The Canon of John Lydgate Project

The Canon of John Lydgate: Related Papers

For those of us working in the area of medieval poetry, especially lyric verse, the Index to Middle English Verse continues to be one of our principal resources despite its age. Just a year or so ago a new index to the manuscripts cited in the IMEV was published by the University of Toronto Press, which shows that it remains a significant reference tool. Since the publication in 1965 of the Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, correcting and updating the original volume, there have continued to be articles issued periodically offering further corrections, such as Ralph Hanna's listing of unnoticed items from the manuscripts of the Huntington Library or Rossell Hope Robbins's identification of a number of IMEV items as parts of larger IMEV items but which were excerpted and circulated separately. Of course, there is also much to be done in terms of simple updating of the bibliographical information: thirty years' worth of new editions of the poems to be listed, manuscript movements to be traced, cross-references to be added to other catalogues which overlap with the IMEV in their coverage, such as the two volumes of early modern manuscript and print verse by William Ringler. In short, with increasing age, the IMEV is losing accuracy and usefulness. Obviously it needs to be revised again, and some consideration needs to be given by its current generation of users as to the shape that a new IMEV should take: a new and computerized IMEV, for instance, could be an even greater tool than the original.

Since the mid-1980s I have been working towards a new consideration of the canon of John Lydgate, the fifteenth-century monk, court and religious poet, and principle disciple of Geoffrey Chaucer. The canon of Lydgate was last thoroughly considered in 1911 by Henry MacCracken, but his methods were considered even at the time to be quite dubious: for example, Harley 2255 is a mid-fifteenth-century anthology of some 45 lyrics, and Eleanor Hammond argued that it had been put together at Lydgate's own monastery of Bury St. Edmunds probably in the latter years of Lydgate's life or soon after his death (that is, well within living memory of the poet, by his brethren who knew him well). This manuscript certainly appears to be intended as an anthology specifically of Lydgate's verse: at the very least, none of the poems have ever been attributed to anyone else. Nevertheless, MacCracken in a footnote dismisses Harley 2255 as an unreliable witness, goes on then to accept 43 of the 45 poems as authentic Lydgate pieces, but rejects one satirical piece because, in his opinion, Lydgate would never stoop so low, and rejects one very fine religious piece because, in his opinion, Lydgate never rose so high. Obviously such reliance upon his own opinion of what Lydgate was and was not capable of writing undermines our trust in MacCracken's list of Lydgate works.

My own consideration of the Lydgate canon will attempt to avoid such reliance upon one's personal opinion, however expert that opinion may be. It is my intention to reconsider all of the internal and external evidence: that is, claims within poems that say, in effect, this poem is by John Lydgate, and claims external to the poems such as scribal attributions or later critical opinions. All such will be weighed and given due consideration, and toward his end I am currently in the process of reviewing the literature on Lydgate's works and examing the manuscripts in which his works have been preserved. That, however, is merely reviewing ground which MacCracken already covered. Where I hope that I might have some advantage over MacCracken, however, is in the area of computer analysis of style: I intend to make use of computer methods to attempt to discover a reasonably objective means of describing Lydgate's style or range of styles so that this stylistic "fingerprint" (or stylistic DNA, if you prefer) can be used to help decide the cases left doubtful when all of the other evidence has been exhausted.

Towards this attempt to discover a means of describing Lydgate's style in reasonably objective terms, I am in the process of producing electronic versions of the texts of all of the 380 poems attributed at one time or another to Lydgate. I am also including in this database of late Middle English texts the works of 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. This textbase will, when complete, be a fairly comprehensive corpus of late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century Middle English verse. I have permission from the Early English Text Society to make electronic versions of their editions for my research use, and so most of my texts are from EETS editions, though I also have made a number of transcriptions directly from manuscripts: I have, for instance, four different versions of Lydgate's "Temple of Glas." I am also currently working on a transcription of Lydgate's "Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund" from MS Harley 2278, the presentation copy given by the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds to the 12-year-old King Henry VI when he visited the abbey for Christmas and Easter, 1433-1434. I hope to turn this into an HTML hypertext form, which can be accessed with a world-wide web browser on the Internet, and to include with it a certain amount of commentary as well as some examples of the illuminations which accompany the text in the manuscript. I will be working on this project through the month of August, with the hope of making a prototype of the edition available on the Internet this autumn.

The work of collecting texts, turning them into computer-readable form through scanner or keyboard, proofreading, and tagging is nearing completion: I currently have just over 400 poems ready for use (including such rather substantial items as the complete text of the Fall of Princes, the Troy Book, and Pilgrimage of the Life of Man), with another 120 scanned but waiting for proofreading and tagging, and a list of some 80 additional poems for which I am now seeking scannable editions or manuscript copies in order to complete the corpus. The tagging, for those of you who might be curious, has to date been a simple set of tags to make the poems searchable with the TACT program; at some later stage we will need to bring our tagging into conformity with the new standard promulgate by the Text Encoding Initiative.

By now you should be wondering what all of this has to do with the issue with which I began of the Index of Middle English Verse and its need for a new revision. I would like to comment on a couple of implications of my work for a new IMEV and to propose a rather grandiose scheme.

My corpus of late Middle English verse is intended, as I mentioned before, to allow me to study Lydgate's style through a series of linguistic, stylistic, and rhyme studies, comparing Lydgate's habits with those of his contemporaries with the hope of identifying some distinctive features which only Lydgate uses. Beyond linguistic and stylistic studies, however, such a corpus also has some other uses, one of which is as an aid to identifying the sources of excerpts.

