Essays in this volume argue that it is time for a powerful reassessment of John Lydgate's poetic projects. The pre-eminent poet of his own century, Lydgate (c. 1370-1449) addressed the historical challenges of war with France, of looming civil war, and of new theological forces in the vernacular. He wrote for household, parish, city, monastery, Church, and state. Although an official poet of sorts - perhaps the first major official poet in the English poetic tradition - he was not by any means a merely celebratory or sycophant writer. Instead, he drew on his authority as monk to shape a...

Essays in this volume argue that it is time for a powerful reassessment of John Lydgate's poetic projects. The pre-eminent poet of his own century, Lydgate (c. 1370-1449) addressed the historical challenges of war with France, of looming civil war, and of new theological forces in the vernacular. He wrote for household, parish, city, monastery, Church, and state. Although an official poet of sorts - perhaps the first major official poet in the English poetic tradition - he was not by any means a merely celebratory or sycophant writer. Instead, he drew on his authority as monk to shape a...

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition (The Canterbury Tales, John Gower??'s Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve??'s Regement of Princes, and Lydgate??'s Fall of Princes), Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a ???narrative enactment of cultural authority???. He traces its development through the two strands of the medieval Latin tradition which the Chaucerians appropriate: the sermon exemplum, and the public exemplum of the...

The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century and the advent of print in the fifteenth. This Companion spans four full centuries to survey this most formative and turbulent era in the history of literature in English. Exploring the period's key authors - Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-Poet, Margery Kempe, among many - and genres - plays, romances, poems and epics - the book offers an...