dan Joos,” which describes a monk especially devoted to the Virgin Mary who obsessively recites hymns about her; when he dies, he is found with roses growing from his mouth, eyes, and ears that are imprinted with the words “Maria, ful fayre.” This poem is immediately followed by Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale,” another example of Marian devotion with a similar main character whose body becomes a vehicle for praise of Our Lady upon his death. Next we find a short poem by Lydgate about St. Anne, the Virgin’s mother, which reads in part: And to that ende, lo, here a devoute oreyson, In honour of hir oonly, my friendes deere, That whilom A holy man in his contemplacioun, Had in Remembraunce, with all his hert entier, By whiche, at his dyeng, he saugh hem both appere, This blessid mayden and hir moder fre, Delyveryng his soule from all aduersite.17

In keeping with the plots of the first two poems, we see here another example of a holy person devoted to Mary who dies and experiences a miracle—in this case, the Virgin and her mother delivering his soul from “aduersite” or hell. The logic of these texts is clear: Marian devotion produces salvation, delivering the holy person straight to heaven. What, then, are we to make of the very next entry, which is Lydgate’s lavenders poem, beginning with the Latin couplet “Vinum lacte” and including only the final stanza? The most plausible explanation would be that the “Blessed Virgin” group of poems has ended, and a new group begun. But the two poems following “Vinum lacte” are so clearly connected to the three that precede it that we have no choice but to consider the lavenders poem part of this group. The first of these is a poem titled by its modern editor “The Grateful Dead,” a poem whose attribution to Lydgate is doubtful but whose relevance to this theme is very clear. It concerns a devout man of Paris who constantly prayed for the souls in purgatory, saying his “De Profundis,” “Paternoster,” and “Ave” over and over again. Upon finding himself in mortal danger from his enemies, he ran to the churchyard and prayed the “De Profundis,” at which point the dead rose from their graves and fought off his attackers out of gratitude for his prayers. The poet tells us: He thankyd god of his grete myght, And seyde deprofundis whan they were past. His reward in heuen he had at last. Therfor it is holsom for to have in memory The soulis that ly In paynes of purgatory.18

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We see the themes of death, purgation, prayer, and salvation repeated once again; though the focus on the Virgin Mary has shifted toward a more general focus on the divine, the scribe has retained the basic plot of death and redemption from the earlier narratives. This plot is continued in the penultimate poem of the sequence, a story of one “Wulfrike,” a priest of Wiltshire, who frequently said Requiem Masses for the dead; while Wulfrike was dying, the bodies in the churchyard arose from their graves as children clad in white, prayed for him, and returned to their rest in the ground.19 It is clear what motivated the scribe to choose this poem: we see again a dying man, the power of prayer, and the gratitude of the dead. The sequence ends with a final poem that neatly rounds out the group, Lydgate’s “Child Jesus to Mary the Rose,” in which the infant Christ praises his mother for her virtue and “clennes.” The final stanza makes the connection to the first poem in the sequence clear: O moder! moder! of mercy most habounde, Fayrest moder that euer was alyve! Though I for man have many a bloody wounde, Among theym alle there be Rosis fyve, Agayne whos mercy fiendis may nat stryve; Mankynde to save, best Rosis of defence, Whan they me pray for helpe in thy presence.20

The initial poem in the group, we recall, describes a Monk who prays to the Virgin so obsessively that five roses grow from his head upon his death, five roses whose significance is now revealed in this final text: they symbolize the five wounds of Christ. And the last four lines of the poem summarize the lesson imparted by the entire sequence: seek salvation in prayer to Christ and the Virgin. How, then, does “Vinum lacte” (as I will refer to the portion of the lavenders poem appearing in Harley 2251) fit into this context? It should be clear by now that this group of poems is tightly knit together both thematically and structurally. Not only do we find the themes of prayer, dying, and redemption in each poem, but each text is narratively structured in the same way, describing a holy man who dies and is rewarded by God with salvation that is signaled to others by a deathbed miracle. The poems are especially concerned with purgation, with the transformation of the sinful human being into a saint in heaven. They are also particularly focused on the evidence of such purgation, on the ways in which God communicates to the world that a man has been redeemed. The “Vinum lacte” stanza contributes to, and is explicated by, this context in several ways. First, and most obviously, it too concerns purgation. It explains how to remove “moles” and how to erase spots. It describes a distinction between the kinds of spots

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one encounters: most can be cleansed with water, washed clean in the simplest way—“cetera mundat aqua” [water washes the others]. But some spots require greater attention: “thes thre clense, wyn, mylkes, and beene.” What does this distinction have to do with the narrative described by the poems that surround it? Each poem insists upon the need for prayer to achieve salvation, as well as on the link between prayer and purgation. The first set describes a series of holy persons whose devotion to the Virgin results in immediate salvation; these are the simple cases, the equivalent of the “cetera” of the Latin couplet. They have been washed with water— that is, baptized—and their cleanliness has led to their salvation. The second set of poems is more complex; each one stages the relationship between active purgation—prayer for the souls of the dead—and redemption, and in each we see the main character threatened, the first by his enemies, the second by his own sin. Both characters need help, not from baptism or from the Blessed Virgin, but from the souls in purgatory, those figures who are enduring a cleansing that goes beyond the application of water. “Vinum lacte” does not function here in a strictly allegorical way; we can find no particular equivalents for “wine, oil, and ink” or “wyn, mylkes, and beene.” What is significant is the distinction the poem makes between the kinds of spots that water will cleanse and the kinds that will require extra cleansing, the help of a stain removal agent. This distinction is mirrored in the poems of the sequence in which the text is embedded, which thematize both purity and purgation. The sequence culminates with a poem about purity and blood; in it we see a fluid that creates stains (blood) but paradoxically erases them at the same time, just as the wounds of Christ save mankind, washing men in the blood of the Lamb. It is no coincidence that “Vinum lacte” describes a similar substance—wine—that is also a sacramental liquid that literally becomes the blood of Christ. According to Lydgate, wine functions as both a stain and a stain remover: “Of wyn away the moles may ye wesshe / In mylk whyt” (ll. 15–16) at the same time as one should “Wasshe with wyn the feruent inkes blot” (l. 18). From a strictly literal perspective, one wonders if the wine that removes ink must then be washed with milk—that is, does it make a stain even as it removes one? The blood of Christ is a similar substance: blood leaves stains, even as, read figuratively, it removes the stain of sin. The essential element is the leap that readers must make from literal interpretation to figural reading, from understanding blood, or wine, in bodily or natural terms to understanding the substances as signs. This leap is demanded by the lavenders poem, not only by its insistence on devotional discourse, which is hard to miss, but also, in this case, by its context. The Hammond scribe has embedded this tricky little poem within a sequence of stories about purgation that

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culminates with the blood of Christ, and that sequence demands from readers a kind of mental acrobatics, a jump from the domesticity of Lydgate’s instructions to washerwomen to the sacramental spirituality of the blood of the Lamb. Indeed, the final poem in the sequence literally teaches the reader how to perform figural reading in retrospect: he or she may not have grasped the significance of the five roses in the very first story, but by the final lyric the allegorical meaning of the image becomes crystal clear: the flowers are the wounds of Christ that “defende” human beings from the fiend by washing them clean of sin. What are we as contemporary readers to make of this logic of juxtaposition, this scribal hermeneutic? The major critical question to be answered involves intention: where do we locate intention in this manuscript? As a close analysis shows, it is clear that the order in which the Hammond scribe copied the poems is highly significant; not only does it assert the importance of a theme—here, purgation, and elsewhere devotion and Fortune— but it also puts forward an argument, a thesis of its own. The attentive reader is meant to experience these poems in a didactic way, reading one after the other in accretive fashion and experiencing the meaning of the text through its relationship to other texts. One poem about purgation might be misinterpreted, as might a story about miracles, or the Virgin, or clerical purity. Six such poems, however, make the pedagogical point obvious. But the lavenders poem still remains to trouble us; why, if the goal of the scribe was to communicate to readers a point about prayer, purgation, and redemption, did he include a poem that requires extra interpretive labor to make sense? The first step in determining the answer to this question is to detach it from questions about the motivation, goal, or purpose of the scribe himself. These are unanswerable questions. Instead we must locate intention in the manuscript, where it is lodged in the interstices of the various sequences of poems that structure it and make it meaningful. Having done so, it becomes important to evaluate the effect of the lavenders poem on readers. It is a wrench in the hermeneutic works of the sequence, an aporia into which meaning must be inserted and constructed. It lacks both the content and the form of the remaining poems about purgation, each of which is characterized by a specific theme and a particular narrative line that involves death, purgation, and redemption. When readers encounter it, they can either ignore it, or make it meaningful. I have chosen to do the latter, because it seems to me that such is the intention produced by the sequence itself. Further, the very existence of this hermeneutic wrench argues for a vision of the aesthetic that seems at first to be alien to such a manuscript, which works in a relatively easy and didactic fashion by linking a series of themes together in simple groups. Having to interpret “Vinum lacte” means having to exercise a critical

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faculty that is distinctively literary, that focuses on metaphor and allegory and is alert to the presence of multiple discourses in the same short text. The presence of the poem argues for an aesthetic that values density and complexity, that prizes the labor of interpretation and takes pleasure in a seemingly literal or meaningless text. It is this aesthetic that finally makes sense of the “Tretise for Lauandres,” showing us the interpretive possibilities in a seemingly instrumental text and indeed, suffusing those possibilities with pleasure and enjoyment. The lavenders poem, in the end, is a fundamentally playful text, soliciting interpretive hijinks from readers and making meaning in a surprising and unexpected—and thus aestheticized—way. Seeing how the “Vinum lacte” stanza works in one manuscript is thus instructive, not only in showing us something new about Lydgate’s poem, but also in suggesting something critically important about medieval manuscripts and scribes. Paying attention to a poem’s manuscript context does not mean merely identifying hands or transcribing variant readings. On the contrary, a focus on manuscript context can reveal meaning hidden from view by the distance of time; it can add an entire discursive field to an isolated lyric and thus bring into focus the range of possible significances that such a lyric might have held for medieval readers. But a troubling question remains, one that is made particularly pressing by the sheer oddity of Lydgate’s poem and, paradoxically, by the seeming clarity that Harley 2251 brings to an otherwise opaque text. Are the only “authentic” meanings of medieval texts those granted by “real” medieval readers—in this case, by scribes—or those clearly demanded by their original contexts in manuscripts? What are the limits on interpretability placed on modern readers by medieval poems? The “Tretise for Lauandres” is a small poem on which to hang such a large question, particularly one with such a venerable critical history; each generation of Chaucer critics, for example, has had to confront this problem and each has arrived at an unsatisfactory answer. Developing a new theory of reading is well outside the scope of this paper, which is at root a very simple consideration of a single poem. But as it shows, big questions arise from very small points of intersection between present and past; whenever we grant more than an instrumental or functional status to any text, we are forced to confront the possibility that the excess of meaning we have identified in the poem (or chronicle entry, for that matter) is in fact something we have brought to the text ourselves, something alien to it. That is why reading manuscripts is a fundamentally reassuring thing to do: it seems to grant to the shaky business of literary interpretation a certain stability and authenticity. If a medieval scribe demonstrably finds a particular meaning in a difficult poem, the logic goes, then surely that meaning is more authentic than any other.

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It would be very difficult to mount an argument against this position. Manuscripts occupy a very special place in the enterprise of literary interpretation. They are real objects from the past. They existed then, and they exist now; to touch and feel them is literally to touch and feel the Middle Ages, to hold the hand of a medieval person across the centuries, someone whose DNA might very well still lurk in the nooks and crannies of the sewing and binding, might be mixed in the ink or spots staining the pages. It is hard to overestimate the glamour and seductiveness of touching the past in this way. But literary texts are not, in the end, objects that we can touch. Part of the appeal of manuscript readings is the sense of concretion that they lend to the ephemerality of written language, the sense of embodiment that they bring to what are fundamentally disembodied and voiceless traces of a past culture. When the text in question is a poem, a discursive entity designed to summon up multiple interpretations, brought into being in part to confront readers with the excessiveness of the aesthetic, then the limits enforced by manuscripts and scribes—and the sheer reality lent to the text by its physical presence on a real, touchable page—are profoundly comforting. What has to be recognized is that this comfort is precisely what the literary text works against. I have chosen Lydgate’s lavenders poem to make this point because, unlike more well-known examples like Chaucer’s poetry, or Piers Plowman, it seems at first to resist making meaning at all. Examining the manuscript context for the lyric opens up, rather than closes down, meaning; it is the best possible example of “touching the past” in order to free the poem from the strictures of twentieth-century formal judgment (it is a “bad” poem) and aesthetic dismissal. What this should do is allow the poem to flourish under the gaze of the modern reader, as indeed it will if we do not stop where Harley 2251, or any other manuscript, stops. Am I suggesting that the very nature of “literariness” is such that any interpretation is sanctioned, that once we move beyond what a manuscript might authorize we are free to bring any kind of contemporary meaning to the text? Not at all. What I am arguing is that in order to genuinely grasp the historicity of a medieval poem we must first identify its excesses, the ways in which it solicits meanings that seem, at first glance, to be unauthorized or illicit, and to exceed the brief of the manuscript or the words on the page. Those excesses have to be evaluated, of course, and some we must reject as fanciful, or fundamentally alien to the Middle Ages, or the poet; some we must admit are mere castles in the air built by our own modern preoccupations. Others, however, exist in the spaces between past authority and present desire, and these meanings are perhaps the most significant, and the best indices to the power of the aesthetic within history and culture. In the case of the “Tretise for Lauandres,” one of these interpretive cruces arises in relation to the figure of the laundress herself. If, as I have

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suggested, the primary way in which the poem encourages a literary reading is by exploiting devotional metaphors and discourse, then the meaning that it suggests but represses is fundamentally tied to the morally ambivalent status of laundresses in both late-medieval English society and in literary discourse. For readers of Lydgate, this ambivalence is first suggested by the most obvious poetic intertext for the poem, Chaucer’s use of the term “lavender” in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women: Envye—I preye to God yeve hire myschaunce!— Is lavender in the grete court alway, For she ne parteth, neyther nyght ne day, Out of the hous of Cesar; thus seyth Dante.21

Chaucer is quoting Dante, who in Inferno 13 has Pier della Vigne describe Envy as “La meretrice che mai da l’ospizio / di Cesare non torse li occhi putti, / morte comune e de le corti vizio” (“The harlot that never turned her whorish eyes from Caesar’s household—the common death and vice of courts”).22 He translates “meretrice” (harlot) as “lavender,” a distinctively English usage attested by British Library MS Harley 2253, where we find a lyric using the image of “lecherie my lauendere,” and by John Trevisa, who translates Ranulph Higden’s “lotricibus” as “lauenders” in his rendering of the Polychronicon’s account of Saracen incursions into Spain.23 In this context, we can see that “lavender” itself is a remarkably flexible word whose range of meaning extends from the literal (“laundresses”) to the metaphorical (“spiritual cleansers”) to the colloquial (“prostitutes”). In it we see the allegorical habits of exegetes collide with the everyday phenomenon of linguistic accretion, in which meanings develop informally through association and use. “Lavender” came to mean “whore” not because of theoretical or abstract mental gymnastics, but because of the specific historical status of washerwomen in late-medieval England. As Ruth Mazo Karras has shown, laundresses were frequently associated with and labeled as prostitutes, so much so that bathhouse regulations specifically limited the number of washerwomen that could be employed.24 Coupled with the intimacy of the laundress’s job and the association of dirty laundry with filth in general and the body in particular, it is not surprising that such women came to be seen as threats to the established sexual order of things. Lavenders were also among the very few women who would regularly have entered all-male spaces, such as monasteries or colleges, and as such, acquired a predictable reputation for illicit behavior.25 This meaning of “lavender” is produced by experience, by the specific status of a certain group of women during a historical period. Chaucer’s use of the word takes advantage of its experiential quality in order to embed

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the personification of Envy in a familiar household scenario, lending a certain domesticity to the image of the court and exploiting the connection between whores and washerwomen. Lydgate’s lavenders poem is in no way innocent of these associations. The extended image it constructs of a washerwoman cleaning the spots from her mistress’s dresses could not have been read without evoking the associations between laundresses and illicit sexuality, even as it mined the connection between washing and the purgation of sin. What are we to make of this fundamental doubleness in the image of the lavender, the way in which the washerwoman comes to signify both spiritual purity and bodily contamination? Certainly, as readers of medieval literature, we have encountered this phenomenon before, especially where women are concerned; one has only to think of the “Ave/Eva” link forged by exegetes in order to find an analogue. But noting that women can function as images of purity and icons of danger at the same time is hardly to make a new point, either in the present or in the Middle Ages; the sheer plasticity of the feminine figure in literary art is evident everywhere we look, from the Wife of Bath to Guinevere. What we can learn from Lydgate’s lavenders poem, however, is how to read the poetic discourse of the past in such a way that we both remain within the limits of interpretability set by history and honor the nature of the aesthetic, which challenges limits and exceeds boundaries, embracing excess and resisting the literal. When we examine the manuscript context for the lavenders poem, we find a certain kind of authorization for our readings. But those readings cannot stop when the end of the codex is reached. Other modes of authorization, other ways of putting pressure on the aesthetic object in order to make its complexity visible, must be brought to bear by contemporary readers lest the true density of the medieval poem or other art object be lost to time. In the case of the lavenders poem, I have turned to history in order to revive the meaning suppressed in it by a purely devotional reading. It is without question that the historical discourse in which lavenders acquired a set of meanings and associations connected to illicit and dangerous sexuality would have been available to Lydgate’s readers. That Lydgate intended to confront such readers with a knotty signifier—the washerwoman who is both Charity and Envy, both an agent of purity and a purveyor of filth—remains in doubt. It is certainly possible that he reveled in the contradictions that his little lyric embodied. But what a close reading of the poem shows is that this kind of intention means very little in the broader context of literary history. We cannot know what Lydgate thought about when he wrote his poem, because he failed to tell us. What is knowable is that the “Tretise for Lauandres” manipulates multiple discourses and takes advantage of the ways in which those discourses—theological, colloquial, literary—tend to collide over time as

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they deploy the words available to them. “Lavender” is one such word. It has multiple lives and multiple histories. It is the task of the aesthetic to animate as many of those lives as possible within a single text or object—and this, in fact, the “Tretise for Lauandres” does very well. Notes 1. 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), I:xix–xx; see also Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 73, 219. 2. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 219. 3. “Lye of beene” or “licore fabarum” seems to refer to the water that beans have been cooked in. See MED, s.v. “lie,” n2, for the meaning “sediment of wine” and MED, s.v. “lei(e,” n1, for lye as an “alkaline solution”; thus “lye of beene” would seem to be the sediment remaining after soaking or cooking beans, which has stain-removing properties. 4. The Minor Poems, II:723. 5. Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1988), XV.186–94. 6. Charity “laueth hem in Qe lauendrie, laboraui in gemitu meo, / Bouketh hem at his breste and beteth hem ofte / And with warm water of his yes woketh hem til they white: / Lauabis me & super niuem dealbabor.” See Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane, (London: Athlone Press, 1997), XVI.333–35a. 7. The Minor Poems, I:230, ll. 251–52. 8. Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F.J. Furnivall and Katherine B. Locock, EETS e.s. 77, 83, 92 (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899–1904), ll. 4150–52. 9. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Richard Morris (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1866), p. 145, l. 22: “Qet is Qet we byeQ alle y-wesse of onelepi le{e.” 10. MED, s.v. “observaunce,” 1a. 11. One exception to this rule is Chaucer, who uses the term several times over the course of his oeuvre, nearly always in relation to love; for example, Pandarus enjoins Criseyde to do her “observaunce” to May when he goes to visit her in Book II (ll. 111–12). See The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); all references are to this edition. See also “The Knight’s Tale,” ll. 1045, 1500; “The Merchant’s Tale,” l. 1548; “The Squire’s Tale,” l. 516; Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, F.150, G.136; the Legend of Good Women, l. 1608; Troilus and Criseyde, I.198, III.970; Anelida and Arcite, l. 218; Treatise on the Astrolabe, 2.4.63. Chaucer’s use is undergirded by the common notion of love as a kind of religion, and we see in “The Parson’s Tale,” l. 747, a use of the word to mean both secular and religious practices: “the avaricious man hath

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

moore hope in his catel than in Jhesu Crist, and dooth moore observance in kepynge of his tresor than he dooth to the service of Jhesu Crist.” I discuss the manuscript from a different perspective in “The Fortunes of Piers Plowman and Its Readers,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 21 (2006): 1–41. The “Findern Manuscript” has been published in facsimile; see The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS. Ff. 1.6, ed. and intro. Richard Beadle and A.E.B. Owen (London: Scolar Press, 1977). See the catalogues of these manuscripts, including Lansdowne 762, online at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/HITS0001.ASP?VPath⫽c!/ inetpub/wwwroot/mss/data/msscat/html/40643.htm&Search⫽762& Highlight⫽F accessed March 30, 2006; MS Harley 3528, in A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, Vol. III (Printed by Command of His Majesty King George III, 1808), p. 38; MS Royal 17 B 47, in British Museum Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections, Vol. 2, ed. Sir George F. Warner and Julius P. Gilson (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1921), p. 234. For full descriptions of both manuscripts, as well as discussion of the hands and the “Hammond scribe,” see Eleanor Hammond, “Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Additional 34360): A Contribution to the Bibliography of John Lydgate,” Anglia 28 (1905): 1–28; the Harley manuscript is also described in A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols. (London: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George III, 1808–12), 2:578–82. The catalogue for MS Additional 34360 can be found at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/HITS0001. ASP?VPath⫽c!/inetpub/wwwroot/mss/data/msscat/html/26860.htm& Search⫽34360&Highlight⫽F accessed March 30, 2006. See also Linne Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 182–98. Quoted from the description in A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, 2:578; see also Hammond, “Two British Museum Manuscripts,” pp. 15–16, entries 17–22. Indeed, as A.S.G. Edwards has noted, the long series of extracts from the Fall of Princes that concludes the Hammond scribe’s contribution is distinguished thematically by its antifeminism. A.S.G. Edwards, “John Lydgate, Medieval Antifeminism and Harley 2251,” Annuale Medievale 13 (1972): 32–44. The Minor Poems, I:130, ll. 8–14. A New Ploughman’s Tale: Thomas Hoccleve’s Legend of the Virgin and Her Sleeveless Garment, with a Spurious Link, ed. Arthur Beatty (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902), p. 22. MacCracken does not include this poem in his “Lydgate Canon”; see The Minor Poems, I:v–lviii. For the Wulfrike poem, see A Selection from the Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, ed. James Orchard Halliwell, Vol. II of Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages (London: Percy Society, 1840), pp. 72–73. The Minor Poems, I:235, ll. 15–21.

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21. Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, G.333–36. One odd connection to laundresses and the Legend turns up in an early scholarly exchange, when John M. Manly refuted Frederick Tupper’s identification of Alceste as the “Alice de Cestre” who appears in the Chaucer Life Records with Philippa Chaucer as the recipient of Christmas robes and mourning cloth. Thinking that Alice Cestre must have been, like Philippa, a lady-in-waiting, Tupper proposed that the Prologue was written to honor her after Philippa’s death in 1387. See Frederick Tupper, “Chaucer’s Lady of the Daisies,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 21 (1922): 293–317. Manly, however, a few years later, uncovered two records from Edward III’s Household Books in which Alice Cestre is clearly identified as the queen’s washerwoman, “lotrix,” which would seem to explode Tupper’s theory. See “Chaucer’s Lady of the Daisies?” Modern Philology 24 (1927): 257–59. Certainly the topicality of Tupper’s theory makes it a doubtful explanation for Alceste’s presence in the text, but what the records do show is the extreme intimacy of the laundress’s job and its importance to the aristocracy; Alice merits naming along with other members of the royal household. Chaucer’s choice of lavender as a translation for Dante’s “meretrice” thus becomes a further evocation of the close and claustrophobic world of the court, in which the intimate circle around the King and Queen would have included both favorite members of the nobility and skilled servants like Alice Cestre. 22. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 13.64–66. 23. “Lechery my lauendre,” printed in Specimens of Lyric Poetry Composed in England in the Reign of Edward the First, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Percy Society, 1842), pp. 47–51; for Trevisa, see Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, Monachi Cestrensis, vol. VIII, ed. Joseph R. Lumby, Rolls Series no. 41 (London: Longman, 1882), Book 7, pp. 190–91. 24. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 54. For a translation of the regulations of the Southwerk bathhouses, taken from Oxford, MS Bodley E. Mus. 229 and supplemented by British Library, MS Harley 1877, see her “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” Signs 14 (1989): 427–33 [399–443]. The regulation concerning laundresses is labeled B1. 25. Ruth Mazo Karras, “Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe,” Journal of Women’s History 15 (2004): 153 [153–58].

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CHAPTER 5 “MARKYS. . .OFF THE WORKMAN”: HERESY, HAGIOGRAPHY, AND THE HEAVENS IN THE PILGRIMAGE OF THE LIFE OF MAN Lisa H. Cooper

n 1330, the French Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville composed Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine [The Pilgrimage of Human Life], an allegory whose versified narrative about the spiritually hazardous journey from birth to death quickly became one of the most popular vernacular works of the later Middle Ages. Extant today in over fifty manuscripts in its original French, the work also survives in fifteenth-century German, Dutch, and Spanish versions as well as a faithful Middle English prose translation of c. 1430. But Deguileville did not stop with this first work, though he did delay somewhat before continuing with its theme. Around 1355—some twenty-five years later—he returned to the idea of pilgrimage, not only producing two additional allegories by 1358 (Le Pèlerinage de l’âme and Le Pèlerinage de Jhésucrist), but also revising the first part of what was now to be a trilogy. He greatly amplified the first Pèlerinage, inserting many Latin poems on sacred themes, introducing new allegorical personifications, and expanding largely upon iconographical details only briefly touched upon in the earlier version.1 Even though its importance to the history of medieval spiritual literature and vernacular poetry has long been in evidence, the pilgrimage poems— in all their complicated textual multiplicity, and perhaps because of it— have attracted little sustained critical attention.2 One important aspect of the first work’s allegorical system, in particular, has gone largely

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unremarked: namely, the fact that despite its insistent focus on the transitory nature of human life, the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in both its early and late versions is saturated with images of labor in general and of craft labor in particular. As I argue at greater length elsewhere, artisanry is the poem’s epistemology: within its allegorical dreamworld, craft as both material practice and literary trope is the means by which the pilgrimnarrator is informed about, among other matters, the sacraments, the Creed, and the true meaning of Christ’s sacrifice.3 As a metaphor, however, craft labor operates somewhat ambivalently in both versions of the Pèlerinage. At times a figure for the individual believer’s ability to engage in spiritual self-fashioning, it is at many other points an equally powerful metaphor for that individual’s inability to survive without the institutional Church. Deguileville uses craft imagery—including a carpenter’s square, representing Christ’s triple pax, and the personification of Tribulation as a goldsmith—to reimagine in perhaps the most material of ways what Sarah Beckwith has called the “juridical apparatus” of the Church, a disciplinary system whose shaping power, as she rightly points out, has been somewhat underemphasized in recent critical studies of postLateran IV lay spirituality.4 This material emphasis of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage—an emphasis that consists of an intense focus on manual labor, performed with tools, upon a soul depicted as a kind of malleable artifact— makes the force of the penitential system (not to mention its operation as a system) hard to ignore. In Deguileville’s allegory, the Church, especially the confessional, appears as a kind of sacred workshop whose overseers (the clergy) must compete against artisans of vice, those Seven Deadly Sins who do a more malicious shaping in the treacherous workshop of the world. In other words, while much late medieval spiritual literature in the vernacular emphasizes the active role of the penitent, who must work at both the outward practice of faith and upon his or her inner self in order to secure salvation, Deguileville’s poem more frequently represents the soul as passive material in urgent need of the Church’s protection and guidance (even while at several moments, as we shall see, it takes account of secular ambitions and allows, even encourages, their worldly range).5 It is this spiritually conservative character that helps to account for the Pèlerinage’s popularity in England in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, when—in addition to appealing generally to an increasingly literate laity—it seems to have participated in the contemporary backlash against Lollardy, and particularly against the Lollard rejection of the sacraments that the poem, in contrast, celebrates in great detail.6 Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the Pèlerinage was translated into Middle English twice over; its earlier version, as I have already noted above, was rendered in prose by an anonymous writer around 1430, and survives in six

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manuscripts.7 The much longer second version of 1355 had, however, already been translated into verse four years earlier (that is, c. 1426) by John Lydgate for Thomas Montague, fourth earl of Salisbury and son of John Montague, one of the so-called “Lollard knights” and, according to Thomas Walsingham, the most active. Walsingham calls the elder Montague “maior fatuus” [the most foolish] iconoclast of the group, and reports on the way the elder earl, in line with the outcry against images expressed in Lollard texts, most notably in the last of the Twelve Conclusions of 1395, removed all the religious statuary from the chapel on his family estate.8 In The Gothic Idol, published in 1989, Michael Camille analyzed Deguileville’s figure of an idolatrous carpenter (depicted, in the 1355 Pèlerinage, as foolishly worshipping a statue of his own making [ll. 20851– 21036]) and loosely connected Thomas Montague’s commission of the English verse translation to his heretical heritage. Camille suggested that Montague, because of his father’s actions, would have been more sensitive than most to the debate over images in English spiritual culture, and might have commissioned the poem as part of a programmatic repudiation of his father’s ideals.9 In one of his last publications, Camille returned to this same passage, and to its accompanying images in the single illuminated (but fragmentary) manuscript of the English translation, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII (fols. 65v and 68r), and made his earlier hypothesis much more explicit. In this later study, Camille suggests that Lydgate’s translation would have “carr[ied] a particular charge” in light of the Lollard threat to the material artifacts and ritual traditions of orthodox practice.10 He notes that while the pilgrim-narrator decries idolatry in terms that may look at first like Lollardy (reminiscent, in other words, of the last Conclusion), he then (crucially, and in a passage that greatly expands upon the original French text) proffers an orthodox defense of the use of images in Christian worship (ll. 20975–21015). As Camille notes, however, the “charge” the passage carries is not only problematically ambiguous (idolatry and iconoclasm being “always two sides of the same coin”), but also impossible to attribute to a single source—to Thomas Montague’s specific instructions, say, or to Lydgate’s own independent decisions.11 Despite Camille’s uncertainties about the possible valences of the pilgrim’s response to the carpenter’s idolatry, in this chapter I turn to a number of other passages in the English version of the poem in order to expand on his suggestion that Lydgate’s translation must be read as not just a generally reactionary but in fact as a specifically post-Lollard production if it is to be most properly understood. My argument, simply put, is that the poem—whether on its patron’s directions or not—builds a much more consistent response to Lollardy than Camille suggested. In the first two

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sections of what follows, I show how in two key and relatively early passages in the Pilgrimage, Lydgate alters his source text in order to make use of the contemporary English association of artisans with heresy in particular and with social unrest in general. In the last section, by contrast, I demonstrate that in several other later passages, it is simply by following Deguileville’s text to the letter in the use of artisanry as the poem’s central trope—a trope not without its contradictory consequences for either writer—that Lydgate is able neatly to fit his Pilgrimage to the concerns of his own time.12 Crafting Eucharistic Bread Before he begins his journey proper, the Pilgrimage’s narrator is led by the figure of Grace personified into her house (actually a church), where he witnesses the performance of all seven sacraments. He needs each of them explained, but none more so than that of the Eucharist, by whose “merveyllous mutacion” of “[b]red in-to flesshe, wyn in-to blood” (ll. 3280–81) he is especially confounded. Equally amazed is another of his allegorical guides, Reason, who admits that she is powerless to explain the miracle of transubstantiation to the pilgrim since, as she puts it, “Yt passeth myn understandyng, / My wyt also, & ek my mynde” (ll. 3303–10). She is, however, able to interpret what has just occurred as an insult to another allegorical persona, Nature. Grace’s transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood, Reason asserts, is an act “contrayre” (l. 3332) to Nature, one that flies in the face of what the French text calls “sa coustume et son usage” [her rights and privileges] (fol. 12v) and what Lydgate faithfully translates as her “custom & usage” (l. 3335).13 The figure of Nature, responding to Reason’s alert, now arrives at the scene. She, too, accuses Grace of impinging upon her territory and announces that she has come to protect her “ordenances” (fol. 13r) and “usages” (fol. 13v) from further encroachment. The playing out of the ensuing debate—Nature ultimately loses to Grace and must beg her forgiveness—is beyond my scope here, though it is worth noting that it consists in part of a reference Grace makes to the craft language of Isaiah 10:15 (“Shall the axe boast itself against him that cutteth with it?”) and 29:16 (“as if the clay should think against the potter”) in order to insist that she is the true artisan and Nature but her instrument or even simply her raw material (ll. 3852–67).14 What I want to highlight, however, is the way that Lydgate, faced with introducing this debate to an English audience, capitalized upon on what must have seemed like a readymade ideological opportunity. The denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation, first formulated in technically sophisticated terms by John Wyclif in

