The Canon of John Lydgate Project

The Canon of John Lydgate: Project Descriptions and Reports

I think that it can be said without exaggeration that the central fact of early fifteenth-century literature in English is John Lydgate, the monk of Bury St. Edmunds, court poet to three of the Lancastrian kings, and chief of the disciples of Geoffrey Chaucer. Nevertheless, Lydgate continues to be either sidestepped or lambasted in histories of English literature, for he is seen as monstrous: he is deviant, he is Other, he is the Anti-Chaucer.

We postmoderns like our medieval authors to be carnivalesque and playful, certainly anti-authoritarian: we like medieval authors who tell stories about contests of story-telling or games of beheading; something insincere and sophisticated is far preferable to the simple and sincere; generally speaking, we--I don't mean you and I, but our literary colleagues generally--prefer our medieval authors to be postmodern. And I would suggest that the reception history of Chaucer has everything to do with how each succeeding generation has misread Chaucer as a contemporary, as "one of us," but this is a strategy which Lydgate's works seem to resist. He is authoritarian, both in his own vatic sense of authorship and in his monarchical politics.

Lydgate's works, I would suggest, have tended to be dismissed or neglected because they tend, unlike Chaucer's, to be so unremittingly medieval. Chaucer's self-consciousness of his own art and artfulness makes him appear to be much more modern than he really is, and he is found to be palatable to postmodern taste. Lydgate, by contrast, is much more the typical medieval poet; he is altogether too Gothic for us.

But if we are serious about facing squarely the alterity of the Middle Ages, if we are really interested in the play of differance, including the difference between us and the not-us, if we are interested in testing our literary theories against the hardest possible case, or if we care at all to try to understand the Middle Ages in terms that medieval people would have been able to recognize and acknowledge, then I think Lydgate becomes the ultimate touchstone. We have remade Chaucer in our own image; Lydgate resists being postmodernized: that resistance to us can be useful to us by allowing us a tough case as ultimate test of our hypotheses.

A second reason for the general distaste for Lydgate's verse is his explicit didacticism, for which we moderns have lost the taste although it was highly prized in his own time and down through the eighteenth century. Walter Pater's "art for art's sake" is our dominant creed, and for most of this century literary scholars have been trained to treat overt moralizing with scant sympathy. I think that didacticism in literature is an interesting phenomenon, theoretically challenging, and it is a subject which needs to be pursued further; and I know of some who are using the current resurgence in interest in rhetoric to study the rhetorical strategies of moralizing.

A third reason why Lydgate tends to be neglected, of course, has to do with the sheer volume of his oevre. He was a prolific poet, and the shelf-full of Early English Text Society editions through which one must read in order to become expert in Lydgate is daunting. I came to Lydgate in the early 1980s when I was finishing my doctorate and scouting for a new project to propose for a post-doctoral fellowship; the late Denton Fox suggested that my interest in computer methods might usefully be applied to the question of Lydgate's canon. Almost fifteen years into what was originally conceived as a two-year post-doc project, I am still in the process of an initial survey of the field.

But this autobiographical moment brings me to the main subject of this paper. In 1989 at a conference in Toronto, Canada, on The Dynamic Text--dealing with computers and literature--I described my long-term project to reassess the question of the delimitation of the canon of John Lydgate, supplementing the traditional collecting of internal and external evidence with a computer-based analysis of Lydgate's style. The project description was subsequently published in Literary and Linguistic Computing. Because of the involvement of computer methods in the project, and because of the computer-orientation of the conference and the journal in which this announcement appeared, the project has been reasonably well-known among those involved with electronic texts and computer methods of literary analysis, but less well-known among medievalists.

I want today to give you a brief account of what I have been doing and how far I have progressed to date. I also wish to make a few comments, based upon the work I have been doing towards a comprehensive annotated bibliography of Lydgate editions and criticism, about some of the recent trends in, and more generally the current state of, Lydgate studies. One hopes, of course, that Lydgate studies are not too far out of step with trends in medieval studies generally, so I trust that my reflections on the specifics of Lydgatiana will reverberate with echoes of some of the broader aspects of our mutual interest in things medieval.

There is a growing concensus that the fifteenth-century in English literature is not the literary wasteland of bad Chaucer impersonators as it has been traditionally characterized. There is in fifteenth-century English poetry a range of genre, theme, and tone which is worthy of serious study, and much of that poetry is actually European in inspiration and context rather than Chaucerian. Furthermore, with current challenges to traditional ideas of "canonicity" and the new exploration of previously "marginal" texts, one can now legitimately explore fifteenth-century English literature with an interest in its "difference"--its overt didacticism, its emphasis on rhetorical devices, and those other features which distinguish it from the romantic types of poetry which have dominated modern taste for the last two centuries.

