Abstract: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 Ly… Show more
“…The Goddess Fortuna notes Lydgate’s reference to the Rose ’s Fortune briefly (128), but its significance is given more serious, if brief, attention in two recent studies. Christiania Whitehead’s 2003 Castles of the Mind connects Lydgate’s ‘exegetical’ reworking of the Rose ’s Fortune with Deguileville’s treatment of the Rose in the allegory Lydgate translated (167–9), and Maura Nolan’s 2005 John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture describes how the drama embraces and challenges prior literature, noting that Lydgate’s ‘translation’ of Fortune from the Rose is accompanied by his replacement of Boethian exemplars with ones drawn from Chaucer’s poetry (134–42).…”
Section: Fifteenth‐century Middle English Poetry and The `Rose'mentioning
The late medieval French allegory, Le Roman de la rose [The Romance of the rose], the conjoined production of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, has long been recognized as an important literary influence on Middle English poetry. The majority of recent studies focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s translation, citation, and adaptation of the Rose. Directions in scholarly study include increasing attention to the formal complexity and polyvalence the model of the Rose provides, on‐going interest in constructions of sexuality and gender, and a greater emphasis on the inter‐relation of Chaucer’s response to the Rose with the responses of French and Italian poets, including Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Deguileville (or Digulleville), Christine de Pizan, and Giovanni Boccaccio. The discovery of a new manuscript fragment of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose and the re‐assessment of earlier linguistic exchange also set forth interesting possibilities for future exploration. Beyond the field of Chaucer studies, scholars of late medieval England’s alliterative poems, notably Cleanness but also Piers Plowman, have re‐examined the ways the Rose may have shaped the construction of devotional, sexual, and social ideologies within this poetic tradition. The growing interest in Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower and in the English poetry of the fifteenth century, especially the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, has brought further recognition of the Rose’s widespread influence, as well as the continued influence of Rose‐inspired intermediaries, including not only Guillaume de Deguileville and Christine de Pizan but also Evrart de Conty, Alain Chartier, and Charles d’Orléans. Recalling the attribution of the Rose’s authorship to an English ‘John Moon’ in early literary histories demonstrates one curious later misreading of Hoccleve’s Middle English response to the Rose and may also provoke a deeper appreciation for the strong continuity of interest in the Rose shared by French and English readers during the turbulent era of the Hundred Years War.
“…The Goddess Fortuna notes Lydgate’s reference to the Rose ’s Fortune briefly (128), but its significance is given more serious, if brief, attention in two recent studies. Christiania Whitehead’s 2003 Castles of the Mind connects Lydgate’s ‘exegetical’ reworking of the Rose ’s Fortune with Deguileville’s treatment of the Rose in the allegory Lydgate translated (167–9), and Maura Nolan’s 2005 John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture describes how the drama embraces and challenges prior literature, noting that Lydgate’s ‘translation’ of Fortune from the Rose is accompanied by his replacement of Boethian exemplars with ones drawn from Chaucer’s poetry (134–42).…”
Section: Fifteenth‐century Middle English Poetry and The `Rose'mentioning
The late medieval French allegory, Le Roman de la rose [The Romance of the rose], the conjoined production of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, has long been recognized as an important literary influence on Middle English poetry. The majority of recent studies focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s translation, citation, and adaptation of the Rose. Directions in scholarly study include increasing attention to the formal complexity and polyvalence the model of the Rose provides, on‐going interest in constructions of sexuality and gender, and a greater emphasis on the inter‐relation of Chaucer’s response to the Rose with the responses of French and Italian poets, including Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Deguileville (or Digulleville), Christine de Pizan, and Giovanni Boccaccio. The discovery of a new manuscript fragment of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose and the re‐assessment of earlier linguistic exchange also set forth interesting possibilities for future exploration. Beyond the field of Chaucer studies, scholars of late medieval England’s alliterative poems, notably Cleanness but also Piers Plowman, have re‐examined the ways the Rose may have shaped the construction of devotional, sexual, and social ideologies within this poetic tradition. The growing interest in Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower and in the English poetry of the fifteenth century, especially the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, has brought further recognition of the Rose’s widespread influence, as well as the continued influence of Rose‐inspired intermediaries, including not only Guillaume de Deguileville and Christine de Pizan but also Evrart de Conty, Alain Chartier, and Charles d’Orléans. Recalling the attribution of the Rose’s authorship to an English ‘John Moon’ in early literary histories demonstrates one curious later misreading of Hoccleve’s Middle English response to the Rose and may also provoke a deeper appreciation for the strong continuity of interest in the Rose shared by French and English readers during the turbulent era of the Hundred Years War.