I mentioned at the start an article by Rossell Hope Robbins which appeared after the publication of the Supplement to the IMEV, in which he identifies a number of IMEV items as parts of larger IMEV items, parts which were excerpted and circulated separately. One of the things which must be faced by anyone dealing with the fifteenth-century lyric is this widespread practice of "excerpting." Julia Boffey's work on manuscripts of courtly love lyrics includes consideration of the many poems copied onto flyleaves or into margins as "autograph" verses; besides courtly love poems, many of these flyleaf and "autograph" verses are moralizing passages excerpted from longer works by John Lydgate--bits of The Pageant of Knowledge and The Fall of Princes, in particular, seem to be scattered everywhere, and Boffey discusses a pair of poems which are built out of parts of the Temple of Glas. Indeed, Lydgate seems to have deliberately constructed his poems out of smaller, reusable parts: a number of his works have survived in what appear to be several authorial versions with stanzas appearing in different arrangements; and some of Lydgate's poems appear, again in what seem to be authorial versions, with stanzas from other Lydgate poems inserted. And George Keiser has recently argued that Lydgate's Life of Our Lady was composed with meditational techniques in mind; like Meditationes vitae Christi, Life of Our Lady was not intended not only for sequential start to finish readings but also for non-sequential returning to favourite passages for meditative purposes. Keiser's approach may also serve to remind us of the claims of David Jeffrey a decade ago that about 90% of the religious medieval English lyric--as well as the cycle dramas--were "Franciscan" in spirit: that is, that they were intended to provide materials for the type of meditative practices for which the Meditationes vitae Christi was written. The Franciscans were also very interested in gaining random access to texts, especially the Bible and the works of the Fathers, particularly in order to find appropriate quotations for sermons, and they first created indexes and concordances in order to do what we are now learning to do a little bit better with computer databases; but, again, the point is that there is a medieval interest in texts as things which could be taken apart and reassembled in other forms or incorporated into other texts.

For a variety of reasons, then, both authors and readers of the fifteenth century used and circulated small parts of longer poems. This makes the work of the bibliographer and cataloguer, or the scholar attempting to master Lydgate's canon, rather more complicated than it would otherwise be; this practice of excerpting has considerable implications for my work. It also has implications for the revision of the Index of Middle English Verse; while the IMEV and its Supplement, as they stand, are quite good at identifying the first lines of all the verse materials in the manuscripts, they have been much less successful in identifying which of those shorter items are excerpts from longer items. Before another set of corrections and revisions to the IMEV is prepared, a systematic approach to the problem of excerpts needs to be developed. With the advent of computer textbases, such as the one upon which I have been working, the identification of the sources of excerpts will become easier. Indeed, I have in press an announcement (to appear later this year or early next in English Language Notes) of the identification of a verse fragment on a binding slip preserved in the library of Gonville and Caius College; the verses on this slip have in the past been associated with Lydgate--their style was recognizably his--but it was thought that they were part of an otherwise lost work, perhaps, as the catalogue description by M. R. James suggested, a lost "Life of Christ." James was very warm but missed: the verses are, in fact, from Lydgate's "Life of Our Lady," an identification which was easy for me to make because I could search the works of Lydgate on computer. My point is that one can imagine that various of the "headless" poems and flyleaf excerpts recorded in the IMEV could be identified as parts of larger works if we had a full corpus of Middle English verse online.

Indeed, I would like to propose not only that the IMEV be subjected to a thorough and systematic revision, including an attempt better to identify which items are excerpted from other items, but indeed that the next version of the IMEV be a full corpus of computer-readable Middle English verse texts. All of the features of the catalogue--the identification of texts by first line, assigned a catalogue number, with a short description of the poem in terms of its length and stanzaic form, with a list of manuscripts and printed editions--would be so much more easily searchable if on computer. And this computerized catalogue would be so much more useful if each catalogue description also included the complete text of the poem which it described. This collection of poems would effectively constitute a complete corpus of Middle English verse which could be used in linguistic and other studies.

This is a grand scheme but I think that it is not just a pipe dream. Many of the more substantial texts have already appeared in computerized form: the Oxford Text Archive, for instance, can provide free copies of the complete works of the Gawain-poet, of Chaucer, some versions of "Piers Plowman," and a number of the romances; my textbase, when completed, will contain some 600 texts, including all of the works of Lydgate and Hoccleve and much other fifteenth-century verse. There are other initiatives in terms of turning out electronic texts: the Labyrinth, a world-wide web site at the University of Virginia, has a collection of Middle English texts for downloading, and Hoyt Duggan has just announced a new Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) to encourage the production and to help with the distribution of Old and Middle English, as well as Norse, computer-readable texts. It seems to me to be the next logical step to make an attempt to co-ordinate some of these efforts and try to create a complete set of Middle English verse texts in computerized form, and that this should be done as part of a project to produce a thorough revision of the Index of Middle English Verse.

[The rest of the paper dealt with why the Chadwyck-Healey Poetry Database was not sufficient for my purposes: my review of the Database is summarized on another page.]

[It was only after giving this paper that I learned, much to my delight, that a revision of the Index of Middle English Verse is being undertaken by Julia Boffey, A. S. G. Edwards, and Lynne Moody, and they have already indicated their intention to issue it on CD-ROM.]

Next page

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/