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his treatise De eucharistia (1379–80) and then popularized by his followers, was understood in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as absolutely central to Lollard belief—so much so that well before the time Lydgate was translating Nature’s complaint, even to discuss the nature of the Eucharist could signify one’s possibly heretical leanings.15 Furthermore, though the data on who was and was not a true Lollard will never be as satisfying as we might wish, it is now widely accepted that the rank and file of those for whom the “heresy” held appeal were of the artisan class; as Steven Justice points out, one of the earliest and most vocal “nonacademic Lollards” was a smith.16 These two links to Lollardy—Eucharistic debate, on the one hand, and artisanry, on the other—are clearly joined in the anti-Lollard text known as Friar Daw’s Reply. There, the Friar, responding to the upstart “Jack Upland,” insists on the transformational power of the sacrament and concludes not only that it must be performed by an ordained minister but also, pointedly, that it is no business for an artisan: Qer leeueQ not of Qe breed but oonli Qe licnesse, Which Qat abidiQ Qerinne noon substeyened substans; It is deQ to yuel, lyf to good, encresing of oure grace. It wole not be confect but oonli of a preest Qat lawfulli is ordeyned bi Holy Chirche keies. And so carpenters ne sowters, card-makers ne powchers, Drapers ne cutellers, gi`r’delers, coferers, ne coruysers, Ne no manere of artificeris, Qis sacrament mowe treten, But the privite of preesthode wer prickid in her soulis.17

Leaving aside the curious ambiguity of this passage’s last line (which seems to me to imply that some artisans might acquire the authority to perform the mass), I want simply to observe that the Reply, like Thomas Hoccleve’s reproach of the doting or raving “man of crafft” who dares to make theological arguments,18 suggests the degree to which artisans were implicated not just in historical fact but also in the English literary imaginary with Lollard ideas in general and Eucharistic debate in particular. And Deguileville’s poem—albeit for reasons that are metaphysically significant rather than immediately socially pressing—makes a very similar connection between craft labor and the Eucharist. Seventy-five years before Lydgate was to translate his work, Deguileville, following what was by the fourteenth century a well-established philosophical and literary tradition, makes his Nature (in a passage Lydgate translates literally) unquestionably an artisan, one both proud of her transformative skills and protective of her earthly jurisdiction.19 “[Y]e may. . .off verray right / Maken thynges fresshe of hew, / And whan ye lyst, transforme hem newe”

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in the celestial spheres above the moon, she advises Grace (ll. 3424–26). “But her by-nethe,” she continues, ys al my myght; Off ellementys I am maystresse, Lady also and pryncesse Off wyndys and inpressyouns, And make transmutacyouns, .... I leve no thyng in on estat, But make eche thyng, by declyn, ffor to drawe to hys ffyn. I make alday thynges newe The olde, refresshyng of her hewe. (ll. 3436–50)

While this presentation of Nature as a craftsperson is, as I have already noted, quite traditional, less so is Deguileville’s deployment of the language—already noted above—of custom, usage, and ordinance. This legal language, used by both Nature and Grace alike throughout their spirited spat, comes not just with a political but—by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and especially in the English context with which we are most concerned—an artisanal resonance; like the debate as a whole, these are terms reminiscent not only of the frequent struggles between governing bodies in general but also, and especially, between associations of rival merchants and craftsmen, struggles with which guild records of Lydgate’s time are replete.20 While the Middle English Dictionary records the fact that custom and usage are terms that might refer to the traditional rights and privileges of any corporate body, guild or otherwise, “ordinance” is especially relevant in this regard. For though it can broadly refer to any kind of binding legislation, the word appears again and again in the urban records—I am thinking here of those of London, but it is equally true for other English municipalities—as the term par excellence for a guild statute.21 To cite but one example from many hundreds of possibilities, the London LetterBooks record a petition from 1423 for an “Ordinacio pistor’” [Ordinance of the Bakers] that would prevent any baker from baking bread on Sunday “except in case of great necessity or by special order from the Crown.”22 I use this reference to the bakers’ ordinance not only for convenience, but also because, in a change that Deguileville made to the 1355 version of his poem, it is a reference to the craft of baking that further suggests he wanted the argument between Nature and Grace understood as a commercial contest. In the later text, Nature informs Grace that though she herself has never made bread, it was nevertheless she (Nature) who

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delivered [“baillay”] the grain, “la matiere,” for the Eucharistic bread to “art,” or artifice, an allegorical baker over whom she has full jurisdiction (fol. 13v). In Lydgate’s English, this figure of “art” becomes “Crafft” with a capital “C”: Thogh I nevere made looff, The mater that yt ys made off Kometh fro my corn & greyne; And I delyuered hem, certeyn, Unto Crafft, whych I assure Ys soget un-to Nature. Thogh she yt made by hyr engyn, The mater ffyrst was pleynly myn, And kam fro me, yt ys no drede. (ll. 3547–55)

What matters (as it were) to Nature is not only that Grace has transformed bread and wine in a highly unnatural fashion, but also that she has interfered in what Nature effectively represents here as a commercial monopoly over “mater,” thus undoing a craft hierarchy and manufacturing process that properly begins with “corn & greyne” and ends in a “looff” of bread. Nature clearly expresses the horror of this undoing, not to mention her incapacity to understand it in any but the most material of ways, in her subsequent vision of how Grace has “turnyd bred / In-to Rawh fflesshe” (ll. 3556–57). Returning to the language used earlier by Reason, and by way of launching into a list of earlier miracles (or “[w]rongys” [l. 3565]) that have likewise offended her, such as the Virgin birth, Nature insists that Grace has regularly but unlawfully “ytournyd” [overturned] her “custommys & [her] ordyauncys” (ll. 3568–69). That Lydgate clearly understood Deguileville’s Nature as participating in a system of small commodity production and emerging mercantilism is made clear not simply by his faithful translation of the passages I have already cited, but also, and more importantly, by the new vocabulary he added to the debate. For where Deguileville’s Reason ends her initial protest with the reference to Nature’s coustume and usage—a phrase, as I noted above, Lydgate translates faithfully as “custom & usage” (l. 3335), as he likewise does Nature’s reference upon her arrival to her “ordynauncys” (l. 3376)—the English poet gives Reason several more lines, allowing her to comment that Grace has “of force & might, / Broke [Nature’s] franchyse & hyr ryght” (ll. 3339–40). Nature, arriving only shortly after these last words of Reason’s have been uttered, repeats Reason’s terms, expressing anger that Grace has dared “to medle of my fraunchyse” (l. 3372); in addition, where Deguileville’s Nature at this point claims that

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she comes to “deffendre le mien” [defend my own] (fol. 13r), Lydgate’s Nature comes instead to “dyffende my lyberte” (l. 3374), asserting in the face of Grace’s encroachment upon her “lordshepe” that “[m]y fredam I wolde kepe” (l. 3399–400).23 Like the term ordinaunce, the words fraunchyse, liberte, and fredam— especially when they occur in a debate that concerns, however allegorically, the manufacture of and trade in a comestible like bread—come freighted with an undeniable artisanal and mercantile weight. All three, of course, have long connections to the privileges associated in general with urban citizenship, but those privileges were from their establishment essentially commercial in nature. Caroline Barron notes the importance to artisans of London, from the late thirteenth century on, of acquiring and protecting “the freedom” that allowed them to practice their craft and sell retail in the city, while Pamela Nightingale observes that “[i]n the fourteenth century the citizens [of London] meant above all by their franchise their claim to a monopoly of the city’s retail trade” (my emphasis).24 These terms, together with liberty (usually synonymous with franchise or freedom), often appear as close together in contemporary civic records as they do in Lydgate’s poem, as a turn to the London Letter Books again reveals. A letter, perhaps from the mayor, to citizens residing outside the city, informed them in 1432 that “we shull procede to discharge yow of youre fredom as the custume and fraunchise of the Cite asketh”; in the next year, in response to a petition, “outeduellers” who wished to retain their trading privileges were informed that they had to return to their households in the city and pay the requisite taxes or else they would “lese and forfait alle Qe benefice and avauntage of Qair saide Fraunchise and liberte.”25 Highlighting Nature’s protests in terms recognizably related to English commercial culture, then, Lydgate’s additions to Deguileville’s verse subtly align his Pilgrimage with the cultural climate in which he wrote—a climate, that is, in which a skeptic of the transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood during the Mass and a worker responsible for more mundane transformations in the process of his or her daily labor could be depicted as one and the same—as Hoccleve’s “man [or, in the case of this poem, a woman] of craft.” Lydgate’s changes to Deguileville’s poem serve to make even clearer than does the French version of the episode that Nature, an artisan who dares to challenge the material miracle at the center of the Christian faith, is in the wrong. Subject to theological defeat, Nature is forced to recant what is, if not explicitly heretical, then certainly a rebellious attitude toward doctrinal orthodoxy and spiritual authority. In the next section of this chapter we will see how, faced with another rebellious artisan in the course of Deguileville’s plot, Lydgate went even farther in an attempt to subdue the potential implications of his source text.

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Putting English Artisans in Place Where Deguileville’s fourteenth-century French verse usefully coincided with a fifteenth-century English program, all Lydgate needed, as we see in the Nature-Grace debate, was to make a few small changes in order to emphasize a concept that was, in a sense, already present in his source. The extent to which Lydgate’s choices in this regard were as deliberate as I have suggested is made clearer by a later passage at which the English poet made another telling choice, this time de-emphasizing statements in the French text with which he (or, again, his patron) may well have been uncomfortable. These are statements made, in both the first and second recensions of the Pèlerinage, by Occupation, the personification of virtuous industry, who sits at the head of the first fork in the pilgrim’s road. As he hesitates—and before he makes the wrong choice, opting for the way of Idleness and opening himself to the attack of the Seven Deadly Sins—the pilgrim engages with this figure in a discussion that, unlike the debate of Nature and Grace, is more social than spiritual; that is, it contemplates the artisanal not as a way to interrogate divine truths, but rather as a means to contemplate very immediate earthly tensions. Occupation is a net-maker by trade, but one whose activity gives the puzzled pilgrim some pause since he makes, undoes, and remakes his nets in a never ending and seemingly unprofitable circle. Unable to recognize that Occupation (whose name he only learns late in the discussion) thus keeps himself active in the manner of the desert fathers in order to avoid the deadly sin of acedia (sloth), the pilgrim queries him as to the point of his “vil et povre mestier” [low and poor craft] (fol. 47r).26 At this point, an audience familiar with sermon exempla might well expect a response from the net-maker on the theme of labor as virtue in and of itself; the late thirteenth-century collection known as the Alphabetum Narrationum includes, for example, the story of the hermit who makes baskets in the wilderness even though he cannot sell them in order, as the fifteenthcentury Middle English translation puts it, “to kepe his harte from ydull thoghtys & vanyties.”27 While eventually both Deguileville’s and Lydgate’s later net-maker do present an argument extolling the virtue of any kind of work over idleness (ll. 11424–50), that argument is not the net-maker’s first answer to the pilgrim’s query. Instead, he responds, in Lydgate’s translation as in Deguileville’s original, with a social rather than a spiritual defense of his work: “Every man hat nat a fforge, / Crownys of gold, in for to forge. . .. / Nor alle may nat be Iowelerys” (ll. 11353–57), he informs the pilgrim. Each has his own art, the net-maker argues, and “konnyng,” he adds, “wer off no prys, / Yiff ech man were alyche wys” (ll. 11361–62). At first, then, the net-maker appears to be validating his own craft,

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unremunerative and tediously repetitive though it might be. But in the French text he goes farther than this, daring to claim that “le mestier / Qi povres est a mielx mestier / Et plus souvent neccessaire est / Que cil qui riche et grans est” [the craft / That is poor is more useful / And is more often needed / Than that which is rich and great] (fol. 47r). In its elevation of simple crafts over luxury arts (like forging crowns of gold) and in its implied elevation of poor artisans over noble men (like those who wear such crowns), the net-maker’s remark seems to have come, for Lydgate—who, we must recall, was writing for an aristocratic patron—a little too close to turning the hierarchical image of medieval society on its head. For while he does literally translate Deguileville’s “un par lautre est maintenu / Et gouverne et soustenu” [“Every crafft (& thus I mene) / Mut [sic] governe other, & sustene” (ll. 11411–12)], Lydgate instead replaces the earlier lines comparing rich and poor crafts with the somewhat less inflammatory “crafts used in poverty / May not all refused be: / Crafts poor be necessary” (ll. 11407–9). But as if this alteration were not enough to ensure a socially conservative interpretation, Lydgate also has the net-maker give the pilgrim an extended lesson about the three orders that does not appear in his source.28 Over thirty lines long, this is a passage in which the English artisan greatly expands his French counterpart’s twoline claim that “[s]e tous d’un mestier estoient / povrement se cheviroient” [if everyone were of one craft, / they would manage very badly] (fol. 47r). Lydgate’s net-maker declares that “thys sentence” should be learned from him: Ther muste be a dyfference (Pleynly yiff thow lyst to knowe) Off Estatys hih & lowe, And off crafftys ek also. (ll. 11363–67)

Utter chaos, this English incarnation of the net-maker now goes on to note, would result if “all ffolk in a Regioun / Hadden On occupacioun / In the Rychest crafft of alle”—not only would the “ffoot [be] as good as ys the hed,” he warns, drawing upon the well-entrenched metaphor of the body politic, but a “knave also, by hys werkyng, / Sholde ben Egal wyth the king” (ll. 11369–70, 11374–76).29 The kind of upheaval he fears would be “no maner polycye, / But rather a confusioun” (ll. 11378–79). This is why, he insists, that everyone “in Townys and cytes” should “lyven lyk [according to] her degres” (ll. 11381–82). He continues for another twenty lines in this vein, rehearsing the well-worn idea that the strong and wise should govern and protect, the laborers should work, and the clergy should

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pray. Laborers in particular, he concludes, should “do trewly ther labour,” since “Carte & plowh, they ber up al / The clergye & the chevalrye” (ll. 11397, 11400–1). In what is still the most thorough survey of the “three estates” ideology in medieval literature, Ruth Mohl observed of this very passage that in it “Lydgate sets forth the whole philosophy of the literature of estates,” and vaguely connected these ideas to the “politics” of the earl of Salisbury.30 She was more right than she apparently knew, since the fact that the passage seems to be Lydgate’s addition (something Mohl does not observe) points to its having had a specifically political import for poet, patron, or both. In post-1381 England, advice on the importance of keeping well within the bounds of one’s assigned estate has a particular valence; indeed, the net-maker’s comments on the lack of “polycye” and social “confusioun” should the established hierarchy be allowed to crumble read something like a footnote to (or reminder of ) Walsingham’s description of the political confusions and reversals of the Rising: “Intrabant et exibant ut domini, qui quondam fuerant uilissime condicionis serui; et preferebant se militibus non tam militum, set rusticorum, subulci” [“The peasants, who had once occupied the most menial position of serfs, now went in and out like lords. Swineherds exalted themselves above the knights, while not behaving as knights, but as peasants”].31 Conservative views on the maintenance of the estates cannot be assigned only to those who saw artisans and Lollardy as possibly two sides of the same coin and so sought to suppress the latter by holding inquisitions into the beliefs of the former; in a sermon on the sin of sloth (the same sin that Lydgate’s Occupation decries), the Wycliffite preacher Nicholas Hereford remarked that “each man must know what his estate is, and keep to the work of that estate, otherwise he sins in idleness.”32 Lydgate’s Pilgrimage, however, postdates not just one but rather two moments of social unrest in which artisans are known to have participated—the Rising of 1381 and the quickly quelled Oldcastle rebellion of 1414, a rebellion associated, like its namesake, with Lollardy. Some artisans were executed after the 1414 event (the number, as with the total number of participants, remains uncertain), and the fact that artisans continued to be associated with it is evidenced by the number of those receiving the king’s pardon in the months following, including “bakers, brasiers, carpenters, cordeners, curriers, drapers, dyers, fullers, glovers, hosiers, ironmongers, labourers, mercers, parchmeners, tailors, saddlers, spurriers, smiths, webs, ploughmen and others.”33 In this context, Lydgate’s use of an artisan as a mouthpiece for conservative social theory can be read as a somewhat overdetermined intervention. Inserted into a convenient moment in the source text, the passage stands out as a textual marker of contemporary concerns in

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fifteenth-century England, and even for readers unaware of its departure from the French poem—if Mohl’s reading is any kind of evidence—the sheer conservatism of its stance appears as if in a kind of literary high relief. In less immediately textual and even more social terms, to make an artisan speak these words is effectively to, on the one hand, give artisans and other workers their traditional due—yet it is, on the other hand, also to relegate workers to their “proper” place within the social body. But in Deguileville’s poem, the net-maker’s tenets of social orthodoxy are far from the last and certainly the least problematic words to be heard from an artisan. In the next section, we will see that while Occupation’s task is to make, unmake, and remake nets for the sake of spiritual reward, another of Deguileville’s allegorical inventions unmakes and remakes to precisely the opposite end. Tailoring Faith The admonitory advice about maintaining each estate that Lydgate puts into the mouth of Deguileville’s net-maker fits oddly with the same figure’s confession, several lines later, that he would take up another occupation were it in his power to do so: And yiff I, lyk thyn oppynyoun, Koude other occupacioun, I wolde yt done, be wel certeyn, And nat vnmake thys natte ageyn. . . . (ll. 11419–22)

Lydgate’s retention of these lines from the French original jar somewhat with his otherwise conservative revisions—a discrepancy, however, that only highlights the slight but nevertheless telling conceptual difference of the “three orders” passage from that which surrounds it. As we have seen, that insertion, qua insertion, indicates that Lydgate’s motivation to revise his source at this point probably sprung from an impulse to relegate members of the lower estates to their “proper” place. But Deguileville’s interests seem ultimately to have inclined more toward further accounting for the socially and economically ambitious artisans at whom his netmaker’s words gesture. This, at least, would be one way of explaining the fact that, as part of his 1355 revisions, the Cistercian monk added three new episodes—a meeting with Heresy, an encounter with Hagiography, and a discussion with Astrology—that are even more attuned to artisanal and commercial matters than those I have already reviewed. In both Pèlerinage texts, the pilgrim-narrator narrowly evades the clutches of the Deadly Sins with the help of Grace (who provides him with

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a scrip, or textual declaration of faith—a Latin poem on the Creed in the second version, but an “ABC to the Virgin” in the first, a work known to English readers through Chaucer’s translation, retained in full in Lydgate’s Pilgrimage [ll. 19791–974]).34 But the pilgrim escapes only to find himself immediately confronted by the figure of Heresy, who hopes to seize his scrip and either “correct” it to her liking or else rip it to pieces. In both recensions and their translations, she is iconographically signified by the faggot of wood that she carries, and on which she predicts she will be burned (Vie1, ll. 11541–44; Vie2, fol. 78r). But in the second Pèlerinage, Heresy is equipped not only with her future pyre but also with a pair of “aciaus” [scissors] that in Lydgate’s Pilgrimage are said to be “scharpe I-grownde” (l. 18929). In the revised Pèlerinage she has become, explicitly, a “cousturiere” [couturier] and “taillaresse” [tailoress] (fol. 77v), who plans to cut up and re-sew the pilgrim’s scrip into a statement of heretical belief according to the teachings of her father—Satan. Although Lydgate did not translate the few lines of the French poem in which Heresy names her profession, it is tempting to consider the possibility that this image of a heretical tailor held significance of a remarkably coincidental sort for poet and patron alike. In March of 1410, John Badby, tailor of Evesham, was executed by burning at Smithfield for his persistent denial of the Real Presence in the sacrament of the Eucharist—the very sacrament, as we have seen, that Deguileville’s poem, and Lydgate’s after him, both vehemently support. The future Henry V had paused the execution, offering Badby a chance to recant, but he refused, thus becoming the first layman to be burned under the 1401 statute known as De haeretico comburendo.35 Likewise, Deguileville’s Heresy declares that she will not desist from her heretical work until the flames force her to do so. As she says, in Lydgate’s translation of her obstinacy, . . . .I schal, what so byffalle, Assaylë the amonge hem alle, And myn ooldë purpos holde, In ffyre, though that I brennë shulde, I wole my wyttës alle applye, Hardyd with obstynacye, Contynue til the ffyre be hoot; Therffore I berë this ffagot. (ll. 18982–88)

That this burning left a mark on the national and particularly upon the literary psyche of England is evidenced in part by Hoccleve’s heavily Lancastrian-oriented description of the event in the Regement of Princes (ll. 281–329).36 And further evidence of the event’s import—or at least of

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its believed utility as a piece of Lancastrian and anti-Lollard propaganda— may well be found in the illuminator of Cotton Tiberius A.VII’s careful attention to the figure of Heresy in Lydgate’s Pilgrimage. For she is depicted twice on the same page, first with her scissors in her hand and then at her worktable pulling on the pilgrim’s scrip; before her rest a series of scrips she has apparently already refashioned or is about to work on (figure 5.1).37 Cotton Tiberius A.VII has been dated to c. 1430–50; it thus is likely to have been produced after Thomas Montague’s death in the fall of 1428, and it is impossible to ascertain whether the visual attention paid to the figure of Heresy originated with him or, for that matter, with any other patron. But what is certainly clear is that, one way or another, the manuscript’s illuminator was attuned to the material metaphor that makes Heresy’s heterodox activity into an artisanal act. What is particularly interesting, in this regard, is that the same artist also made much of two other craft images that appear only in the second recension of Deguileville’s poem: the idolatrous carpenter, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and masterfully analyzed by Camille, and the shop of Hagiography, a figure whom the pilgrim encounters once he enters the “Ship of Religion” near the end of his journey (ll. 22247–518). Perhaps there is no better evidence that Deguileville, and Lydgate after him, were each comfortable using craft to represent both vice and virtue, both heresy and orthodoxy, than in their shared vision, on the one hand, of an artisan who worships a useless idol in the house of Idolatry and, on the other, of a merchant who makes and sells ointments, mirrors, and books of saints’ lives (representative, in Lydgate’s cultural moment, of the very accoutrements of faith that the Lollards decried). Hagiography, in a sense, proffers in these items a concrete counterpart to some of the more abstract tenets of faith with which the pilgrim—and allegorical characters like Nature—have had to struggle with throughout the poem. Furthermore, spread out before the pilgrim in MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII in no fewer than three separate miniatures, Hagiography’s sanctified merchandise sanctions, by association, the artisanal labor that went into its production.38 As we have seen, the potentially heretical “man of craft,” as Thomas Hoccleve referred to one type of Lollard in his poem to Oldcastle, was not always represented in the best light in fifteenth-century England. This, of course, is not something of which Deguileville can have foreseen in the late fourteenth century, but it is certainly something Lydgate was able to use, as I hope I have shown, to his patron’s probable ends. And yet—and this is where the making of the material into metaphor generates its own set of contradictions in the case of this complex poem—Lydgate often retains Deguileville’s more positive attention to worldly makers. I have claimed throughout this chapter that Lydgate’s Pilgrimage can be read as a piece of

Figure 5.1 The pilgrim encounters Heresy. Source: London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII, fol. 50r. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved.

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anti-Lollard propaganda, the traces of which can be found in the way the English poet chooses either to emphasize or to downplay the most artisanal aspects of the Pèlerinage. But it is in the pilgrim’s argument with the figure of Astrology, an episode that takes place even before he encounters Hagiography, that we can see just how flexible craft imagery could be in the later Middle Ages, and how impossible it must have seemed, for even the most determined of propagandists, to force it into a completely coherent signifying system. In Lydgate’s text as in Deguileville’s, the pilgrim condemns Astrology’s predictive use of the stars and insists that the heavenly bodies are “Nothyng but markys, for to shewe / Off the workman, and off the lord / That made al thyng with A word” (ll. 20430–32).39 That God the Creator is to be found reflected in every aspect of the natural world is a medieval tradition of very long standing, as is the conception of Nature as an artisan that springs from it. Not quite as traditional, however, is the evidence, drawn directly from the world of urban commerce, that the pilgrim uses to prove his point. “[I]n cytes and in townys,” he begins, in a passage interestingly detailed enough to be worth citing in full, Maystres off dyvers crafftys Hang out, on polys and on rafftys, Dyuers sygnys hih and lowe, Wher-by that men ther craft may knowe; As somme of hem hang out lyouns, Somme Eglys and gryffouns, Peynted on bordys and on stagys, Dyuers Armys and ymáges (In cytes mo than .ix. or ten,) Wherby men knowe thys craffty men; But wher-so-evere they hanged be, Hih aloffte, that men may se, He were A ffool, and nothyng sage, That woldë deme in hys corage, That thys markys, on pool or rafft, Kan no thyng medlen off the crafft, Nor helpe ther-to, (yt ys no ffayl,) Nor to the craffty men avayl. (ll. 20396–414)

In this striking moment, not figurative but rather literal craft signs have become the way that the pilgrim himself, after many an episode of being instructed through craft metaphor by others, is able to speak of the inestimable power of God, that artisan who needs no advertisement and yet whose might the stars nevertheless blaze forth. In the thirteenth century,

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the philosopher Roger Bacon had used the example of the street sign to differentiate between “the imposition of signs by human agency and natural signs imposed by God.”40 In Deguileville and Lydgate’s poems, however, the stars “imposed” by God on the heavens and the signs placed in city streets by a series of earthly makers are mentioned in virtually the same breath. As reflections of one another, the signs that mark the “craffty men” and the heavenly bodies point to another and even more striking concept: namely, that a craftsman, suspect though his politics may have been in 1426, remained in fifteenth-century England, as he had been in fourteenthcentury France, a viable figure for the master Artifex. . .and also, or so it would seem, vice versa. Notes This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Michael Camille, whose work on the Pèlerinage was the first inspiration for my own, and with whom I wish I could have discussed the poem further. 1. Beyond this bibliography, very little is known about Deguileville other than that he was born in 1295, entered the Cistercian monastery of Châlis in northern France around 1316, and spent the rest of his life there. The most extensive attempt at a bio-bibliography is Edmond Faral, “Guillaume de Digulleville, Moine de Chaalis,” Histoire Littéraire de la France 39 (1962): 1–132. The 1325 Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (usually referred to as Vie1, a practice I will follow here) and the other two pilgrimage poems were first edited by J.J. Stürzinger for the Roxburghe Club (London: Nichols & Sons) in 1893 (Vie1), 1895 (L’âme), and 1897 (Jhésucrist). For a modern English translation of Vie1, see The Pilgrimage of Human Life (Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine), trans. Eugene Clasby, Garland Library of Medieval Literature Series B, Vol. 76 (New York: Garland, 1992). A summary of the poem with reproductions of many of the illuminations from one of its heavily illustrated manuscripts is Paule Amblard, Le Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). There is no modern edition of the 1355 Vie2; my references to that text will be from the relevant folio of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 377, dated to the last quarter of the fourteenth century and believed to be the oldest manuscript of the second recension. A modified early print edition of Vie2 was published as Le pèlerinage de l’homme (Paris: Anthoine Vérard, 1511). 2. The key exceptions fall into two main categories. First are a group of (somewhat older) studies focusing predominantly on iconography, especially Michael Camille, “The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinages, 1330–1426,” Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1985, but also including: Rosamund Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 143–218; Kathryn Margaret Walls, “The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode: The Prose Translation from Guillaume de Deguileville in its English Context,” Ph.D.

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5.

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thesis, University of Toronto, 1975; Susan K. Hagen, Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990); and Avril Henry, “The Structure of Book 1 of Pe Pilgrimage of Qe Lyfe of Qe Manhode,” Neuphilologische Mittelungen 87.1 (1986): 128–41 and “Pe Pilgrimage of Qe Lyfe of Qe Manhode: The Large Design, with Special Reference to Books 2–4,” Neuphilologische Mittelungen 87.2 (1986): 229–36. More recent, historically informed, and theoretically inflected studies marking a sea-change in the fortunes of Deguileville studies are Michael Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. Jeremy Dimmick et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 151–71; Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Middle English Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 17–46; and Sarah Kay, “Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 193–205. Lisa H. Cooper, Crafting Narratives: Artisans, Authors, and the Literary Artifact in Late Medieval England, in progress. Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 91–95 and 232 n4; quotation from p. 91. The “juridical” aspects of the spiritual system are even more explicit in Deguileville’s second poem, the Pèlerinage de l’âme, which begins with an extended scene of trial and judgment of the soul after death in a court presided over by St. Michael. This work was anonymously translated into Middle English prose in 1413; for an edition of another English translation, that printed by William Caxton in 1483, see James Stanley Flynn, “Pilgrimage of the Soul: An Edition of the Caxton Imprint,” Ph.D. thesis, Auburn University, 1973. A modern edition of Book 1, the trial scene, is The Pilgrimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision, ed. Rosemarie Potz McGerr (New York: Garland, 1990). On the literature and practice of confession and penance in England after Lateran IV (1215) see among many others Mary Flowers Braswell, The Medieval Sinner: Confession and Characterization (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), and Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 376–406, esp. pp. 390–406. On the whole process as hard work for the penitent, see Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 104–33. On the rise of English seven-sacrament art during the same period in which the English Pilgrimages circulated, see Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350–1544 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1994). The growing critical bibliography on Lollardy is too

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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large to account for fully here; the standard studies are K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and The Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London: English Universities Press, 1952); Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984); and Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). A very useful overview is Steven Justice, “Lollardy,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 662–89; another, one that cautions against overemphasizing the significance of the Lollard movement, is Richard Rex, The Lollards (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2002). The critical edition is The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, 2 vols., ed. Avril Henry, EETS o.s. 288 (text) and 292 (notes) (London: Oxford University Press, 1985 and 1988). Lydgate’s version survives in London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius C.XIII (an almost complete but unillustrated text), London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII (a lavishly illustrated fragment of 4,000 lines that I discuss further below), and London, British Library MS Stowe 952 (a complete text also without illustration); the only modern edition is 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). All subsequent references to the poem will be to this edition. I have silently modernized the edition’s use of “v” for “u.” For Walsingham’s characterization of John Montague see The St. Albans Chronicle: The “Chronica maiora” of Thomas Walsingham, 1: 1376–1394, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. 820; see also K.B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), esp. pp. 67–69, 75–76, and 167–68; and Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1987), pp. 46–48 and 59–60. For the text of the Twelve Conclusions, see Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 24–29 and 150–55. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 293–97, esp. p. 296. Derek Pearsall has drawn an explicit connection between royally authorized Lollard suppression in England and the writings of Deguileville, referring to the English translations of the Pèlerinage and the Âme as a “veritable Lancastrian cult of Deguileville”; see his “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,” Speculum 69.2 (1994): 408 [386–410]. Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire,” pp. 161–68, quotation from p. 163. For images of the idolatrous carpenter from Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 829 (fol. 112r) and British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII (fol. 65v), see Camille, The Gothic Idol, p. 294, Fig. 157, and p. 296, Fig. 158, and also “The Iconoclast’s Desire,” Figs. 9 and 10. Camille, “The Iconoclast’s Desire,” p. 170.

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12. While Lollardy appears to have become a much less serious issue for the crown following the quelling of the Oldcastle rebellion in 1414 (on which see more below), possible Lollards, many of whom were artisans by profession, continued to be ferreted out and questioned about their beliefs throughout the fifteenth century, particular in the decade following the rebellion (and thus in the years just before Lydgate’s translation of the Pèlerinage). See John A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 13. The subsequent quarrel of Nature and Grace, together with a later scene between Charity and Penitence, were clearly recognized at an early date to be some of the most important moments in the poem, dramatized along with several others—and with no changes to Deguileville’s text—in a French morality play in the fourteenth century; see Walls, “The Pilgrimage,” p. 70; for a parallel text of play and poem (Vie1), see Mystères et Moralités du Manuscrit 617 de Chantilly, ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris: Librairie ancien Edouard Champion, 1920), pp. 93–130. 14. Interestingly, records from fifteenth-century Lollard trials show that some of the accused used a similar argument to counter orthodox doctrine on the Eucharist, “asking. . .how could the priest make God, or declaring by analogy that the carpenter makes the house and not the house the carpenter” (Thomson, The Later Lollards, p. 246). In both Deguileville’s Pèlerinage and Lydgate’s Pilgrimage, this first contest between Nature and Grace is followed by a second, even longer one, between Aristotle (who argues on Nature’s behalf regarding the unnatural character of transubstantiation) and Sapience (ll. 5509–6162) in which Nature is called Sapience’s “scoler” in “Crafft” (ll. 5646, 5651) and Aristotle her “aprentys” (l. 5684). 15. John Wyclif, De Eucharistia Tractatus Maior, ed. Iohann Loserth (London: Trübner, 1892); see Rex, The Lollards, pp. 42–45. On Wyclif’s views see McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 23–28, and on the anti-Lollard Oxford “Constitutions” of 1407, which included preaching heterodoxically on the Eucharist, see pp. 114–15; on the spread of Wyclif’s views beyond Oxford and into lay circles see Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350–1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 209–31. 16. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 30. See McFarlane, John Wycliffe, p. 180; Margaret Aston, “Lollardy and Literacy,” History 62 (1977): 355–56 [347–71]; Rex, The Lollards, pp. 21, 72–73, 100, 103–4. 17. Jack Upland; Friar Daw’s Reply; and, Upland’s rejoinder, ed. P.L. Heyworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 99, ll. 860–68. Heyworth’s dating of the Reply to 1419–20 is challenged by Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who dates the whole Upland Series to between 1382 and 1410 and the Reply to shortly after 1388 (pp. 135–36 and pp. 216–20); on the way the passage I have quoted takes a “standard, well-known anti-Wycliffite position” on the Eucharist see p. 161, n. 43.

