John Lydgate

Abstract

AbstractJohn Lydgate is the major poet of his era. He is the most successful and recognized claimant to Chaucer’s literary heritage in the national tradition that emerges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a poet and author, he depends on a selective appropriation of Chaucer’s materials and style, balanced by the critical distance of a clerical historian-moralist, the self-described ‘Monk of Bury’. The range of Lydgate’s writing is decisively shaped by commissions, specific occasions, patrons, and audiences. His earliest dated poem, Troy Book (1412), begins an epic project that encompasses the heroic and aristocratic narratives of antiquity and medieval modernity in the Siege of Thebes (1422), the prose Serpent of Division (1422), and Fall of Princes (1431–9). Alongside these dynastic and public works, Lydgate composes courtly dream visions, fables, hagiography, didactic and religious verse, and paradramatic works that rewrite their sources and shift them to a distinctive stylistic register.