Inspired by the example of his predecessors Chaucer and Gower, John Lydgate articulated in his poetry, prose and translations many of the most serious political questions of his day. In the fifteenth century Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as dominating the cultural life of the nation. Thus the new literary forms and modes developed by Lydgate and his contemporaries helped shape the development of English public culture in the fifteenth century. Maura Nolan offers a major re-interpretation of Lydgate's work and of his central role in the developing literary culture of his time. Moreover, she provides a wholly new perspective on Lydgate's relationship to Chaucer, as he followed Chaucerian traditions while creating innovative new ways of addressing the public.
Sensation is a liminal phenomenon, a phenomenon that marks edges and borders. It is the interface between the material world and the physical body as well as between the body and the mind. Medieval writing is full of sensation, from the theoretical accounts of sensation found in scholastic philosophy to the richly sensuous poetics of romance and the raw sensationalism of the fabliau. But the relationship between theories of sensation and the performance of sensation found in poetry or other kinds of imaginative writing -a relationship that, in contemporary terms, would be understood as an aesthetic -is rarely made explicit in medieval texts. Medieval accounts of sensation focused instead on the relationship between the human senses and divinity as various thinkers sought to understand the meaning of embodiment in a world both material and immaterial. In contrast, the locus of modern thinking about literature and sensation can be found in aesthetic theory, which considers the relationship between sensory perception and the material world, particularly in the limit cases of the beautiful and the sublime.This essay brings together two medieval explorations of sensation -one by St. Thomas Aquinas and one by Geoffrey Chaucerand situates them within the twentieth-century account of aesthetics offered by Theodor Adorno. This juxtaposition reveals how past and present structures of thought and expression, far from being straightforwardly aligned in a sequence or developmental arc, are asynchronously intertwined. All three writers engage with the relationship between sensation and historical change; all three, in different ways, think about the problem of embodiment and its relation to generalities like "society," "history," and "divinity." Adorno and Aquinas are concerned with abstractions, with describing how categories like "sensation" or "beauty" function within historical or theological structures of understanding. Chaucer, conversely, is immersed in the particular; not only does he create characters who experience sensations, but he also arouses a variety of sensations by means of poetic craft, from line to line, image to image, and sound to sound. As a result, his poetry functions here as a kind of hinge between the Thomistic account of minnesota review 80 (2013)
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