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

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See also V.J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1971), pp. 241–52. Thomas Hoccleve, “Address to Sir John Oldcastle,” Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 13 [8–24], l. 144. On the medieval personification of Nature, see George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). Also implicit in the discussion may be a reference (in Nature’s protests) to the struggles of urban towns to free themselves from aristocratic domination (represented here by Grace), a struggle with which Deguileville may not have been sympathetic. I thank Christopher Baswell for pointing this out to me. See MED, s.v. “ordinaunce,” n. 3c, and Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 207–8. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London, 11 vols., ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: J. E. Francis, 1899–1912), Letter-Book K (1911), fol. 5b, p. 10. Nature’s insistence on her primacy in the host-making process is vaguely reminiscent of the mock-communion of broken millstones in which the rebels at St. Alban’s participated in 1381. As Steven Justice notes, this striking event symbolically underscored the agricultural labor subtending the sacrament (Writing and Rebellion, pp. 158, 168–69). Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 204–6; Pamela Nightingale, “Capitalists, Crafts and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth-Century London,” Past and Present 124 (1989): 9 [3–35]. See also MED, s.v. “fraunchis(e,” n. 3a–c; “fredam,” n. 3–4; and “lyberte,” n. 4. Calendar of Letter-Books, Letter-Book K, fol. 95b, pp. 131–32, and fol. 126, p. 163; emphasis mine. This phrase is repeated from Vie1, l. 3542. Lydgate gives his pilgrim-narrator a more economically than socially charged remark, noting at this point that Occupation’s craft “[y]s so pore, yt wynneth nouht” (l. 11344). On traditional eremitical occupation see George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 91–92. On sloth see Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Wenzel notes that Deguileville’s net-maker is “like a latter-day Abba Paulus” (p. 124). An Alphabet of Tales, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, EETS o.s. 126, 127 (1904–05; repr. Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1987), p. 388. We do not know from what French manuscript Lydgate worked, and it is of course possible that his source text could have contained this passage as a variant. Until a modern edition of Vie2 is produced from all the surviving manuscripts (and even afterward), hypotheses like mine must necessarily remain somewhat conjectural. The fact that the passage does not appear in Vérard’s 1511 printed version of the second recension (see Note 1, above),

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30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

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along with the general tenor of Lydgate’s translation, however, suggests that the passage is the English poet’s addition. The metaphor of the body politic has its most important medieval source in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus; by the fifteenth century, however, it was no longer the only option for representing the human community and was actually the more conservative option, with figures like the horizontal chess-board coming increasingly into use. See Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 26–33. Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), p. 115. On estates satire see also Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), and on the theory of societal orders from which the literary form springs, see Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The St. Alban’s Chronicle, pp. 424 and 425. “On the Seven Deadly Sins,” Select English Works of John Wyclif, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869–71), Vol. 3, p. 143; quoted in Diana Wood, “‘Lesyng of Tyme’: Perceptions of Idleness and Usury in Late Medieval England,” in The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History, ed. R.N. Swanson (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), p. 110 [107–16]; see also Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 91. James Hamilton Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth, Vol. 1 (1413–15) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1914), pp. 275–76; see also p. 270 on artisans actually executed after the rebellion. See also Rex, The Lollards, pp. 72–73 (and on the link drawn between heresy and political treason as of 1381 see pp. 31, 52–53, 87, 103, and 145; also McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 30–35, 87). For the suggestion that the Oldcastle rebellion may have been at least in part staged by the Lancastrian government, see Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 65–86. In the 1355 Pèlerinage, the giving of this scrip happens at an earlier moment, and the scrip itself takes the form of a Latin poem on the creed of over five hundred lines, also retained in Lydgate’s translation (inserted between ll. 7306–7). On Chaucer’s translation of the “ABC,” see Georgia Ronan Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” Medium Aevum 59.2 (1990): 191–213; Helen Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville: The ABC in Context,” Medium Aevum 62.1 (1993): 1–19; and William A. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere: An ABC as Artifact and Critical Issue,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 109–41. McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 81–92 and 199–219; McNiven notes that the official record of the event refers to Badby as scissor—i.e., a “cutter” or “tailor,” while Walsingham calls him a faber [artisan] (p. 199 and p. 239 n1).

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36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

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On the execution see Strohm, “Heretic Burning: The Lollard as Menace and Victim,” Chapter 2 of England’s Empty Throne, pp. 32–62, esp. pp. 56–57. See Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement,” p. 404. Hagen observes that “Heresy’s threat to cut up and reshape the scrip called Faith constitutes a self-definition in terms of action” (p. 120), but what matters here is not just that Heresy acts, but that she does so, quite specifically, as an artisan. For the three separate depictions of Hagiography’s shop in MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII. (fols. 91v, 93r, 95v), see Hagen, Allegorical Remembrance, Figs. 48–50. It is worth noting that in her explanation of what she is as a literary genre, Hagiography is quite frank about the material foundation, literally, of sacred narrative, as well as about the fact that such narrative forms part of a larger economy that includes the profane along with the sacred: “At ffeyres and at ffeestis, / I rest in skynnes off dede bestis” (ll. 22281–82), she remarks. On parchment in the Pilgrimage, but not this passage, see Kay, “Flayed Skin as objet a.” On the growing influence of astrology in the later Middle Ages see Hilary M. Carey, “Church Time and Astrological Time in the Waning Middle Ages,” in The Use and Abuse of Time, pp. 117–32, and Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Michael Camille, “Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 23 [1–36].

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CHAPTER 6 LYDGATE, LOVELICH, AND LONDON LETTERS Michelle R. Warren

aterial culture offers an especially effective means of dismantling the aesthetic hierarchies that have made “style” the basis of literary history. By focusing on the material, critics can set aside the rhetoric of apology when venturing beyond the recognized literary stylists. In the case of Lydgate, materialism challenges the very concept of mediocrity that often clouds understanding of his work and of the fifteenth century generally. An approach to poetry through the materials that condition the very existence of texts—payments or other kinds of support from patrons, manuscripts of previously copied texts, paper, writing and language conventions, ways of earning a livelihood between poems—can reorient both the kinds of questions critics ask and the kinds of objects they study. Materialism can thus inspire new views of the relations among production, reception, and the culture at large. In this approach, the distinction between professional writers and amateurs lies not in their use of classical allusion or their style but in their social and economic relations. By way of illustration, I propose to sound the depths of amateur mediocrity by considering Lydgate alongside a writer who has been mostly ignored even by those dedicated to the analysis of dullness—Henry Lovelich (fl. 1400–35). With a materialist approach, Lovelich’s English verse translations of the Old French Estoire del saint graal and Estoire de Merlin (c. 1230–40) find a recognizable place in English literary history at the same time that they suggest some new interpretations of Lydgate’s textual endeavors.1 As contemporaries in the early decades of the fifteenth century, Lydgate and Lovelich both reflect on the materiality of poetry

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itself—as a form and as an intervention in public discourse. The idea of the “public” actually underwrites many of the most productive critical perspectives on the period. Whether one speaks of “public poetry,” “public culture,” or the “public sphere,” critics foreground the instrumental roles of texts in shaping audiences’ sense of communal belonging.2 Lydgate and Lovelich share a specifically urban public; even though Lydgate also had other publics, London occupies a significant place in both the generation and reception of many of his texts.3 Indeed, many of the chapters in this book suggest that “material Lydgate” is essentially “London Lydgate.” Within London, Lydgate and Lovelich do not so much address the common populace as they do the elites, be they merchants or kings. Both writers give voice to civic ambition—to those who aspire to the highest level of ordered participation in governance and commerce. The majority of these aspirants were merchants—members of craft guilds who dominated trade, controlled city politics, and supported the monarchy. To quite different degrees, the culture of London craft guilds shaped the poetry of both Lydgate and Lovelich. In Lydgate’s case, guild patronage motivated a small but significant portion of a much larger poetic corpus, and represented but one aspect of a broad spectrum of social contexts and performance venues. For Lovelich, the Skinners’ Guild provided the entirety of his sustenance, intended audience, and initial poetic resonance. In both cases, though, we find merchant elites endeavoring to write themselves into the center of civic culture through literary performance. Overlapping patronage networks and common poetic practices, moreover, reveal various kinds of interdependence between the laureate Lydgate and the craftsman Lovelich. This interdependence arises from their joint participation in a civic culture that invested in the literary as a public form of social action. Within this culture, material qualities prove fundamental to the definition of valuable literature. Ultimately I hope to show how the anomaly named Lovelich can be woven into the larger fabric of London letters in the early fifteenth century—a fabric whose brighter threads include Lydgate. The Craft of Patronage: Lydgate Poetry and craft interact in various ways—from the material (craftsmen listening to poetry) to the thematic (poems that discuss trade and craft) to the metaphorical (craft terminology in the service of poetic discourse). In the early fifteenth century, as Lois Ebin has argued, poetic creation became more firmly aligned than ever before with the idea of material fabrication, as poets embraced the idea of themselves as “makers” and presented their poetry as a kind of craft product. Lydgate, for example, treats eloquence

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and rhetoric as “crafts” that enable the communication of truth and the preservation of memory.4 This approach shapes not only Lydgate’s “laureate” creation but also the poetry that he produced for craft guilds. In these texts, eloquence and rhetoric support the public image and political aspirations of merchants and artisans; the poetic “maker” and the maker of commercial products legitimate each other as civic actors. All of Lydgate’s craft poems date from 1426–32.5 They have received a fair amount of attention recently, all pointing in different ways to Lydgate’s nuanced engagements as an urban, public poet.6 Most of these poems appear in John Shirley’s famous anthology, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20.7 Shirley portrays Lydgate writing at the request of the Armourers, the Mercers, the Goldsmiths, and one “worthy citizen” (probably a guild member as well, whose commission could also have been related to company interests).8 While most scholars agree that Shirley’s manuscript was probably meant for relatively limited circulation among acquaintances, everything about his rubrics for Lydgate’s craft poems declares the book’s public status. The first that appears in the manuscript, Bycorne and Chichevache (pp. 10–15), begins with a direct address to a group of readers: “Loo sirs Qe deuise of a peynted or desteyned clothe for an halle a parlour or a chaumbre / deuysed by Iohan Lidegate at Qe request of a werQy citeseyn of London.”9 By the time Shirley identifies the individual source of the request, he has enumerated several public or semi-public venues in which the “clothe” might be viewed. The “balades” themselves also address a general public of “prudent folkes” (l. 1), “felawes” (l. 43), “noble wyves” (l. 71), and “cely housbandes” (l. 124). Like Bycorne and Chichevache, the ballads that make up The Life of Saint George (pp. 74–81) address a collective public of “yee folk” (l. 1). The rubric also places the verses in public view in a “halle”: “Nexte nowe filowing here bygyneQe Qe devyse of a steyned halle of Qe lyf of Saint George ymagyned by Daun Johan Qe Munk of Bury Lydegate / and made with Qe balades at Qe request / of Qarmorieres of London for Qonour of Qeyre broQerhoode and Qeyre feest of Saint George.”10 In this case, the inclusion of images as well as text—and the suggestion that Lydgate “imagined” the visuals as well as “devising” the ballads—broaden the public to include even those who cannot read. The Armourers’ commission, then, presents a poetic experience and model of Christian chivalry for all “Englisshe men” (l. 7), whether they be knights, craftsmen, or other urban citizens. Alongside the materiality of the poetic object commissioned by the guild, Shirley draws attention to his own poetic object by referring to the book’s structure (“nexte. . . filowing”) and physical presence (“nowe. . .here”). Both of these rubrics thus associate the poetry that decorates public spaces with the poetry copied in the manuscript, casting the book itself as a public space.

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Like the rubric for the Armourers, the rubrics for The Mumming for the Mercers of London (pp. 171–75) and The Mumming by the Goldsmiths of London (pp. 175–78) accentuate the material experience of reading the book as well as the public performance of the “ballads” by repeating the transitional comment “And nowe filoweQe. . .”: And nowe filoweQe a letter made in wyse of balade by Daun Iohan, brought by a poursuyaunt in wyse of mummers desguysed to fore Qe Mayre of London, Eestfeld, vpon Qe twelffeQe night of Cristmasse, ordeyned ryallych by Qe worthy merciers, citeseyns of London.11 And nowe filoweQe a letter made in wyse of balade by Ledegate Daun Iohan, of a mommynge, whiche Qe goldesmythes of Qe Cite of London mommed in right fresshe and costele welych [strange, foreign] desguysing to Qeyre Mayre Eestfeld, vpon Candelamsse day at nygh, after souper; brought and presented vn to Qe Mayre by an heraude, cleped Fortune.12

Both ballads were presented by professional speakers (“a poursuyaunt,” “an heraude,”), although the goldsmiths seem to have “mummed” the performance themselves. The context for both performances, however, is the same: the public celebration of a religious holiday for the mayor, William Estfield. Shirley actually emphasizes the urban setting of all of the craft poems. Indeed, “London” and “Iohan” are the only terms that appear in all four rubrics, underscoring the urban setting and Lydgate’s authorship as the common thread. Shirley foregrounds his personal relationship with Lydgate in the Mercers’ rubric, where he uses the shorthand “Don John.” Less apparent, though, is his personal relationship with Estfield, a prominent mercer. The mummings only appear in this manuscript, and Estfield’s public role as mayor at the time may account at least partly for their commissioning and recording. Estfield held the office in 1429–30 and 1437–38, and the mummings were almost certainly played in January and February of 1430.13 A few years later, Shirley arbitrated a dispute between two members of Estfield’s guild, and in 1441 accepted Estfield’s arbitration in an inheritance dispute. In 1444, possibly to avoid paying a legal judgment, Shirley granted all his lands and revenues (in London and elsewhere) to several prominent citizens, including Estfield.14 If Shirley and Estfield were acquainted before 1430, Shirley may have played a role in facilitating the commissioning of performances in his honor; if the mumming commissions brought the two together, they subsequently maintained a lasting and trusting relationship. Shirley’s social circle shifted in this period from the household of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (with which he remained connected) to the urban milieu of the London merchants, and by 1438 at

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the latest he was firmly established in rooms at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in close proximity to London affairs.15 The anthology that includes the craft poems emerges from Shirley’s new orientation toward the urban elite, which coincides with the surge in Lydgate’s civic commissions. Did the expansion of Shirley’s coterie audience from the Beauchamp household to the civic elite directly strengthen Lydgate’s own urban ties? The recording of two mummings for the same mayor in the same year, combined with the absence of other similar records, suggests some exceptional circumstance. Whatever the case, Shirley seems to have played some role in connecting Lydgate, Estfield, and the craft guilds. The mummings themselves support the merchant elite’s vision of an ordered city, a veritable earthly paradise.16 They do so in ways that underscore the role of poetry, and the poet, in shaping public discourse.17 Thus in the Mercers’ mumming, “books” (l. 6) maintain the memory of “poetes laureate” (l. 35), while merchant values triumph (“grande peyne. . .grande gayne,” ll. 90, 91) and a Syrian visitor seeks out the “noble Mayr” (l. 102). Numerous classical references, and several lines of French, signify the text’s status as high literature. The Goldsmiths’ mumming likewise begins with “bookes” (l. 3), and names the “noble Mayre” (l. 7) several times in its exposition of the ark presented to ensure his good governance. In both cases, Lydgate offers urban audiences didactic lessons in aristocratic literature as he adapts royal themes to mercantile contexts and popular forms to literary expression.18 The ostentatiously poetic nature of the mummings, especially the Mercers’, surfaces in Shirley’s extensive glosses, which teach readers of his book the literary background that the listening audience might have grasped as only a general impression of “difficult poetry.”19 The mumming is also a particularly telling example of the fluidity of reading practices between merchants and nobles, and the degree to which they formed a common “public” for certain literary forms.20 This kind of blurring enables simultaneous address to rulers and ruled, in a way that is pleasing and meaningful to both. The corporate aspects of the mummings, combined with the political setting of their performance, point toward the broader role of corporate sponsorship in textual production and to some specific parallels between Lydgate’s occasional craft poetry and Lovelich’s translation project within the Skinners’ Guild. Estfield, for example, served as mayor the year after Henry Barton, a skinner and the patron of Lovelich’s project. Mayors were elected from the aldermen, who were consistently among the wealthiest citizens and tended to serve extended terms.21 Indeed, Estfield was alderman from 1423 to 1446, while Barton served from 1406 to 1435. During the twelve years they served together, Barton and Estfield certainly had occasion to be close colleagues at Guildhall—and in their professions, given

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their respective trades. Indeed, in April 1431, Barton and Estfield arbitrated, along with two other aldermen, a dispute concerning the building of a parsonage.22 Barton was easily the most prominent skinner of his era; his property and obit mass continue to appear in the guild’s accounts through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century.23 As Lovelich’s patron, he extended his influence to textual creation. Barton seems in fact to have had a keen eye to how public performance and poetry could intervene in civic and corporate life. Given the ties between Estfield and Barton, it might be possible to locate a fifth poem in the craft corpus of MS R.3.20, Lydgate’s Pageant for Corpus Christi. Shirley does not specifically identify the poem as a “craft” commission, as he does the mummings, but critics have consistently connected it with the Skinners’ Guild because its members were responsible for the civic celebration of Corpus Christi in London as of at least 1393 (the year after it is mentioned in Richard II’s reconfirmation of the guild’s charter).24 The Pageant appears near the end of Shirley’s book (pp. 348–56): “And nowe here foloweQe an ordenaunce of a precessyoun of Qe feste of corpus Christi made in London by daun John Lydgate.”25 Like several of the other rubrics, this one focuses on the “here and now,” on London, and on Lydgate. Instead of a ballad or a devise, however, it is an “ordenaunce” (indeed, it has eight-line stanzas instead of seven); instead of a mumming or a “steyned halle,” it is a “precessyoun.” Despite this seeming generic difference, the documented relations among Shirley, Lydgate, Estfield, and Barton align it with the other craft commissions. The Corpus Christi verses, moreover, may have found their way into Shirley’s book for the same reasons as the other craft poems. Lydgate may even have written them at around the same time—perhaps even during Barton’s mayoralty for the procession of the summer of 1429. Most speculation about the poem has centered on the nature, not the fact, of the Skinners’ involvement: whether they commissioned it directly, whether it was composed prior to the presentation of the “figures” (l. 6) of scriptural scenes or recorded afterwards, whether it was meant for private or public use.26 Shirley’s rubric, I would argue, suggests something closer to a commission than a post-facto memorial, something close to a “deuise”—but perhaps a text meant to be used more than once, unlike the mummings. The political careers of Estfield and Barton point toward another of Lydgate’s poems, The Mumming at Bishopswood. Although not part of MS R.3.20, the performance’s civic context places it directly in the mayors’ path: “sente by a poursyvant to Qe Shirreves of London, acompanyed with Qeire breQerne vpon Mayes daye at Busshopes wod, at an honurable dyner, eche of hem bringginge his dysshe.”27 These verses for the sheriffs’ potluck picnic once again place Lydgate in close communication with craft

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circles: sheriffs were necessarily guild members, and election to the office the first step on the path to higher civic office. Indeed, Barton served as sheriff in 1405–06, and Estfield in 1422–23. Moreover, only two men filled the office each year, such that the request for the “balade” could have been a very specific commission on the part of one or two individuals, in conjunction with their “brethren,” that is, fellow guildsmen and civic leaders (who are addressed in the text as “Mayre, provost, shirreff. . .And aldremen”) (ll. 60, 61). Anne Lancashire suggests that the mumming at Bishopswood could have taken place in May 1430, soon after the mummings commissioned for Estfield: Henry VI was crowned king six days after Estfield began his term of office; Lydgate wrote poems for the coronation festivities, and would have been the logical choice for enhanced civic entertainment in the following months.28 Perhaps the sheriffs, one of whom was a goldsmith, having seen Estfield honored earlier in the year, sought to enhance their own office (which was royal as well as civic) with poetic performance. The mumming, in other words, witnesses once again both the pleasure and stature that poetry brought to civic and corporate events.29 The material conditions of Lydgate’s craft poems (their performance, copying, commissioning) open the possibility of reimagining a broader literary and social context for Lovelich’s translations for the Skinners. His poem and the manuscript in which it appears emerge from the same social, political, and commercial network as Lydgate’s own poem for the Skinners. Moreover, this network includes the same breadth of political association as Lydgate’s patrons, for the Skinners’ Fraternity of Corpus Christi included among its members Henry V, Henry VI, and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (all patrons of Lydgate).30 Ultimately, the extended patronage affinity around Lydgate suggests something about what it might have meant for Barton and/or Lovelich to organize a corporate poetry project for the Skinners. Lydgate’s crossings of social strata reflect the crossings to which the civic elite aspired—grounded in mercantile networks, supported by religious affiliations, connected to the highest levels of nobility and royalty. Lydgate engaged all of these areas at different moments and to different degrees. Imagining Lydgate and Lovelich as contemporaries developing complementary projects, under recognizably similar patronage circumstances, inserts Lovelich’s work into the broader context of fifteenthcentury reflection on the material advantages of English-language poetry. The Craft of Patronage: Lovelich If Lydgate probably wrote at the request of the Skinners, Lovelich definitely did. And if Lydgate both created and satisfied the tastes of the merchant elite,

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as Derek Pearsall has suggested,31 then the Barton/Lovelich project witnesses an effort to extend that satisfaction from periodic public performance to more durable forms in books. Lovelich’s status as a poet commissioned to write for a craft guild is revealed in a marginal annotation in the surviving manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 80.32 Opposite line 10251 (fol. 127) a hand different from that of the main text has written: “henr’ louelich skinner Qt translated Qs boke oute of ffrensshe in to englysshe at Qe instaunce of harry barton.” I.A. Doyle identified the annotator as John Cok, who rented rooms to Shirley at St. Bartholomew’s and also copied manuscripts for him.33 The annotation in MS 80 renders Cok’s association with Shirley graphically in the forms given to “French” and “English”: the doubling of consonants (not present in the poem) characterizes, according to Margaret Connolly, Shirley’s own idiosyncratic orthography.34 The ascender flourishes along the top of some pages of MS 80 (some clearly added after the initial copying) may also reflect what Linne Mooney has called “Shirley’s decorative style.”35 In relation to Lovelich, Cok’s instaunce implies not only that Barton requested the translation but that he paid for textual services. Carole Meale, who first noted the importance of Cok’s relationship with Shirley in understanding Lovelich’s enterprise, has emphasized the commercial overtones of instaunce and concluded that Lovelich’s translations were probably meant for public, not private, consumption.36 Barton appears to have paid for the copying, and possibly also for the translation itself. MS 80 thus bears the traces of several overlapping communities, including most directly Lovelich, Barton, Cok, the scribe of the main text, members of the Skinners’ Guild—and also by extension Shirley, Lydgate, Estfield, other merchant guilds, and the citizens of London more broadly. When Cok identifies Lovelich first and foremost as a skinner, he reveals the central role of craft in the translation project. Historical records confirm Lovelich’s identity as “civis et pelliparius” [citizen and skinner], and substantiate Cok’s association of Lovelich with Barton: in 1409, Lovelich served as Barton’s representative in a property transfer involving other skinners, and in 1411 he transferred his own property to Barton.37 Lovelich and Barton also both appear as dues-paying members of the Skinners’ Guild’s Fraternity of the Assumption of Our Lady.38 Together, these records suggest that Lovelich had a relatively moderate economic and social status within the guild, probably as a minor merchant: he represented Barton in a property transaction but did not himself participate; he owned property but did not keep it or record a will. He also never held elected office. Lovelich nonetheless had sufficient knowledge of relatively antiquated French to undertake the lengthy translation project. Barton, meanwhile, traded at the upper echelons of civic politics and royal service. He began in the service of Queen Anne, and after she died

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Richard II confirmed his annuity in 1394; Henry IV later reconfirmed Richard’s grant and kept Barton on as a “yeoman of the chamber.”39 Recognizing Barton’s loyal service to his father, John of Gaunt, as well as to himself, Henry IV created the position of Royal Skinner in 1405 and appointed Barton to the post for life. Barton was thus responsible for the furs of Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, from acquiring skins to arranging for transport of royal garments.40 If it is at all relevant to call Lydgate a “Lancastrian” poet, then Barton was surely a Lancastrian skinner. Barton’s appointment as King’s Skinner coincided with the beginning of his lengthy career in civic politics: he was elected sheriff the same year, alderman the year after, mayor in 1416 and 1428 (despite a new law barring second terms), and served in parliament in 1419.41 Barton’s political prominence, in conjunction with his royal appointment, resulted in a period of exceptionally high visibility for his guild. Of the twelve great companies, the Skinners were one of the oldest establishments, although they were not consistently among the most influential in civic affairs.42 Relative rank among the guilds was jealously and sometimes violently contested. The Skinners’ median position (on the verge of higher rank but never far from a lower one) made them among the more jealous. Barton’s political career thus represents a period of increased status and visibility for the Skinners, one which seems to have inspired Barton to seek symbolic and material confirmation of the guild’s distinctive urban and national identity. Barton’s individual career encapsulates the broader trend of convergence between the upper echelons of merchants and the lower and middle ranks of nobility. The guilds that traded in luxury goods (such as the Skinners, Goldsmiths, and Mercers) felt this convergence most keenly. Shared reading practices represented one manifestation of new affinities among formerly separate groups. The book of Lovelich’s poems thus testifies in a very specific way to how the creation, not just the consumption, of poetry could be used to generate new forms of shared public culture. For the Skinners, Lovelich’s romances function alongside the public pageantry of dramatic performance (such as the Corpus Christi procession or mummings for the mayor) and the semi-public display of the guild’s luxuriously illustrated fraternity records.43 Translated at Barton’s “instaunce,” the romances seem to have been meant for collective consumption—for reading aloud at guild gatherings and for viewing by somewhat smaller groups. The poems tell the story of Christianity’s arrival in Britain with Joseph of Arimathea, and then of Arthur’s accession to the throne followed by his lengthy wars against rebellious barons. Together, the poems thematize various forms of chivalry, from the pious to the aggressively bloody, while placing London very much at the center of the Arthurian world.44 The poems and their book support Barton’s and the Skinners’ image of a

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corporate identity tied to the oldest national mythologies, themselves more present than ever on the contemporary political scene. Cok’s description of Lovelich translating at Barton’s “instaunce” parallels Shirley’s descriptions of Lydgate’s various patronage relations. Shirley uses the same term to describe Lydgate’s relation to Henry VI (“Invocation to St. Edmund,” translated at Henry’s “Qinstance”45), Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick (“Title and Pedigree of Henry VI,” “made. . .by Qinstaunce of my Lord of Warrewyk”46), and Isabelle Countess of Warwick (“Fifteen Joys of Our Lady,” “translated out of Frenshe into Englisshe by daun John the Monke of Bury at Qinstaunce of Qe worshipfull Pryncesse Isabelle nowe Countasse of Warr’ lady Despenser”47). These attributions, alongside Cok’s, ascribe similar roles to Barton, the king, and members of the Beauchamp household. Cok, in other words, viewed Barton’s intervention no differently than Shirley viewed the earl of Warwick’s. Barton’s “imitation” of the high aristocracy mirrors that of other noncourtly patrons in the period, who adopted courtly practices “in desiring books that would affirm their social status.”48 Cok’s annotation reveals a world in which not only reading practices but the mechanisms of textual acquisition by different sectors of society came to resemble each other more and more—all the way to the corporate commissioning of a craftsman-poet to translate French romances in order to make a luxurystyle manuscript on paper for other craftsmen. These various examples of “instaunce” refer exclusively to commissioned translations. Translation, perhaps more than other kinds of textual creation, calls attention to the materiality of poetry, to the process of turning one kind of material into another. Lovelich himself does not discuss the origins of his work (although the first pages of the Grail are missing), but Lydgate offers something like a poetic definition of instaunce in his Troy Book (another translation) when he says that he was “comaunded the drery pitus fate / Of hem of Troye in englysche to translate,” and to “write it for his sake”; Lydgate returns to Henry V’s commission in the conclusion.49 Lydgate’s description of the motives of the commandment, moreover, evoke a monarchical desire for the creation of the very kind of public culture sustained by the civic commissions of the Mercers, Goldsmiths, and Skinners: By-cause he wold that to hy{e and lowe The noble story openly wer knowe In oure tonge, aboute in euery age, And y-writen as wel in oure langage As in latyn and in frensche it is; That of the story thee trouth[e] we nat mys

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No more than doth eche other nacioun: This was the fyn of his entencioun. (Prologue, ll. 111–18)

For Lydgate here, translation and textual patronage aim to create open access for all citizens, to offer in English what readers already enjoy in other languages, and ultimately to fortify the nation.50 Lovelich espouses similar purposes when he avers that “owre Modris tonge” is “swettere to sowne to More and lyte; / and more Cler to {oure vndirstondyng / Thanne Owther Frensch OQer latyn, to my sopposing” (Grail, LVI:527–30). The broader significance of “instaunce” and translation into “our sweet mother’s tongue” lies in the craft context of the work’s patronage and intended audience. Cok’s intervention in MS 80 makes visible the textual and social network that shapes Lovelich and Lydgate’s common engagements with urban culture, London letters, and the material promises of poetry. Cok, a former goldsmith apprentice turned brother and scribe, was in charge of rents at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital by 1428; as of 1438, Shirley rented rooms there. Connolly has demonstrated their close association, especially through the evidence of Shirley’s seal surviving in a rental payment to the hospital—and the appearance of the seal’s motif, fleur-de-lis, in a book that Shirley owned, written by Cok.51 In addition to this book, Cok annotated or signed several other manuscripts, including MS 80.52 Both Cok and Shirley, then, practice annotation as a form of reading. Indeed, Cok’s note on Lovelich appears in the middle of the poem, and his other marginal notes testify to extensive rather than perfunctory reading. Through this same kind of material reading, Shirley came to function as a “maker” of Chaucer and Lydgate as poets.53 Similarly, Cok “makes” Lovelich a commissioned poet and Barton a patron. If Shirley modeled his notion of authorship on the scribe, as Seth Lerer has argued,54 then Cok is that scribe. Cok’s relation with Shirley suggests that he may also have been a reader of Lydgate. Shirley named Cok one of the executors of his estate, which suggests that they formed a trusting relationship. Although Shirley’s will does not mention any books,55 Cok of all people would have had access to Shirley’s rented quarters and thus conceivably to his anthologies. For Cok as reader, Lydgate and Lovelich would both appear as London writers working on commission. Cok, in other words, represents at least one person who could have read carefully both Lydgate and Lovelich, an audience for whom the distance between them could have been only a short walk, or a few shelves. Cok’s own craft connections (as a former goldsmith apprentice) and formal office as rent collector at St. Bartholomew’s suggest the further (speculative) possibility that Lovelich and/or Barton specifically

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sought out Cok and/or Shirley for the production of the fancy manuscript at least one of them had in mind. St. Bartholomew’s was indeed close to the neighborhood of the book trade, but Barton could have gone anywhere to have the manuscript produced. For whatever reason, Cok ended up with close knowledge of the production of Lovelich’s poems and with the inclination to read them carefully. As recorders of patronage relations, Cok and Shirley bear witness to one of the most intimately material aspects of textual creation. As scribes and annotators, they themselves create the texts they record. To further the understanding of relations between patronage and poetry, we might ask how Cok’s and Shirley’s own practices as writers relate to those of Lovelich and Lydgate. Shirley’s extensive use of the “doublet couplet,” where two successive rhyming lines express more or less the same idea, certainly parallels Lydgate’s and Lovelich’s style of amplification.56 And to the extent that Shirley’s copies of certain texts by others are the only copies, some of “Lydgate’s” style might even be “Shirley’s”: his treatment of known sources shows great freedom, and the same may be true in the absence of known sources.57 Conversely, it has been suggested that Lydgate (rather than Shirley) may have written the verses known as Shirley’s “bookplate stanza.”58 Shirley and Cok also share some textual traits, such as a penchant for acrostics and letter riddles.59 While they are not unique in this, it is worth noting that a cryptogram identifies Lovelich as the author of the Merlin, just after an important address to the audience: but trewly this Feste hit is ryht drye, For me lyst wel to drynken, jn feye, a drawht oQer two of the beste wyn that the goode lord hath here with-jn. but fulfer hit were forto fette; there-fore j hope Som oQer to gete My wyttes to scharpen & to Redresse To Maken an Ende of this processe. and for as moche as wyn js here non oplase, [now present] drynkeQ {e of Qe beste, Er forthere {e pase, and wysch me some of {owre drynk Qe beste; this j preye to god: {eve hire Ryht good Reste that at {owre table my kuppe gan fylle of Qe beste, & hit browhte me vntille! {ow preyeth, lordynges, to hauen Mynde of this Gallina Ciligo Amo Similis. (ll. 21575–96)

In addressing the public of the “feste” and asking to share in their wine so that he may go on with the “talking,” the narrator inscribes the poem

