Lydgate Matters

Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century

L. Cooper, A. Denny-Brown, L. Cooper, A. Denny-Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781349537365, 9781403976741
• eBook ISBN: 9780230610293
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction: Lydgate Matters
• 1 Lydgate and London’s Public Culture
• 2 Lydgate’s Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache
• 3 Sovereignty and Sewage
• 4 Lydgate’s Worst Poem
• 5 “Markys…off the Workman”: Heresy, Hagiography, and the Heavens in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man
• 6 Lydgate, Lovelich, and London Letters
• 7 St. George and the “Steyned Halle”: Lydgate’s Verse for the London Armourers
• 8 Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption
• Afterword: Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index