It is by now commonplace to observe that the emphasis on history, culture, and politics in current literary critical practice has helped to bring unprecedented attention, usually appreciative, to the productions of the vastly prolific early fifteenth-century Benedictine monk John Lydgate. Formerly derided as a feeble and ponderous Chaucer imitator, Lydgate, in the six years leading up to the appearance of the collection of essays under review, became the star of James Simpson's revisionist literary history, Reform and Cultural Revolution, the subject of two monographs, and the focus of an earlier essay collection. In the latter, editors Simpson and Larry Scanlon explicitly announce it their project to recuperate Lydgate as a major author; the volume under review, which follows Simpson's and Scanlon's effort by just two years, in many ways takes this recuperation as its starting point. That Lydgate now "matters" among so many readers of late medieval English literature provides Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown the point of departure for a investigation of matter in Lydgate's writings and in Lydgate studies; as they put this aim in their introduction, "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" (1).
Lydgate's many and varied productions, with their countless and complex engagements with the world (that is, with "mundanity"), do indeed form a capacious vehicle for a study of, as the volume's subtitle terms, "poetry and material culture in the fifteenth century." In the end, however, because (as Cooper and Denny-Brown acknowledge) the contributions approach materiality in so many different ways--ranging from, say, the historicity transmitted in the excess of the literary (Maura Nolan) to the material relations among the merchants and civic leaders of Lydgate's London patronage network (Michelle R. Warren)--I found the focus of the book less coherently discernable than the subtitle and introduction suggest. Put positively, this is to say that the idea of volume, while plainly a touchstone for each of the contributions, never obstructs the specific interests and energies of the contributors. As a result, while the collection's overall conclusions regarding poetry and material culture may remain uncertain, it fully succeeds as a multidimensional contribution to Lydgate studies, intervening in critical debates, providing new readings (often of relatively neglected poems), supplying rich and revealing historical and textual contextualizations, and deepening our grasp of Lydgatean poetics.
The contributors to the volume include some of the most influential voices in current Lydgate studies, who productively build off of their earlier work on the poet, as well as some newcomers to the scene, who offer fresh, illuminating perspectives. The majority of the contributions focus on works produced relatively late in Lydgate's career for London audiences or patrons, such as the mummings. In comparison, more trodden critical paths--say, the politics of the Troy Book--are mostly, if not entirely, avoided. The Lydgate of this volume is not so much the poet to princes as the sometimes subtle voice of a vaguer, contested, multifaceted establishment; the Lancastrian Lydgate of much earlier work is here complemented by a Lydgate enmeshed within, and who is a shaper of, the byzantine, overlapping, sometimes conflicting strands of authority of early fifteenth-century English society.
This collection is unusual in that it twice offers integrative overviews of each of the contributions. In their introduction, Cooper and Denny-Brown supply an admirably lucid précis of the argument and coverage of each chapter and helpfully suggest relationships among them. In his afterword, D. Vance Smith reviews each chapter by indicating how its findings bear on the characteristic Lydgatean aesthetic of copia, the significance of which he provocatively explores. Both of these bookends provide more thorough accounts of the contributions than is possible here; hence, I will simply suggest what I take to be the three general categories, in relation to the volume's governing idea, into which the contributions fall, and briefly adumbrate the chapters in this respect. Let me emphasize, though, that none of the contributions is truly contained in any one of these ad hoc categories; each both crosses into the other categories as well as reaches beyond them.
Three chapters approach materiality in an especially concrete fashion. Warren's contribution is a tour de force in this respect. Her most basic aim is to show that the Arthurian verse translations of Lydgate's contemporary Henry Lovelich were produced under strikingly similar historical circumstances as those of Lydgate's London commissions, and this finding casts light on the nature and circumstances of both Lovelich's and Lydgate's writings, and also, more importantly, on the material relations governing cultural production of this time and place. In the process, Warren achieves a kind of thick description of the materiality of this cultural production, offering comments on everything from the politics of the London craft guilds to the "materiality of language" evident in a cryptogrammic signature of Lovelich's. Jennifer Floyd achieves a similar density of description, although her object is much more specific. The ground of her contribution is the persuasively demonstrated argument that Lydgate's Legend of St. George did not, as previous scholars concluded, accompany paintings on the walls of the Armourer's guildhall, but rather was distributed across a series of wall hangings. Upon this basis she constructs an account of the significance such an artifact and its commissioning would have held for the Amourers and a sketch of the possible structure and contents of what must have been a spectacular multimedia production. Like both Floyd and Warren, Claire Sponsler is interested in the social, cultural, economic and political circumstances and significances of Lydgate's London productions, but her argument pertains less to particular texts as to other critics' accounts of the relation of these productions to a Habermassian "public culture." Offering a correction to the work of such scholars as Nolan and C. David Benson, she concludes, "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" (27).