Progress in the study of fifteenth-century English literature has been hampered, however, by continuing vexatious questions of canon and authorship. Partly the result of hesitancy to proceed until such questions are cleared up, but at the same time contributing to the failure to get beyond these questions, fifteenth-century English literary studies still lacks the sort of basic tools which are common in all other periods and which were provided for Chaucer studies a century ago: reliable critical editions, thorough bibliographies of previous research, surveys of the manuscripts, and linguistic and stylistic studies based upon the concordancing of the texts (I use the verbal to emphasize the activity rather than a printed product: nowadays, of course, concordancing is something that any scholar can do with a computer, which is much to be prefered to the old, heavy, too expensive, and single-access-point printed volume). So, while fifteenth-century English literature is no longer easily dismissed as uninteresting, those who are working in this field are still very much pioneers whose progress is slowed by the lack of adequate tools--the kind of tools that are taken for granted in any other period of literary study.

One of those vexatious questions of canon and authorship which still troubles students of the fifteenth century is that surrounding the works of John Lydgate. As A. S. G. Edwards noted a decade ago in his survey of "Lydgate Scholarship: Progress and Prospects" (pp. 40-41), we still rely upon Henry MacCracken's 1911 formulation of the Lydgate canon even though MacCracken's methods (and, particularly, his reliance upon a personal authority, presenting himself as one who knew--quite apart from questions of evidence--what Lydgate could and could not have written) were denounced at the time by critics such as Eleanor Hammond; and current scholars are raising more and more questions about the authorship of various titles which MacCracken declared to be Lydgate's. As long as there is such uncertainty about what Lydgate did and did not write, any pronouncements about his style, versification, themes, and especially influence, can at best be only tentative. Much of the progress which we have seen in Chaucer studies in the twentieth century is predicated upon a relatively stable Chaucer canon, a stability which is the product of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century work by Skeat, Brussendorf, Hammond, and others. It is time for similar stability to be achieved for Lydgate.

It is my intention to attempt the resolution of the question of the Lydgate canon, the final product being a book along the lines of Richard Harrier's 1975 study of The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry. I intend to reconsider all of the internal and external evidence for all of the approximately 380 poems which have, at one time or another, been attributed to Lydgate; further, with respect to those titles which cannot be satisfactorily determined by such means, I intend to apply current techniques of computer analysis of style in order to seek additional evidence.

There are a number of works in which we find Lydgate naming himself as the author, as he does in the Troy Book epilogue (5.3468), or in which he refers to the village of Lidgate as his birthplace, as he does in the first of the "Isopes fabules," where we learn that Lidgate is nowhere near "Tullius's garden" ("The Tale of the Cok," ll. 32-33); as a general principle, where there is no contrary evidence, such internal declarations will be taken as proof of Lydgate's authorship. The reconsideration of the external evidence for the Lydgate canon will involve a review of the opinions, with respect to the attribution of works to Lydgate and also to the characteristics of Lydgatian poetry, of editors and critics, of later poets (like Stephen Hawes, whose Pastime of Pleasure includes a list of Lydgate's works), and of scribes.

I am, then, in the process of completing a survey of critical opinion on Lydgate's works; towards that end, I am producing a comprehensive annotated bibliography of editions and studies of Lydgate. This bibliography currently lists some 3200 articles and books, about 1700 of which have been examined and notes on them prepared. Again, while this review of the literature is primarily intended as part of my research on the issue of the canon and of Lydgate's language and style as they relate to the authorship issue (and my notes on these questions are being collected in a second database), I am preparing this bibliography for publication as one of the reference tools needed by students of fifteenth-century English literature.

Secondly, I am undertaking a reconsideration of the evidence provided by scribal attribution in the manuscripts of these 380 poems, including the careful weighing of the relative veracity of the various scribes insofar as this can be tested. Towards this end, I am producing a computer database of standardized summary descriptions of all of the 509 manuscripts which include any of these 380 poems. Again, I believe that this database is a research tool which could be of use to other scholars, and I hope eventually to expand it to include the manuscripts of all late Middle English literature. I was once asked by a colleague how many Canterbury Tales manuscripts included illuminations: at the moment, this type of information is not easy to find, even with the catalogue of manuscripts in vol. 1 of Manly and Rickert's edition; with a computerized database of summary descriptions of late medieval literary manuscripts, answering such questions will become very easy. So, besides a database for my own use on the question of scribal attributions to Lydgate, I envisage as by-products of this research both a printed handlist of late medieval literary manuscripts and a computer searchable database available to other scholars through the Internet. To date, almost 500 descriptions have been produced and entered into the database.

