Reading and hearing were close relatives in medieval culture. Even when not composed orally, poems long and short were sung or spoken aloud to listeners, while also offering themselves for silent, private reading. As with Chaucer’s invocation of an audience for the Canterbury Tales of everyone who “redith or herith,” a good deal of medieval poetry contains traces of the expectation of differing forms of reception, as scholars have noted.1 Reading and looking were also near kin, and the metaphor of sight was used in the later medieval period to characterize a variety of kinds of understanding, including the understanding of the poetic text.2 A number of scholars have examined the effects of manuscript page layout on readers and on texts, as well as the overlap between the visual and the theatrical in illustrated manuscripts.3 Fewer, however, have looked at poems that were visually displayed outside of the codex. One result has been that the variety of places in which written texts could be encountered has not been given its full due, leading to a skewed and limited picture of the readership for a text. Those earlier studies of writing outside the book, which I discuss later in this chapter along with more recent work on graffiti and the permanent and ephemeral display of writing (as posted broadsheets or as inscriptions on walls), remind us that especially before the introduction of production processes that made handwritten texts affordable for a wider range of purchasers, many readers may have encountered poetry not on the page but on a wall, whether in a church, household, or other public or private place. Tapestries depicted scenes and speeches from drama, city spectacles included painted words and images on hanging cloths or pageant structures, and murals featured written as well as drawn representations.
On more than one occasion, Lydgate turned his hand to poems intended for visual display outside a codex, including, most famously, the Danse macabre or Daunce of Poulys, commissioned by John Carpenter for painting on the walls of the Pardon Churchyard at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London; some of his other verses eventually ended up being publicly displayed, such as selections from his “Quis dabit?” and Testament that were incorporated into the decorations for the Clopton chantry chapel at Long Melford Church in Suffolk, not far from Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate also made two poems for Londoners—the Legend of St. George and Bycorne and Chychevache—that John Shirley links to wall paintings or hangings. All of these pictorial verses raise questions about what difference, if any, it made that a poem was read from a manuscript page or viewed on a wall hanging or listened to in a performance, and about the limits of genre labels such as poetry, painting, or play when applied to medieval cultural forms.
Like spectacles and ceremonies, which relied on visual display to communicate with audiences, wall paintings and painted or woven tapestries depended on spectatorship. But even if the experience of watching a play was in some ways homologous to that of looking at a tapestry, it could never be identical, if only because a live performance was a fleeting event, while a wall painting could be viewed again and again.4 The verses Lydgate wrote for public visual display complicate notions of public poetry in late medieval England as well as notions of spectatorship. Meant to be read alongside visual images, these texts point to interactive and performative modes of looking that argue for an understanding of spectatorship as a far from passive engagement with the visual. Also, and more fundamentally, these texts reveal how such representational forms merged and differed, and with what results for theater and literary history.
Tapestries were among the most popular luxury goods of late medieval Europe and, in less lavish form, were part of everyday decoration and household furnishings, as attested by frequent mentions in wills of bequests of tapestry or arras bedclothes. They were also an important art form, particularly in the hundred or so years from 1350 through the end of the fifteenth century. Although tapestries had been produced in Europe earlier, large-scale production began in the fourteenth century in areas already known for weaving, most notably Paris and Arras, whose name became synonymous with woven figurative fabric. In the second half of the fourteenth century, tapestry grew more artistically and commercially important, and its use increased in the courts of Europe. Many tapestries depicted scenes from secular or religious history, often organized into a narrative. Best known among the large-scale historical tapestries of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which were probably used for civic or religious ceremonies, are the famous Nine Worthies wall hanging now in the Cloisters in New York; the Battle of Roosbeek (no longer extant) made for and celebrating the part played by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in the defeat of Flemish rebels in 1382; and the Jousts of St Denis (no longer extant) commissioned by Charles VI in 1397.5
While the cost of woven tapestries limited their purchase to the wealthiest of patrons until the production boom of the late fifteenth century lowered prices, painted or “stained” hangings offered a less expensive textile medium for images and narratives. A will from 1429, for example, bequeaths to the “chapel of oure lady . . . a steyned clooth with the salutacion of oure lady ther to abide perpetuelly,” while a reference from around 1449 comments, “Here in this steyned clooth, King Herri leieth a sege to Harflew.”6 As Charles Kightly’s discussion of wall hangings in medieval York suggests, woven or painted tapestries could be a source of household ornamentation, a marker of social status, and, most pertinently for my arguments in this chapter, an opportunity for entertainment, given their predilection for depicting narrative.7
Woven or painted wall hangings often shared structural, affective, and aesthetic features with drama, as Laura Weigert has shown in the case of tapestries linked to the Vengeance mystery play, while in contrast, paintings of the same theme “depart significantly” from the play. Weigert argues, in fact, that of all the forms of visual representation from the late medieval and early modern periods, tapestry “exhibits the most numerous and striking similarities with mystery plays,” to such an extent that the two media appear to have been mutually dependent.8 Those similarities may be traced to instances of direct exchange, in which performances were created from famous tapestries scenes, or, more generally, to shared circumstances of production and reception, as the same wealthy patrons commissioned tapestries and performances. The similarities between the two media, including the resemblance of tapestry’s life-size figures to live actors, often makes it hard to tell to which written accounts refer, since the language used to describe the two is frequently the same.
