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 only in late medieval society but also in our own.

'Lydgate scholars are back in town. This stylish posse takes aim at the following: medieval London's wealthy oligarchies, its eateries, the sewage systems, the laundromats, trade unions, and the multimedia outlets. The action is brisk and invigorating, the aim startlingly accurate. Each sharpshooter in this this superb collection holds his or her own.'

-James Simpson, Douglas P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Department of English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, USA.

'If any volume proves that Lydgate matters to current scholarship, criticism, and teaching of medieval literature, it is this one. The editors have assembled a remarkable collection of distinguished senior and promising junior scholars. Taken together, they illuminate Lydgate's place in post-Chaucerian poetry, in the material culture of late medieval England, and in the broader arc of English literary history."

-Seth Lerer, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University, USA.

'This volume has an admirable conversational quality to it, a sense that many of the essays are really engaged in a collective reading of Lydgate and cross-pollinate ideas with each other and a larger discourse. A solid contribution to the ongoing interest in Lydgate's work.'

-Ethan Knapp, Ohio State University, USA.

Autorentext

LISA H. COOPER is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
ANDREA DENNY BROWN is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California-Riverside, USA.

Inhalt
Lydgate Matters; L. H. Cooper and A. Denny-Brown Lydgate and London's Public Culture; C. Sponsler Lydgate's Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache; A. Denny-Brown Sovereignty and Sewage; P. Strohm Lydgate's Worse Poem; M. Nolan 'MarkysOff the Workman': Heresy, Hagiography, and the Heavens in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man; L. H. Cooper Lydgate, Lovelich, and London Letters; M. R. Warren St. George and the 'Steyned Halle': Lydgate's Verse for the London Armourers; J. Floyd Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption; J. M. Ganim Lydgate's Refrain: The Open When; D. Vance Smith