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...

Lisa H. Cooper offers new insight into the relationship of material practice and literary production in the Middle Ages by exploring the representation of craft labor in England from c.1000-1483. She examines genres as diverse as the school-text, comic poem, spiritual allegory, and mirror for princes, and works by authors both well-known (Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton) and far less so. Whether they represent craft as profitable endeavor, learned skill, or degrading toil, the texts she reviews not only depict artisans as increasingly legitimate members of the body politic, but also deploy images of...

Lisa H. Cooper offers new insight into the relationship of material practice and literary production in the Middle Ages by exploring the representation of craft labor in England from c.1000-1483. She examines genres as diverse as the school-text, comic poem, spiritual allegory, and mirror for princes, and works by authors both well-known (Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton) and far less so. Whether they represent craft as profitable endeavor, learned skill, or degrading toil, the texts she reviews not only depict artisans as increasingly legitimate members of the body politic, but also deploy images of...

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...