How people might have “read” stories on wall hangings or paintings is suggested by an episode in William Caxton’s version of the romance Blanchardyne and Eglantine (c. 1489). Blanchardine, walking in his father’s palace with his tutor, gazed at the “hangings of Tapestrie and Arras” on the wall. The romance describes how, “stedfastly pervsing the abstracts & deuises in the hangings,” Blanchardine asked his tutor “what warlike seidge and slaughter of men that might be.” So taken was he by his tutor’s reply, which recounted the history of the war and the heroic feats performed by its participants, that Blanchardine himself aspired to the same honors with the result that he “continually practised, both in action and in reading, the imitation of those valorous warres; neither thought he any time so wel bestowed as either in reciting, reading, or conferring of those warres.”9 This conflation of looking and doing, reading and imitating, is consistent with and extends to secular contexts the well-documented emphasis within late medieval visual piety on affective experience and engaged remembering that were central aspects of lay devotion.10
Although tapestries and murals could offer legible texts well suited to spurring action and reflection alike, as the Blanchardyne example suggests, not all of them required an extra-textual commentator similar to Blanchardine’s tutor to supply the missing verbal component needed to explain the visual depiction. As Eleanor Hammond has observed, it is not uncommon in surviving tapestries to see verses woven into the fabric. Citing evidence from the inventories of Charles VI of France and Henry V of England, Hammond notes frequent references to wall hangings à personnages that describe pictures of people accompanied by writing (often their names): one tapestry, for instance is described as including writing beneath its depictions of people, as well as their names (“ou il y a au dessoubz desdits personnages ecriptures et leur noms escripz”); another tapestry of many other people (“plusieurs autres personnages”) contains “au dessoubz de elles a grans escriptures”; and yet another that contains many inscriptions (“plusieurs escripteaulx”) is mentioned. More elaborately, the inventory of tapestries owned by Henry V cites what appears to be the opening phrase of the story (“estorie”) on each tapestry: “Vessi amour sovient” (here follows love), “Cest ystorie fait remembraunce de noble Vierge Plesance” (this story commemorates the noble Virgin), “Vessi Dames de noble affaire” (here are women of noble deeds), and “Vessi une turnement comenser” (here a tournament begins).11
Firmer proof of words actually woven into wall hangings also survives. The January miniature of the Très riches heures depicts a banquet in an aristocratic household; on the wall behind the banqueting table hangs an expensively decorated tapestry that is perhaps an illustration of a tapestry that once belonged to Jean, Duc de Berry, and that includes written verses above scenes of battle. The six-piece Angers Apocalypse tapestries originally had panels below each scene with an inscription; the inscriptions, now lost, probably consisted of excerpts either from the text of Revelations or from a commentary on it. The tapestries of the Romance of Jourdain de Blaye (from the early fifteenth century) include inscriptions in a Picardy dialect. And a St. George tapestry described in the inventory of Thomas, duke of Gloucester, as “Une pece d’Arras d’or de St. George,” is said to begin with an inscription in letters of gold and the arms of Gloucester (“comense en l’escripture des lettres d’or ‘Geaus est Agles’ ovec les armes de Monsr de Gloucestr”).12
In what ways would spectators have interacted with woven or painted writing displayed alongside images? While direct evidence is elusive, the scholarship on religious visual experiences and devotional images provides some helpful answers. In a perceptive analysis of the late fourteenth-century altarpiece now known as the Despenser Retable—which was discovered in Norwich Cathedral in 1847 being used as a table—Sarah Stanbury observes that the retable has both a narrative as well as an iconic status (“in Walter Benjamin’s terms,” it carries “both cult and exhibition value”) and that its five painted panels depicting the Passion “form a powerful linear narrative that operates in tandem and in dialogue with the fixity of its coats of arms.” While the Despenser Retable does not mix words and images, the armorial banners that appear within its frame require of viewers the ability to take in two different forms of visual media. Stanbury shows how the visual dynamic of the piece, particularly the dominance of the frame with its coats of arms linked to powerful local families, engages the viewer in part by memorializing the community and can be understood through the history of lay self-representation, as the panels play out a narrative of social disruption and the restoration of order.13 Although she does not focus specifically on viewer interaction with the altarpiece, Stanbury suggests that to “read” the retable, anyone looking at the retable would have had to negotiate between two narratives, one concerning a Passion sequence that moves from bodily disruption to containment, the other having to do with the local history inscribed in the armorial banners.14 In this way two visual fields demand a back-and-forth form of looking in which meaning can only be derived from the interplay between the two fields.
