Milton's Lydgate: A New Perspective on the Nativity Ode

Abstract

This essays reads Lydgate's Troy Book and Milton's Ode in the context of East Anglian history to reveal how this region's culture of religious dissent shaped the neighboring East Anglian towns of Bury St. Edmunds and Cambridge before and after the Reformation. Both authors drew on their local experience to define an ideal nation that tolerated religious and political difference. In the Nativity Ode Milton adopts Lydgate's digression on idolatry in Troy Book to define his own thoughts on the perils of mandated state religion, with Lydgate's epic as the immediate source of Milton's poem.