Notes about his Life and Work

     Much extant medieval poetry lacks one of the things that modern poetry has: an identifiable author. “A Dyte of Womenhis Hornys” differs because it has been attributed as the work of John Lydgate. Despite Lydgate’s surviving texts and apparent fame—both contemporary and after—he has heretofore been marginalized. Although most people have heard of Geoffrey Chaucer, relatively few have heard of John Lydgate even though he grew up during Chaucer’s lifetime. Perhaps this is due to Chaucer’s canonization and place as the most celebrated of medieval authors. Whatever the reason for his marginalization, John Lydgate is a poet who should be studied as his works give us an insight into society at that point in time.
 

     Unfortunately, we know very little of Lydgate’s life which is exemplified in the sparse facts that are given in the biographies about him. Indeed, the biographies about Lydgate often have, as Derek Pearsall notes, “devoted most of their space to assessment and appreciations of [his] poems” (John Lydgate 9). We know that Lydgate was born around 1370  in the town of Lydgate (sometimes “Lidgate”) in Suffolk near Cambridgeshire (Ebin 1).ⁿ We know that he studied at Oxford. We know that Lydgate became a monk at the Abbey of St. Edmunds in Bury (northeast of Lydgate) and was ordained to the levels of acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest within the Benedictine order and that from 1423 until 1430 Lydgate served as prior for a priory of the order called Hatfield Broadoak in Essex. Also during this time, Lydgate spent some time in Paris. We also know that Lydgate had Henry V as a patron from around 1413 until 1422 and wrote poems at Henry’s behest or in his honor. Finally, we know that in 1449 or 1450 Lydgate died. These facts have only been gleaned from surviving documents and (like his birth year) from allusions in his substantial body of surviving work. A body of work which, as Lois A. Ebin points out, amounts to more than 145,000 lines of verse; much more than we have of Chaucer (139).
 

     Lydgate’s work includes translations from Latin during his years at Oxford and after. These texts include The Eight Verses of St. Bernard, parts of Isopes Fables, and Historia Destructionis Troiae (commonly referred to as Lydgate’s Troy Book) (Pearsall John Lydgate 17-8). He also translated Danse Macabre from French while in Paris (Pearsall John Lydgate 25). Lydgate continued to translate religious material such as psalms and hymns in addition to secular works throughout his life.  Lydgate’s oeuvre also obviously includes original poetry, but, despite his religious affiliations, he did not compose religious verses exclusively. Lydgate did write religious and moral poems as well as the lives of saints (The Life of Our Lady for example) but he also wrote instructional and didactic poems and poems dealing with politics and courtly love including love complaints, poems celebrating love, and satires about love (Ebin 20).
 

     Sadly, although we have much more of his surviving verse as opposed to Chaucer’s, Lydgate has often been seen in a negative light by critics even though his contemporaries, according to Ebin, saw him as being “the equal of Chaucer and Gower” (139).  The trope of this negative view on Lydgate can be traced back to the criticism of his work by Joseph Ritson (a late eighteenth, early nineteenth century critic) who referred to Lydgate, as Ebin quotes, “a ‘voluminous, prosaick [sic], and driveling monk’” (139). However, this censure on Lydgate has continued into the twentieth century when such critics as H.S. Bennett, as Andrew Higl notes, “dismisses [Lydgate] and chalks up his popularity in print to the lack of discretion on the part of early modern printers” (58). Even present day critics such as Derek Persall have lamented “Lydgate’s halting versification, his turgid syntax, his repetitiveness, his long-windedness and verbosity” (“The Apotheosis” 31). The negative comments by such critics may give us an insight as to why Lydgate has been and continues to be marginalized in addition to possibly being overshadowed by Chaucer. Although we can never be sure of the reason, we are missing out on a prolific author of the time causing many to miss discovering the quality of his work.

 

ⁿDerek Pearsall puts the year as 1371 in his recent—indeed the most recent available—biography John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-bibliography due to a line in Lydgate’s Prologue to The Siege of Thebes in which Lydgate identifies himself and notes that as of writing the poem he is “nygh fifty yere of age” and the dating of the poem being in Pearsall’s sense 1421 (12).