Other studies of religious affect have shown that in late medieval meditative writings, the interactive engagement of spectator and image is especially strong, with the devotional image often seeming to become animated and to enter a charged space that includes the individual who gazes on it.15 For Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe alike, the sight of a religious image often triggers revelations or strong emotional responses. Passion poems and other visionary texts describe religious icons or images that literally speak to the spectator or become animated, among the most gripping being stories of the appearance of the Christ child in the host.16 Iconographic representations of saints helped create a spiritual dialogue between saint and worshipper and were tied to acts of devotion such as vows, veneration of saints, and pilgrimages; a viewer’s engagement with images was part of a larger involvement with devotional practices of various kinds.17
As the linking of viewing images with other acts of devotion suggests, there was considerable spilling over from sight to other sensory experiences and from looking to other forms of embodied action, a phenomenon Michael Camille recognizes when observing that “medieval pictures cannot be separated from what is a total experience of communication involving sight, sound, action and physical expression.”18 Far from being isolated as discrete forms of representation, images in the late medieval period took their place within a broader set of cultural practices revolving around the sending and receiving of expressive messages. To “read” an image was thus to do much more than merely decipher iconographic details; “reading” such visual works as fifteenth-century murals and large-scale panels in effect granted the viewer what Elina Gertsman calls “a participatory, performative function within the otherwise fixed interpretative visual and textual context.”19
If the example of Blanchardyne suggests how images on tapestries were received, Colart de Laon, a French painter whose life spanned the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, shows how they were produced and, specifically, how an artist might have shaped a career around providing visual representations on fabric for ceremonial uses. Colart is first mentioned in 1377, in the employ of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Most of Colart’s commissions appear to have been related to royal festivities and consisted primarily of painting banners and jousting implements. He was employed for the elaborate entry of Isabeau of Bavaria into Paris (1389) and prepared ceremonial trappings in connection with the marriage of John, eldest son of Duke Philip the Bold, in Cambrai. In December 1395, Colart was paid by Duke Philip’s chamberlain for “grands tableaux,” whose subject matter unfortunately went unmentioned. Soon thereafter, Colart executed “un tableau de bois qui fait ciel et dossier,” which included images of the Virgin, St. John, and the Trinity, for a chapel endowed by Louis of Orléans in the church of the Celestines, Paris, and supplied a panel with Sts. Louis of France and Louis of Toulouse for the room of the Dauphin Charles. In 1400, he provided four large painted cartoons for tapestries ordered by the queen, and in 1406, he agreed to complete a tableau intended to be given as a gift from Jean de la Cloche to the Paris parliament.20 While few have been as well documented, there must have been many similar artisans who made a living by supplying visual images for wall hangings and murals, many of them destined for ceremonial occasions and spectacles.
