Late medieval Benedictine anxieties and the politics of John Lydgate

Abstract

In Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson has argued that the many affiliations of John Lydgate (1370-1449) mitigate against the traditional critical portrayal of the poet as a mere Lancastrian propagandist. My dissertation explores the influence of Lydgate's major affiliation, his Benedictine monasticism, on his political work. I argue that the autonomy of the Benedictine order was already under siege a hundred years before the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries and that the resulting anxieties and remedial strategies of the Benedictine order could not help but have an impact on the work of a fifteenth-century Benedictine poet. I attempt to show that, far from being uniformly "pro-Lancastrian," Lydgate's political poetry (which comprises just about all of his secular work and much of his religious work) is often openly resistant to the main activities of the Lancastrian regime: the usurpation and murder of Richard II; the suppression of the alien priories and the taxation of the church; the invasion of Normandy and the continuation of the war in France after the Treaty of Troyes and the death of Henry V; and the encroachment of the Lancastrian hierarchical church---under the direction of a succession of powerful archbishops of Canterbury---on the autonomy of the religious orders, the monks in particular. I read Lydgate's works as a reflection of Benedictine policy that, more often than not, stands in opposition not only to the Lancastrian dynasty, but to the official hierarchy of the orthodox church in England, and I reconstruct the poet as a Benedictine spokesman very much in control of his own voice.