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pointedly within its performance context—perhaps a guild-sponsored celebration or even a religious feast. How would a public of wine-drinking skinners, or other celebrants, understand aurally the playful Latin naming of the poet—Hen (Gallina) rye (Ciligo) Love (Amo) Liche (Similis)? It is difficult to say, but the line—designed more for reading than for casual listening (also a trait of some of Lydgate’s craft poems)—does seem dissonant with the performance context. Is it possible that Cok or another scribe inserted this cryptic naming? Although the line does complete a couplet, it is written in darker ink and below the line that defines the bottom of the column (fol. 172v)—the only line in the manuscript to break this boundary. The phrase itself could of course have been memorized by Lovelich, and so its Latin logic need not necessarily point toward Cok or another scribe. In all events, the cryptogram draws attention to the materiality of language, English syllables turned into complete Latin words; only in translation does the phrase become a name. This substitutive procedure mirrors the translation project as a whole, encapsulating the spirit of equivalency that governs both the poems and the manuscript: Barton enlists Lovelich to substitute an English romance for a French one, while seeking to maintain all of the prestigious connotations of the aristocratic source. In the process, patronage, authorship, and bookkeeping reveal their malleable contours. The Craft of Books The fact that almost all of Lydgate’s craft commissions survive in a single book, and the mummings in sequence, invites a closer look at the book itself as an intervention in the “materiality” and the “publicness” of poetry. The fact that Shirley’s and Barton’s books are both made of paper suggests that their literary projects depended partly on newly expanded access to relatively affordable materials. Shirley’s book is a large format miscellany (11.375” x 8.5”) that includes a great variety of texts, in both English and French, from Lydgate, Chaucer, and a few others. While it might at first appear as a relatively random collection of unrelated poems, the consistency of the paper stock suggests that Shirley envisioned the collection as a collection, and that the surviving manuscript was copied within a relatively brief period in the early 1430s; originally, the book probably included about 300 folios.60 At the time, paper was typically used for more modest projects and more practical applications. Yet there is nothing really pragmatic about Shirley’s enterprise, from a material perspective. The sheer size of the collection, on paper, signifies a relatively new kind of literary idea—a utilitarian approach to poetic ambition. The “value” of the collection lies not in fancy materials but in the social

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connections the book documents and creates among writers, readers, and patrons. Shirley’s book suggests that paper enabled those of more limited means to imagine books on a more grandiose and ambitious scale than previously possible.61 Completed around the same time as MS R.3.20, the manuscript of Lovelich’s poems materializes this tendency even more dramatically. MS 80 is also a large paper manuscript (15.6” x 11”), completed at a time when such books were usually produced from vellum.62 Although vellum might seem an obvious choice for a skinner, most furs and all paper were in fact imported products. Paper then may not indicate pragmatism so much as connection to international markets. Like MS R.3.20, MS 80 is made of consistent paper stock, with almost 60 sheets of a unicorn-type watermark at the beginning, followed by approximately 140 of an R-type watermark.63 One sheet of third type of watermark (balancing scales, fol. 149) documents further the professional care that Meale identified in the handwriting and interlineal corrections of the text.64 This page was clearly copied separately from the rest of the book, in a lighter ink, and after the other pages had been completed: perhaps the scribe skipped a page, or made errors that a marginal note could not correct. The most striking feature of MS 80, however, is its layout, which provides for extensive illustration at regular intervals (about thirty spaces for the Graal, over sixty for the Merlin). The idea of designing an illustrated manuscript for an Englishlanguage work, even for a translation, on paper is rather remarkable, given the relatively low number of English secular illustrated books in the early decades of the fifteenth century.65 MS 80 thus represents a luxury-sized and styled book, well suited for recitation and group viewing, made on a relatively modest budget. Its execution on paper, rather than vellum, materializes the book’s unique urban setting. It shares as much with Lydgate’s Troy Book (a long narrative of royal commission, frequently illustrated, on vellum) as it does with Shirley’s relatively unpolished collection of Lydgate’s craft poems. Although MS 80 remains incomplete, it witnesses Barton’s ambitious effort to bring an illustrated Arthurian romance to the eyes and ears of his fellow guildsmen—an effort to define a new kind of literary public by furnishing a new kind of reading material. In books of paper, Shirley and Lovelich both thematize the materiality of textual production and reception (as already seen in Shirley’s rubrics for the craft poems). Shirley declares his personal relationship to the book in a “bookplate stanza” toward the end of the manuscript (p. 361): Yee Qat desire in herte and haue plesaunce Olde storyes in bokis for to rede Gode matiers putte hem in remembraunce

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And of oQer ne take yee none hede Beseching yowe of youre godely hede Whane yee Qis boke haue over redde and seyne To Johan Shirley restore yee it ageyne.66

Shirley emphasizes the materiality of the reading experience by identifying books as the source of reading pleasure and as the physical supports of memory. Lerer has elaborated on the commemorative role of these verses, drawing attention to how the whole sequence of texts that follows in Shirley’s manuscript dramatizes writing and remembrance.67 Indeed, the immediate next verses, extracted from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (I.631–37), extend Shirley’s concern with the materiality of textual creation: Pandarus to Trojlus: A wheston is no kervyng instrument, But yet it maketh sharppe kervyng tolis; And there thow woost that I have aught myswent, Eschuw thow that, for swich thing to the scole is; Thus often wise men ben war by foolys. If thow do so, thi wit is wel bewared; By his contrarie is every thing declared. (p. 361)

The whetstone refers not only to the content of the book—which Lerer calls “the whetstone to the honing of readers’ minds”68—but to the physical pages that literally transmit poetry to readers. Following Shirley’s plea to “restore” his book to him, the whetstone functions as a metaphor for the book object itself—an inert instrument that nonetheless serves as the necessary support for the “sharp carving tools” of poetry. It is poetry that can then provoke readers to draw the good lessons and leave the bad (as recommended in the “bookplate” stanza that precedes). A few pages later in Shirley’s book (p. 367), the poem “Adam Scriveyn” extends the material meditation on poetry, with its vivid description of textual “scraping” and the physical craft of carving texts onto books. Ultimately, Shirley’s bookplate stanza establishes his identity as owner of a specific object and articulates his desire to maintain control of his material property. As a mark of ownership, the bookplate stanza functions like the flourishes that decorate Shirley’s name at the front of other manuscripts (such as the one copied for him by Cok).69 Verse and decorative pen strokes both draw attention to the book as an object of value, and to the name of the person who values it most. Parallel to Shirley’s bookplate stanza and his introductory rubrics, MS 80 includes indications of material concern, from Cok’s annotation on

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Barton’s patronage to Lovelich’s references to both writing and the book. The passage that provokes Cok’s annotation occurs in the midst of the manuscript, as Lovelich interrupts the story to ask for the audience’s support: of the merveilles that aftyr befalle, j hope to declaren to {ow alle, {if god wile granten me grace & myht, helthe of Body, and myn eyen syht, owt of Frensch jnto Englysch now wyl j fonde hit to drawen, that {e moun vndirstonde. Therfore for herry Louelyche that {e preye, that til this be endid, he may not deye, but lyven jn helthe and prosperite; Now, good lord, grante hit moot so be. (ll. 10246–54)

Lovelich begins with the physical conditions for producing texts from the perspective of the writer—health of body and eyesight. He then evokes the translation process, and his commitment to transmitting “understanding.” Finally, he names himself and asks for prayers, again for his material wellbeing. As a parallel to Shirley’s bookplate, this passage identifies a textual proprietor, and also a close-knit public of reception. In the ambit of Lydgate’s civic commissions, Lovelich’s “grace and might” speaks to the link between the creation of poetry and the creation of civic identity. For in the Goldsmiths’ mumming, Lydgate writes that the sacred ark given to the mayor will grant him the “konnyng, grace and might” (l. 81) to govern well. Where the mayor and the poet draw their performative strength from the same sources, civic identity coalesces around public investments in texts. Lovelich and Shirley understand texts first and foremost as books— material objects to see and touch. Lovelich’s poems abound in references to the source book (e.g., “As the Storie Of this book vs sayes,” Grail, XII:336), characters entangled in reading and writing books (especially Blaise in the Merlin, e.g. ll. 1599–1616), and a narrator responsible for “making” the book (Grail, XXXIII:542, LVI:537). These textual thematizations of books draw constant attention to the visually striking book that contains the poems, a book meant to consolidate the guild’s public status and that could be used repeatedly for company celebrations. The book object, like the other material aspects of textual creation, suggests something of the environment shared by poets, craftsmen, scribes, readers, religious, and merchants—some of whom fulfilled more than one of these roles. Together, the various elements that make up the book reveal the

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material craft of poetry, the poetic resonances of materials, and the engagements of both with the social networks of guild craftsmen in London. The Craft of Poetry The physical and textual forms of Barton’s commission distance Lovelich’s romances from the pragmatism of business writing. Instead, they lay claim to the more limited functional connotations of the rhyming couplet. That is, their form signifies poetry. Lovelich’s project thus relates both to Lydgate’s narrative works involving translation, like Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Fall of Princes, and to his more occasional compositions for merchants; it draws on aristocratic forms of patronage as well as on urban forms of public performance. As Lydgate and Lovelich turn disparate sources into similar-looking forms of English verse, they practice very similar kinds of “making” in which verse itself, in its formal materiality, promises social advantages to its consumers. Verse translation from prose sources represents an ostentatiously poetic choice that boldly signifies the presence of the literary. Lydgate draws on French prose for the Siege of Thebes (Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, c. 1210) and the Fall of Princes (Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, c. 1409),70 while Lovelich works from the Estoire del saint graal and Estoire de Merlin (c. 1230–40). In all of these cases, but perhaps surprisingly in Lovelich’s, the translators orient the generic identity of their sources more strongly toward “poetry” while reinforcing their commitment to truth (a commitment their sources signify through the prose form). Lydgate and Lovelich thus both strategically configure poetry itself as form of truthtelling. Verse, it would seem, enhances the text’s truth value in part because it functions as efficacious public discourse. Verse forms, then, materialize several connections between Lydgate and Lovelich, connections that in turn suggest that some of the salient features of Lydgate’s style may derive as much from the “publicness” of his verse as from the idiosyncrasies of his particular “poetic voice.” Insofar as Lovelich’s style resembles Lydgate’s, Lovelich writes as one who absorbed the lessons of public style available on the London streets (in performances like those written by Lydgate). In terms of meter, for example, both writers’ texts included lines of various lengths. This “irregularity” has long provided the most damning evidence of Lovelich’s lack of poetic skill.71 Lydgate has been similarly criticized, and notes himself at the end of Troy Book that his verse includes lines of varying lengths: “Falsly metrid, boQe short & long” (V:3484); “For in metring Qou{ Qer be ignoraunce” (V:3491). Lydgate also laments his metrical deficiency in the prologue to

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the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man: “ffor in metre I ha ne with me no muse.”72 The quantitative variability of the verse contributes to the effect of “connectedness” and performative fluidity that Philippa Hardman has observed in Lydgate’s syntactic structures. As certain lines fall short of metrical expectation and others exceed, the strict limits of meter give way to a more flexible rhythm—one that approaches not only oral speech, as Hardman suggests of Lydgate’s syntax,73 but also prose. As John Ganim puts it in his discussion of the Siege of Thebes, “the work, as a reading experience, more resembles nonfiction prose than poetic fiction.”74 And yet Lydgate and Lovelich do not write in prose. For all of their metrical variability, they maintain the idea of poetic meter as a material claim on public literature. Almost all of Lydgate’s connective syntactic forms have parallels in Lovelich’s style: extended sentence structures with diffuse subordination, frequent use of conjunctions at the beginning of sentences, narratorial interventions to mark transitions between sections or episodes, and sentences ending in the first line of a couplet (such that two sentences are joined in continuity by the rhyming structure).75 Hardman cites the opening of the Siege of Thebes as exemplary of Lydgate’s dilated syntax. Similarly, in an early transitional passage in his Grail, Lovelich delays the narrative action for fourteen lines while he reflects on memory, books, and reading in a series of propositions that almost all begin with a conjunction: Now let vs speken of Serphë, Of his worthiness, & of his meyne That {it with fowre batailles don fyhte, And kepen here owne as men of myhte; For as it is put into memorye For on of the most wondir storye That euere was rad in ony book, Owther in storye, as men cowden look, For so lytel a peple & so vigerous A{ens so manye & so therto dispetous; For ther myhte neuere man hem with-stonde Whiles they hadden ony wepone on honde, So that Seraphes men on horse & foote Heelden Thomoes men wondir hote. (XIV:1–14)

These stylistic similarities suggest not that Lydgate and Lovelich both lack discipline. Hardman, for example, cites examples of crisp syntax in Lydgate’s poems, and Lovelich can also write with concision when he chooses. Rather, their formal choices respond to the varied demands of

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public writing: verse declares its literary value, while rhythmic variety and syntactic dilation declare its public engagements. Beyond meter and syntax, Lydgate’s and Lovelich’s narrative structures reveal similar uses of amplification. This very prolixity, as Ganim has argued for Lydgate, witnesses an address to audiences beyond the court and monastery—in other words, an address to the urban public.76 Lydgate and Lovelich share a preference for the “doublet couplet,” a form of cadenced repetition that some find tedious but which, according to Lydgate’s view of amplification, correlates directly to the amount of truth a poet has to communicate. At the beginning of the Fall of Princes, as Ebin has shown, Lydgate suggests that short texts signify, formally, a lack of truth: they are “constreynyd vndir woordes fewe / For lak off trouthe;” to tell sufficient truth requires “long processe.”77 Processe is in fact one of the terms that Lovelich employs most frequently to describe his narration. The word has numerous connotations, but Lovelich’s craft identity invites emphasis on the relation between processe and manufacture—the steps necessary to create a viable product. Processe thus conjoins narration and storytelling with craftsmanship. Lydgate invites similar emphasis when he opens the Fall of Princes with the translation of an explicit craft metaphor: Artificeres hauyng exercise May change and turne bi good discrecioun Shappis, formys, and newly hem deuyse, Make and vnmake in many sondry wyse, As potteres, which to that craft entende, Breke and renewe ther vesselis to a-mende. (ll. 9–14)

The creation of new forms out of old serves as a metaphor for translation, but also for the materiality of language in general and thus of textual creation more broadly. “New” forms emerge from “old” words, made into new shapes. The materiality of processe and the measurement of truth in terms of word count lends narrative a concrete character that Lydgate and Lovelich both purvey in their literalizations of narrative “space.” Lydgate offers a striking example in the Siege of Thebes with Pilgrim Lydgate’s opening proclamation that his tale will last the “space” of seven miles (l. 324), and his later reference to a hill that will temporarily interrupt his telling (l. 1044).78 Although literal within the fiction of the narrative frame, these claims nonetheless mirror Lovelich’s seemingly metaphorical claims to “walk” from one narrative section to another, occasionally pausing to admire a particular scene. Roger Dalrymple has developed examples from

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the Merlin,79 and others can be found in the Grail (e.g., XV:1–2), along with the lovely metaphor of “gliding” forth to the next topic (Merlin, l. 11468). Treating narration as a physical space enhances the impression of a material relation between narrator and listening public, who share a physical relation to the performed text. In Lovelich’s case, ambulatory metaphors further link the narrative to the experience of public procession. Dalrymple has shown how Lovelich is seemingly unique in using the term “pageant” to describe his own narrative, and also how he casts certain scenes in terms that might recall the experiences of public pageantry, such as Lydgate’s mummings for Estfield.80 A handful of manuscript rubrications in the midst of the Merlin reinforce this parallel between narration and visual display, as various forms of “a pageant” appear opposite the spaces for illustration (fols. 153v, 154, 159). The rubricator, in other words, envisions the book itself as a performance space, its images the equivalent of props in a public procession, the poem the equivalent of accompanying “ballads.” As Lydgate and Lovelich both turn their sources into English verse, they articulate a particularly urban vision of English identity, one based in translation and oriented toward past and present histories shared with French. Lovelich’s translation of the Grail history represents a direct counterpart to Lydgate’s Troy Book: ancient Trojan settlement and ancient Christian conversion (the story of Joseph of Arimathea told in the Grail) together underwrite English claims to cultural supremacy in the early fifteenth century. Lovelich and Barton’s project to provide an illustrated history of the island’s Christian foundation gives this “national” project a particularly urban inflection. Some of Lydgate’s craft commissions offer glimpses of similar conjunctions. When, for example, the Armourers’ ballads present Christian chivalry to an urban audience, they offer on a smaller scale very much what Lovelich does in the Grail. And David’s lineal relation to Christ, presented by the Goldsmiths to Mayor Estfield, also shapes the genealogical background of Lovelich’s Grail. Lovelich’s texts thus perform a layering of religious, royal, and civic interests similar to that identified by Maura Nolan in the mummings. These relationships suggest that Lydgate’s method of making civic and corporate interests public was not unique to him or his associates, but part of a broader poetic transformation of public culture in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Both Lydgate and Lovelich address their poetry to communities of readers and listeners, emphasizing its public function. Lydgate’s practice of public poetry addresses first and foremost his powerful patrons—from the king to the aristocracy to mayors. Lovelich, meanwhile, defines a public function for poetry within the culture of his guild, where corporate, civic,

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and national interests could converge and unify a socially and economically diverse craft community. Lydgate’s own interactions with the Skinners reinforce what we already know about his varied engagements with urban society. These interactions suggest that Lovelich’s own engagements may have been broader than often supposed. In both cases, the defining roles of scribes and bookmakers demonstrate how materialism can reconfigure the intertextual structure of literary history. Ultimately, the similarities between Lydgate and Lovelich suggest methods for further distinguishing between material and poetic phenomena that might be considered properly “Lydgatean,” and those that belong to more generalized trends. They also suggest that Lovelich participated in something far more significant than the making of mediocre poetry. Lovelich’s long narrative poem for a craft audience brings together what are often considered two very different spheres of Lydgate’s production, the “aureate” texts of royal commission and occasional verses for less rarified purposes. This conjunction suggests that Lydgate may not so much have created as expressed a popular idea of public literature. Or perhaps Lovelich bears witness to the monumental effectiveness of the vision of public culture that Lydgate propagated in his verses written for urban performance. Whatever the case, Lydgate and Lovelich both “draw out” their poetry from material encounters with other books. As they narrate these encounters to new audiences, they engage literature with public identity, and demonstrate its capacity to form and perform social relations. Notes 1. Henry Lovelich, The History of the Holy Grail, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 20, 24, 28, 30, 95 (London: N. Trübner, 1874–1905); Merlin, ed. Ernst A. Kock, EETS e.s. 93, 112; o.s. 185. (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1904–32). 2. David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54 (1987): 761–99; Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 284–309; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); James Simpson, “Bulldozing the Middle Ages: The Case of ‘John Lydgate,’” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 213–42; Sponsler in this volume. 3. David C. Benson, “Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 147–68. 4. Lois A. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 38–42.

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5. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria: University of Victoria, English Literary Studies, 1997), pp. 28–29. 6. Simpson, “Bulldozing”; Benson, “Civic Lydgate”; Nolan, John Lydgate; Sponsler Floyd, Cooper, and Denny-Brown in this volume. 7. Full analysis in Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 69–101, with MS contents listed on pp. 70–74. 8. Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 123. 9. John Lydgate, 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), II:433–38. 10. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:145–54. 11. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:695–98. 12. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:698–701. 13. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 121; Lancashire, “The Mayors and Sheriffs of London 1190–1558,” Appendix I in Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 340–41 [pp. 308–55]. 14. I.A. Doyle, “More Light on John Shirley,” Medium Aevum 30 (1961): 96–97 [93–101]; Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 54–56, 58–59. 15. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 55. 16. Claire Sponsler, “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; Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” pp. 162–63. 17. Nolan, John Lydgate; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 51–56. 18. Nolan, John Lydgate, especially pp. 23, 71–119. 19. Nolan, John Lydgate, p. 99. 20. Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 100–3 21. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 147–58; Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 81. 22. Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at Guildhall, 1413–1437, ed. A.H. Thomas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1943), pp. 253–55 (Roll A 59, Membr. 4). 23. London, Corporation of London, Guildhall Library, MS 31302/189, 193, 194. 24. John James Lambert, Records of the Skinners of London, Edward I to James I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), p. 51; copy in Guildhall Library, MS 31693.

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25. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:35–43. 26. Gail McMurray Gibson, “Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle,” Speculum 56 (1981): 60–61, 81–84 [56–90]; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 238; Carole Meale, “The Libelle of Englysche Polycye and Mercantile Literary Culture in Late-Medieval London,” London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages., ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King (London: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1995), pp. 194–95 [181–227]; Meale, “Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 213 [201–38]; Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, pp. 124, 126. 27. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:668. 28. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, p. 122. The sheriffs of May 1430 were William Russe, goldsmith, and Ralph Holland, tailor and draper (Lancashire, “The Mayors and Sheriffs,” p. 340). On the office of sheriff, Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 159–71. 29. Beyond the “Shirley-Lydgate” corpus, King Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London, 21 February 1432 (Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:630–48), commissioned by Mayor John Wells, also engages urban corporate culture (Nolan, John Lydgate, pp. 25, 233–41). 30. Guildhall Library, MS 31693, fol. 12. I am grateful to the Beadle and Clerk of the Skinners’ Company for permission to study these and other records formerly held at the Skinners’ Hall. 31. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 73. 32. I am grateful to the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, for assistance with the manuscript, especially Ms. Gill Cannell. 33. Doyle, “More Light,” p. 99 n44. 34. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 170. 35. Linne Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 182–98, describing Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Eng. 530. 36. Carol Meale, “ ‘gode men / Wiues maydnes and all men’: Romance and Its Audiences,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 217–21 [209–25]. 37. Guildhall Library, MS 31302/135, 198; National Archives, Husting Roll 139 (8, 10). 38. Guildhall Library, MS 31692, fols. 5v, 6, 6v. 39. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, preserved in the Public Record Office (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. 1903), Richard II (5:488), Henry IV (1:116, 323). 40. Elspeth M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: London Record Society, 2003), pp. 55, 81, 206–7; Calendar of the Close Rolls, Preserved in the Public Record Office (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1929), Henry IV (2:408).

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41. Chronicles of London, ed. Charles L. Kingsford (London: Oxford University Press, 1905), pp. 96, 131; concise and complete biography in The History of Parliament on CD-ROM (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 42. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 68, 87; Veale, English Fur Trade, pp. 36–56; William Herbert, The History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies of London (New York: Kelley, 1968), 2:307–21. 43. Guildhall Library, MSS 31692, 31693: James Wadmore, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Skinners of London, Being the Guild or Fraternity of Corpus Christi (London: Blades, East, and Blades, 1902), pp. 26–33; Meale, “Patrons,” pp. 212–13; Lindenbaum, “London Texts,” p. 304; Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490 (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1996), no. 130, Figs. 473, 474. 44. Roger Dalrymple, “‘Evele knowen {e Merlyne, jn certeyn’: Henry Lovelich’s Merlin,” in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 163–66 [155–67]. 45. In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 59, cited in Connolly, John Shirley, p. 160. 46. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:613. 47. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:260. 48. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 60. On further similarities in reading materials among aristocracy, gentry, and merchants: A.I. Doyle, “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 163–81; A.S.G. Edwards, “John Shirley and the Emulation of Courtly Culture,” in The Court of Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 309–17; Rosemary Horrox, “The Urban Gentry in the Fifteenth Century,” Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. John Thompson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 22–44; Meale, “‘gode men,’” “Libelle,” “Patrons”; Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Literacy of the Laity,” in Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts, ed. Malcolm B. Parkes (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), pp. 275–98. 49. John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906–35), Prologue, ll. 104–5, 110; Book V, ll. 3461–69, 3604–8. 50. Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 82 [69–107]; Christopher Baswell, “Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin,” in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp. 224–25 [215–37].

LYDGATE, LOVELICH, AND LONDON LETTERS

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 106–7, 111. Doyle, “More Light,” pp. 98–99; Connolly, John Shirley, p. 165. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 117–46. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 120–29, 132. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 64. Margaret Connolly, “‘Your Humble Suget and Seruytoure’: John Shirley, Transcriber and Translator,” The Medieval Translator 5 (1996): 423–26 [419–31]. Connolly, “ ‘Your Humble Suget,’ ” p. 428. Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 460; Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, “Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 284 [279–315]. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 165. R.J. Lyall, “Materials: The Paper Revolution,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 19–20 [11–29]. Edwards, “John Shirley.” Lyall, “Materials,” p. 12. Doyle discusses the watermarks of MS 80 briefly in “More Light” (99 n44). The R-type, though, seems closer to Briquet, no. 8935 (Belgium, 1420) than to Heawood, no.64, as Doyle suggested. Charles Moise Briquet, Les filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600 (1907; repr. Amsterdam: The Paper Publications Society, 1968); E. Heawood, “Sources of Early English Paper Supply,” The Library, 4th ser, v.10 (1929): 283–307. Meale, “ ‘gode men,’” p. 219. The scales closely resemble Briquet, Les filigranes, nos. 2399, 2400, 2412, and 2413. Examples in A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 265 [258–78]; Lesley Lawton, “The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts, with Special Reference to Lydgate’s Troy Book,” in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 41–69. Cited in Connolly, John Shirley, p. 192. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 132–37. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 132. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 193; plate 3(vi). Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 149–52; Molly Lynde-Recchia, Prose, Verse, and Truth-Telling in the Thirteenth Century (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 2000); Laurent de

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71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

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Premierfait, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (Book 1, translated from Boccacio), ed. Patricia May Gathercole (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Robert W. Ackerman, “Herry Lovelich’s Merlin,” PMLA 67 (1952): 477 [473–84]. 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. 170. Philippa Hardman, “Lydgate’s Uneasy Syntax,” John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 30 [12–35]. John Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 117. Hardman, “Lydgate,” pp. 23–25. Example of this last: Lovelich, Grail, XIV: 27–28. Ganim, Style, pp. 103–22. Ebin, Illuminator, pp. 36–37; John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 4 vols., ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924–27), Book I, ll. 92–93, 97. John Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, 2 vols., ed. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, EETS e.s. 108, 125 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1911–30), ll. 324, 1044. Dalrymple, “ ‘Evele knowen,’” pp. 158–59; Lovelich, Merlin, ll. 13627–38, 17429–30, 19193–94. Dalrymple, “‘Evele knowen,’” pp. 158, 164–65; Lovelich, Merlin, ll. 19391.

CHAPTER 7 ST. GEORGE AND THE “STEYNED HALLE”: LYDGATE’S VERSE FOR THE LONDON ARMOURERS Jennifer Floyd

he scribe John Shirley introduces The Legend of St. George with a fascinating headnote, one that offers evidence of John Lydgate’s involvement in a multimedia mode of poetic production and details the commission and early reception of his verse. The note, found in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, reads:

T

Next nowe filowing here bygynneQe Qe devyse of a steyned halle of Qe lyf of Saint George ymagyned by Daun Johan Qe Munk of Bury Lydegate / and made with Qe balades at Qe request / of Qarmorieres of London for Qonour of Qeyre broQerhoode and Qeyre feest of Saint George.1

Any clear insight this seemingly straightforward note could provide has been muddied by persistent scholarly misreadings. Readers from the sixteenthcentury antiquarian John Stow to contemporary critic Derek Pearsall have misunderstood the nature of the “steyned halle.” Most recently, in an accidental and yet richly telling error, literary scholar James Simpson substitutes the London Goldsmiths for “Qarmorieres of London” as patrons of the poem.2 Correcting these kinds of errors is more than an exercise in antiquarian minutiae. Tracing the ways St. George responds to its context of commission and display and investigating Shirley’s goals in preserving such information helps us flesh out the vibrant role of verse in the daily life of fifteenth-century London. During this period, poetry frequently had an

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extracodical life, appearing in wall paintings, windows, and textiles where the juxtaposition of words and images could differ significantly from the strategies of the illuminated page. The scale and format of such simultaneously textual and visual narrative forms proffers a more public face than the codex: these works are designed for communal reception and offer, therefore, a unique opportunity to study the communal functions of verse. For the London Armourers, the “balades” and “steyned halle” of St. George helped assert their rising status among London guilds; for us, this multimedia project illuminates how patrons integrated their literary commissions with architectural and art patronage, while also shedding light on Lydgate’s production in a distinctly non-Chaucerian genre. I would like to begin by considering the patrons of the poem: not the Goldsmiths’ Guild, as Simpson writes, but rather the Armourers’ Guild, a fraternity dedicated to St. George. Fifteenth-century guild records illuminate the Armourers’ motivations for patronage of both the visual scheme of the “steyned halle” and Lydgate’s “balades,” which offer an English verse rendering of the popular Legenda Aurea version of the life of St. George.3 To fully understand the nature of the Armourers’ commission, however, we must clarify not only their motivations, but also the medium and matter of the “steyned halle” they commissioned. Untangling the long history of misreadings of the medium of the “halle” will make it clear that Shirley’s headnote describes the commission not of wall paintings but of wall hangings; we must, therefore, examine extant and attested examples of inscribed hangings in order to determine whether Lydgate’s verses could have been included on the “halle” itself. I will argue that where Lydgate departs from his source text and his own practice in translated works, he makes changes that suggest the verses were inscribed on the “halle.” In addition to condensing the narrative to a length that would fit comfortably on a textile “halle,” Lydgate focuses intensely on the visual surface of his source narrative. As the Legenda Aurea is the source for both Lydgate’s English translation of the Legend of St. George and the widespread, internationally consistent visual iconography of the life of the saint, comparing extant visual cycles of St. George to Lydgate’s verses can help us reconstruct the probable iconography of the “halle” and trace how Lydgate’s textual narrative could have been paired with the standard visual narrative on a portable, textile artifact keyed to the Armourers’ institutional needs at a key point in the guild’s development within the City of London. The Armourers as Patrons St. George is not extant in any architectural setting but is preserved in three manuscripts: Cambridge, Trinity College MSS R.3.20 and R.3.21, and

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Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686. I will focus on the version found in Shirley’s R.3.20, a manuscript filled with the scribe’s personal, chatty notes. While we should not read his comments as transparent records of fact, they can give us a clear sense of how one of Lydgate’s contemporaries understood—or wanted to understand—the poet’s position within their shared community, a complex urban landscape where royal, aristocratic, civic, mercantile, and clerical groups were constantly coming into contact. Shirley details a wide variety of early presentation formats, urging his readers to visualize Lydgate’s presence in London as one animated by spectacular performances and displays throughout the streets and spaces of the city. Through his selection decisions and the content of his notes, Shirley consistently portrays the Monk of Bury as a key player in the London scene. Shirley reports that in addition to composing verse for the royal family, Lydgate wrote for the leading city officials and the guilds that, time and again, produced these officials. He names the Mercers’ Guild, the Goldsmiths’ Guild, the Lord Mayor (at the time, a mercer) and the sheriffs (a pair that typically included at least one goldsmith or mercer) as Lydgate patrons. Simpson’s substitution of the Goldsmiths for the Armourers as patrons of St. George, therefore, serves as a kind of testament to Shirley’s rhetorical success: the Lydgate of R.3.20 is the poet of the London elite—and the Armourers were simply not in this class of London society. The registers of sheriffs, aldermen, and mayors are dominated by grocers, mercers, and drapers; goldsmiths appear consistently throughout the fifteenth century, their guild producing three mayors in the first half alone. In contrast, not a single armourer became alderman or mayor until John Warner was mayor in 1506, three years after his translation to the Grocers’ Guild. Nevertheless, I see no reason to doubt Shirley’s attribution of patronage on these grounds: why invent a patron who cuts against the grain of his own characterization of Lydgate as poet to the powerful? If anything, the London Armourers’ relatively humble status lends the claim greater authority—if authority is needed beyond their clear and undeniable connection to the subject matter of the poem: St. George is, after all, the armourers’ patron saint. The Armourers’ Guild’s motivation for artistic patronage—their commission of a “steyned halle” of St. George—is easy to reconstruct and demonstrates the emulative, aspirational character of their patronage activities in the period. Guild records across London attest to a general interest in material representations of the patron saint, an interest the wealthiest companies were able to indulge at great lengths—literally. In the early sixteenth century, the London Goldsmiths commissioned a custom tapestry of the life of St. Dunstan measuring 195 Flemish ells, or about four hundred feet, in length.4 By 1512, the Merchant Tailors’ Hall contained a gilt

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image of John the Baptist, an embroidered cloth of St. John, and “{ Costrynges of red Saye with borders steyned of the lyf of Saint John,” as well as a suite of nine tapestries of his life; they had even more images in their parlor and elsewhere.5 For the Armourers, such displays had added utility, as one of the guild’s early inventories suggests: it lists “a George in compleate armor,”6 a wooden statue currently displayed at the Armourers’ Hall, commissioned by a guild member in 1528 and clad in a miniature version of plate mail made by the armourer-commissioner himself (figure 7.1).7 Displaying a “George in compleate armor” advertised the best examples of their craft while honoring the patron saint. Although this armored George was created about a century after the “steyned halle,” similar statues were produced in fifteenth-century England. The painted alabaster sculpture of St. George and the Dragon at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, for instance, dates to 1400–20 and depicts both a mounted, armored George trampling and spearing the dragon and the kneeling figure of the princess he is rescuing.8 Like the London Armourers’ later “George in compleate armor,” this one sports the latest fashions in helmet and armor styles. In addition to making images of George relatively easy to date, this feature of the iconography allows images of St. George to work like an advertising campaign for armourers. This virtue was not limited to three-dimensional depictions: the alabaster George wears the same scalloped mail skirt and carefully rendered round knee-plates found in an early fifteenth-century wall painting of the saint at Banningham, Norfolk, demonstrating the consistency of the iconography of George—and his attention to current armor fashions—across media.9 By the end of the fourteenth century, the wars in France had benefited not only George—who earned new renown as the patron saint of England— but also his armourers. The London Armourers took full advantage of increased demand to make a hefty profit on their wares, and the king and City of London responded with ordinances attempting to check war profiteering. In 1372, Edward III issued a “[w]rit to the Mayor and Sheriffs to make proclamation forbidding armourers, vintners, and victuallers enhancing the price of their goods by reason of the army mustering at Sandwich.”10 In 1377, the masters of the Armourer’s Guild were asked to enforce such controls themselves in a “[p]recept sent to Simon Wynchecombe, John Scorfeyn, John Game, and other Masters of the mistery of Armourers, bidding them cause the men of their mistery to sell harness and armour at a reasonable price to all liege men.”11 Three years later, the mayor issued an ordinance asking the London Armourers “to elect surveyors to search for defects in the mistery and see that Armourers sell their harness at reasonable prices to those about to set out for Portugal and Britanny and elsewhere.”12

Figure 7.1 St. George in “Compleate Armor.” Source: By permission of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers in the City of London.