While Colart lets us glimpse a visual artist’s involvement with pictorial poetry, Lydgate offers a nearly contemporary look at a poet’s corresponding role. Although the paintings that accompanied Lydgate’s verses have not survived, as far as we are aware, internal clues within the poems point to their connection with images as do Shirley’s headnotes. Several of Lydgate’s religious works were apparently intended to be read along with visual images, as they themselves tell us. “Cristes Passioun,” for example, ends with the poet-speaker sending the poem (“Go, lytel bylle”) to “Hang affore Iesu” in the hope that “folk that shal the see” will read “this compleynt” (ll. 113–16). “The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun,” which begins, “erly on morwe, and toward nyght also, / First and last, looke on this ffygure” (ll. 1–2), and ends by stating that saying a Paternoster, Ave, and Creed while kneeling before this “dolorous pite” will earn pardons (l. 51–56), similarly suggests that the poem was intended to accompany a visual image (a “pite,” or pietà) displayed in some public place, presumably a church. “The Image of our Lady” begins with a similar command to “Beholde and se this glorious fygure, / Whiche Sent Luke of our lady lyvynge / After her lyknes made in picture” (ll. 1–3), a picture that is later identified as resembling a painting in the church of Santa Maria de Populo in Rome. And the last stanza of “On De Profundis” claims that the verses were compiled at the request of William Curteys (abbot of Bury) so that he would be able “At his chirche to hang it on the wal” (ll. 167–68).21
Similarly, some of Lydgate’s secular poems were also seemingly written to accompany visual representations. The “Sodein Fal of Princes” contains phrases (e.g., “Beholde þis gret prynce,” “Se howe,” “Se nowe,” and “Lo here”) that suggest it was intended for a mural or wall hanging or possibly a tableau or dumbshow in which silent performers mimed actions while a presenter recited the text.22 In excerpted form, stanzas from the Pageant of Knowledge, such as the descriptions of the seven estates that appear in some versions of it, could readily have accompanied visual images. Lydgate also wrote verses to accompany the subtleties for the coronation banquet of Henry VI and verses related to a procession of Corpus Christi in London, performances I discuss in later chapters.
The enthusiasm Lydgate reveals for working at the crossroads linking image and written text played out within the context of larger debates in the fifteenth century about the validity of devotional images, with on the one side Lollard polemic against images and on the other such defenders as Reginald Pecock.23 Lydgate’s embrace of images is consistent with his preference for orthodoxy and, perhaps more interestingly—especially for a consideration of his verses that engage with nonreligious images—with his vernacular poetics, as the varied poems in which he reflects on the role of images show. Shannon Gayk has pointed out that a number of Lydgate’s poems “instruct the viewer in how to read images” and that, more broadly, he fashions a literary practice that “inscribes the objects and practices of contemporary devotion within an increasingly textual culture.”24 That claim should be extended to nondevotional objects and practices as well, given the degree to which even in them for Lydgate images are assimilated to textual culture. Stories can be “shewyd in fygur” (“On the Image of Pity,” l. 39), a choice of terms that connects shewing both in the mind’s eye and in embodied form and figurae in the exegetical or symbolic sense and, as I argue in the case of the processional images discussed in the next chapter, the material (i.e., painted or displayed image).
It is not, however, just the mixing of word and picture that shapes many of Lydgate’s picture-poems but also performance. Theorization of the relationship between medieval visual and dramatic texts has in recent years beneficially moved beyond an earlier preoccupation with identifying the ways in which one influenced the other to a consideration of art and drama as, in Martin Stevens’s words, “intertextual, not causal or agentive.”25 Yet, even considered from the perspective of semiosis, not mimesis, as Stevens urges, the relationship between the two can be elusive, not least because of the scarcity of surviving evidence. Some medieval paintings, although not many, seem to depict plays being performed, including a book from twelfth-century St. Albans that contains the plays of Terence and shows gestures of characters in dialogue, figures from the plays, and classical masks in a structure that seem to represent a classical scena; the miniature by Jean Fouquet of the martyrdom of St. Apollonia; and the depiction of the “Dance of the Wodewoses” found in a manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles, c. 1470.26
A more extended interaction between art and drama can be found in the paintings that precede the play-texts in the fifteenth-century manuscript of seventy-two French plays once performed in Lille. They depict one or two scenes from the following play and not a stage or a play being performed; instead, they show scenes from biblical stories, just as the texts of the plays do. Thus, in the Lille manuscript, “the paintings and plays have parallel functions for readers and spectators,” as Alan Knight has noted.27 Something similar occurs with the words and images in Lydgate’s murals and wall hangings, where there is also a pronounced association with performance, whether the performance in question is a mumming, procession, dance, or religious ritual. Mieke Bal’s notion of the “cotext,” as distinct from the “pre-text” of a work of art, is useful in theorizing the relationship among words, images, and performance in these works. Rather than searching for a “pre-text” that would explain what the work of art derives from, analysis that focuses on the “cotext” can elucidate the immediate literary and visual milieu of a work of art and the meanings generated by that milieu. In the case of Lydgate’s visual texts linked to performance, performance does not simply lie in the background as a precursor of the image-text but instead forms part of its immediate milieu and shapes the viewer’s interaction with the mural or wall hanging.28
