MAURA NOLAN, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Pp. ix + 276. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 50.00 (ISBN 0 521 85298 6).

Abstract

THIS thoughtful book provides a series of perspectives on Lydgate's public writings during the ten years after Henry V's death. Nolan's focus on the unsettled period of Henry VI's minority allows her to scrutinize some of Lydgate's shorter and formally innovative works, without subsuming them into a grand narrative of his voluminous output. After an introduction briefly positioning her readings amongst currents of historiography, historicism, and formalism, chapter 1 discusses The Serpent of Division as tragic history, whose complex accretions reveal both Lydgate's ‘desire to write a history faithful to both past and present’ (58), and the powerful tensions between historical contingency and moral desert as drivers of tragic narrative. Chapter 2 aligns Lydgate's mummings not with folk custom but with elite entertainment, and describes how the mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths are embroiled in the problematics of hierarchical and religious/secular representation. In chapter 3 the ‘disguisings’ performed at London and Hertford kindle Nolan's interest in how the scrutiny of sources (especially Chaucer here), text, and performance might articulate ‘broader cultural impasses’ (140), that Lydgate cannot assimilate or control: ‘The text reaches the limits of cultural legibility at those moments at which unspeakable or incomprehensible historical truths flash up, highlighting what are irreconcilable contradictions buried in the very forms through which history itself is rendered’ (142). Nolan's historicism is nuanced and cautious, even anxious, rubbing the assimilatory power of rhetorical or dramatic form up against the knotty ‘facticity’ (153) of events. Her intricate dance around issues of causality, topicality, and intentionality is not always persuasive, but it does illuminate one of the central strands of the book: the late-medieval tension between the past as recognizably different, and the past as grist to exemplary moralizing. Lydgate's public forms, his ‘uniquely hybrid texts’ (3), Nolan argues, create novel opportunities for tragic or exemplary narrative to emerge from such tensions. Chapter 5 addresses the issue of history and exemplarity by tracking the exemplum of the Roman triumph through Isidore's Etymologiae, Hugutio of Pisa's Derivationes, the Gesta Romanorum, Fasciculus morum, and then in Higden, Holcot, Bromyard, and Gower, before describing how Lydgate knitted the traditions of royal entry and Roman triumph together in his verses describing Henry VI's 1432 entry into London. This shift of perspective plays to Nolan's strengths in textual archaeology, though it provides a curiously adjunctive finale for a book with no separate conclusion.