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The proclamations increasingly recognize the Armourers’ Guild as a regulatory body with the ability and right to inspect their trade, a bureaucratic authority prized by London guilds. The Armourers had issued regulations for the craft in 1322,13 and both Edward II and Edward III granted them the right to search and assay all armor sold in London.14 Nevertheless, the guild occasionally encountered some difficulty enforcing these regulatory rights, and injunctions to do so would have been far from unwelcome.15 Coming out of this period of increased demand, financial resources, and regulatory authority, the London Armourers continued to make moves to solidify their corporate identity and provide themselves with a secure infrastructure. In 1428, after nearly a century of renting the property, trustees of the guild acquired the freehold for 81 Coleman Street, earlier called “the Dragon and two Shoppes.” The guild’s earliest recorded benefactions date to the following year and include decorative objects, eleven glass windows, and monetary donations amounting to over thirteen pounds.16 These are precisely the sort of benefactions we find in other guilds’ records during the construction of new halls or major renovations of existing ones. It seems likely that the Armourers were building a new one. In 1422–23, they were unable to hold their quarterly meetings at any of their properties; they rented the Brewers’ Hall four times.17 In that one year, the Brewers’ Guild earned 3l. 4s. 2d. by renting their hall for up to 2s. per day; the Carpenters’ Guild records rates of up to 3s.18 It was becoming apparent to London guilds that building a central hall could save them money—and provide a source of additional revenue. Construction on the Armourers’ new hall was probably complete by 1430, at the height of Lydgate’s production for London city patrons and at the tail end of his most intense production of occasional works. While the Armourers occupied other spaces in London, including a chantry chapel of St. George in the northern part of St. Paul’s, their new hall was surely the primary site for the “steyned halle”: all later guild records report that the “feest of Saint George” was celebrated in the main Hall at 81 Coleman. As the first feast in a new hall was an occasion for major celebration—the mayor himself attended the Grocers’ “first feast in [their] fair hall” in 143119—we can probably date the “feest of Saint George” in Shirley’s heading to April 23, 1430. The commission of the “steyned halle” and “balades” would have been slightly earlier, probably coinciding with the construction-related gifts of 1429–30. The poem’s manuscript history supports such a date. Of the three manuscripts, R.3.21 is the latest, dating to the reign of Edward IV (1461–83). Shirley’s R.3.20 dates to the early 1430s, likely between 1430 and 1432.20 The only manuscript that might call my dating of St. George into question is Bodley 686: while Manly and Rickert date the

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manuscript 1430–40,21 David Lorenzo Boyd argues, based on his own paleographic examination, that it might be as early as 1420.22 Boyd’s focus on the manuscript’s Chaucerian content leads him, however, to overlook the dates of Bodley 686’s Lydgate poems. In at least one case, a heading within the manuscript itself contradicts his dating: according to the Bodley heading, Lydgate’s Legend of Seynt Margarete was “compendiously compiled in balade by Lydgate Dan John Monke of Bury Anno viiio henr’ vjti,” or 1429–30.23 Bodley 686 also includes the Danse Macabre, a translation Lydgate made around 1426 of French verses painted on the walls of Holy Innocents in Paris in 1424.24 The Bodley 686 heading calls the verses “A tretis of the daunce of Poulys,” so the version must postdate Town Clerk John Carpenter’s commission of wall paintings incorporating the verses for the north cloister at St. Paul’s, usually dated to 1430.25 There is no reason, therefore, to believe that Bodley 686 predates R.3.20, or that it would invalidate a date of 1429–30 for the commission of St. George. The Medium of the “Halle”: Hanging or Painting? Having clarified the context and date of commission, we are still left with the task of understanding the medium and matter of the “steyned halle.” In the margins of the R.3.21 copy of the poem, John Stow has written: “The lyfe of saynt gorge compyled by John lidgate monke of bery at Qe request of Qe armerers of london to peynt about ther haulle.”26 Although it may be possible that Stow saw the verses painted at the Armourers’ Hall, I have found no evidence to suggest this is the case. It seems more likely that his note is based on Shirley’s R.3.20 heading. Stow’s handwriting appears in the margins of both manuscripts; he copied several poems, complete with headings, from R.3.20 into his own Lydgate anthology, London, British Library MS Additional 29729. In the process of transferring information from the R.3.20 heading for St. George into R.3.21, however, Stow made a significant change: while Shirley talks about two coordinated commissions, a “steyned halle. . .made with Qe balades,” Stow reads the “steyned halle” as the site of the “balades,” apparently thinking that Shirley’s phrase described a painted hall. I believe Stow misread both terms. While the semantic range of steyned expanded between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, taking on new meanings, the range of halle narrowed. Stow seems aware of some slipperiness or archaism about Shirley’s “steyned,” opting to use the verb “peynt” instead; his insertion of a u into Shirley’s “halle,” on the other hand, is a mere orthographic variation. Nevertheless, Stow’s usage dramatically alters the sense of the latter term.

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In an article on the place-name “Rondolesette Halle” in the Awntyrs off Arthure, Andrew Walkling calls our attention to the multiple possible definitions of Middle English halle as well as the scholarly tendency to ignore these in favor of the single meaning that has survived into modern English.27 The confusion is etymological in origin, as Middle English halle could derive from either Old English hall, meaning a large chamber or structure, or Old French hale, meaning a tent or pavilion.28 A third meaning of halle was current in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one that resonates with both root words: “A piece of tapestry, painted or stained cloth, etc., used as a hanging on the walls of a hall.”29 While this definition from the Middle English Dictionary employs the singular, a halle may have been composed of multiple cloths forming a set and creating a kind of Old French hale within the Old English hall. Other textile terminology of the period similarly adopts the name of the site for sets of hangings, as in the terms “bed” or “chamber.”30 My belief that Shirley’s “halle” describes this kind of portable textile suite rather than a permanent structure is reinforced by his use of the adjective “steyned.” To a certain extent, it was possible to use steyned and peynted interchangeably even in the fifteenth century; Shirley uses both terms to describe a decorated cloth in the R.3.20 headnote to Bycorne and Chychevache, which he calls “Qe deuise of a peynted or desteyned clothe.”31 Yet while peynted was used to describe all kinds of decorated surfaces, the word steyned seems to have been used, in the fifteenth century at least, solely to describe decorated textiles. Interestingly, Stow himself suggests the reason this may have changed by the time he was writing. Describing the location of the Painter-Stainers Hall in his Survey of London, Stow remarks, “now that workemanship of stayning is departed out of vse in England.”32 As a result of the continued use of the joint title “painterstainer” to describe craftsmen who were all technically painters, some confusion or conflation of the crafts appears to have occurred in the sixteenth century, which is when the word steyned or stained was first used to describe the decoration of nontextile surfaces such as walls.33 When Shirley penned R.3.20, however, there was neither confusion between nor conflation of the two arts: Lydgate lists them as distinct crafts, and they still had separate fraternities in London.34 While sixteenth-century applications of the terms stained and painted differentiate between the quality of pigments—those that penetrate versus those that remain on the surface of the object—fifteenth-century craft practices of staining and painting were differentiated based on type of surface. The Steynours’ Guild used glue-size based paints, also called distemper or tempera paints; the dry fresco technique employed by London Painters required the same pigments.35 But while the Painters’ Guild worked on metal, walls, boards,

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and other solid objects, the Steynours worked on cloth.36 The association of the art of staining with textiles seems to have shaped the use of the participial adjective steyned, as well. Even in Lydgate’s highly allusive, playful use of the term steyned elsewhere in his poetry, the adjective is only used in a decorative sense to describe cloths, although these are frequently evocatively juxtaposed with other kinds of objects which are “steyned” in the sense of being discolored, usually with blood. In A Seying of the Nightingale, he explores at some length the ways that staining as a problem for laundresses might bleed (no pun intended) into staining as a decorative technique. As images of Christ’s bleeding body are multiplied, the blood “steyning” his form becomes a kind of decorated cloth: a “garnement” or “apparaile” identified with the cloth “steyned in Bosra,” the red garb of the figure who appears to Isaiah in Isaiah 63:1, a figure typically read as a prefiguration of Christ.37 Lydgate’s treatment of another “steyned” cloth, deeply significant for the armourers, plays with the ways the staining of Christ’s body with blood reverberates with the decorative staining of textiles. In the opening lines of the hymn Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, Lydgate conjures the image of the banner of St. George: Royal Banerys vnrolled of the kyng Towarde his Batayle, in Bosra steyned reede, The Crosse his standart Celestyal of schynyng Wyth purple Hewe depeynt38

The banner is drawn into the circulation of “steyned” objects: the body of Christ, the Cross of Cavalry, the cloth of Bosra. The image has rich resonance with the armourers’ craft as well: their own product was in this vein of blood-soaked but potentially apotropaic cladding for the body of the martyr-knight. In this selection, Lydgate uses the terms “steyned” and “depeynt” as synonyms, but I believe it is significant that he does so not only at a moment when he is specifically discussing a decorated cloth, but also at a moment when he is blurring the boundaries between blood, body, and cloth as well as decorated and dirtied surfaces. The blood of Christ is not the kind of stain you wash out but rather the kind you proudly display—a stain in the decorative vein. Christ’s body becomes, here, the cloth-like ground on which the narrative of his sacrifice is figured in the emblematic image of the cross—not so unlike the textile “halle” that is “steyned” with the narrative of George’s Christ-like passion and martyrdom. If Stow, writing not much more than a century after Shirley, understood the “steyned halle” as a description of a painted hall, it cannot be

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surprising that later scholars have followed him in this error. Neither Walter Schirmer nor Pearsall consider the medium an open question: both follow Stow and assert the poem was painted in a hall.39 Claire Sponsler, who transcribes Stow’s note in her article exploring medieval relationships between texts and textiles, allows for the possibility of a textile display but argues that “[t]he term ‘steyned halle’ seems to point to a mural rather than a tapestry.”40 In this she follows Eleanor Prescott Hammond’s tendency to discuss tapestry and mural paintings as interchangeable media,41 while also following Stow in his (mis)reading of Shirley’s phrase. If the two media were truly interchangeable, correcting Stow’s and subsequent misreadings would be a purely academic (or antiquarian) exercise. Textiles, however, differ from murals in at least one important respect: they are portable. They can be moved, reinstalled in new locations, passed on to heirs—all features that affect their function and value for patrons. This is also the feature that confirms my reading of the phrase “steyned halle.” As transferable objects, “steyned halles” are mentioned in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wills, inventories, and even court cases. In one case from the London plea and memoranda rolls, the portable nature of “steyned halles” is made particularly clear. One William Gysbourne was accused of unlawfully removing a number of pieces of armor, articles of clothing, and a “steinydhalle” from the tenement of his financially insolvent friend—items which should have gone toward paying off that fellow’s large debts. Although Gysbourne denied that he had these objects, members of the jury found them “hanging on a perch in his room.”42 Surely no painted, plastered wall was ever surreptitiously removed to the thief’s quarters and then hung “on a perch” with a jacket and pair of gloves. This and other documentary records of “steyned halles” confirm that they are wall hangings rather than wall paintings. There are two references in the London Armourers’ archives that might describe a textile “steyned halle.” The first occurs in their list of construction-related benefactions of 1429, which includes John Amflesch’s donation of “hallyngs to the high deysse”; the word “hallyng” is another related term for a “hanging on the walls of a hall.”43 If these “hallyngs” are identical to our “steyned halle,” it is possible that Amflesch, who had been master of the Armourers’ Guild in 1427, commissioned and donated Lydgate’s Legend of St. George as well as the “steyned halle.” Furthermore, if the hangings were scaled specifically to surround the high dais at the upper end of the Armourers’ new hall, they might very well have been the same “sev’ll pieces of Painting which are worn out being done upon Cloth and the same being Rotten and past Repairing” that the Armourers disposed of in 1733.44

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The Matter of the “Halle”: The First Frame Although Stow may have been mistaken about the medium of the “halle,” there is one respect in which I agree with his reading: I do believe the verses were inscribed on the “steyned halle.” Hammond coyly proposes that the verses were read aloud at the first revelation of the accompanying visual scheme—only to note that “history gives us no ground for the suggestion.” In fact, she claims the “destruction which has overtaken nearly all medieval tapestries and frescoes” prevents us from assessing whether a poem like St. George could have been incorporated into a wall hanging or painting.45 Not all has been lost, however. Hammond lists a few suggestive inventory taglines that seem to describe tapestries with verse inscriptions; Sponsler expands her catalogue by adding evidence from manuscript miniatures and naming some further recorded and extant examples.46 In addition to examining inscribed hangings that have been preserved in documentary or material form, I believe we must also consider the material evidence of extant, purely visual cycles of St. George. A careful reading of Lydgate’s poem in light of contemporary iconography will allow us to reconstruct the visual scheme of the “steyned halle”—an exercise that will also demonstrate the likelihood that Lydgate’s verses were inscribed on the “halle” itself. Sponsler argues for an oral performance of St. George, supporting her claim with reference to both the opening line of the poem and the note that directly precedes the first verse in R.3.20, which reads: “Qee poete first declareQe—.”47 While I agree that this note and the opening line of the poem (“O yee folke Qat heer present be”) have a distinctly oral feel, this “orality” does not continue throughout the poem. After the third stanza, he never again addresses the audience directly; in fact, “the poet” as such never speaks again. It is important to remember that Lydgate’s St. George is a translation, and in his other translated works Lydgate tends to make the audience intensely aware of his activity as translator, frequently speaking in the first person or citing his source. While he refers to his source only once in this poem, mentioning “myn auctour” in the third stanza (l. 18), phrases like this are usually scattered throughout his translations. He employs this particular one over a hundred fifty times in the course of The Fall of Princes, while the substantially shorter Legend of Seynt Margarete opens with a seventy-seven-line-long prologue describing his activity as a translator, refers his readers to “the storye” shortly afterward, and concludes with a direct address to “Noble princesses and ladyes of estate, / And gentilwomen lower of degre.”48 This kind of persistent self-consciousness of the poet’s source, audience, and activity as translator is entirely lacking in the later stanzas of St. George.

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The opening lines of St. George are closest to those of another Lydgate poem appearing in R.3.20: Bycorne and Chychevache. This poem begins: “O prudent folkes, takeQe heed / And remebreQe, in youre lyves, / How Qis story doQe proceed.”49 Shirley also describes Bycorne as the “deuise” for a cloth hanging, here a “desteyned cloth.” The scribe includes extensive notes throughout the “balades,” detailing the images that should accompany Lydgate’s verses.50 While Bycorne opens on a seemingly “oral” note, the first of these notes makes it clear that the verses were inscribed on the “desteyned cloth,” not read aloud. It reads: “ffirst Qere shal stonde an ymage in poete-wyse seying Qees thre balades.”51 This iconography of the “ymage in poete-wyse” has been preserved. The surviving five pieces of a late-fifteenth-century tapestry of the Hunt of the Frail Stag, now at the Metropolitan, include an “ymage in poete-wyse” speaking either the epilogue or prologue of the poem.52 In this fragment, a robed and bearded figure stands to the right of twelve lines of verse enclosed in a frame. This verse, like the opening stanzas of St. George and Bycorne, addresses the audience in the voice of the poet: “Gens de breifve duree modaie. . .cosiderez la vie humaine” [You people whose life on earth is brief; /. . .Think of human life].53 The “oral” feel of these lines reflects their visual status as words spoken by the poet, who stands with hand raised to indicate speech. Similar verses accompanied by bearded figures representing the author of the poem appear in both illuminated manuscripts and in other inscribed narrative tapestries, as well.54 Although only twelve lines are transcribed in the Hunt of the Frail Stag fragment, as opposed to the twenty-one spoken by the image of the poet in Bycorne, it is worth noting that the Hunt of the Frail Stag is quite small in scale, each remnant measuring only three feet by two feet. There is no reason to believe that either the Bycorne cloth or the Armourers’ “steyned halle” would have been so small. The first few stanzas of Lydgate’s St. George could easily have been inscribed on the first frame of the “steyned halle,” accompanied by just such an “ymage in poete-wyse.” Indeed, this format would explain why Lydgate avoids the “voice” of the poet after the third stanza of the poem, eschewing not only first-person address but also authorial insertions—also exceedingly common in Lydgate’s other translated works. Despite his reputation for almost compulsively expanding on his source material, in the St. George Lydgate only adds content in the first two stanzas: in the first, he identifies George as the “protectour and patroun. . .of knighthood loodsterre, / To Englisshe men booQe in pees and werre,” and in the second he relates the story of Edward III’s foundation of the Order of the Garter at Windsor and describes the Order’s St. George’s Day solemnities. These insertions are keyed to his patrons’ interests; the London Armourers’ star had risen along

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with George’s emergence as patron of England and specifically of England’s military undertakings in France. On the occasion of the Armourers’ feast of St. George, the description of the Order’s observances would resonate clearly with the guild’s own, creating a sense that the members of the Armourers’ Guild were involved in a communal celebration with the aristocratic and royal figures at Windsor. Of course, these additions would have appealed to any English reader. Caxton includes similar passages at the end of his 1483 translation of the Legenda Aurea composed for a broad English reading audience.55 Caxton’s placement of the description of the Order of the Garter is more standard for the genre than Lydgate’s. Typically, material postdating the saint’s death is located at the close of the legend, in largely chronological order. The composition I have proposed for the first frame of the “steyned halle,” with the opening verses given in a text block “spoken” by an “ymage in poetewyse,” would account for Lydgate’s unusual decision to place these authorial insertions at the opening, along with other words of the poet. Textual Textiles As for the rest of the stanzas, Hammond nicely sets up the arguments a “modern student” might make against their inclusion on the “steyned halle”: “Were the reproduction of so long a poem possible. . .it is difficult to see how a poem so devoid of dramatic emphasis could have furnished the illustrator with points of attachment for his pictures.”56 The question of length may be answered by considering other examples of inscribed cloths. The “balades” of Bycorne and Chychevache are composed of 133 lines broken into nineteen stanzas, with between one and four stanzas accompanying each of the seven images. St. George is nearly twice as long, with 245 lines in thirty-five stanzas; but the “steyned halle” could easily have been twice as long as the “desteyned clothe.” The “clothe” of Bycorne and Chychevache was probably a single hanging, while a “halle” of St. George, like a “bed” or “chamber,” was probably a set of hangings. The “clothe” was, furthermore, to be displayed in either the hall, or parlor, or bedchamber of a private citizen. Of the three, the hall would certainly be the largest space—but it would still have been dwarfed by the Armourers’ Hall at 81 Coleman Street. The Goldsmiths’ Guild’s 400-foot-long, sixteenth-century tapestry of St. Dunstan offers an extreme example of just how large a guild’s textile decorations could be. Although the textile postdates the Armourers’ “steyned halle” by nearly a century, its dimensions give us a sense of the scale of London guilds’ halls during the fifteenth century. The Goldsmiths’ Hall, constructed in 1365, was not rebuilt until 1634, so even the fourteenthcentury structure was already large enough to accommodate their lengthy

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textile commission. But were such large-scale textile projects ever inscribed with verses? The detailed records of the Goldsmiths’ purchase of this tapestry do include a payment of 10s. for a translation of Dunstan’s vita; it was, however, into Dutch. It was probably used not for inscription but rather to guide the work of (presumably Dutch-speaking) artists who were paid 1s. a day for sixteen days to develop the black and white cartoons for the weavers.57 Other sets of similarly large scale were inscribed, however. Both Henry VII and Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, owned tapestries depicting the events of the Trojan War with French and Latin verses inscribed along their upper and lower borders. Pasquier and Jean Grenier of Tournai produced both of these sets in the later fifteenth century, working from pen-and-ink drawings dating to the middle of the fifteenth century. These sketches have been preserved in the Louvre in Paris.58 The kings of France, Naples, and Hungary also seem to have owned Troy sets. Although all of these were not necessarily based on the same set of drawings, they seem to have been fairly similar in content and scale.59 No complete set is preserved, but the numerous fragments held in collections throughout the United States and Europe has allowed for a nearly complete reconstruction of the sequence: the Troy series was about a hundred feet shorter in total length than the London Goldsmiths’ life of St. Dunstan, and included 528 lines of verse on a full set of eleven hangings—about twice as many lines as St. George.60 Despite the fragility of the medium, even earlier examples of textually inscribed textiles do exist. The tapestry of the Story of Jourdain de Blaye, now in the Museo Civico in Padua, for instance, dates to the late fourteenth century and includes French verse inscriptions at its upper edge.61 While it is unclear whether the Armourers’ Hall was large enough to contain a “halle” as expansive as the Troy series, the relatively low cost of a domestically manufactured stained hanging may have put such lengths within their financial reach. Furthermore, the composition of the Trojan War tapestries restricts the verse to the very margins of the cloth, greatly limiting the amount of text that could be depicted in each “frame” of the narrative. Smaller-scale inscribed tapestries like the Hunt of the Frail Stag, in contrast, tend to devote larger portions of their picture-plane to text. It is possible, then, that a set of hangings well under half the size of the Troy series could easily have accommodated St. George’s 245 lines. Lydgate as Pictorial Poet Having answered Hammond’s “modern student” on the issue of size, what of St. George’s alleged lack of “dramatic emphasis”? Pearsall seems to agree that the poem lacks pictorial or dramatic qualities. He calls it “refined, decorous, abstract, generalised,” contrasting it with the “raucous

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colloquialism and violence” of the South English Legendary version of the saint’s life.62 Of course, Pearsall’s preferred version leaves out the most frequently visualized and, for the Armourers, most pertinent episode of all: George’s battle with the dragon.63 Although Hammond and Pearsall find Lydgate’s St. George less than visually inspiring, it is actually a translation of precisely the version of the saint’s vita that generated the widespread, international medieval iconography of the life of St. George: the Legenda Aurea. Furthermore, in comparison with this version, Lydgate’s translation is markedly more concrete and pictorial. Lydgate systematically tweaks the original to suit the Armourers’ particular interests and, I would argue, to make the verse both an appropriate plan for a “steyned halle” and a good candidate for inscription thereon. His St. George is concise and, as Pearsall argues, “simple” in form. Pearsall suggests that “the more sophisticated saint’s life”—he offers Lydgate’s Legend of Seynt Margarete as an example—“is conducted chiefly through speeches and prayers, with the minimum of actual narration.”64 In an inscribed hanging, however, speech-texts beg to be located alongside the speaker, as is the case with the “ymage in poete-wyse.” Such insertions, if brief, could be elegantly incorporated in undulating scrolls, but long text blocks would interrupt the visual flow of the inscribed tapestry narrative, which typically moves from left to right in chronological sequence using external “frames” or internal architectures to define discrete narrative units. It might be better, then, to understand Lydgate’s form as a consequence of his medium, where a more “sophisticated” literary structure would yield an awkward final product. Opting always for “actual narration” over reported oration, Lydgate eliminates any extended speeches found in the Legenda Aurea. In a striking example, he reworks the moment in which the King prepares to send his daughter out as a sacrifice to the dragon that has been terrorizing their city. Unaware that George will shortly rescue her and liberate the city, the King bids the princess farewell in a highly visual scene whose stylized, seemingly “conventional” surface ripples with emotional intensity, expressing his sorrow more vividly than the Legenda Aurea’s long-winded lament: At hir oute goyng hir fader for Qe noones Arrayed her with al his ful might In clooQe of golde with gemys and with stoones, Which shoone ful sheene ageyne Qe sonne bright. (ll. 78–81)

He piles glittering gold and gems on his daughter’s body, as if attempting to express her pricelessness, to make visible the value of what he is about to lose. Powerless to prevent her death, his excessive “full might” is frustrated,

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diverted into this poignantly pointless endeavor. Passages such as this demonstrate Lydgate’s sensitivity to the expressive power of the emblematic surface: deeply conventional, it is nevertheless rich with meaning. Throughout his translation, Lydgate consistently concentrates on this visual surface of the narrative, playing with the ways both ekphrastic and material images can be made to carry complex and allusive meanings. George’s body is no exception. Introducing George “in steel armed bright” (l. 21), Lydgate spends just over half of the poem describing his exploits as an armed and mounted knight, “protectour and patroun” (l. 5). The pivotal moment where Lydgate begins to detail his “martirdome and his passyon” (l. 4) is signaled sartorially: George makes a conscious decision to leave his armor behind as he goes to confront the tyrant Dacian: “He of pourpos lefft of his knightly weede” (l. 157). It is this compositional balance—the armor-clad body of the knight on the one hand, and the “pourely cladde” (l. 158) and then blood-garbed, naked body of the saint on the other—that gives real force to the thick veneer of courtliness Lydgate layers onto his source. The George of the Legenda Aurea is certainly a martyrknight, brandishing lances and rescuing princesses, but Lydgate relentlessly plays up the rhetoric of romance and courtly love. He refers repeatedly to George’s knightly qualities, and while our saint still chastely addresses the princess as his “owen doughter deer” (l. 70), his motivations are couched in the language of courtly, not paternal, love: he journeys to defend “Qe Right of wydowes, and of virgynytee,” and vows “to socour Qis mayden” and “beon hir Chaumpyon” (ll. 35, 87, 96). Because George’s “noblesse and cheuallerye” (l. 31) are only amplified at the moment he removes his “knightly weede,” however, the effect of this romance surface is not to render George more secular but rather to celebrate the religious significations of the iconic knight. Lydgate defines this aspect of George early in the poem: although the poet is about to relate George’s heroic rescue of a damsel in distress and his decapitation of a dragon, Lydgate frames the episode as a story of how George rode forth, as Christ’s knight armed in bright steel, “Qe feond venqwysshing of manhoode and prowesse, / Qe worlde, Qe flesshe” (ll. 19–21). Like popular lyrics depicting Christ as the heroic champion and courtly lover rescuing the (feminized) soul, this life of St. George exalts military or knightly undertakings by assigning them significance within a Christian allegorical framework—a trope with obvious appeal for armourers. Locating Lydgate’s “Balades” in the Cycle of St. George Many churches preserve only single images of St. George, which densely pack the narrative of his encounter with the dragon into one scene. Some

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cycles similarly condense this portion of the narrative, devoting most of their space to George’s passion and martyrdom. More than half of the nowlost windows of St. George’s, Stamford, for instance, featured individual scenes of torture; only two of the twenty-nine windows were dedicated to George’s knightly rescue mission.65 If I am correct in arguing that Lydgate’s verses were inscribed on the “steyned halle,” such compositions seem unlikely. Almost half of Lydgate’s thirty-five stanzas deal with the dragon narrative: he devotes a full ten stanzas to George’s rescue of the princess, and another four to their triumphant entry into the city and George’s subsequent conversion and religious education of its populace. There would hardly be room within one or two frames for so much text. Instead, we might expect a balance of visual and textual narrative closer to that described in the notes for Bycorne and Chychevache, with around one to four stanzas accompanying each image. With this kind of visual organization, about half of the “halle” would have been devoted to the story of George and the dragon, and about half to the saint’s martyrdom and passion. The patrons’ obvious interests in the chivalric portions of the George narrative would certainly account for a greater emphasis on that part of the cycle, although of course there are extant cycle images that also strike a more equal balance between the knightly and saintly episodes of George’s vita. The St. George Altarpiece at the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne, c. 1460, is a good example.66 Of its eight frames, three are devoted to the dragon narrative, four to his passion, and one to his martyrdom and burial. Like Lydgate’s St. George, the Cologne Altarpiece follows the Legenda Aurea version of the narrative very closely, and includes nearly every image we might have found on the “steyned halle.” I have already proposed a possibility for the first frame or image of the “halle”: an “ymage in poete-wise” accompanying the first four or five stanzas of Lydgate’s poem. The next sixteen stanzas, which narrate the knightly portion of his vita, were most likely paired with about four images. Dividing Lydgate’s “balades” at roughly every fourth stanza would suggest three frames very much like the first three frames found on the Cologne Altarpiece, as well as one additional scene. Both the “balades” and the altarpiece represent the threatened city proffering sacrifice to the dragon, St. George’s battle with the dragon, and George’s conversion and baptism of the city. In addition, Lydgate devotes four stanzas to the king’s farewell to his daughter and George’s subsequent encounter with her outside the city walls (ll. 71–98), which finds no corollary in the Cologne Altarpiece. Other fifteenth-century paintings, however, represent George’s encounter with the princess as a separate scene. There is a relatively spare English example on the church walls at Astbury, Cheshire; but Pisanello’s fragmentary fresco of St. George and the Princess of Trebizond in the Pelligrini

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chapel of Santa Anastasia, Verona, offers a more haunting, complex example of the iconography that might have been paired with these particular Lydgate “balades.” The Pisanello fresco is very nearly contemporary— painted around 1436—and has the same intense concentration on surface ornamentation: the princess is laden with layers of “clooQe of golde with gemys and with stoones” (l. 80). The final fourteen stanzas of Lydgate’s poem concern St. George’s martyrdom and passion, and while it seems they would have occupied about the same amount of visual space on the “halle” as his chivalric exploits, that space could have been divided in any number of ways. Single episodes of torture, such as those found in the lost windows at Stamford, could have been paired with individual stanzas in a smaller “frame”; on the other hand, in many cycles such as the Cologne altarpiece, we find larger “frames” with composite images of sequential torments organized chronologically from left to right. Such composite images could have been accompanied by multiple verses, perhaps exhibiting a visual logic similar to that of the Troy tapestries. In the extant fragments of this series, the visual narrative typically progresses from left to right, sometimes “stacking” scenes vertically as well, without many sharply defined frames or divisions between events. Individual stanzas describe the action located more or less above them, but such a composition has the advantage of flexibly allowing for occasional differences in visual and textual narrative pace: if the “balades” get ahead of the images at one point, at another point the visual depiction of events will take more horizontal space than the associated verses, and an overall balance can be achieved. How the Medium Matters I am particularly interested in the possibility that Lydgate’s verses were contained on the “steyned halle” because of the implications this has for the nature of the Armourers’ commission as a whole. While the mummings that Lydgate wrote for more prominent guilds were ephemeral, occasional performances, the “steyned halle” was a lasting work that could continue to advertise “Qonour of Qeyre broQerhoode” over time. Within the London guild community, the emulative act of commissioning “balades” from Lydgate—poet to the Goldsmiths and Mercers, powerful livery companies—would have appealed strongly to the Armourers as they sought to establish their position in the London hierarchy. It seems likely that they would have wanted his verses to be an integral part of the “halle,” an enduring, material incarnation of their act of patronage. For the Goldsmiths and Mercers, the occasion for which they commissioned Lydgate was markedly “public”: Shirley specifies that Mayor Estfield

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was to attend both performances. I have not found any suggestion, however, that the Lord Mayor attended the Armourers’ St. George’s Day feast; later celebrations were limited to members and their families. An oral performance of verses by Lydgate would surely have impressed this group with a sense of their own significance, but it would have done little to assert the guild’s status on the city stage. Throughout the rest of the year, on the other hand, a broader audience would have viewed the “steyned halle,” as the Armourers rented out their hall to unhoused guilds and other groups. As a textile, furthermore, the “halle” itself could have been lent out. This was common in London in a slightly later period, at least; in 1507, the London Mercers requested to “haue the kepyng” of the London Guildhall’s tapestry. An Act of 1518 restricted the lending of this “best hangyng of Arras. . .to the Guylde Hall for the Mayer or Shirriffes Fest” or on occasions when the mayor himself requested its use; the imposition of a fine for masters or wardens who let the cloth out for any other reason suggests that other groups had frequently requested—and obtained—permission to borrow it.67 The Armourers themselves could have taken advantage of the portability of the piece, using it in full or part during their processional displays for Lord Mayor’s Day or royal entries, for instance, or for special events in their chantry chapel at St. Paul’s. If Lydgate’s verses were in fact contained on the “steyned halle,” their act of emulative literary patronage materialized in textile form would have advertised their ability to celebrate holidays, patronize poets, and put on spectacular displays just like their superiors. Given the disciplinary divisions of the modern academy, it can be difficult to study verse as an extracodical phenomenon, as an integral part of interior decorative schemes, architectural projects, or as part of the ceremonial presentation of such public endeavors. In the fifteenth century, as works such as Lydgate’s St. George demonstrate, verse was a lively part of daily experience and was often incorporated into architectural, ceremonial, and other forms of public display. Colin Fewer, in his work on Lydgate’s Troy Book, argues that Lydgate is interested in “the transformations in power and social relations” occurring in his life time, as well as in the idea of a social order that might “emerge. . .locally” rather than being “produced or imposed by the sovereign or even by the law.”68 Studying Lydgate’s work within the local network of the City of London helps us understand how individuals and corporate bodies such as the Armourers’ Guild sought to use strategies of literary patronage to enact such transformations in power and social relations within their own real, local communities—to dramatize or establish their place within local hierarchies. For patrons like the Armourers of London, Lydgate’s verse was an agent of this process of producing social order from below: their emulative act of