Three chapters elucidate the symbolic or thematic function of some aspect of material imagery in a specific Lydgate poem. Denny-Brown takes up Bycorne and Chychevache, quite thoroughly situating this work in respect to its Chaucerian and French sources, and arguing that it is not merely a domestic comedy but more centrally and profoundly about appetite--that is, about corporeality, consumption, and desire and their relation to an elusive spiritual ideal. In a world in which fasting and feasting held powerful metaphysical as well as physical significance, the two titular beasts of the poem convey much more than marital discord and misogyny: "Appetite, in its various manifestations, becomes in this poem the tool through which one can better comprehend the incomprehensible" (44). Cooper's focus is on the imagery and language of craft labor in Lydgate's translation of Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. She argues that Lydgate adapts to an English context of conflict between orthodoxy and Lollardy the original's ambivalent deployment of craft labor, which provides both figures "for the individual believer's ability to engage in spiritual self-fashioning" and metaphors "for that individual's inability to survive without the institutional church" (90). Examining closely some of Lydgate's alterations to his source, she concludes that, while the translation retains some ambivalence in this regard, on the whole it tends toward "anti-Lollard propaganda" (104). Paul Strohm takes as his point of departure the observation that urban sanitation and plumbing held symbolic value for the medieval sovereign; the power of urban cleansing was an expression of the royal control and management of death: "Good plumbing, to put it baldly, is death-denying, and asserts the continuity of the social order" (62). He then discusses how Lydgate's alterations to his source in the Troy Book show the poet to be an alert and adept shaper of this symbolic strategy, especially in the remarkable account of the preservation of Hector's corpse in book 3, which Strohm reads alongside Lydgate's eulogistic preservation of a laureate Chaucer.
Two chapters and Smith's afterword--while they each, like the contributions of the second category, offer poetic elucidations--put forth arguments about the nature of Lydgate's poetics. John Ganim explores what he names Lydgate's "poetics of exemption," by which he means the discursive strategies whereby the privileges of monasticism in general and Bury St. Edmunds in particular may be textualized alongside and within an ostensibly unrelated discourse involving other, potentially competing interests. He argues that Lydgate's aptitude in this regard made his work attractive to patrons across the sociopolitical spectrum (as well as a model for other poets), since this poetics may easily be marshaled for a defense of something else, such as royal power or mercantile civic authority. Ganim shows how this poetics operates in such poems as the Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund and the Miracles of Saint Edmund (perhaps not by Lydgate), emphasizing the role of the rhetoric of place--and its literal specification--in the defense of privilege. Nolan contributes a wonderfully head-spinning, yet entirely convincing, reading of Lydgate's Treatise for Lauandres. Through a careful account of the literary precedents and manuscript contexts for this short poem about stain removal (Lydgate's "worst poem," her title announces), she demonstrates that it in fact signifies in a multilayered, poetically sophisticated manner, and that it brings together the sacred and profane even while leaving their relation, to a degree, open. This reading leads to larger reflections on "what the category 'literary' might mean, both during the late medieval and early modern periods and for medievalists now" (72-73). Nolan argues, among other things, that literariness occurs as an excess of signification, and that it is through identification of this excess that we may "genuinely grasp the historicity of a medieval poem" (82). Like Nolan, Smith in his afterword is also concerned with how Lydgate's poetic practice points us to larger questions about the nature of the literary aesthetic. Tackling Lydgate's notorious rendition of the opening sentence of the Canterbury Tales in the Siege of Thebes, he argues that Lydgate's open-ended syntax here and elsewhere, his frequent use of the refrain or refrain-like structures, and, most generally, his rhetorical copia reflect, in contrast with Chaucer's comparatively closed forms, a "lyricist's desire for the world, the sadness at its passing away" (185). In a Hegelian sense, "Lydgate's use of amplification is the greatest sign of his tremendous capacity for tarrying with the negative" (189).
As with most collections, readers will find some of the contributions more persuasive or more lucid than others. At times, readings of individual passages of Middle English are not as convincing or as fleshed out as one might desire. Sometimes conclusions seem to overwhelm supporting evidence; sometimes the converse is the case. In addition, the idea of the volume raises some methodological and theoretical questions that might have been usefully foregrounded. For example, while Warren appears to put aside the critical utility of the category of the literary in favor of that of material culture at the outset of her contribution, Nolan seems to privilege the literary at the conclusion of hers. Nonetheless, each contribution unfailingly furthers our understanding of Lydgate's verse and its place in early fifteenth-century English culture, and some of the essays do so extensively, supplying a generous and exemplary balance of erudition and critical insight. This collection has well earned a spot on the shelf next to the other impressive twenty-first century contributions to Lydgate studies.