The longest of Lydgate’s poems for visual display was the Danse macabre or, as it is named in one manuscript, the Daunce of Poulys, a translation into English of French verses from the (now lost) Dance of Death of 1424–25 painted in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris. Lydgate probably made this poem when he was in Paris in 1426, at the behest of certain “French clerks,” as he says in the prologue to his poem.29 Lydgate’s verses were designed, a headnote in one of the surviving copies of Lydgate’s poem tells us, for display in St. Paul’s Cathedral.30 In his Survey of London, John Stow corroborates Shirley’s claim, mentioning that around the interior of the cloister on the north side of St. Paul’s was once painted the Dance of Death, like that in Paris, and that Lydgate’s translation was made “with the picture of Death, leading all estates painted about the Cloyster” at the request of John Carpenter, London’s common clerk. According to Stow, the whole cloister was pulled down by the duke of Somerset in 1549 to supply building material for his palace in the Strand.31
Dance of Death murals combing words and images could appear outdoors, as in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, but were more often displayed on church walls.32 Carpenter’s decision to have the Daunce of Poulys painted on panels hung on the inside walls of the cloister enclosing the cemetery known as the Pardon Churchyard, on the northwest side of St. Paul’s Cathedral, placed the Dance of Death mural in a similarly interiorized and relatively secluded space, away from the bustle of St. Paul’s cross and the city.33 In a reading of the mural’s significance for Londoners, Amy Appleford has argued that the collaboration between poet and bureaucrat on this visual-verbal display resulted in “the construction of an image of England’s capital city as a diverse yet coherent association of people otherwise fragmented along numerous internal divides.” Appleford’s view of the St. Paul’s mural as intervening in struggles over cultural dominance in the city by using the topos of the memento mori to insist on London’s “autonomy from, and ability to hold its own against, alternate and competing sources of sociopolitical authority, namely, the church and the Crown” meshes well with what we know of Carpenter’s concerns and of Lydgate’s abilities to turn his hand to urban discourses. More to the point for my argument in this chapter, Appleford’s recognition that, as common clerk, Carpenter’s domain was the city’s documentary culture (he was the creator around 1421 of the massive Liber Albus that attempts to organize centuries of archival material from London) and that he therefore not surprisingly believed in the power of the written word helps explain his decision to re-create the Parisian image-text of the Dance of Death in London.34
Because both the Paris and St. Paul’s paintings were destroyed and because the fidelity to the original of later versions—such as Guyot Marchant’s woodcuts in the 1485 edition of the Danse macabre and the damaged late fifteenth-century imitation of the St. Paul’s paintings in the Guild Chapel at Stratford-on-Avon—is uncertain, we cannot know what anyone who visited the Pardon Churchyard saw. Stow suggested that the figure of Death led the procession around the walls, but that may be his own interpolation and cannot be verified by extant sources.35 Presumably the mural was painted at eye level or slightly above, as was the case for the Dance of Death mural at Meslay-le-Grenet, c. 1500. In the Meslay-le-Grenet mural, the pictorial images of Death and the figures he leads dominate, while the written text appears in a much smaller border-like space immediately below. Gertsman argues that this positioning of the Meslay-le-Grenet mural made it “accessible to the congregation,” and its prominence meant it was “the backdrop for every ceremony that took place within the church walls.”36 The Pardon Churchyard at St. Paul’s held the Becket tomb, which was linked to one of London’s patron saints, and was the destination of mayoral processions, thus making the Daunce of Poulys mural a similarly charged backdrop for civic ceremony in fifteenth-century London. By entering the Pardon Churchyard and territory that while once an open space had been ceded to ecclesiastical authority since the 1320s, the mayor and his entourage asserted “the city’s claim to rights of way within the precinct walls,” as Appleford has argued.37
Lydgate’s Dance of Death verses survive in fifteen manuscripts, including Ellesmere 26.A.13, which was owned by John Shirley, and Trinity R.3.21, a London anthology linked to the Hammond scribe and thus, by association, to Shirley.38 The manuscripts of Lydgate’s verses fall into two groups: the A version fairly closely follows the French poem (but adds four women to the French version’s all-male cast of characters and includes a Tregetour, or magician/entertainer, named Jon Rikelle), while the B version reorders and reworks the A version, omitting several characters and adding eight new ones, including a number of representatives of urban society such as a Sergeant in Law, Juror, Merchant, and Artificer.39 We do not know what degree of collaboration was involved between Lydgate and Carpenter or if Carpenter suggested changes in the poem, but the B version certainly does a better job than the A version of fitting the St. Paul’s setting and of drawing attention to the middling urban social groups usually only lightly sketched in the traditional version.
