Abstract
This chapter argues that the original Danse Macabre, by generating an intense set of social energies, provided a crucial platform for illustrating the prominence of style in transmitting socially-encoded ideas about the value of art, captured in Lydgate's phrase my stile I wille directe. Author focuses on the A-version of the poem (translation of the Danse Macabre by Lydgate), in which the greatest tension is registered between the verbal and the visual in Lydgate's attempt to translate not just a text, but an absent image with a resonant physical location: the Paris that lay at the center of English ambitions in France in the 1420s. This chapter, is dedicated to a discussion of Lydgate's Aversion of the Dance of Death, the earliest verbal text of the genre, alongside the earliest extant visual form of the Danse Macabre, a work ignored completely by Middle English scholars.Keywords:Dance of Death; Danse Macabre; John Lydgate; My stile I wille directe
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