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patronage marked the first move in an intense, thirty-year push to strengthen their infrastructure, advance their authority over their trade, and develop a stronger sense of corporate identity, a process that would culminate in 1453 with their successful bid for a royal charter. As one player in the pageant of Lydgate patrons played out in Shirley’s R.3.20 headnotes, the Armourers add a new dimension to the scribe’s characterization of Lydgate as London poet. Their commission of a flexible, portable multimedia work like the “steyned halle” materially captures the fluidity and interconnectedness of the aristocratic, the civic, the entrepreneurial, and the clerkly within the London landscape: like Shirley himself or the Lydgate he invokes, the power of the “steyned halle” inheres in its ability to move among these spheres. Furthermore, studying The Legend of St. George not simply as a textual artifact, but rather in the material form Shirley describes—as a commissioned translation coordinated with, if not physically incorporated into, a visual, decorative scheme— helps us understand how Lydgate’s lyric engaged contemporary iconography at both a literal and aesthetic level. As recent studies of sermon literature have frequently noted, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 encouraged an international pastoral education effort that used vernacular sermons keyed to a well-developed Christian visual iconography to teach both doctrine and important narratives from the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints.69 The English painted church, responding to this pastoral push and ubiquitous in Lydgate’s home region of East Anglia, was richly decorated with both single images and cycles of both doctrinal concepts such as the Seven Works of Corporal Charity and hagiographic episodes. Like Lydgate’s St. George as read by Pearsall, many of these are “refined, decorous, abstract, generalised,”70 but certainly these qualities did not make them less vibrant or evocative for viewers. Generations of instruction in a kind of Christian visual literacy had created an audience for whom the simplest conventional images could carry deep emotional impact and even multiple, layered narratives or allusions to a wide-ranging body of doctrinal and devotional concepts; in fact, it is precisely the quality of conventionality or generality that renders an iconographic system easily “legible” to trained audiences. The resulting visual and vernacular culture feeds into a sort of aesthetics of the conventional surface in Lydgate’s lyric poetry: some works, like the Procession for Corpus Christi or even his more secular royal entries, focus on providing orthodox readings of visual and spectacular narratives, instructing readers in the proper technique for extracting meaning from often stylized ceremonial and displays; while others, like the Armourers’ Legend of St. George, use the evocative juxtaposition of heavily visual word with narrative image to explore both the decorative potential of the text itself and the power of this

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decorative surface to become imbued with meaning—to tell stories, to instill pathos, to inspire devotion. The materiality of Lydgate’s works as visual artifacts as well as his interest in textually exploring the relationships between language and the visible, material world are issues we cannot ignore if we want to understand Lydgate’s contribution to fifteenth-century London culture. The multimedia nature of nearly all of his London commissions during the late 1420s and early 1430s would suggest that it is Lydgate’s ability to engage, explicate, and capitalize on the visual and spectacular—to synthesize his verse with the visual and spectacular culture of the community—that allows his poetry to matter for his patrons. Only by studying the literary patronage of Lydgate’s poems in relation to his patrons’ architectural, dramatic, and visual commissions can we recover a sense of the frequently extracodical, fascinatingly material incarnations and effects of Lydgate’s lyrics. Notes 1. Transcribed in 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), I:145. 2. James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 58. I discuss and cite specific examples of discussions of the medium of the “steyned halle” below. 3. The Légende Dorée, Jean de Vignay’s fourteenth-century translation of the Legenda Aurea, is so close to the Latin in the case of the George legend that either of the two could have been the source for Lydgate’s translation into English; I use Legenda Aurea simply to designate the version of the story as distinct from others circulating at the time. The George narratives in The South English Legendary and Mirk’s Festial, for instance, both differ from this tradition. 4. George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (1908; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1963), p. 179. My conversion is approximate; translating tapestry dimensions to modern units can be tricky. See Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 66, 112, 165–69. 5. Charles M. Clode, The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Taylors (London: Harrison & Sons, 1888), p. 78. 6. London, Guildhall Library MS 35044, quoted in Timothy Morley, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers (London: Guildhall Library, 1878), p. 63. 7. Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (London: V&A Publications, 2003), pp. 198–99. 8. See Item 84 in Gothic: Art for England, p. 218. Detail images of the alabaster and its full exhibition and publication history are available on the website for

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

the National Gallery of Art, Washington, “Saint George and the Dragon,” http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object⫽42118⫹0⫹none accessed May 1, 2006. Anne Marshall of the Open University maintains a frequently updated web catalogue of parish church wall paintings, including those at Banningham. See Anne Marshall, Medieval Wall Painting in the Parish Church: A Developing Catalogue, “St. George and the Dragon: Banningham, Norfolk,” http:// www.paintedchurch.org/bannigeo.htm accessed May 2, 2006. Marshall points out that armor styles reflect current trends in other parish church paintings of George: the fourteenth-century George at Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire sports fourteenth-century chain mail while the fifteenthcentury George at Hornton in Oxfordshire wears the full plate that became popular in this later period. For images of Hornton, see http://www. paintedchurch.org/horntgeo.htm; for Little Kimble, see http://www. paintedchurch.org/lkimgeo.htm accessed May 15, 2006. Letter Book G, fol. 290. All citations of Letter Books are from Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, A–L, 11 vols., ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: J.E. Francis, 1899–1912), online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ accessed February 28, 2006. Letter Book H, fol. 68b. Letter Book H, fol. 130b. Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, ed. and trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868), p. 145. See Syndey Hewitt Pitt, Some Notes on the History of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers (London: private printing, 1930), pp. 8, 13. In 1450, for instance, the London Armourers reproved the mayor and aldermen for lapsing in their support for the guild, claiming that the resulting lack of regulation had caused “grete hurt of the Kyng and his liege people.” Pitt, Some Notes, pp. 13–14. London, Guildhall Library MS 12105. The book appears to be in a seventeenth-century hand, and is presumably a copy of an earlier, now lost, record book; the earliest entries are dated to the seventh year of Henry VI’s reign (1428/9). The first entry records a gift from Thomas Whight; his name is followed by the letter “M” and a flourish, likely a contraction of “Master,” a position he assumed in 1429. Unwin, Gilds, p. 181. Edward Basil Jupp, An Historical Account of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1887), pp. 242–43. Joseph Aubrey Rees, The Worshipful Company of Grocers (London and Sydney: Chapman and Dodd, 1923), p. 42. Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 77. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 1:64–70.

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22. David Lorenzo Boyd, “Social Texts, Bodley 686, and The Politics of the Cook’s Tale,” in Reading from the Margins, ed. Seth Lerer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1996), p. 85 n10 [81–97]. 23. Bodley 686, fol. 193b, as transcribed by Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, p. 68. 24. Simpson, Reform, p. 55. 25. Thomas Brewer suggests Carpenter commissioned the paintings in 1430, when he applied for a charter to found a chantry in the north aisle of St. Paul’s. See Thomas Brewer, Memoir of the Life and Times of John Carpenter (London: A. Taylor, 1856), p. 29. However, Carpenter could easily have commissioned the paintings in the cloister independent of this foundation. The north side of Old St. Paul’s was popular with London civic groups; the Armourers’ Guild and the Goldsmiths’ Guild both had chantries there. It was a natural location for the town clerk to commission a work at any point in his career. A close examination of all manuscripts naming the verses as the “Dance of Paul’s” would surely help narrow the date of commission, but as far as I know no such approach has yet been taken. 26. Transcribed in Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:146. 27. Andrew R. Walkling, “The Problem of ‘Rondolesette Halle’ in the Awntyrs off Arthure,” Studies in Philology 100.2 (2003): 113–14 [105–122]. 28. In addition to Walkling’s article, see MED, s.v. “hal(le,” especially n. 1a and 2, and “hale,”.n. 2. 29. MED, s.v. “hal(le,” n. 4. 30. For examples of this use of “chamber,” see MED, s.v. “chaumbre,” n. 10g. Textile “beds” are mentioned in numerous Middle English inventories and court cases. The London plea and memoranda rolls, for instance, include late fourteenth-century references to a “steyned bed” (Roll A 21, Membr. 12); beds of “worsteyd,” a woolen cloth (Roll A 33, Membr. 8); an embroidered bed depicting leopard’s heads (Roll A 11, Membr. 6); and a bed of “tapicerie” featuring a lion (Roll A 32, Membr. 4). All citations of the plea and memoranda rolls are from Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, 6 vols., ed. A.H. Thomas and Philip E. Jones (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1926–61), online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ accessed March 10, 2006. 31. In Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:433. 32. John Stow, A Suruay of London (1598; repr. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, 2001), p. 288. http:// name.umdl.umich.edu/a13049.0001.001 accessed March 15, 2006. 33. As in the 1562 quote given to support the definition “Coloured with liquid pigments that penetrate below the surface.” See “stained,” ppl. a.3, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 34. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:773. The guilds merged in the early sixteenth century to combine resources. In 1431, however, a man named Richard Davy petitioned to translate from the Painters to the Stainers Guild, demonstrating the full independence of these two bodies at that point. See Letter Book K, fol. lxxxviii.

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35. For a discussion of the stainers’ technique and competition between London stainers and Netherlandish cloth paintings, see Gothic: Art for England, p. 79. For a fifteenth-century example of a stained cloth and a discussion of the fragility of the medium, see the entry for Item 155, Gothic: Art for England, p. 291. 36. In 1400, the Steynours applied “for certain ordinances to be approved and enrolled.” Letter Book H, fol. 331. W.A.D. Engleworth, in his history of the Painter-Stainers Company, suggests that “If ‘staining’ did not consist of the colouring of cloth or canvas as distinct from wood, it is difficult to see what else could have been the art referred to.” He concludes this in part from the ordinances of 1400, which repeatedly mention cloth and require members of the craft to use only new cloth and fine pigments. W.A.D. Engleworth, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1950), pp. 46–47. 37. See especially Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:2231, ll. 123, 133–36, 149, 272. 38. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:25, ll. 1–4. 39. Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), p. 157; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 181. 40. Claire Sponsler, “Text and Textile: Lydgate’s Tapestry Poems,” in Medieval Fabrications, ed. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 25–26; she cites Stow’s note on p. 28. 41. See Hammond’s seminal article on Lydgate’s verse and narrative visual schemes: Eleanor Hammond, “Two Tapestry Poems by Lydgate,” Englische Studien 43 (1910–11): 21–22 [10–26]. 42. Roll A 20, Membr. 6. 43. London, Guildhall Library MS 12105, f. 2v. See MED, s.v. “halling(e.” 44. London, Guildhall Library MS 12071/6, second entry. 45. Hammond, “Tapestry Poems,” 22. 46. Hammond, “Tapestry Poems,” 22; Sponsler, “Text,” pp. 22–23. 47. See Sponsler, “Text,” p. 26. 48. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:192, ll. 82, 520–21. 49. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:433, ll. 1–3. 50. Whether he generates these notes or copies them is not apparent; see Sponsler, “Text,” p. 27. 51. Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:433. Sponsler proposes that Bycorne may have been delivered orally rather than included on the cloth, pointing to the R.3.20 running titles for the poem, which mention mummings (a kind of performance), to support this idea. Sponsler, “Text,” p. 28. For an argument that these compare Bycorne to a mumming without defining it as such, see Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 106 n2. 52. A description and analysis of the entire sequence can be found in Adolpho Salvatore Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), pp. 347–58; the piece containing an image of

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53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

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the poet is reproduced on p. 354. Although Cavallo titles the piece The Poet with his Epilogue, he notes that this panel has been exhibited and published as the first panel, as well, and suggests it could have been either prologue or epilogue (p. 350). For a full transcription and translation, see Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, p. 353. The tapestries of the Trojan War, which I discuss below, include this iconography in the final panel; for a discussion of this and other examples, see Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, p. 234. As far as I am aware, Lydgate has never been identified as the source of Caxton’s passage. Manfred Görlach believes it to be Caxton’s own addition, but he also notes that “[o]ne of the evident shortcomings of the investigations [of hagiographical traditions] available in print is that scholars have tended to start with Caxton and look backwards to his sources.” See Manfred Görlach, Studies in Middle English Saints’ Legends (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), pp. 73, 141. While I have not been able to determine with certainty that Caxton had access to any of the extant manuscripts of St. George, there are tantalizing possibilities: the mercer Roger Thorney, who had connections to Caxton and certainly provided copy texts to Wynkyn de Worde, owned and may have commissioned R.3.21. See Gavin Bone, “Extant Manuscripts Printed from by W. de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney,” The Library 4th ser. 12 (1931–32): 284–306. See also Alexandra Gillespie, “Folowynge the Trace of Mayster Caxton,” in Caxton’s Trace, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 167–95. Hammond, “Tapestry Poems,” 21. Unwin, Gilds, p. 179. These drawings were published by Paul Schumann, Der trojanische Krieg (Dresden: A. Gutbier, 1898). For a discussion of the design, manufacture, and date of these tapestries of The Story of the Trojan War, see Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, pp. 239–43. For a reconstruction of the set based on extant pieces and transcriptions of the verses, see J.P. Asselberghs, Les Tapisseries tournaisiennes de la Guerre de Troie (Bruxelles: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, 1972), pp. 94–175. See Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, p. 56. Item 7 in this catalog, the tapestry of the Seven Sacraments, also sports French verses; it predates the Troy series and may be as early as 1435. See pp. 156–73. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 277. Only one surviving manuscript in the SEL tradition contains this story, Minneapolis MS Z.822 N.81. Görlach argues that the revisions in this fragmentary text reflect the late date and “regional distance from the original home of the SEL.” See Görlach, Studies, pp. 56–57. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 278. See Samantha Riches, “The Lost St. George Cycle of St. George’s Church, Stamford” in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Late Middle

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67. 68. 69.

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Ages, ed. Colin Richmond and Eileen Scarff (Leeds: Manly Publishing, 2001), pp. 135–50. The altarpiece has been published most recently in Frank Günter Zehnder, Katalog der AltkölnerMalerei (Cologne: Museen der Stadt Köln, 1990); Frank Günter Zehnder, Gotische Malerei in Köln: Altkölner Bilder von 1300–1550, (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1989); and Rainer Budde, Köln und seiner Maler 1300–1500 (Cologne: DuMont, 1986). Images of the altarpiece can also be viewed online at the Web site for the Rheinisches Bildarchiv, http://www.bildindex.de, by searching for “Georgsaltar.” Acts of Court of the Mercers Company, ed. Laetitia Lyell and Frank D. Watney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 309, 470. Colin Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence,” Chaucer Review 38.3 (2004): 230 [229–45]. See Miriam Gill, “Preaching and Image: Sermons and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval England” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Boston: Brill, 2002), pp. 155–80. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 277.

CHAPTER 8 LYDGATE, LOCATION, AND THE POETICS OF EXEMPTION John M. Ganim

his 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. Lydgate’s sense of place is part of a discourse linking locales, institutions, holiness, and power that can be traced back at least to William FitzStephen’s Description of London, attached to his biography of Becket, but Lydgate’s particular framing of this discourse is related to the specific conditions of monastic cultural production and its translatability to other settings.4 This chapter will outline this translation of power and place, beginning with the Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, also known as

T

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The Life of Saint Edmund, and will conclude with an analysis of some of Lydgate’s least-studied poems, the so-called Miracles of St. Edmund, specifically those that describe miracles occurring in London and in the vicinity of Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate’s home monastery. Although the thesis of this chapter is straightforward, its unfolding is not, and at the risk of redundancy, it is worth predicting my argument at the outset. Lydgate’s role as a poet and a monk at Bury St. Edmunds involves him in the larger defense of exemptions, privileges, and liberties associated with the monastery. As wealthy and powerful as monastic houses were in medieval England in particular and in Western Europe in general, they were obliged to defend their independence and their material holdings against claims by local episcopal hierarchies, by the crown and by the papacy, and often appealed to these various institutions for aid against the claims of the others. Many typically monastic literary productions, from hagiography to chronicles, often were composed with such defenses in mind, or were called up as evidence for such defenses. Lydgate is especially skilled in devising a rhetoric of negotiation among shared temporal, spiritual, and political claims. The poetic that results from such a monastic context is translatable to other, apparently more secular contexts, including commissions from the London elite. As a consequence, Lydgate’s monastic and civic poetry often takes on the quality of document or archive, both performing and preserving the claims of his patrons in the physical and material body of his texts. Lydgate is consistently interested in built landscapes, even describing his ancestral village as an intersection between place and time. He was, he writes in “L’Envoye” to The Fall of Princes addressed to his patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: Born in a vyllage which callyd is Lydgate, Be olde tyme a famous castel toun; In Danys tyme it was bete doun.5

Where the family romance imagines one’s heritage as far above one’s present embarrassed state, Lydgate creates a romance of place centered upon a one-time “famous castle town” that is linked, through a battle, with Saint Edmund—king of East Anglia and the namesake of Lydgate’s monastery, which was founded in the honor of Edmund’s martyrdom at nearby Hoxne to hold his remains.6 Interestingly, Bury originally claimed to be the site of the martyrdom, only later defining its importance as the resting place of the king’s remains. Lydgate’s monastic sense of history also informs his description of his birthplace. As with the martyred Edmund, the town of Lydgate was also destroyed by the Danes, but it survives in spirit, not in material form, or, more accurately, its material form exists

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virtually, in a somewhat shaky memory. In the Life of St. Edmund, Lydgate emphasizes Bury St. Edmunds’ claims as a preconquest abbey and therefore its independence, in many ways, from episcopal oversight and revenue assessment.7 In fact, it is entirely possible to read the poem in the context of a defense of monastic privilege and exemption. I will argue that Lydgate’s commissions for other places in England, namely London, are informed by his rhetorical experience in representing his monastic home of Bury St. Edmunds. I will compare the institutionally driven narrative message of Lydgate’s Life of St. Edmund with an analogous movement in the London poems, some of which also center on the records of miracles attributed to St. Edmund. The Life of St. Edmund contains its own account of its writing as a token specifically meant to remind Henry VI of his visit to the monastery. Lydgate is charged by “Thabbot William, his humble chapeleyn” (Book I, l. 188), and he is explicit about why the commission is undertaken: Hopyng ageynward, the kyng shal for his sake Been to that church diffence and protectour And into his handis al her quarel take.8

The “church” in these lines is a general one, but it is metonymically linked with Bury itself. And Henry is linked to St. Edmund, and therefore to Bury, the place that holds Edmund’s remains. Edmund is held up as a model for Henry. Indeed, the account of Edmund’s early life that follows, with his inheritance of both “Estyngland” and his native “Saxonie,” suggests Henry’s own claims to both England and to France, repeating the Lancastrian litany of legitimate succession. Moreover, in the early years of his life, Edmund is surrounded by worthy knights and others who guide him into his majority—again like Henry. He departs for Suffolk to claim the crown passed on to him by his childless uncle, and, despite resistance from troublemakers who question his right to the throne, is crowned there in Bures, Suffolk, not far from what will later be Bury St. Edmunds. The description of Edmund’s reign and comportment, from his administration of justice to his diet, suggests a narrative as much shaped by concern to educate the young king as to praise the martyred saint. A considerable motivation behind what we look back on as monastic cultural production, including the displaying of relics, the writing of saints’ lives, and the keeping of chronicles, was the defense of the autonomy and independence of the abbey, especially in regard to the defense of exceptions from episcopal interference, and sometimes even from the royal power to which Bury St. Edmunds claimed a special relationship.9 Even more fundamental was the attempt by abbeys founded before the conquest

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to preserve their rights and privileges in relation to the new Norman administration. A number of the miracles associated with St. Edmund describe the punishment of invaders and violators of his resting place.10 As with other sponsoring saints across England (and especially so directly after the Norman conquest), interference with the integrity of the monastic house is equated with the actions of marauders, doubters, and pagans. The Norman policy of syncretism in regard to older English saints allowed a rhetoric of autonomy and historical precedent to flourish in the writings of the inheritors of the older Anglo-Saxon houses, even when they were Norman appointments.11 Here again St. Edmund held a special place, both defining a specific notion of pious resistance and a model of kingship translatable across the divide of the conquest. In a visitation, a bishop or other high ranking episcopal figure might have the right to enter an abbey, call together the monks, and interrogate them about matters relating both to spiritual practice and to the administration of the house. Visitations could result in severe penalties, ranging from suspension to excommunication. By frequent pleas to the papacy, Bury was able to obtain the right of exemption in the twelfth century. In addition to defending the self-regulation of internal administration and spiritual practices according to its rule, large and wealthy monasteries such as Bury St. Edmunds also were constantly concerned with defending their feudal holdings against the claims of competing ecclesiastical institutions and other feudal lords. Bury St. Edmund’s concern with its independent status could not end with the granting of exemption. By the middle of the twelfth century the archbishop of Canterbury had also acquired extraordinary papal powers; now classified as a legate, he was able to exercise the power of the papacy directly. The monastery had to resist efforts by some powerful church officials, including such figures as William de Longchamps, Bishop of Ely and Chancellor for Richard I, and Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury and also Chancellor, to exert control. Not coincidentally, Bury was where the barons met to agree to confront John with the Magna Carta. The abbot himself, empowered after exemption to claim the trappings of the rank of a bishop, ran his own household and land holdings and rents independent from the chapter. Bury St. Edmunds was not alone in claiming exemptions from visitations by bishops and other possible compromises of its independence, at the same time that it vigorously defended its own liberties regarding feudal sovereignty over town and region. Large Cistercian and Benedictine abbeys across Europe often held papal exemptions from any subservience to local dioceses. Bury’s efforts in such areas are memorable at least partly because of its outsized abbots, from the administration of Abbot Samson, memorialized by Jocelyn of Brocelande, to Lydgate’s own abbot William

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Curteys.12 As with other major abbeys such as St. Albans (more often a political staging area, in contrast to Bury St. Edmunds’ role as a spiritual retreat for royalty), the enormous wealth and influence attributable to their vast holdings lent the abbot a stature normally reserved for clergy at the rank of bishop or higher. For instance, the abbey records detail the visit of Archbishop Arundel in 1400 after his visitation to Norwich and Ely. The protocol of the visit was quite specific that despite the comfort and respect accorded Arundel, he was not to be regarded by the abbey as an official visitor with power to conduct inquiries into the abbey’s affairs. Rather than being met at the grand entrance gate to the abbey (still standing today), he was met outside of Bury and personally conducted into the abbey by the abbot and some of the other monastic officers. No formal procession greeted him, and the church bells were not rung to announce his arrival. A reading of the records of Bury St. Edmunds might give the mistaken impression that such disputes and overlapping conflicts were the primary concerns of the monks and abbots. However that may be, the concern with traditional autonomy pervaded, sometimes covertly and sometimes overtly, many of the cultural productions of the great monastic houses of England. From the point of view of urban history, Bury’s importance lay partly in its conflicts with the town that it governed.13 A major uprising was directed against the monastery in 1327 by the townspeople, who, chafing under monastic control, rampaged through the abbey grounds and visited significant damage to the buildings. Even more symptomatic of its relations with the town was the fury with which the events of 1381 were visited upon the monastery, when the prior was beheaded by the rebels after an impromptu trial.14 Given Bury St. Edmunds’ claim to a special relationship to the king and to the idea of English kingship, at the same time that it defended its uniquely autonomous status, it is somewhat surprising to find Henry V, in what would be one of the last years of his life, directly urging reform of what he suggested was a laxity in Benedictine practice. Negotiations with the crown were understandably a long tradition with a rich and powerful abbey, but Henry called the chief Benedictine officers to his court more as a command. Henry had founded a Carthusian house at Sheen, and had also launched the famous Bridgetine house at Sion, with its accommodations for both sexes and its strict discipline. It is possible that Henry, with his own severe piety, had been influenced by powerful Carthusians, or that he admired the successful reform of Benedictine practices in Germany. In a laundry list of demands, he urged the Benedictines to put their own houses in order. Henry’s urging was more or less of a return to first principles, and he does not seem to have singled out Bury St. Edmunds any more than any other monastery. With a unified papacy and a new authority thus accorded to Rome, it is possible that Henry was attempting to preclude any

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interference from the new Pope, with whom he had been involved in extensive negotiations over the relative independence and unprecedented power, he, Henry, had been able to exert over the English church. At the same time, Henry’s emphasis on purity, discipline, and orthodoxy is consistent with his other ecclesiastically related decisions during his reign, including his involvement in the suppression of the Lollards a few years before. Sophisticated at institutional defense, the Benedictines were able to replace Henry’s demands with another set of goals of their own devising, and the King was in any case dead within a year. It is impossible to tell whether Lydgate and Bury St. Edmunds redoubled their efforts to cultivate Henry’s successor as a result, but the special lay status of Henry VI, his long visits to Bury St. Edmunds, and the elaborate rhetorical association of the special link of saint, king, and monastery in the Life of St. Edmund does suggest a systematic intentionality beyond the earlier close associations of the monastery with Lancastrian interests. Lydgate’s role in defending the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by Bury St. Edmunds was not limited to the implicit ideology of his hagiographic poems. Lydgate also probably wrote a versified translation and description of the official charters of the abbey, published in The Memorials of Bury St. Edmunds as the “Cartae Versificatae.” While not specifically ascribed to Lydgate, both the editor of the records of Bury St. Edmunds, Arnold, and the editor of the minor poems, MacCracken, defend Lydgate’s authorship.15 The poem summarizes or versifies grants and charters from King Cnut, from William I, from King Harthacnut, from Edward the Confessor, and from others. Kathryn A. Lowe demonstrates how critical each of these charters, some of doubtful authenticity, were when called into play at various points in Bury’s history of defending itself from challenges by local episcopal authorities and others. Lydgate thus lent his pen not only to metaphoric and cultural defenses of Bury’s exceptionality, but also to its legal and documentary claims in the most literal sense. That is, at least part of the appeal of Lydgate’s commissioned work to his contemporaries lay in a particular rhetorical stance that allowed a claim for historical autonomy as well as a special relationship to the center of power, usually embodied in the king. St. Edmund, as both king and martyr, is the obvious key to this claim, but his contemporaries found what might be called Lydgate’s aesthetic of exemption useful to other contexts, other institutions, and other places. Certainly this is true of Lydgate’s handling of the genre of hagiography.16 Writers such as the Augustinians Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, both the subject of some recent important work, obviously found much in Lydgate to model themselves on, and I believe that what I am trying to describe here was part of that appeal.17 Even the abbot of St. Albans, the other most powerful monastery in

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England, calls on Lydgate to write The Life of St. Alban in 1439, and it is hard not to imagine that the success of the Life of St. Edmund was at least partly responsible for the commission.18 The history of Bury, so foregrounded in Lydgate’s work, reveals a history of negotiation, exertions of control, resistance to control, constant self-definition, and lobbying for the monastery, often expressed in stories, legends, and narrative asides. As with other great monastic houses, but with a clearer branding, as it were, the monks at Bury could lay claim to an intensely personal relationship to their patron St. Edmund, who, by virtue of his kingship, was also a personal link to the crown itself. History, place, and the bodies of the martyr and king (and kings) are thereby linked in a complex that is richly interdependent, but also possible to disaggregate for strategic purposes. I believe that this aspect of Lydgate’s aesthetic and rhetoric had an even broader appeal, helping to explain his many civic commissions, especially in London. Recently, C. David Benson has asked us to add a “civic” Lydgate, largely characterized by his poetry related to London, to the Lydgate of the court and the monastery.19 Among such works are the satirical views of urban life in A Ballade of Jak Hare and Against Millers and Bakers, both of which may have led earlier readers such as John Stow to assume that Lydgate had also written London Lickpenny. King Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry Into London, according to Benson, alludes both to Lydgate’s Lancastrian court poetry and to his monastic background, adding biblical figures to the original pageants. The Danse Macabre, written as a legend for a cloister wall at St. Paul’s, was also probably commissioned by London civic leaders such as John Wells, the mayor, and John Carpenter, common clerk of London from 1417–38. Benson also argues that such well-known works as Lydgate’s Troy Book, especially in the scenes of Priam’s improvements of his city, and The Siege of Thebes, in its Prologue dramatizing the return of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims to London, are thematically linked to London and its self-image. Lydgate’s mummings, including A Mumming at London, the Mumming at Bishopswood, the Mumming for the Mercers of London, and A Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London celebrate their patrons and the city, but according to Benson they also, as with Lydgate’s other civic works, offer a subliminal critique of their commercial values. Although written for specific occasions and somewhat different audiences, Lydgate’s mummings reveal an underlying message of the possible coexistence of potentially conflicting sources of authority. The Mumming at Bishopswood, in the middle of a Maying poem, reminds the sheriffs and others present of their calling, in such a way as to emphasize their jurisdiction on the one hand, and on the other to suggest that their office does not, or need not, conflict with the claims of the crown, represented by the Princess

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present. Spring will not only usher in refreshment, physical delight, and renewal, but it will also usher in a new coordination of estates: Wynter shal passe of hevynesse and trouble, F[l]owres shal springe of perfite charite, In hertes Qere shal be no meninge double, Buddes shal [blosme] of trouQe and vnytee, Pleinly for to exyle duplicytee, Lordes to regne in Qeire noble puissance, Pe people obeye with feythful obeyssaunce. Of alle estates Qere shal beo oone ymage, And princes first shal ocupye Qe hede, And prudent iuges, to correcte outrages, Shal trespassours const[r]eynen vnder drede, Pat innosentes in Qeire lowlyhede As truwe comvnes may beo Qeire socour, Truwly contune in Qeire faithful labour.20

When urban patrician culture first articulated itself in the late thirteenth century across Europe, it did so by imitating the trappings and rituals of the nobility whose influence the new bourgeoisie sought to escape. What marks civic culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is an awareness of a set of concerns and themes unique to urban identity, and at least one of them is a didactic emphasis on moral qualities, both religious and secular, that are inserted—sometimes uneasily—into festive forms. In this sense, what is unique about Lydgate is not so much the awkwardness of his juxtaposition in the previous passage of the homiletic and the festive, but his relative comfort in linking the two discourses. Shifting from festivity to homily almost seamlessly, Lydgate suggests that the coordination of time and season should also introduce a new harmony of classes and offices. This is somewhat different than the usual pleas to estates to work together, in that it emphasizes their separate spheres. Lydgate transforms time into social space, and he defines that social space as open to and even subject to negotiation. When Lydgate turned to his projects sponsored by the London city powers, then, he already was prepared for a poetic that could simultaneously assert royal majesty and institutional independence. Among Lydgate’s possible patrons or collaborators, one of the most interesting was John Carpenter.21 He is remembered today for a bequest that led, in the nineteenth century, to the founding of the City of London School and was also associated with Richard Whittington, the famous mayor of London who died in 1423. Carpenter may have been responsible for one of the earliest guild libraries at Guildhall, but most relevant to our purposes, he put

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together the Liber Albus, a collection of items relating to the rights of the City of London.22 Carpenter was heir to the upheavals of the late fourteenth century, including the Rising of 1381, the ravages of the plague, the Northampton and Brembre factionalizations, the Merciless Parliament, and Richard’s seizure of London’s liberties in 1392. The Liber Albus thus stresses both the need for stability and the need for independence in its collation of historical and legal records. In this sense, it is as much an argument as it an archive. The Liber Albus justifies itself as a memorial repository, in lieu of the collective memory of men who may, through such strokes of fortune as the plague, be lost to future generations: “Forasmuch as the fallibility of human memory and the shortness of life do not allow us to gain an accurate knowledge of everything that deserves remembrance, even though the same may have been committed to writing,—more especially, if it has been so committed without order or arrangement,—and still more so, when no such written account exists.”23 The book itself is meant to be a material repository of memory. The fifteenth century saw an explosion of London chronicles, but such chronicles were part of a tradition stretching back to the thirteenth century and even earlier. What is new about them in the fifteenth century, however, is that, like dramatic performances, they reflect an aspect of mercantile literary aesthetics that seeks to distinguish itself from aristocratic models.24 Lydgate’s commissions were in fact motivated by the same concern, to preserve for future generations an image of what happened, or what was supposed to happen, as in the Liber Albus. Why Lydgate? Why, that is, should Carpenter turn to Lydgate to execute these commissions? One obvious reason is status. By hiring a poet with such strong connections to the court, Carpenter might be seen in some sense to ape the aristocracy. But Carpenter’s motivation was probably more sophisticated, calling upon a poet the way one might call upon a lobbyist nowadays: to make a case for one’s agenda. Moreover, by hiring a poet with royal connections and the aura of speaking to and from power, Carpenter could place London and its interests at the same level as that of the crown, to suggest both that the interests of the crown and the City are one in the same, and, at the same time, that the interests of the City must and should be respected as an entity distinct from the unilateral view of the king. From his earliest poetry Lydgate had in fact positioned himself as the poet of “Both/And,” rather than “Either/Or,” as one able to devise a form of panegyric that could hold in suspension simultaneous and competing claims. Such a rhetorical position was rooted in Lydgate’s earlier defense of Bury, which linked the particular location of the monastery with its empowerment and protection by the body of the martyred king.

