Introduction Lydgate Matters

Abstract

The pun of this volume’s title encapsulates at once both its basic subject (the treatment of material culture in the poetry of John Lydgate) and its basic argument (John Lydgate is important). But in its Butlerian polysemy it goes one step further, since in fact this book argues that Lydgate’s significance stems, in part, from what his poetry has to teach us about the role of the material—in quite a number of senses—in the later Middle Ages.1 In many ways the chapters in this book reflect the multifaceted nature of current scholarly interest in “material culture” in relation to literary discourses. They reach across disciplines and methodologies to make use of, for example, the archeological and anthropological study of material artifacts; the materialist philosophy of Marxism; the documentary experience and politicized economies of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism; and the contemporary sociological theories of practice, place, and space in everyday life.2 In speaking to the way Lydgate’s poetry considers the role of material goods and the material world in the formation of late-medieval identity and culture, this collection demonstrates that his verse, once dismissed for both its pedestrian content and mediocre style, is in fact fascinating in its very mundanity.