Some New Thing: The Floure and The Leafe and the Cultural Shift in the Role of the Poet in Fifteenth-Century England

Abstract

It is a truth universally acknowledged that fifteenth-century English poetry has had a very bad critical press—that for a long time it has been the subject of sustained and often venomous critical abuse. In the 1950s, we had C.S. Lewis speaking of the history of fifteenth-century English literature as “a history of decay”;1 R.F. Green’s remark in 1980 to the effect that English literature of the fifteenth century constituted a litany of “servile platitudes”2 can only have been a reflex of decades of critical neglect and even ignorance. As recently as 1987, David Lawton called fifteenth-century English writing “a literary prolepsis of the Slough of Despond.”3 Lawton asks, seemingly incredulously: “can a period of such convulsive historical instability really have produced writing so monotonous and drab?”4 His answer is a resounding “yes!” Dullness is, he claims, the hallmark of this writing—in part assumed dullness, in order to influence princes and the public world, and in large part, real. There was dullness before truth and authority, dullness before love, and dullness before Fortune and divine providence. Dullness, willed, self-conscious, and ostentatious, was all around.5 Then, just one year later, in 1988, there appeared Lois Ebin’s study of fifteenth-century English and Scottish poetry.’ Ebin, banishing all notions of dullness, claimed for the poetry from Lydgate to Skelton the qualities of illumination and enlightenment.