Thirdly, I am producing electronic texts of Lydgate's works towards linguistic, stylistic, and rhyme studies, as well as other concordancing-based analyses. Besides the texts of all of the 380 poems attributed at one time of another to Lydgate, I am also including texts by various of his predecessors and contemporaries (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, many anonymous lyrics, and so on) to provide "control" texts against which to test whatever stylistic tests appear to be most useful in discriminating Lydgatian style from the styles of others. Again, I envision this database as gradually being expanded to become a corpus of Middle English verse, eventually including all of the texts listed in the Index of Middle English Verse.

I am in the process, then, of gathering data towards the reconsideration of the canon of John Lydgate, producing along the way some of those basic reference tools which are needed by Lydgatians and by students of the fifteenth-century in England more generally. The work is certainly labour intensive, but I see these databases as a very deep mine of information out of which I, my graduate students, and other scholars can be drawing material for publishable studies for many years to come--studies which will contribute to our understanding of medieval literature and of the manuscript production and dissemination of that literature.

I have been working steadily on this project since 1987, at first with small grants from various sources directed towards specific items, and then for three years with a major research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thus this project is well advanced. Partly through this past funding I have also been able to attract several graduate students who have contributed to my project and who are working on related projects, and there is quite a little Lydgate industry, mostly working on new editions of various of Lydgate's minor poems, going on in Alberta right now.

On the subject of editions, one of the important Lydgate texts which has yet to appear in a modern edition is his Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund, a hagiographical piece of about 3000 lines which Lydgate prepared as a gift from the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds to the 12-year-old King Henry VI when he visited the Abbey for Christmas and Easter in 1433-1434. It is my intention to prepare a transcription of the Presentation Copy of this work, British Library MS Harley 2278, and to include with it in an HTML hypertext some of the illuminations found in that manuscript as well as various levels of introduction and annotations. I hope to do much of this work in what remains of this summer, and to post this HTML version of Edmund and Fremund as the first item in a Lydgate page on the Internet's World Wide Web.

My project, then, is essentially bibliographical and secondarily editorial in nature, with a view ultimately towards a book-length study of Lydgate's style insofar as we can identify what is Lydgatian about the works of Lydgate and his imitators. The bibliographical and the editorial work is quite thoroughly traditional, though I do believe that the use of computers in creation and dissemination of these databases will make a radical difference in how they can be used. The bibliographical and editorial thrust of my work also shapes the way that I view the current state of Lydgate studies, and it is the trends and state of work on Lydgate to which I wanted to turn at this point, and I will highlight a few and draw quickly to a conclusion.

My own interest in editing, as well as my frustration a year ago when I had an opportunity--including enough interested graduate students--to put on a Lydgate course but could find no textbooks, leads me to praise recent moves to produce teaching editions of various late medieval texts, particularly in the TEAMS series of the Medieval Academy published in Kalamazoo. All of us who teach in the area of fifteenth-century English literature will have cause to be thankful for the TEAMS series, and they have included in their list of projected titles such Lydgate items as his Reson and Sensuallyte, Life of Our Lady, selections from the Troy Book, not to mention the Siege of Thebes already published in John Bowers's collection of the continuations of the Canterbury Tales. Making these texts more accessible to students will, I am sure, lead to significant re-evaluations of them.

Another pronounced trend in Lydgate scholarship and in fifteenth-century English studies more generally is a surge in studies of the manuscript contexts of medieval literary works. The painstaking efforts of scholars like Neil Ker, A. I. Doyle, A. C. de la Mare, Maurice Seymour, Charles Owen, Jr., and A. S. G. Edwards is bearing fruit in the work of a new generation of young scholars who recognize the centrality of codicological questions to literary pursuits. Julia Boffey's study of the manuscript contexts of courtly love lyrics--examing questions of the dissemination of lyrics in late medieval England--and her many subsequent papers, and even her co-founding of the Early Book Society (which meets in Nottingham next week), have set something of a new direction in the study of Lydgate and his contemporaries. Kathleen Scott's extensive publications on the decoration and illumination of late medieval English manuscripts, including an excellent study of the Arundel manuscript of Lydgate's Lives of Edmund and Fremund, are a great contribution to a reconsideration of fifteenth-century literature and art, as also is Lesley Lawton's work on the illustrations in manuscripts of Lydgate's Troy Book. The works of Lydgate are frequently found in what are otherwise considered to be Chaucer manuscripts, and Dan Mosser's past work on the Cardigan Chaucer manuscript, and his current project of producing a new catalogue of Canterbury Tales manuscripts to be issued on CD-ROM, are both very helpful, as too are Peter Robinson's project to issue Chaucer manuscripts in digitized form on CDs, Barbara Kline's work on Harley MS 7333, or Carol Meale's work on Harley 2252. All of these are signs of exciting new work in late medieval manuscripts, including those which preserve Lydgate's works.

