Nolan Review

For scholars of fifteenth-century English literature, Maura Nolan offers a much-needed, serious assessment of John Lydgate’s textual reaction to the crisis of the minority of Henry VI. Rather than simply rehash the usual description of Lydgate as a ‘Lancastrian propagandist’, Nolan explores what she describes as the ‘distinctly literary’ nature of Lydgate’s writings between 1422 and 1432. According to Nolan, the novel forms which Lydgate’s ‘propagandist’ texts take complicate both his message and our understanding of how propaganda typically functions. She argues that ‘Lydgate, spurred on by a strong sense of crisis, remade the forms of public culture available to him, and did so in a counterintuitive way that challenges our assumptions about propaganda – not only the Lancastrian propaganda of the minority, but also instrumental texts more generally’.

Although Lancastrian ‘propaganda’ has been the subject of several studies, the motives and devices of the poets who composed ‘propagandist’ texts have only recently begun to be re-evaluated. Of those poets who composed texts to further the agenda of the Lancastrian kings, Lydgate, with his rather prosaic style and apparently blatant propagandist motives, has become something of a joke among medievalists. It would be fair to argue that Lydgate’s current reputation as ‘mere’ propagandist has contributed to his having been all but ignored by many scholars of medieval literature.

Nolan’s book counteracts, to some extent, the usual assessments of Lydgate as a ‘mere’ propagandist. Her study comprises four chapters, each of which uses as its centrepiece a different work or group of works from Lydgate’s ‘aureate’ years. She moves from her discussion of Lydgate’s Serpent of Division (1422) in her first chapter to consider Lydgate’s mummings at Eltham (1425 or 1428) and Windsor (1429) and his ‘Mumming for the Mercers’ (c. 1429) and ‘Mumming for the Goldsmiths’ (1430) in her second. She then turns to his disguisings, the ‘Disguising at London’ and ‘Disguising at Hertford’ (1426-1427). (She uses John Shirley’s term ‘disguisings’ to describe the latter two works, which she distinguishes from the four ‘mummings’ based on their structure – they are written in rhyming couplets, whereas the ‘mummings’ are written in rhyme royal – and their more ‘complex and elaborate’ treatment of their subject matter.) Her book concludes by considering how Lydgate and other fifteenth-century writers used the image of the ‘Roman triumph’ in their discussions and presentations of royal entries, arguing that the triumph represents ‘the emergence of a new interest in the classical past as past’ and that Lydgate’s uses of the triumph exemplum constitute ‘moments at which form, historicity, and spectacularity collide to produce a new place for the classical past in literary and dramatic history’. Nolan maintains that the triumph exposes the tensions between ‘the pagan past’ and ‘the Christian present’, as well as the problems that arise when authors must use moralised, glamorised history both to glorify monarchs and to advise or caution them. The ‘distinctly literary’ nature of Lydgate’s works complicates them because it carries with it a collection of traditions – ‘sedimented meanings and implications’, in Nolan’s words – that extend beyond the boundaries of simple propaganda.

Useful and serious a treatment though it is, Nolan’s book is not without its shortcomings. For example, she gives no convincing explanation for her decision to mention the description of the Roman triumphs from the Fall of Princes only cursorily rather than to explore it in greater depth in her final chapter. Overall her book leaves the reader hungry for more, and wishing that Nolan had explored Lydgate’s place in the tradition of ‘public’ literature more fully. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture would be more accessible and useful to those less familiar with Lydgate and his work if it made more of an effort to situate the particular works it examines within the arc of his ambitions to unofficial ‘poet laureateship’. But these shortcomings do not outweigh the fact that, of recent treatments of Lydgate, Nolan’s is one of the most highly nuanced. Her investigation of how Lydgate’s propaganda works is an essential addition not only to Lydgate studies, but to the study of all late medieval propagandists.

Mary Flannery, U. of Cambridge