John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture

Description: Studies how John Lydgate's occasional poetry, including mummings and diguisings, reacts to and helps to shape an emergent notion of "public culture" that differs from that of his predecessor, Chaucer. Lydgate, Nolan argues, translated "the poetic and literary techniques he learned from Chaucer into new media, especially spectacle." Includes recurrent attention to Lydgate's dependencies on Chaucer and his departures from him, with sustained attention to the idea of tragedy in MkT and Lydgate's "Serpent of Division" and to the impact of MkP, WBT, ClT, and the fabliaux on the comedy of Lydgate's "Disguising at Hereford."

Chaucer Subjects: Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion; Monk and His Tale; Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Clerk and His Tale