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But Edmund was a moveable saint in several different senses. One of the most intriguing images in Lydgate’s Life of St. Edmund is that of the wolf watching over Edmund’s severed head, moved to another place than his body: But blissid Ihesu which euery thyng may se His holy martir list nat so forsake Bvt of his grace and merciful pite Knowyng that he deied for his sake Suffred a wolf his holy hed to take And to conserue it ageyn assautis alle. . .. (Book II, ll. 840–47)

Once found, Edmund’s head is reassembled so miraculously that it is difficult for all but the most discerning to notice the sutures: The folkys dide ther bysy dilligence This holy tresour this relik souereyne To take it upp with dew reuerence And bar it forth tyl they did atteyne Vnto the body and of thylke tweyne Togidre set God by myricale anoon Enyoyned hem that they were maad bothe oon Off ther departying ther was no thyng seene Atwen the body and this blissid hed For they togidre fastnyd were so clene Except only who sotylly took heed A space appered breede of a purpil threed. . .. (Book II, ll. 946–57)

It is not only Edmund’s literal body that can be moved and reassembled, but also the powers associated with that body. And here I turn from the sumptuous and lengthy Life of St. Edmund to the relatively unstudied Miracles of St. Edmund, which contain some of the most specific locations in Lydgate’s poetry, depicting them with the immediacy of city tabloid journalism. The Miracles of St. Edmund have been rarely discussed, perhaps because of their uncertain canonical status, perhaps because they do not fit into most general theories of Lydgate’s poetry.25 But their relation to the transpositions of the rhetoric of place described above provides a new way of considering them as part of a Lydgatean project. The Miracles describe three incidents that occurred in 1441 and 1444, one of them in London and the others occurring in the vicinity of Bury. A group of children are playing on a limestone bridge over the Thames on

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St. Edmund’s day “at ffoure afftirnoon” (l. 26) when an ox from a passing team lifts up one of them on his horns and throws him into the rushing waters: On that bregge, bylt of lym and stoon, Chyldre to pleye assemblyd were in oon; Among which sone of a ffleccheer, Tendre of lymes so as he myght goon, Was among hem, of age but thre yeer. Which of custom ther pleyes did ordeyne, Lyk ther conceyt, of verray Innocence. Tyme of ther play to-gidre thre or tweyne Kept ther dispoort, in whoom was no diffence. A droof of oxes cam fforby ther presence Passyng the bregge; the chyldre wer so neer: Oon of the beestys by sodeyn violence Cauht in his hornys the chyld of the ffleccheer, Lefft hym vp-on heyghte toward the Oryent, Ovir the wal caste hym in-to the fflood— Sondry peple beeing ther present: Off aventure somme on the bregge stood. (ll. 28–44)26

The child—maybe a month short of three years old, notes Lydgate—is swept by the waves “toward Cooldherberwe passyng ‘The Swan’” (l. 55) when a boatman, during an ebb in the flow, lifts him into his boat. Meanwhile, the child’s mother, at home, and knowing nothing of this tragedy, is informed of what has happened by a neighbor. At this point the mother tears her clothes in grief and runs out toward Thames Street, where she meets “Lord Fanhoop” (probably John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, a son-in-law of John of Gaunt). She desperately asks him what feast day this might be, and he answers that it is King Edmunds’, upon which she kneels in prayer. Suddenly she hears her child crying out, “Wher is my moodir, my owene moodir dere?” (l. 129). She runs down to the Thames, and is miraculously reunited with her child. One might think that the miracle could use some sequence editing, in that the child is rescued before the mother knows he is gone, but that can easily be explained by regarding the mother’s prayers as the agent of the miracle itself, the calm boatman scooping the child from the water as a wave ebbs. The miracle depends on a specific geography that captures the physical relationship of the city’s buildings to its people precisely, and that contrasts the walls of stone to the forces of nature rushing through them, including the rushing oxen and the swirling waters. Anyone doubting Lydgate’s narrative or descriptive ability

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should be directed to this tale, whose power depends on an investment in the physical landscape that is often obscured in his other works. Like many saints, and particularly like many urban saints, Edmund specializes in child endangerment rescue scenarios. One afternoon, not far from Northgate, a female toddler slightly less than two years old falls off an embankment and into the river while gathering flowers. The said stream is seven feet deep—this is Lydgate’s line—and she was buried head and breast deep in the mud. Her five-year-old sister cried out, and everyone on the street rushed to help and administer first aid, but by the time they arrived the child was “gruff” (l. 269). Again, a neighbor runs to tell the mother, who laments as the child’s body is brought to shore, her feet cold to the touch. Suddenly, a highly competent women passing by picks up the child by the legs, turns her upside down, and shakes out the dreadful river fluids, while everyone prays to St. Edmund. Soon, the child’s color comes back into her face. Abbot William happens to be nearby and orders the bells to be rung and a te deum to be sung. The child is brought to Bury in a procession to visit the body of the saint who has saved her life. Bridges and banks were in reality an especially treacherous passage for children, but the frequency with which they comprise the settings of miracles suggest a literary or mythic motivation. They are also paths of social crossing, as are roads and crossroads. So they make an appropriate setting for an emphasis on community and on public apprehension and witness of the events in question. Along Rysbygate, another baby not two years of age is run over by a cartwheel, her body broken, bloody, and blackened. As the entire neighborhood comes out, a neighbor picks up the child to bring her to her father’s house, and the wisest among them advises taking the child to Edmund’s shrine, upon which she is brought back to life. Again, the formation of the people in a spontaneous procession, the emphasis on community and social cohesion, and the miraculous ordering of a chaotic and accidental world by the intercession of the saint are all emphasized by the physical layout of the town. That is, in the works that directly link Bury with London, the material and physical structure of place becomes centrally important, so that it is not so much transcendence that is emphasized as the special status accorded to place by Edmund’s miracles. Edmund’s “miracle,” however, is not only the saving of the lives of these children; rather, it is his inspiration of a communal coherence, one similar to the ideal of the legal and physical topographies of London that we find from the writing of FitzStephen through that of Carpenter and Stow. Such an ideal could cut both ways. The fact that community is solidified by a crisis reveals a certain undercurrent to Lydgate’s image of urban life in the Miracles. In Lydgate’s youth, Bury St. Edmunds could hardly lay claim to the utopian Golden Age reputation it had had during the first centuries

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after its founding, nor had it yet begun to enjoy the relative renaissance it would experience during Lydgate’s maturity. The model of community that we find in the Miracles is a utopian representation rather than a mimetic imitation of urban life, despite its realistic detail. There are no watchmen or other representatives of civic order in the city and towns of their settings. Rather, by eliminating such figures, Lydgate suggests that community can be achieved only by uniting the social and spiritual bodies. Civil society works best, the Miracles seem to say, when it follows the model of monastic utopianism, in which neighbors, guests, passersby, and others are united in a common goal, even while their specializations (some of the intercessors in the stories have near-professional skills) work separately toward that goal. The social background of Lydgate’s miracles substitute the neighborhood or community for both the watchful eye of and for the support structure of either a nuclear or extended family (with the possible exception of the sister or brother reporting that their sibling has fallen into the silt of the river). In each case, it takes a village, or its equivalent, to raise the child from the dead or else rescue him or her from danger. The Miracles imagine ordinary life, heightened by crisis, as best fulfilled by the ideals of monastic life. In this regard, the framing of fortune and contingency in the Edmund miracles is worth considering.27 For the saint and his inspiration seems to magically inform the action and motivate the agency of various characters in the Miracles, impelling them to shift from a passive posture of grief to an active intervention. The saint is capable of redeeming the waywardness of fortune, channeling its chaotic and destructive potential into a providential path. Another aspect of the miracles is the response of parents, friends and neighbors, and bystanders. They do not kneel and pray as a first resort, but rather engage in vigorous attempts at first aid. In the narrative of these miracles, an enlightened or fortuitously placed individual intervenes at a propitious moment. Only when physical intervention proves futile do the participants and observers usually turn to prayer or appeals for a miracle. Significantly, except for the resuscitation of one of the children in the last miracle, the Saint enables action rather than acting himself. The point of view in Lydgate’s Miracles is significantly a communal or composite point of view. In the first reports of a miracle connected to a saint, an individual or a few people—often parents—might describe the occurrence, recounting the absence and subsequent recovery of a child. But in response to commissions investigating a cluster of miracles, as well as to legal investigations by bailiffs and coroners, a wider range of points of view, and a carefully articulated sequence of actions in time are woven together. It is such a sequence that we find in the Miracles, with their explicit recounting of who, what, when, where, and why. What also marks the result of legal or canonical investigation, as opposed to the tales of pious

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participants in the accident or miracle, is a very detailed picture of landscape, buildings, roads, natural features, as well as their relative location and the time in takes to traverse from one point to the other. Lydgate’s miracles resemble such hagiographic legal documents in their eyewitness point of view, as much as they resemble more self-conscious literary genres. The complete description of the child being swept into the Thames could not be narrated from one point of view. It is composed of a series of perspectives provided by eyewitnesses to different parts of the rescue drama. But Lydgate’s Miracles may also have been virtual miracles, calling upon the details and structures of child rescue narratives found in legal inquiries, local chronicles, and hagiographic investigations.28 The documentary quality of Lydgate’s miracles more nearly resembles the records of hagiographic investigations necessary to support canonization than they do the more literary or even romance qualities of saints’ lives. While obvious to historians who study miracle stories, from the perspective of a literary scholar these features help to explain the artless spontaneity and directness of the Miracles, despite their stanzaic form and in contrast to much of Lydgate’s other writing, which often depends on elaborate rhetoric to suggest that human actions are divinely influenced or inspired. What I am calling Lydgate’s poetic of exemption produces works that are performative, commemorative, and memorial. Lydgate’s works are not reflective of but actually part of material culture. Their function is archival, even documentary, in that they offer a retrospective witness, one that is simultaneously declarative and petitionary. Lydgate’s works take on the significance of objects as well as texts. Their existence is more important than their essence. If one imagines a Northrop Frye-like continuum from painting and sculpture on the one hand, to performance and drama on the other, Lydgate’s London poems fall somewhere in the middle. That is, rather than exploiting the narrative temporality of language, they emphasize the ecphrastic, not only describing bodies and objects and props, but also becoming props themselves. Bycorne and Chychevache was commissioned by a “werthy citeseyn” of London as “the devise of a peynted or desteyned clothe for an halle a parlour or a chaumbre,” according to John Shirley; the Legend of St. George was described as “the devyse of a steyned halle,” made for the armourers of London, according to Stow, who also claims that the “The Dance of Death” was part of a wall painting.29 That is, Lydgate’s mummings and other apparently performative works were imagined, at least by Stow and Shirley, as part of the physical and material landscape of the city. The scholarship surrounding the “Entry of Henry VI into London” sometimes suggests that Lydgate devised the pageant. It is not impossible that Lydgate was consulted beforehand on the details of the procession, but as most authorities now agree, Lydgate basically translated

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and versified Carpenter’s letter describing the pageant.30 The poem was officially commissioned by the Lord Mayor of London, John Wells, and some of the description in the poem, such as the allegorical figures of Mercy, Grace, and Pity, may have been inserted by Lydgate to gesture toward Wells’ patronage, and may not have been actually part of the pageant itself. Lydgate’s poem, then, despite its gestures toward performativity, including giving some of the allegorical figures speaking parts (in the actual pageant these had legends affixed to them), has the status of record or archive, of object rather than event. To the artifacts of the material culture of late medieval London, then, can be added Lydgate’s poetry itself. Commissioned to record a moment in history, Lydgate effectively removes the event from history, emphasizing its timeless and ritual quality. The “Entry of Henry VI into London” is Lydgate’s Ode to a Grecian Urn. The piety of Lydgate’s poetics of exemption is in my account highly purposeful and instrumental, but part of its aesthetic power, especially in his hagiographic and miracle poems, is that the instrumental is integrated with the spiritual, so that the more one believes in the saint and his powers, the more pervasive and beneficial to all is the model of a monastic life originally designed to be separate from the active world. In these poems, we see a process of literal, linguistic translation, and a symbolic physical translation of power and grace from and between London and Bury. A poetic discourse that begins by celebrating the reassembled body of the martyred saint and king in the monastery is also employed to encourage a reassembly of the body politic in the secular city. Lydgate’s poetry, encouraged by Abbot William and others to glorify and protect Bury St. Edmunds and its special place, also becomes enlisted in the effort of John Carpenter, and Richard Whittington, and Mayor Wells to stitch together a London that is simultaneously a legal and literary and material place. Notes 1. 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. 2. 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). 3. 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).

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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

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14. 15.

16.

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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). See Gottfried, Urban Crisis, pp. 220–235. 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 Versificatae,” 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). Fiona Somerset, “ ‘Hard is with Seyntis to Make Affray’: Lydgate the ‘Poet Propagandist’ as Hagiographer,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, pp. 258–78, has recently argued for a unified consideration of Lydgate’s secular and religious poems, which have previously been approached separately. She finds an identical ideological structure underlying both, uncovering the elements of the Lancastrian propagandist even in the hagiographic writings, which are concerned with “regality, proper rule, and succession” (p. 261). In some of her observations, Somerset partly anticipates my argument here, noting that “Edmund’s most important posthumous miracle, anticipated since the opening prologue (ll. 58–64), is his retributive defeat of the next Danish encroachment through his murder of Sweyn, who wishes to attack Christianity and encroach on Bury’s franchise by imposing taxes” (p. 266); at the same time, St. Edmund seems

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18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

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to overlook arbitrary behavior from “anyone who upholds the franchise and liberty of Bury St. Edmund’s and its surrounding region” (p. 271). 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. The Mumming at Bishopswood in John Lydgate, The Minor Poems, II:669, ll. 44–56. 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). Liber Albus, p. 2. 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. Altenglische Legenden, pp. 441–45. 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

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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. 28. 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. 29. 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. 30. 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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AFTERWORD LYDGATE’S REFRAIN: THE OPEN WHEN

D. Vance Smith

t has taken almost forty years, but Lydgate is finally recovering from Pearsall.1 The chapters in this book testify not to a surmounting of Pearsall’s critique, but to an embrace of the very pathological traits in Lydgate’s writing that Pearsall identified wittily and eloquently. These traits, of course, are only pathological when considered against the force of the powerful and only partly suppressed adoption of the normativity of a high modernist economy of narrative (what Pearsall calls a “fastidious notion of poetry” embodied in a “slim volume of verse”).2 For readers accustomed to the digressions and immensities of David Foster Wallace’s and Mark Danielewski’s work, it must be possible to resist Pearsall’s devotion to proportion and circumspect development of character. Lydgate’s verse seems to extend infinitely, and therefore it seems to invite us to critique it for its failure to have shortcomings, its apparent failure to acknowledge a linguistic economy apart from its infinite capital. More inescapably, Lydgate has always suffered from Chaucer. Chaucer’s instinctive sense of architectonics, structure, the duration of time and memory, gives him the confidence not to resolve everything. Where the humor of The Miller’s Tale is partly subterranean, in discovering how words like “hende” are complicit in a sly poetic surveillance, Lydgate would give us immediately a catalogue of the word’s uses. Yet that impulse is really what strangely animates Lydgate’s poetry. The desire to catalog is really part of the lyricist’s desire for the world, the sadness at its passing away, and there’s not much emotional distance between letting it go and entombing it completely. Where Pearsall disparaged Lydgate’s languorous style by comparing it to slow-motion film of a bird’s flight, we might compare it to the ravishingly beautiful video art of Bill Viola, which shows the infinite complexity of expression in a face by replaying a moment in extreme slow

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motion. There’s something elegiac yet fascinating in watching one of Viola’s installations, because it makes one aware of how much is contained and lost in a fleeting instant. Lydgate’s much-mocked opening of The Siege of Thebes, in which he extends Chaucer’s beautiful, nested opening of The Canterbury Tales, is one of the most infamous sentence fragments in English literature. But it is not the product of incompetence or inattention; it is the product of his refusal to see the world passing away, which he knows at the same time is all too irresistible. In his longest narratives the longing for return is palpable: the “recur” of the declining body of England, of all of us, of our language. In the Troy Book the meta-narratives that frame each book are like the refrain of this longing, the repeated statement of the relation between the present in which Lydgate writes and the past that is suspended. The most egregious refrain in all of Lydgate’s writing must be the opening of The Siege of Thebes, which begins with a restatement of the opening of The Canterbury Tales. It is a restatement in both the positive and negative senses of the word: it echoes Chaucer’s great eighteen-line sentence so deliberately and closely that we cannot help but imagine we are witnessing a repeatable phenomenon. But we do not experience Lydgate’s Canterbury refrain as a repetition of the precise phenomenon of the opening of Chaucer. Chaucer’s opening is terminated, as Lydgate recognizes at some level, and I think his most radical claim to have continued, to have revived, the work of Chaucer lies in his reanimation of the lyric refrain that he sees as Chaucer’s innovation, in his reopening of that sentence. What readers since Pearsall have seen as Lydgate’s risible inattention to the architectonics of the sentence, his obliviousness to any grammatical object and a terminating “then” to close the series of “when’s” that Chaucer so neatly suggests and then designates, is the clearest symptom of Lydgate’s lyric sense of time. Next to Chaucer’s majestic but implicit assurance that the moment to which he is pointing will emerge, Lydgate’s syntactical effluence seems both hasty and pompous. But it also leaves us wondering what happened at the moment that we can never see, that moment in which whatever happened that caused Lydgate to leave the sentence incomplete but ended, that lapsus of attention, of memory, of logic, that left his great Chaucerian refrain—like Chaucer’s work would always remain for him— forever open. The “open when” of Lydgate’s writing is characterized by this persistence of the present, by a charming, even heroic, refusal to submit to its aporia, to the impossibility and utter desirability of ever really being present in any sense—as Augustine demonstrates in Book 11 of The Confessions, and especially at the moment of writing. This “open when” may account for the surprising economy and pungency of many of Lydgate’s shorter lyrics, especially when measured against

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the extensive dilation of the longer poems. The “open when” is the immense power of the refrain, and it is surprising how often Lydgate’s refrains in short poems can be read as embodiments of larger narrative and ontological questions. The circularity, persistence, and irresolution of the refrain also haunts the larger narrative of poems such as the Troy Book. It is both regressive and inceptive, the point around which Lydgate organizes the matter of these poems, the appeal of and to language to resolve or “resorte” the lost world of the Golden Age, as Lydgate calls it at the end of the Troy Book. “Resorte” is a word that conjures both coming and going (re- and sortir), and as both the short and long poems show, it is precisely the abundance of matter that allows, that sorts out, the lyric excursus that is such a material and vital feature of Lydgate’s poetry. When we turn to Lydgate’s meta-reflections on the nature, the form, or the matter of his poetry, we encounter a deeply materialist economy. It is at the pole opposite to form, in fact, that Lydgate is most compelling, at the level of the matter he touches. I do not mean here the legendary matière that he inherits and far more scrupulously than Chaucer documents and preserves, because that is something of a formal legacy. And I do not mean the way in which Lydgate can burden his narrative with the weight of synonym, antiphrasis, exemplum, and precept, which is also a part—and some might be tempted to say a synecdoche, a part standing for the whole—of his poetic tradition. It is this last trait, his seemingly unrelenting extension of descriptions by the use of amplificatio, that makes Lydgate seem most medieval, most exemplary to us of his time, furthest from the Chaucerian ideal, which was once ours, too, of a formal and minimalist ideal that selects poetic matter only to illuminate that Apollonian form, disdainful of the human. What makes Lydgate such a salutary and important writer, I would argue, is that he exposes the nullification of the embodied and material present in Chaucerian humor, the inhuman perspective that makes materiality the symptom of both human finitude, and the inaccessible and knowing perspective of narrative pleasure. The itch of “leest” materiality in Absolon’s mouth in the Miller’s Tale (l. 3683) is only funny because of what he does not know, and what we could not know, either. What kind of itchy materiality is it that makes sense, so to speak, when we know the form in which the matter is embedded only by knowing the form independent of the impulses of the (and of whose?) body. We have to know the form, the abstract shape, of the narrative in order to know what impressions to select and preserve for the story’s future. Everything else disappears. The problem of this transcendent, inhuman form of knowledge is intensified even further in other Canterbury tales, such as the very next one, in which the dominant logic that governs a world covered in

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darkness and regulated only by touch is the implacable formal demand for the justice of the fabliau. Even in the midst of night, Chaucer looks ahead, to what lies beyond it. The humor at night in The Merchant’s Tale comes from its brevity, shaped by the witty and incisive formalism of bodily and rhetorical anticlimax: on his wedding night, January “taketh hire [May], and kisseth hire ful ofte, / And leyde hym doun to slepe, and that anon” (ll. 1948–49). We might say that this is the Chaucerian ontology, in which matter makes most sense when it is contained in antiphrasis. Consider what Lydgate does with night in a comparable moment: The worthi man, as it cam hym of age, He toke a slepe; al nyhte he was in rest With wery bones, but his wife of corage Wolde have be fed, as brid in the nest. She het his bak, to halse hym thouht hir best, But al for nouht was al hir contenaunce, The man was of a gentle governaunce. And a man of sadde religioun, He kept the nyhte in peas and silence; He brak no covenaunt nen condicioun, That he with hir made first by his prudence, But sobrely he kept his contynence. I dare wel sey ther was no speke y-broke, Nor wrestelyng wherby he was y-wroke.3

In Chaucer’s passage January’s sudden passivity is surprising, and it brings the narrative of that moment to a halt that makes sense only because of the way in which sexual arousal is converted into the sudden arousal of repose—the conversion of one sense of the phrase “sleep with” into another. In Lydgate’s passage the husband’s passivity gives the poet the occasion for an extended series of rhetorical inventions. The husband is not merely doing nothing, nor not responding appropriately, as is the case in Chaucer. His inaction, his suspension in sleep, Lydgate tells us, is the result of his gravitas or his comportment, the sign of a vigilant self-governance even in the midst of lethargy. Or else the silence he leaves is charged with the inward intensity of prayer and contemplation; or surely, at the very least, his silence is that of the scrupulous and prudent lawyer, who promises nothing and keeps to that promise. Moments like this are symptomatic of the relation between time and narrative in Lydgate. He never seems to enjoy himself as much as when nothing is happening, and he pushes to describe what that is like. In the “Prohemy” he does that with the figure of auxesis, an ironic comparison

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that ridicules by exaggerated comparison. But the joke is that silence is a negation no matter where we encounter it, and the brilliance of this passage is that it fills this silence with further negations. It is probably the case that Lydgate’s dilations are not this brilliant everywhere, but this passage does show how Lydgate’s poetry negates the real time of experience (and the suspension of experience) by projecting onto it the experience of rhetorical invention. And this extravagant amplification is really motivated by an enjoyment of the negative. As Hegel demonstrates in the first part of the Phenomenology of Spirit, every negation has a positive aspect: it is also a determination, a recognition that it is other than something else.4 In this respect, Lydgate’s use of amplification is the greatest sign of his tremendous capacity for tarrying with the negative. The profusion of determinations that copia in its simplest form of extensive synonyms gives him also allows him to designate what is not there, what we do not experience while we amplify the things and concepts present to us. That experience is obviously also what occupatio gives us, the listing of things that a poet tells us he will not tell us. But this is not the kind of negation that I mean, because it is a negation in name only. Lydgate’s is a negation of the name itself, or at least of the capacity of the name to remain indeterminate, a concept rather than a thing. In other words, Lydgate’s poetry more often celebrates his capacity to generate names for a concept or thing than it does his capacity to analyze or break down those things dialectically or to reaffirm the deep connection between word and thing. His names are, in several senses, quite literally the matter of his writing. Poor Jason is emblematic of the reader who fails to grasp the ineluctable materiality of Lydgate’s discourse. Dazzled by Pelleus’s ability “with asour & with golde to peynte / His gay wordys,” words that are, in fact, utterly aureate and copious (“enchaseth & voideth,” “inspeccioun,” “disposicioun”), Jason agrees to find the “flees of gold” and “retourne hom in body safe and sounde” (Troy Book, Book 1, ll. 384–85, 432–34, 483–85). So extreme is the surface tension of Lydgate’s poetry that Jason here is also a figure of the very project that Lydgate anticipates at the (very distant) end of the poem, the restoration of a golden world that is not incidentally a world of aureate language. That a literally superficial piece of gold would occasion this enterprise only points to the deep importance of superficiality in Lydgate’s poetry. As Jennifer Floyd demonstrates in her chapter for this book, the delight in his poetry lies also in a play of reference beyond the sententious force of the text, and indeed beyond the conceptual domain of the text itself. The very predictability of a Lydgate poem is founded on what Floyd calls the “aesthetics of the conventional surface in Lydgate’s poetry,” but in the lyric, expressive mode that emerges alongside it she identifies a complex play of materialities, surfaces, and places.

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In her discussion of Lydgate’s poetics of amplification, Michelle Warren offers another way of understanding the significance of the apparent superficiality of compositional mode. It is the index not of unmotivated digression and careless indulgence, but of a governing sense of telos, the indication that one is aiming at truth precisely by “long processe.” As Warren argues, the semantic range of “processe” includes other fields of production that operate on the materiality of the world, and that double back on the work of Lydgate and Lovelich to provide them with guarantees of the specific address of their works and of the embodiedness of the space of narrative itself. But this “process” of truth also implicates the times of historical memory and of narrative in a continuous, interminable making. At the end of the Troy Book, Lydgate calculates that the Trojan War lasted ten years, six months, and “overmore complet dayes twelve” (l. 3356). Here the word “complet” clearly refers to the length of entire days, and the whole phrase to a clearly delimited span of historical time, the Trojan War. But just a few lines later (ten), Lydgate uses the same word to refer to the writing of the book, the “tyme complet of this translacioun” (l. 3366). It seems at first to be an uncharacteristically precise and sharp gesture at the moment of completion, sometime in 1420. But as I have argued, Lydgate does not so much repudiate clearly deictic gestures like this, especially gestures that mark a time of utterance, as he overwhelms them, diffuses, and, yes, even confuses them, with his amplification of the time of invention. John M. Ganim examines the kinds of territorial, hagiographic, and narrative pressure that surface in what he nicely refers to as Lydgate’s “poetics of exemption.” In Ganim’s formulation, this poetics crosses from the literal and archival configuration of the space of monastic privilege to the inventional and memorial determination of the space of and for Lydgate’s poetry. In Lydate’s “civic” poetry, he writes, we can see most clearly the relation between the negations and determinations of social space and the moral, political, and theological agon animating “a form of panegyric that could hold in suspension simultaneous and competing claims.” As Claire Sponsler argues, the time and space to which even Lydgate’s ostensibly “public” London poems point is difficult to locate, partly because we have tended to assume that “London,” especially, is equivalent in the fifteenth century to a “public sphere,” and that Lydgate therefore wrote for that public in some version of a “public vois,” and partly because important bibliographic information about their contexts has been lost. I would also suggest that the evasiveness of register in many of Lydgate’s poems is an internal feature, another aspect of a mode of amplification that veers into the terrain of rhetorical invention, and in which real sites and inventional topoi lose their boundaries. “The Disguising of London,” for instance, which Sponsler points out has a clear deictic reference to “this

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houshold,” which appears near the end of the poem, uses a slightly different mode of deixis, switch reference, to introduce each of the allegorical sisters that appear in the poem: “This lady in your presence” (l. 139), etc. Switch reference distinguishes the subject of one clause or string of clauses from another or, as in the case of Lydgate, one string of synonyms from another. Yet that “this” is also a personal deixis, a reference to the person standing before us in the performance. Earlier in the poem, however, “this” refers to an even wider range of places, times, and people: to Fortune, to her island, to the day; to her “dwelling,” which Lydgate also calls a “hous,” “hall,” “mancyon,” “dongeon,” “hoolde,” and “habytacle.” Yet this last profusion of synonyms is not merely a virtuoso exercise in copia: Lydgate’s point here is that Fortune is not “elyche” from moment to moment, just as her “hous is ay unstable.” Amplification here is the experience of unlikeness itself, the slippage from one noun to another, even in the designation of places. In the “Disguising” “this place” is a refrain that brings us back to a topical moment, but a moment that increasingly excludes everything but the poem’s own matter. Lydgate’s infamous “Treatise on Lauandres” may seem to push this logic further, to exclude even the most elementary kind of poetic matter—not just the question of Horacian dignity but of conceivable interest—by focusing not just on things themselves, but on the inherently maculated nature of matter. In her chapter, Maura Nolan argues that the poem confronts us with the aporia of its reference, appearing as it does with other poems whose moral is obvious and serious. If Nolan is right, then this poem is an interrogation of Lydgate’s own mode of proceeding, of his reliance on synonym, on the easy and evident connection of one word with another. It is precisely because this poem is so hard to connect with others that it reveals the stakes of Lydgate’s method of composition. Nolan brings before us the deeply literary quality of a poem, and even of a poet, that is more easily seen as constituting an antiliterature: “Having to interpret ‘Vinum lacte’ means having to exercise a critical faculty that is distinctively literary, that focuses on metaphor and allegory and is alert to the presence of multiple discourses in the same short text.” The poem raises the question of the aporetic quality of amplification itself, or of Lydgate’s style: what meaning is there in the juxtaposition, the mere relationality, of references? And there is a further, more difficult question related to these literary and logical ones, and that I think is ultimately the most important question that Lydgate’s style raises: what relation is there between an insistent focus on the material and the disappearance of matter, the relation between, that is, purgation and death? In this most apparently inconsequential of poems, Lydgate demonstrates how a close attention to matter is an ethical action that continually brings death before us as a way of immaculate being.