One particular aspect of recent Lydgate manuscript studies is worthy of specific mention: various writers, like A. I. Doyle, Kathleen Scott, and Nicholas Rogers, have been exploring some of the characteristics of a significant group of manuscripts produced for, perhaps produced by, the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in the mid-fifteenth century. Many of these are Lydgate manuscripts, and there is some justification in referring, as one critic has done, to a "Lydgate factory" in western Suffolk churning out manuscript copies of his works. That, of course, suggests hasty and careless mass production, which is not the case: many of these manuscripts are richly and beautifully written and decorated, and as a group they reveal a "Bury style" of illumination which is worthy of further study.

Besides editions and studies of manuscripts and questions of dissemination and illustration, there are also exciting developments in terms of re-considerations of Lydgate's historical and literary importance, which I will review just briefly. Lydgate's historical importance as a court poet, as a pre-laureate laureate, is receiving some important attention: there are new studies of his royal and aristocratic patrons, his role as translator of continental literature for English patrons, and his role as writer of poems and mummings and pageants for royal occasions. Richard Firth Green's study of Poets and Princepleasers is a seminal work, and many of its implications for Lydgate studies are now being explored by Green himself and by others. John Fisher's book on the Importance of Chaucer and, more particularly, his 1992 PMLA article on the Lancastrian use of Lydgate and the memory of Chaucer to help to solidify support for the new regime is a recognition of the central role which Lydgate played in the political upheavals of the day. Lee Patterson's several recent books are rightly having a significant impact on medieval studies generally, but his article on Lydgate and Henry V (in New Historical Literary Study) is particularly interesting in terms Lydgate's political involvement in the House of Lancaster: the "typically medieval," which we noted above as a characteristic of Lydgate (a point made before me by Derek Pearsall and others), is seen by Patterson as a deliberate rhetorical strategy on the part of Lydgate, a stance taken up as a means of promoting literary and political stabilization by constructing "traditionalistic" poetic and political identities for himself and for the king whom he is praising.

David Lawton in a 1987 article also talks about careful and deliberate rhetorical strategies on the part of Lydgate and other fifteenth-century English poets; he argues that the dullness characteristic of the English fifteenth century is deliberate, used by these poets as part of their attempt to exhalt Chaucer as father of English poetry. Another interesting re-assessment of the Chaucerian nature of fifteenth-century Chaucerianism is found in Seth Lerer's recent book on Chaucer's fifteenth-century readers, illustrating, among other things, how Lydgate and others re-created themselves in the image of various of Chaucer's fictional characters--such that Lydgate deliberately takes upon himself the monkishness of the Monk of the Canterbury Tales and lives out this role in his life and works (an idea suggested by A. C. Spearing's set of articles on Father Chaucer and Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, but Lerer develops it at length and further shows how applicable it is to many others besides Lydgate).

Finally, Norman Blake's several studies of Lydgate's influence upon Caxton remind us of his popularity and influence at the critical time of the invention of the modern printed book: Blake argues that Caxton's selection of texts to print, and the sentiments expressed in the prologues and epilogues that he added to them, betray again and again the influence of Lydgate upon Caxton, and demonstrate an awareness on Caxton's part that Lydgatian morality and didacticism was a marketable quantity in early modern England.

The fifteenth century in England, then, was not the literary drab age as C. S. Lewis characterized it, nor was it the period of a host of indistinguishable Chaucer imitators that is described in various histories of English literature. There is a greater variety in fifteenth-century English literature generally, and in Lydgate's works more particularly, than has traditionally been acknowledged, and I think that there is cause to be excited about the re-evaluation of Lydgate and his contemporaries which is now taking place. I am pleased to have a role as bibliographer and, in a sense, chronicler of these developments.

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The Canon of John Lydgate Project

© 1995 Stephen R. Reimer
English; University of Alberta; Edmonton, Canada
All rights reserved.
Last revised: 6 Nov. 1995

email: Stephen.Reimer@UAlberta.Ca
URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/lydgate.htm/