Even more so than in the A version, in their fragmented form, the B group verses offer a vision of society understood as what James Simpson has called “a complex set of self-contained and overlapping jurisdictions.”40 The B version also effectively translates the poem from a form designed for reading on the page to a text that would be viewed as part of a mural. The B version skips over the “Verba Translatoris” with which the A version opens (a section that emphasizes the craft of translating and writing) and begins with a stanza that in the A group is one of two stanzas designated as “Verba Auctoris.” That stanza stresses the spectator’s visual engagement with the images and verses about death, by keeping the phrase “Ye may seen heer,” which appears in the A version as well, but changing A’s “How ye schulle trace / the daunce of machabre” (l. 46) to “how ye shal trace / the daunce which that ye see” (l. 6). Combined with the omission of the five stanzas explaining how the poem was translated, the stronger emphasis on sight in the first stanza of the B version of the poem immediately identifies a visual context within which the following verses are to be apprehended.
While the opening of the B version stresses vision, the following verses encode a broad range of sensory participation. The verses describing the exchange between Death and the various social groups preserved in the B version the address-and-response structure of the A group, as in alternate stanzas Death addresses in turn each figure, who is given a chance to reply. This alternation of voices creates the impression of a dialogue that injects an element of aurality into the visual representation; reader-viewers of the mural at St. Paul’s were thus also asked to listen as Death engages each figure in a conversation. That engagement with the words and pictures painted on the cloister walls is intensified by the increased use in the B version of phrases that introduce the various figures by calling them forward, as in “Com forth maistresse” (l. 353) or “Come neer sir Sergeant” (l. 337), thus stressing motion in a way that resonated with the movement of viewers around the cloister walls. These altered phrases intensify the processional form of the mural and act as an encouragement to viewers to move along the walls of the cloister in a way that mirrored the procession of Death being described in the pictures and painted words. As Gertsman has argued, such features invited “a kinesthetic and participatory mode of viewing” that provided “a site for active spectatorship”; Seeta Chaganti has similarly asserted that in Danse macabre wall paintings, “human bodily movement represented one medium functioning as part of the installation’s complete spectacle.”41 Those who walked the walls of the Pardon Churchyard, following the mural from beginning to end, would have been asked to become not just viewers but active participants in the ritual of the Dance of Death depicted before them.