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Paul Strohm’s—or Lydgate’s—linkage of bodily and civic putrefaction throws us back on the relation between matter and Lydgate’s style. Yet matter here is an aporia. On the one hand, matter in the Troy Book (as elsewhere in Lydgate’s corpus) is an index of corruption in all of its senses, from political and bodily to the Aristotelian conception of it as the change that encompasses everything. On the other hand, purgation in Troy and in Hector’s body displaces a matter that is already unpleasant before it leaves its original place, and uses the very flows that are the sign of the passage of time to prevent further degeneration and corruption from taking place. The complex machine of Hector’s embalming—and it is complex, both, as Strohm shows, in its associations with other forms of preservation, and as a closed system that restores the primal condition of matter—is also a figure of Lydgate’s time machine of style. This machine suspends the degeneration that signifies time precisely by circulating alternatives to bodily matter through the body. It is a “crafte above nature” yet is still rooted in it, a “crafte” that belongs to the Chaucerian pharmakon of “licour” and “virtu,” yet one that is specifically Lydgatian in its weird figuration of, as Strohm calls it, the “perfect subject: alive but without independent volition.” This is not an inaccurate description of the pathological body of Lydgate’s corpus. His representations of what “craft” means and what the body signifies are tangled and complex precisely because he associates so much with what he also intends to be idealizations of the bare life. Body and craft are materializations of an extreme instrumentality, yet as Lisa H. Cooper demonstrates they are also contained, and constrained by, systems of history, theology, and social order that are deeply antithetical to the initiatives that those forms of instrumentality represent. These antithetical impulses in Lydgate’s work— independent volition and subjection—appear even when Lydgate resorts to explicitly material analogies for his work, like that of the street signs of craftsmen. These signs are continuous with the signs of the divine Artifex, the stars, and indicate the presence of a material and final cause, but, as Lydgate ostensibly argues, these signs cannot themselves be causes. That is a good summary of the conservative appraisal of Lydgate’s work: the sign of a tremendous industry that itself remains inert. Yet there is a strange overdetermination of negations in that passage that may be the symptom of the unresolved antitheses that motivate Lydgate’s work: “He were A ffool, and nothyng sage, / That wolde deme in hys corage, / That thys markys, on pool or rafft, / Kan no thyng medlen off the crafft, / Nor helpe ther-to. . .” (The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ll. 20409–12). Try as I might, I cannot make that passage say what Lydgate literally means. There are either too many denials and negations or too few, and to read the passage closely is to have to choose between being a fool and believing that ultimately poetry does make things happen. That self-contradiction actually is Lydgate’s larger point, as

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Cooper argues. Although they lack instrumentality, “literal craft signs have become the way that the pilgrim. . .is able to speak of the inestimable power of God.” That is, signs are also deeply instrumental to the discourses of craft, theology, and poetry. Lydgate’s poetic suspensions—the long dilations, the excurses on precedent and example, the listing of synonyms, all the various forms of digression and amplification—narrate this very instrumentality. They are created both out of the archive, the inherited and inert signs of the literary past, and out of Lydgate’s unwillingness to return to it in the form of the bare narrative (to change the terms of Strohm’s analysis of the Lydgatian “bare life”). His machine of suspension is the technologization of his deliberately aureate style, a style that is sovereign in precisely the way that the sovereign, as Strohm says, solves “problems of duration negotiating finitude and death.” It is exactly in the material rootedness of this style that we confront the sovereign provocations of Lydgate, the problems of narrative duration, and finitude that he always seems to put before us. Indeed, Andrea DennyBrown’s account of Lydgate’s handling of literary history shows how he suspends the irresolvable appetites of sexuality, sociality, and narrative precisely by framing of the problem not just as a series of responses to the body but as the doubled body itself. In Bycorne and Chychevache the two bodies are brought together but remain separate consumed by each other yet utterly distinct. And the irresolvability of the alternatives the poem places before us at the beginning, the “stryves / With lyf or deeQe” (ll. 5–6) that are to be resolved by the struggle of the two bodies, points us out of the poem into the embodied, enfleshed world. Yet, as Denny-Brown suggests, the form of refrain at least allows alternatives to be stated: it “represents nicely Lydgate’s interest in aesthetic accord—rhyme—versus material, temporal discord.” The irresolution, the potential of infinite repetition, that the refrain suggests also points beyond the poem whose refrain DennyBrown discusses, the “Ryme Without Accord.” Repeating the line “It may wele ryme, but it accordith noght” ten times, the poem begins to produce a more than merely fictive accord. The copious kinds of “variaunce” in the poem are made, as the final, eleventh, stanza says, by the very God who creates “concordance,” a term that indicates both communion— accord—and, paradoxically, the resources of lexical variance and substitution. At the end of the Troy Book Lydgate’s “tyme complet” also refers to the completion of the work of translation only after the span that has elapsed since the Trojan War, a work that has lasted since the war began in narrative, a time immemorial. But Lydgate also measures this “tyme complet” against, or as, the span since the birth of Christ and the regnal year of Henry V. Even if we grit our teeth and resist the pull of Lydgate’s time here, it becomes increasingly difficult as we move into a ninety-line

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encomium to Henry V (ll. 2275–3465), in which Lydgate’s writing of the poem, the translation of the Trojan War, and the transformation of the prince into the king during that span weave in and out of focus. So resistant is Lydgate to deixis, so strong is the appeal of the “open when,” that even when he uses it, even when he finally closes with a “then,” he still points beyond time. Once Henry I is crowned King of France, Lydgate says in this passage, the Golden Age will come: “thanne I hope the tyme fortunate / Of the olde worlde called aureate / Resorte shal” (ll. 3399–401). The utopian future will only come about to the degree that it is really the past, the “tyme” that is past us now, but that we can still recover in matter. I think here Lydgate’s use of the term “aureate” is not merely a synonym for “golden,” but that its aureate nature itself (a coinage from Latin) makes it a referent for what exactly we will “resorte” to in this time. Elsewhere Lydgate uses the word to describe this impossible resorting as a return to what we already know, to where we remain lodged: he will “resorte ageyn to my mateere,” he says in “The Legend of St. Austin at Compton” (l. 137).5 In his short and brilliant “Letter to Gloucester,” Lydgate writes a rich account of the forms that resorting takes, and the forms of matter that it takes up.6 In “The Letter,” Lydgate is weakened by old age, his purse by a remedy that itself caused the disease: “A laxatif did hym so gret outrage, / Made hym slendre by a consumpcioun” (ll. 14–15). The laxatif, is of course, the outward flow of money that was intended to purge the purse of its too-liberal dispensing of flows of money. This allusion to purging also signals the beginning of a trajectory that parallels the trajectory of alchemical treatises. Indeed, Lydgate suggests, alchemical transformation will provide the antidote to the poem’s consumptive flux, a flux that, by the poem’s envoy, has affected the poem as much as the purse: “O seely bille, why art thu nat ashamyd, / So malapertly to shewe out thy constreynt? / But pouert hath so nyh thy tonne attamyd / That nichil habet is cause of thy compleynt” (ll. 49–52). Lydgate’s conceit in the poem links the disappearance of money with the disappearance of health, but by dilating this theme the poem finally concerns the renewal of its own linguistic soundness. It is as if he is able to contemplate in a suspended moment a number of kinds of matter that are subject to degeneration and corruption, a kind of copia that underwrites the poem’s contemplation of the exhaustion of matter. Lydgate describes a single antidote for both his and his purse’s ailments: “Gold is a cordial, gladdest confeccioun, / A-geyn etiques of oold consumpcioun, / Aurum potabile for folk ferre ronne in age, / In quynt-essence best restauracioun” (ll. 44–47). And as in a pharmakon, the degenerative flux that grips the poem’s own language is stabilized by the very antidote that restores Lydgate and his purse to their original condition: “briht plate enpreentyd with

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coignage” (l. 56). This stamping of figures in a base metal is one metonymy of the poem’s elliptical incorporation of the transmuting power of aureate language, a “half-chongyd Latyne” that stamps new rhetorical figures in the base metal of English.7 Yet the “restoratif” that is aurum potabile also implicitly restores, resorts language from, the decrepitude of Lydgate’s poetry. The stanza in which he describes aurum potabile is also, as it happens, a site of especially fecund aureate accumulation: “confeccioun,” “consumpcioun,” and “restauracioun,” and the word “coignage” itself, which recurs at the end of every stanza, all of which are also the “cleer soun” of coinage that the last lines tell us is the real “letuarye” (ll. 63–64). This coinage marks the transmutation of the linguistic poverty of English into the golden, aureate, properties of Latinate diction, the creation of linguistic value in an alchemical process of restoration that simultaneously arrests the process of linguistic declination. It is the refrain that underscores this essential, material movement in Lydgate, the insistence on the moment that always returns in the suspension of time. Notes 1. As Lee Patterson commented to me once. 2. John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 4 3. “Prohemy of a Mariage Betwixt an Olde Man and a Yonge Wife,” ll. 372–385, in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2002), p. 115. As Salisbury points out, the first English editor of the poem, Henry MacCracken, suggests that the poem might not be by Lydgate. See The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 107 and 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911, 1934), I:xlviii. 4. See especially A II, “Perception: or the Thing and Deception,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 5. The Minor Poems, I:193–206. 6. The Minor Poems, II:665–67. 7. John Metham, Amoryus and Cleopes, ed. Stephen Page (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1999), l. 2195.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lisa H. Cooper is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her most recent article is “The Poetics of Practicality,” in Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford, 2007). Her book in progress is on the representation of craft labor in late medieval literature. Andrea Denny-Brown is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent article is “Povre Griselda and the All-Consuming Archewyves,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006). Her current project is on Fortune and fashion in late medieval England. Jennifer Floyd is currently a graduate student at Stanford University, where she is completing a dissertation on John Lydgate’s verse and fifteenth-century architectural decoration. She previously earned an M.A. in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. John M. Ganim is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and President (2006–08) of the New Chaucer Society. His most recent book is Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Maura Nolan is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005), and the editor, with Jill Mann, of The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers (Notre Dame, 2005). D. Vance Smith is the Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University, where he also teaches in the English Department. His most recent book is Arts of Possession (Minnesota, 2003), and his next book is called Dying Medieval.

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Claire Sponsler is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Her most recent book is Ritual Imports: Medieval Drama in America (Cornell, 2004); she is at work on a study of Lydgate’s mummings and entertainments. Paul Strohm is Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent book is Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, 2005). He is currently thinking and writing about Conscience. Michelle R. Warren is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She is the author of History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minnesota, 2000) and coeditor of Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Her current projects include merchant translation in London as well as a colonial history of medieval French studies entitled Creole Medievalism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Agamben, Giorgio, 66, 70n24 Alighieri, Dante, 83, 87n21–22 allegory, 7, 45, 54n22, 73, 79–81, 83, 89–90, 92–100, 102, 105n2, 111n38, 154, 179, 191 Alphabetum Narrationem, 97, 109n27 Amflesch, John, 148 Anderson, M.D., 42, 55n35 Anne of Bohemia, queen of England, 120 appetite (see consumption) Aristotle, 108n14, 192 Arnold, Thomas, 110n32, 170, 180n10, 180n12 artifacts and objects, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11n17, 42, 49, 50, 82, 84–85, 90, 91, 106n3, 110n34,111n38, 113, 115, 116, 124, 125–29, 137n60, 137n62, 140, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 158, 159, 166, 173, 178, 179 (see also books and manuscripts; matter) artisans (see craft, laborers) Arthurian literature, 8, 121, 126 Awyntyrs off Arthure, 146, 161n27 Estoire del saint graal, 113, 126, 129 Estoire de Merlin, 113, 126, 129 The History of the Holy Grail (see Lovelich, Henry) Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 169 Augustine, 40, 186

aureate poetics, 4–5, 6, 11n23, 133, 189, 193, 194, 195 Ayenbite of Inwyt, 74, 85n9 Bacon, Roger, 105 Badby, John, 101, 107n8, 110n35 Barron, Caroline, 16, 19, 20n9, 28n14, 29n16–17, 29n21, 96, 109n21, 109n24, 134n13, 134n21,135n28, 136n42 Barton, Henry, Mayor of London, 117–26, 128–29, 132 beast-fable, 35–51 Beauchamp, Richard, Earl of Warwick, 116–17, 122 Becket, Thomas, 165 Beckwith, Sarah, 90, 106n4 Benjamin, Walter, 66, 70n24 Bennett, H.S., 13, 27n1 Benson, C. David, 14–15, 21, 22, 28n4, 28n5, 30n28, 133n3, 134n6, 134n16, 171, 182n19 Bloch, Maurice, 62–63, 69n15–17 bodies (see under matter) Boethius, 3, 21, 40–41, 51 Bokenham, Osbern, 170, 182n17 books and manuscripts, 7, 80–82, 84, 86n13–14, 86n15, 91, 105n1–2, 113, 120, 128, 133, 136n43, 137n60, 137n62, 137n65, 140–41, 150, 173, 182n25 (see also artifacts and objects; material aesthetics; material culture; matter)

216

INDEX

books and manuscripts––continued individual codices: Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 80, 120, 123–25, 126; Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19, 30n26, 56n52; Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, 25, 26, 30n26, 32n44, 32n52, 41, 76, 115, 126, 139, 140–41; Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21, 32n43, 140–41; Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6, 75; London, Guildhall Library MS 12105, 160n16, 162n43; London, British Library MS Additional 16165, 25, 26; London, British Library MS Additional 29729, 26, 145; London, British Library MS Additional 34360, 75–76, 86n14; London, British Library MS Cotton Otho A.XVIII, 54n23; London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.VII, 91, 102, 103 (Fig. 5.1), 107n8, 107n10, 111n38; London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius C.XIII, 107n8; London, British Library MS Harley 78, 25; London, British Library MS Harley 2251, 44, 52n2, 56n52, 75–78, 81–82, 86n14, 86n16; London, British Library MS Harley 3528, 75, 86n13; London, British Library MS Landsdowne 762, 75, 86n13; London, British Library MS Royal 17.B.XLII, 75; London, British Library MS Royal 18.D.II, 59–61, 63–65; London, British Library MS Stowe 952, 107n8; London, Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.44, 25; Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole

59, 25, 26, 32n52, 136n45; Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686, 141, 144–45, 161n22–23; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 377, 92, 95–96, 97–98, 101, 105n1 manufacture and circulation of, 25, 32n43, 72, 75–76, 89, 90–91, 102, 109n28, 115, 119, 120, 124–29, 132, 135n26, 163n55 as possessions, 25, 32n48, 122, 123, 127, 136n48, 182n21 as repositories of cultural memory, 117, 126–27, 130 selling of, 26, 102 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17 Boyd, David Lorenzo, 145, 161n22 Boys, Lady Sibille, 71 Brembre, Nicholas, Mayor of London, 173 Bromyard, John, 49–50, 56n47 Brusendorff, Aage, 25, 31n40, 137n58 Bury St. Edmunds, 31n37, 33n52, 135n26, 166–70, 176–77, 179, 180n6–7, 180n10, 180n12, 181n13, 182n16 Butler, Judith, 1, 9n1 Camille, Michael, 55n34, 56n53, 91, 102, 105, 105n2, 107n9–10, 108n11, 111n40 Capgrave, John, 170 Carpenter, John, Common Clerk of London, 8, 17, 145, 161n25, 171, 172, 172–73, 176, 179,182n21–23, 183n30 Casey, Edward, 165, 179n2 Caxton, William, 106n4, 151, 163n55 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 152 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11n23, 13, 14, 27, 28n10, 31n30, 31n33, 31n40, 32n45, 32n49, 37, 52n3, 55n33, 66–68, 70n26–27, 76, 81, 82, 85n11, 87n21, 123, 125, 134n17, 136n48, 136n50, 137n53–54, 137n58, 137n67–68,

INDEX

137n70, 140, 145, 179n1–2, 182–83n27, 183n30, 185, 187 “ABC to the Virgin,” 101, 110n34 “Adam Scriveyn,” 127 Anelida and Arcite, 85n11 Boece, 41 The Canterbury Tales, 171: “The Clerk’s Tale and Envoy,” 36, 37, 38–39, 40, 43, 53n16–17, 55n36; “The General Prologue,” 60, 67, 110n30, 186, 192; “The Knight’s Tale,” 67–68, 85n11; “The Merchant’s Tale,” 85n11, 188; “The Miller’s Tale,” 185, 187; “The Parson’s Tale,” 40, 50, 85n11; “The Prioress’s Tale,” 77; “The Squire’s Tale,” 85n11; “The Tale of Melibee,” 39–40; “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” 40, 53n7, 53n16; Legend of Good Women, 83, 87n21; Treatise on the Astrolabe, 85n11; Troilus and Criseyde, 85n11, 127; “Truth,” 40, 44, 54n22, 54n23 Christ, 2, 45–46, 56n46, 73, 78, 90, 96, 132, 154, 158, 193 (see also Corpus Christi processions) blood of, 74, 96, 147 crucifixion of, 46, 90 wounds of, 78–80 Christine de Pizan, 37, 53n8 Clopper, Lawrence M., 27, 28n10, 31n36, 32n51 Cnut, king of England, 170 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 11n20, 38, 53n15, 134n16 Cok, John, 120, 122–25, 127–28 commercialism, 16–17, 94–96, 100, 104, 114, 115, 119, 120, 171 (see also guilds; merchants) “common profit,” 14, 23, 182n21 Connolly, Margaret, 26, 32n42, 32n44, 32n47, 32n52, 120, 123, 134n7, 134n14–15, 135n34,

217

136n45, 137n51–52, 137n55–57, 137n59, 137n66, 137n69, 160n20 consumption, 5–6, 11n20, 35–51, 53n17, 56n42, 193, 194–95 see also material culture Cooper, Lisa H., 7, 106n3, 192–93 Cornwall, John, Lord Fanhope, 175 Corpus Christi, 135n26 (see also Christ) processions, 18, 23–25, 31n37, 106n4, 118, 121, 158 (see also under Lydgate, John, works) craft (see also guilds) images of, 7, 61, 89–105, 109n26, 147, 192–93 laborers, 18, 29n17, 146 and literary production, 7, 106n3, 114–33, 139–59 as metaphor for poetic labor, 4–5, 11n22, 11n26, 129–33 regulations, 31n37, 94–96, 109n24, 144, 162n36 technology, 64, 95, 109n26, 145–48, 162n35, 192 Curteys, William, Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 168–69, 179, 181n15 Dalyrymple, Roger, 131–32, 136n44, 138n79, 138n80 Danielewski, Mark, 185 De haeretico comburendo, statute of, 101; (see also Badby, John) death, 6, 9, 17, 43–44, 50, 58, 62, 63, 64, 66–68, 69n15, 77–79, 80, 89, 106n4, 153–54, 177–78, 191–93 Deguileville, Guillaume de (see Guillaume de Deguileville) Denny-Brown, Andrea, 5–6, 53n17, 134n6, 193 didactic and moral instruction, 6–7, 21, 30n28, 45–46, 71–85, 89–105, 117, 158, 172 Doyle, I.A., 31n39, 120, 134n14, 135n33, 136n48, 137n52, 137n63

218

INDEX

dullness, 1, 3, 5, 10n13, 10n15, 15, 28n7, 31n30, 113, 133 Eagleton, Terry, 15 Ebin, Lois A., 11n23, 11n26, 114, 131, 133n4, 138n77 Edward the Confessor, king of England, 170 Edward II, king of England, 144 Edward III, king of England, 61, 87n21, 136n48, 142, 144, 150 Edward IV, king of England, 144 Erasistratus, 65 Estfield, William, Mayor of London, 19, 22–23, 29, 29n20–21, 30n28, 116–19, 120, 132, 156 Fewer, Colin, 157, 164n68 FitzStephen, William, 16–17, 28n11, 165, 176, 180n4 Floyd, Jennifer, 8, 42, 52n2, 55n32, 134n6, 189 Fortune, 20, 21, 76, 80, 86n12, 116, 177, 191 Friar Daw’s Reply, 93, 108n17 Frye, Northrop, 178 Galen, 63, 65–66, 69n18, 69n20–23 Ganim, John M., 8, 28n10, 68n3, 130, 131, 138n74, 138n76, 179n1, 183n27, 190 gender, 35–38, 40, 53n13 Golden Age, 175, 187, 194 Gower, John, 14 “The Grateful Dead,” 77 Greenberg, Cheryl, 26, 32n46 Grenier, Pasquier and Jean, 152 Guido delle Colonna, 6, 59–60, 63–64, 69n10 guilds, 8, 17, 18, 21, 28n14, 31n33, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 141, 144, 151, 156, 157, 159n4, 160n17, 163n57

Armourers, 8, 115–16, 132, 139–59 (Fig. 7.1), 159n6, 160n14–15, 161n25, 178 Bakers, 94 Brewers, 144 Carpenters, 144, 160n18 Goldsmiths, 20, 30n22, 115, 119, 121, 122, 132, 139–40, 141, 151–52, 156, 161n21 (see also under Lydgate, John, works, Mumming for the) Grocers, 141, 144, 160n19 Mercers, 20, 30n22, 121, 122, 141, 156–57, 164n67 (see also under Lydgate, John, works, Mumming for the) Merchant Tailors, 19, 141, 159n5 Painters, 146, 161n34 Skinners, 7–8, 24, 114, 117–22, 125, 126, 133, 134n24, 135n30, 136n43 Stainers, 146–47, 161n34, 162n35–36 Guillaume de Deguileville, 7, 73, 89–111 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 15–18, 28n8 (see also public culture, and public sphere) Hammond, Eleanor Prescott, 32n45, 32n48, 52n3, 54n26, 86n14–15, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 162n41, 162n45–46, 163n56 Hardman, Philippa, 30, 130, 138n73, 138n75 Harthacnut, king of England, 170 Hector, 6, 63–68, 192 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 189 Henry II, king of England, 26 Henry IV, king of England, 18, 19, 107n8, 121, 135n39–40 (see also Lancastrian regime) Henry V, king of England, 19, 101, 119, 121, 122, 136n50, 169, 193–94

INDEX

Henry VI, king of England, 9, 15, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27n3, 30n28, 32n44, 41, 68n3, 119, 121, 122, 135n29, 160n16, 167, 170, 171, 178, 179, 183n30 Henry VII, king of England, 136n48, 152 Hereford, Nicholas, 99 Higden, Ranulph, 83, 87n23 Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, 129 Hoccleve, Thomas, 10n4, 13 “Address to Sir John Oldcastle,” 93, 96, 102, 109n18 Legend of the Virgin and Her Sleeveless Garment, 77–78, 86n18 Regement of Princes, 101, 107n9, 111n36 Homer, 63 Horace, 191 humanism, 4, 15, 21 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 31n31, 32n52, 119, 166 (see also under Lydgate, John, works,”Letter to”) Hunt of the Frail Stag, tapestry of, 150, 152 identity, 1 civic, 120, 128 corporate, 7, 94, 121–22, 131, 144, 158 English national, 119, 121, 132, 136n50 and genre, 129 individual, 63, 127 public, 133 urban, 3, 57, 63, 121, 172 Isabelle, Countess of Warwick, 122 Jehan le Fèvre, 37–38, 41, 53n6–7, 53n16 Jocelyn of Brocelande, 168, 181n12 John, king of England, 168 John of Gaunt, 121, 175

219

Justice, Steven, 93, 107n6, 108n16, 109n23 Karras, Ruth Mazo, 83, 87n24–25 Katherine, queen of England, 22 labor (see craft) Lancashire, Anne, 18–22, 24, 29n15, 29n18, 29n19–20, 30n22–23, 30n25–26, 31n31–32, 31n37, 119, 134n8, 134n13, 135n26, 135n28 Lancastrian regime, 2, 3, 8, 10n4, 17, 21, 27, 27n3, 29n21, 101–2, 107n8–9, 110n33, 121, 167, 170, 171, 181n16 (see also Henry IV, King of England) Langland, William, 14, 40, 54n20, 73, 82, 85n5–6, 86n12 Lateran IV, Council of, 90, 106n5, 158 Laurent de Premierfait, 129, 138n70 Lawton, David, 3, 10n13, 10n15, 15–16, 23, 28n7, 31n30, 133n2 Le Corbusier, 57 Legenda Aurea, 140, 151, 153–54, 155, 159n3 Lerer, Seth, 11n23, 31n30, 123, 127, 134n17, 136n48, 137n53–54, 137n67–68, 161n22 Lindenbaum, Sheila, 17, 28n13, 70n27, 133n2, 136n43, 182n24 Lollards and Lollardy, 7, 17, 21, 30n29, 48–49, 56n46, 90–93, 96, 99–104, 106n6, 107n8, 107n9, 108n12, 108n14, 108n15–16, 110n33, 111n35, 170 London Lickpenny, 171 Lovelich, Henry, 7, 8, 113–38, 190 The History of the Holy Grail, 122–33, 133n1, 138n75 Merlin, 124, 126, 128, 132, 133n1, 136n44, 138n71, 138n79, 138n80 Lowe, Kathryn A., 170, 181n15

220

INDEX

Lydgate, John, works “Against Millers and Bakers,” 171 Ballade of Jak Hare, 171 “Bendictus Deus in Donis Suis,” 10n5 Bycorne and Chychevache, 5, 20, 23, 25, 41–51, 54n32, 55n38, 56n52, 115, 146, 150, 151, 155, 162n51, 178 “Cartae Versificatae,” 170 “Child Jesus to Mary the Rose,” 78 Danse Macabre, 20, 145, 171, 162n25, 178, 182n25, 183n29 “The Debate of the Horse, Hose, and Sheep,” 10n9 “A Defence of Holy Church,” 49 Dietary, 11n20, 47, 56n42, 75–76 Disguising at Hertford, 22, 30n28 Disguising at London, 20, 23, 30n24, 171, 190 “Dyte of Womenhis Hornys,” 50 “An Holy Medytacion,” 10n7 Fall of Princes, 4, 10n4, 11n18, 71, 86n16, 129, 131, 138n77, 149, 166, 180n5 “Fifteen Joys of Our Lady,” 122 “The Fifteen Ooes of Christ,” 10n8 King Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London, 15, 19, 22, 23, 24–26, 32n44, 135n29, 171, 183n30 “The Legend of St. Austin at Compton,” 194 Legend of St. George, 20–21, 23, 25, 30n26, 139–59, 163n55, 178 The Legend of Seynt Margarete, 10n10, 145, 149, 153 “Letter to Gloucester,” 194–95 The Life of St. Alban, 171 Lives of St. Edmund and St. Fremund, 8–9, 122, 165–67, 170–71, 174, 180n8, 181n13 “Mesure is Tresour,” 46 Miracles of St. Edmund, 166, 174, 180n8 Mumming at Bishopswood, 19, 20, 23, 31n35, 118–19, 171, 182n20

Mumming at Eltham, 22 Mumming at Windsor, 22–23 Mumming for the Goldsmiths, 11n20, 19, 22, 30n28, 115–117, 171 Mumming for the Mercers, 11n20, 19, 23, 26, 54n31, 115–117, 116, 171 Pageant of Knowledge, 21 “A Prayer Upon the Cross,” 10n8 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 1, 7, 10n6, 50–51, 55n39, 73–74, 85n8, 89–111, 130, 138n72, 192 Procession of Corpus Christi, 23–24, 25, 118, 158 “Ryme without Accord,” 44–45, 193 “A Seying of the Nightingale,” 73, 147 Siege of Thebes, 10n4, 71, 129, 130, 131, 138n78, 165, 171, 183n27, 186 Sodein Fal of Princes, 21 “A Song of Just Mesure,” 46, 47 “That Now Is Hay Some-Tyme Was Grase,” 10n5 “Title and Pedigree of Henry VI,” 122 “Tretise for Lauandres,” 71–85, 191 Troy Book, 6, 10n4, 10n5, 55n38, 58, 63, 68, 69n9, 71, 122, 126, 129, 132, 136n49, 136n50, 137n65, 157, 164n67, 165, 171, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193 Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, 147 MacCracken, Henry Noble, 10n5, 29n22, 30n26, 51n1, 53n13, 85n1, 86n18, 134n9, 159n1, 165, 170, 179n3, 183n30, 195n3 Magna Carta, 168 Manly, John M., 144–45, 160n21, 161n23 manuscripts (see under books and manuscripts)

INDEX

material aesthetics, 3–5, 7, 9, 11n17, 43–44, 47, 49, 68, 84, 113–14, 122, 123, 129–30, 133, 158–59, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 (see also material culture; matter) material culture 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 60, 68, 113, 119, 125–29, 178, 179 (see also material aesthetics; matter) goods and possessions, 1, 3, 5–6, 9n2, 29n17, 35–36, 40–41, 42, 44, 49–50, 51, 54n32, 118, 120, 121, 127, 142, 148, 166 (see also consumption) and identity, 1, 40, 119, 121, 158 theories of, 1, 8, 113, 133 matter, 1–3, 7, 9, 46, 92, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194 (see also artifacts and objects; craft) antimaterialism, 39 and bodies, 2, 3, 5–6, 9n1, 9n2, 10n2, 35–36, 39–40, 46, 50, 51, 54n31, 62–66, 67, 79, 83, 84, 96, 128, 147, 153, 154, 171, 173–74, 176, 178, 179, 180n10, 187, 189, 192,193 Cultural Materialism, 1, 9n2 Marxist materialist philosophy, 1 mater(e, 1, 2–3, 9, 10n11, 36, 45, 46, 47, 95 material world, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 36, 44, 159, 190, 191, 193 materiality, 2, 4, 7, 9, 38, 68, 106n2, 113, 115, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 159, 187, 189, 190 and metaphor, 4, 5, 7, 44, 46, 63, 72–76, 83, 90, 102, 104, 114, 127, 131–32, 170, 192 and performance, 9, 9n2, 132 and representation, 42, 106n2, 140, 141, 145, 149, 154, 156–58 and spirit, 3, 4, 7, 35–36, 43–46, 48, 49, 73–74, 77, 80, 83, 84, 90, 91, 100, 166–67, 189,195n4 (see also Christ) Meale, Carole M., 120, 126, 135n26, 135n36, 136n43, 136n48, 137n64

221

medievalists, 4, 31n33, 72, 183n30 (see also labor) merchants, 29n21, 94, 102, 114, 116–17, 128, 134n21, 136n48 (see also commercialism; guilds, Mercers) Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale,” 85n11, 188 merchant corporation, 17 as patrons, 3, 7–8, 29n16, 54n31, 114–15, 119–25, 129 Merciless Parliament, 173 Merston, John, 25, 31n31 Middleton, Anne, 14–15, 22–23, 27n2, 28n6, 31n35, 182n19 Mohl, Ruth, 99, 100, 110n30 Mooney, Linne, 25, 32n43, 69n11, 86n14, 120, 135n35 Montague, John, Earl of Salisbury, 91, 107n8 Montague, Thomas, Earl of Salisbury, 91, 99, 102 Mortimer, Nigel, 4, 11n18 mundanity, 1–2, 3, 71–74, 96 New Historicism, 1, 136n50, 165 Nightingale, Pamela, 96, 109n24 Nolan, Maura, 4, 6–7, 11n17, 11n19, 11n23, 14, 22, 27n3, 52n2, 54n30, 54n31, 86n12, 132, 133n2, 134n6, 134n17–20, 135n29, 162n51, 182n19, 182n27, 191 Northampton, John, Mayor of London, 173 Norton-Smith, John, 21, 30n29 Oldcastle, John, 99, 102, 108n12, 109n18, 110n33 Orchard of Syon, 74 Order of the Garter, 150–51 Pearsall, Derek, 5, 10n3, 10n13, 10n24–27, 20, 28n9, 29n20, 30n23–24, 30n26–27, 30n29, 32n43, 33n52, 52n2, 54n28,

222

INDEX

Pearsall, Derek––continued 55n34, 66, 71, 85n1, 107n9, 111n36, 120, 134n5, 135n26, 135n31, 137n58, 137n60, 137n65, 139, 148, 152–53, 158, 162n39, 163n62, 163n64, 164n70, 185, 186 Philip de la Vache, 40, 54n22 Pisanello, 155–56 public culture, 5, 11n19, 13–27, 52n2, 114, 121, 122, 132, 133, 133n2, 162n51, 182n19 (see also under space) and public sphere, 5, 15–18, 28n8, 114, 190 Renoir, Alan, 4, 11n22 Reule of Chrysten Religioun, 74 Ricardian poetry, 14, 20, 22–23 Richard I, king of England, 168 Richard II, king of England, 18, 27n2, 29n18, 68, 70n27, 118, 121, 135n39, 173, 182n19 Rickert, Edith, 54n22, 144–45, 160n21, 161n23 Rising of 1381, 99, 108n16, 109n23, 110n33, 169, 173 Sabine, Ernest L., 58–59, 68n3, 69n6, 69n13 Scanlon, Larry, 4, 10n17, 11n21, 11n23, 28n4, 30n29, 52n2, 54n31, 55n36, 133n3, 138n73, 181n13 Schirmer, Walter, 4, 11n21, 20, 30n23, 31n37, 53n13, 148, 162n39, 180n7 Shirley, John, 8, 13, 19–27, 31n39, 32n42–47, 32n52, 41–42, 43, 51n1, 53n13, 76, 86n14, 115–28, 134n7, 134n14–15, 135n29, 135n34–35, 136n45, 136n48, 137n51–52, 137n55–56, 137n59, 137n61, 137n66, 137n69, 139–41, 144–48, 150, 156–57, 158, 160n20, 178

Simpson, James, 4, 10n16, 10n17, 11n21, 11n23, 28n4, 30n29, 52n2, 54n31, 55n34, 133n2, 133n3, 134n6, 138n73, 139, 140, 141, 159n2, 161n24, 181n13, 183n29 Smith, D. Vance, 9, 9n2, 68 South English Legendary, 153, 159n3 sovereignty, 6, 14, 38, 57–68, 68n3, 70n24, 157, 168, 193 space, 1, 9, 111n40, 180n9 architectural, 42, 115, 145–46, 151, 189, 191 narrative, 131–32, 190–91 pictorial, 155–56 public, 115 rural, 166 social, 8, 16, 20, 83, 172 urban, 8, 13–16, 19, 57–68, 104–5, 111n40, 118, 141, 158, 165, 175–76, 178 Sponsler, Claire, 4, 5, 9n2, 42, 44, 52n2, 54n30, 55n32, 55n34, 56n42, 133n2, 134n16, 148, 149, 162n40, 162n46–n47, 162n50–51, 180n3, 190 St. Anne, 77 St. Dunstan, 141, 151–52 (see also under guilds, Goldsmiths) St. Edmund, 166, 168, 173–74 (see also under Lydgate, John, works, Life of St. Edmund) St. George (see under Lydgate, John, works, Legend of St. George) St. John the Baptist, 19, 141–42 Story of Jourdain de Blaye, tapestry of, 152 Stow, John, 17, 18, 24, 26, 28n11, 31n38, 139, 145, 146, 147–49, 161n32, 162n40, 171, 176, Strohm, Paul, 6, 10n4, 27, 32n49, 70n26, 110n33, 111n35, 182n27, 192, 193 technology, 6 58–66, 68, 109n26, 193 (see also under craft)

INDEX

translation, 39, 83, 87n21, 89, 90–91, 101, 107n9, 113, 119–20, 121–23, 125, 128, 131–32, 136n44, 137n56, 159n3 Trevisa, John, 83, 87n23 Troy (see also under Lydgate, John, works, Troy Book) association of London with, 6, 58–62 tapestries of, 152, 156, 163n61 Viola, Bill, 185 Virgin Mary, 29n16, 72, 76, 77–80, 86n18, 95, 101, 158 Walkling, Andrew, 146, 161n27–28 Wallace, David Foster, 185

223

Walsingham, Thomas, 91, 99, 107n8, 110n35 Walter, Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, 168 Warner, John, Mayor of London, 141 Warren, Michelle R., 7–8, 54n31, 190 Wells, John, Mayor of London, 22, 135n29, 171, 179 Whittington, Richard, Mayor of London, 172, 179 William de Longchamps, Bishop of Ely, 168 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 63 Wyclif, John, 92–93, 107n6, 107n8, 108n15–16, 110n32 Wycliffite texts, 74, 107n6, 109n17 (see also Lollards and Lollardy)