Inner Workings: John Lydgate's Kalendare at the Nexus of Time, Craft, and Devotion

Abstract

Abstract: This article proposes that fifteenth-century English poet John Lydgate transforms the medieval tradition of calendrical verse from a mnemonic aid to a site for readers to practice interpretive agency. Building on studies of the metrical calendar genre by Michael Lapidge and Jessica Brantley, I show how Lydgate's solutions to representing time in poetic meter in fact open up new possibilities for interpretive practice within late medieval penitential devotion. Lydgate's Kalendare is a poetic prayer composed for, and received on, the material page, yet whose proper reading works on, in, and through the reader's "answere," an unfolding process of discovery drawing on a blend of interior assent and commitment to mutual aid. Rather than shutting down readers' personal agency or threatening isolation, the working parts of Lydgate's Kalendare—diction, syntax, meter, and calendar frame—construct and invite an open-ended, socially connective exploration of meaning over time.