“…And among his many compositions, a number of dramatic pieces show a real commitment to performative modes of writing so popular in East Anglia: The Disguisings of London and Hereford , The Mummings at Eltham and Windsor , The Mummings for the Mercers and the Goldsmiths , The Serpent of Division . Maura Nolan has shown that Lydgate’s interest in this genre constitutes a significant contribution to the creation of a public literary culture in the period. Lydgate has been understood as a quintessentially medieval author – it is one way to make sense of the fact that he does not appeal to many modern readers (Pearsall).…”
The study of Middle English drama has long been dominated by discussion of the cycle plays, the sweeping multi‐part pageants of biblical history that were performed yearly in cities such as York. But those cycle plays form only part of a complicated and rich culture of performance in late‐medieval England. This essay seeks to provide a sense of the variety of that culture, attesting to the breadth of medieval English drama in play texts such as Mankind, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and the Digby Mary Magdalene, and also in other kinds of performance record, such as dramatic fragments and prose meditations. For the broadening of medieval theater history beyond the cycle plays includes not only other significant genres of dramatic activity, but also performative practices and literary texts that lie relatively far from the stage. A theater history beyond the cycle plays also necessarily becomes a theater history beyond the theater, as scholars write a new history of medieval performance.
“…The recent turn to ‘new formalism’ has sought to reinvigorate inquiries into matters of form by opening formalist criticism to a broader range of critical approaches. Currently, there is no single school of new formalism, no prescribed or coherent system for analysis nor an approach whose critical paradigms have been fully defined; yet it seems to us that the new formalisms articulated by D. Vance Smith, Maura Nolan, and Christopher Cannon among others, have begun to demonstrate how elements of this re‐orientation might offer Middle English studies a way of creating new methods of interpreting manuscript culture. The intersection of formalist and historicist concerns is of particular concern for Middle English scholars who are frequently asked to shed light on conditions of literary production while relying upon modern critical editions criticized for eliding those very processes.…”
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confidence: 99%
“…emergent forms lurking beneath the medieval conventions of which [a poem] is comprised…they illustrate what happens to a certain kind of representation when a severe challenge is posed to the ideologies and forms through which the social is constructed and the political is ordered. ( Lydgate 13)…”
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confidence: 99%
“…In spite of the paronomastic felicity of this statement, the equation of the form of a text and its manuscript format (or in our model, the two different types of form) conceals the complex negotiation between the meanings produced by the words of a text and how they appear on the page 6 . For Nolan too, form takes on a range of literary meanings but none of them quite corresponds with the physicality of the manuscript: her monograph addresses ‘the cultural form of the mumming, the poetic form of the envoy, the social and political form of the royal entry...the generic form of the exemplum’ ( Lydgate 7). Nevertheless, her sense of the intersection between history and form allow for a space in which such codicological analyses might come to bear.…”
Recent work in Middle English literature addresses the emerging relationship between formal analysis and book history. This article, emerging from the 2009 Conference on Editorial Problems in Toronto, seeks to clarify the way in which formalist approaches intersect with trends in English literary manuscript studies. How, we ask, can the lively field of book history take new direction through contact with the ‘new formalisms’ articulated in literary studies? More precisely, how does the form of the medieval book produce literary meaning in a distinctive and historicizable manner? We explore critical approaches to the formal features of medieval manuscripts, addressing medieval and modern theories of the book’s form, the relationship between written and oral forms of texts, the dialect of scribes, authorial composition of manuscripts, scribal corrections, the layout and illustration, and the binding of the codex. We suggest that close readings of manuscript form can shed light on aspects of texts obscured by the printing technology and formatting changes of modern editions. Furthermore, we point to new avenues for contextualizing the book within late medieval literary culture.
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