The verses by Lydgate displayed in the Pardon Churchyard lay at the nexus of written words, visual images, and embodied action, but in some manuscripts of the B group, the concluding verses reframe this sensorily engaged and active participation as reading. All of the B group texts omit the “Lenvoye de translatoure” of the A group and end with heavily revised versions of two stanzas from A, plus, in some manuscripts, a final, newly added stanza. The two revised stanzas in BL MS Lansdowne 699, for example, change the A group’s “Ȝe folke that loken upon this purtrature / Beholdyng heer all the estates daunce” (633–34) to “Ȝe folk that loken upon this scripture / Conceyveth here that al estatis daunce” (561–62), a shift that elevates “scripture” over “portaiture” and “conceiving” over “beholding.” This emphasis on language, apprehended through the act of reading and through processes of taking in and understanding, as implied by the use of the verb conceyveth (from conceiven) can be interpreted as an attempt to move the viewer’s experience of the picture-poem away from “kinesthetic and participatory” viewing and toward contemplation, a move that is underscored by the repeated exhortation (present, but in a more muted way, in the A group) to keep what has been experienced through the act of viewing the mural “in remembraunce” (565) and “in your memorye” (573). To end as the Lansdowne version of Lydgate’s poem does is to envision the legible text (the “scripture”) as well as the viewable pictures all as one combined image “seen” in and impressed upon the mind. Sensation, imagination, and textuality all come together in this act of remembrance as the image is imprinted on the viewer’s mind, a process that can be seen even more strongly in the following example.42
A lengthy set of Lydgate’s verses was used as wall art in another religious setting, this one close to his abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Sometime in the late 1480s to 1490s, thirty-two stanzas from two of Lydgate’s poems were painted in the newly constructed chantry chapel of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Long Melford. Six of the stanzas come from Lydgate’s “Quis dabit?” and twenty-six from his Testament, poems that were often associated with each other in their manuscript contexts. In BL MS Harley 2255, which was owned by Abbot William Curteys and the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds, the Testament is immediately followed by the “Quis dabit?” poem, but it is almost certain that the verses were painted in the chantry not at monastic behest but on the order of a member of the Clopton family, probably John Clopton (1423–96), a wealthy and politically prominent member of the local gentry who was a generous benefactor in Melford and whose will expresses a request to be buried in the chapel at Long Melford.43 In her work on East Anglian piety, Gail McMurray Gibson has charted a close relationship between John Clopton and Lydgate, one that would explain the choice of the monk-poet’s verses for the Clopton chantry chapel.44
While alterations have been made to the chantry chapel since the fifteenth century, traces of the original elaborate decoration remain and, along with church inventories from 1529 and 1553, allow us to guess at “the visual expectations” of churchgoers and play-goers in fifteenth-century East Anglia.45 Verses from the Testament are painted in black script on a white ground on a series of carved wooden plaques, one stanza per plaque, that form a scroll that runs along three of the walls of the chantry chapel just below ceiling height. The scroll begins in the southeast corner, where it is held in the painted image of a man’s hand, and each plaque is connected to the next by a carved pattern of branches, leaves, and flowers on which the plaques rest. The “Quis dabit?” verses, which are also black on white, are painted on the girder that supports the lower ceiling and are preceded by a small painting of a hooded female figure.46 Other decorations, including short phrases, legends, and coats of arms commemorating the Clopton family, appear throughout the chapel, showing that an elaborate “scheme of textual decoration,” as J. B. Trapp puts it, was once a central part of the interior of the chapel. Such decorations, as Kathleen Kamerick has shown, proliferated in East Anglian parish churches in the fifteenth century and, in so doing, encouraged the visual participation in holy scenes that was a feature of late medieval devotion.47
Although the placement of the verses from Lydgate’s Testament just below the ceiling makes them difficult to read, their function, Trapp believes, was “clearly didactic and penitential,” a claim that has been more fully developed by Jennifer Floyd, who shows how the sacramental imagery linking the Host and Christ that is such a prominent feature of “the devotional poetics and doctrinal messages of the chantry chapel’s entire decorative scheme” is echoed in Lydgate’s verses, especially in the repeated refrain that requests the granting of “shrifte hosyl and repentance.”48 In that regard, the Testament verses are like many other visual displays in medieval churches that were designed for contemplation or edification, whether in solitude or during a church service. The choice of Lydgate’s verses may be due to the poet’s fame and may also reflect his relationship with Clopton.49 Floyd argues that the use of Lydgate’s verses in the chantry chapel would have strengthened the sense of cultural affinity between Clopton and his peers, who (unlike parishioners) would have had access to the chapel and chantry and were patrons or readers of Lydgate, an argument that reinforces Philippa Maddern’s emphasis on the importance of friendship in fifteenth-century East Anglia and Gibson’s assessment of the emphasis on family ties found in the East Anglian cult of St. Anne.50
As with the St. Paul’s Dance of Death mural, the verses from Lydgate’s Testament would have involved viewers in processes “of activity, of movement, of performativity” that Paul Binski has observed were an important part of how, beyond the visual or aural, worshippers encountered texts and images in churches.51 Like a viewer of the Daunce of Poulys, a worshipper following the unfurling panels of the Testament around the chantry’s wall would have been engaged in a mimetic and embodied mirroring of what the verses visually and textually displayed. Floyd suggests that the worshipper’s movement around the chantry chapel becomes a kind of pilgrimage, in which the penitential themes of Lydgate’s verses are bodily performed.52
The Testament painted in Long Melford selects from and reorders the verses found in manuscript versions of the poem, drawing especially from the last sections of the poem, which feature Christ’s complaint and shaping them for their chantry setting, as Gibson has observed.53 As was the case for the Daunce of Poulys, the aim appears to have been to create a version of Lydgate’s poem suitable for the location and for visual display, although in this case, any cutting, reordering, or reworking would have been done not by the poet, who died in 1449, but by the person in charge of selecting the text that would be painted in the chantry chapel. The result, by whatever hand, is a shorter text and one in which stanzas have been moved around to create an effect that differs from what a reader of one of the manuscript versions would have experienced. The verses used in the chantry setting seem to have been chosen, rearranged, and reworked specifically so as to engage the viewer in the act of visualized and performed penance. The use of such injunctions as “beholde” and “beholde and see” stresses the act of looking, while repetition of the phrases “shrifte hosell and repentance” and “knelying on our kne” function as reminders of physical acts of penance.
It appears that in the chantry chapel, the verses from Lydgate’s Testament were never accompanied by images illustrating the verses. Instead, the verses themselves become the image. Although Trapp claims that this usage of “tituli without pictures” was rare before the sixteenth century, Richard Marks notes that framed texts or “tables” were a feature of cathedrals and major monastic churches.54 Gayk’s suggestion that the painted verses at Long Melford can be taken as “a marker of increasing lay literacy and reliance on the textual as well as the visual for religious instruction” points to a use of writing as decoration that would become a more frequent practice in the following centuries.55 Such instances of the imbrication of word and image, in which, as Simpson says, “the ‘picture’ is indistinguishable from the text itself,” are precursors of the embrace of writing on walls as a form of interior decoration as well as a mnemonic and advisory aid that Juliet Fleming has analyzed and that would become a feature of early modern English domestic and public interiors.56 Like that later enthusiasm for wall writing, the text-as-image nature of the Testament verses calls attention to the materiality of the written word and its visual essence; if not quite word become flesh, it is at least word become object, an object that could have the same impact on a viewer as an image might.
While the verses painted in the chantry chapel clearly had a site-specific effect, deriving their force from the sensory context of the room and from the immediacy of a viewer’s experience of them, they also had a take-away aspect. During the time that a worshipper was in the church, including during sermons, text-image displays would have enhanced the message being preached and thus have served as a form of lay instruction.57 They also had a less site-specific effect that allowed their power to extend beyond their immediate setting, particularly by earning indulgences for anyone who gazed on them or by serving as charms that could ward off sickness and death.58 Floyd suggests that by encouraging meditative practices and stressing as they do the act of imprinting on the mind’s eye (“emprynte theese thyng in your inward thought”), the Testament stanzas help the viewer create “internalized and portable ‘copies’ ” of the verses on the wall.59 In this regard, they are like the “posies” described by George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, ephemeral but portable epigrams that are made to be carried away, although in the case of the Long Melford verses, their portability is limited to what can be stored in a viewer’s mental and kinetic memory, to be triggered again at another time and place, regardless of whether the painted verses could be viewed again or even whether they continued to exist at all.60
What path to destruction was taken by the wall hanging that displayed Lydgate’s Legend of St. George and what it looked like we cannot say, since its only surviving traces are to be found in three unillustrated manuscript copies of Lydgate’s verses.61 In surviving, even without any illustrations, the verses expand our knowledge of the overlapping spheres of writing and reading, painting and viewing, and performing and spectating in fifteenth-century England. Their multimedia nature points to the ways in which late medieval textuality and visuality merged and to how picture-poems were used in secular and domestic settings.
Lydgate’s precise role in creating the Legend of St. George is hard to pin down, but it apparently went well beyond just supplying the verses for the wall hanging. In his headnote, Shirley describes the Legend as the “devyse of a steyned halle of þe lyf of Saint George ymagyned by Daun Johan þe Munk of Bury Lydegate / and made with þe balades at the request / of þarmorieres of Londoun for þonour of þeyre broþerhoode and þeyre feest of Saint George.”62 It was Lydgate who authored the surviving thirty-five rhyme-royal ballades that relate the story of St. George’s fight against the dragon and subsequent martyrdom, but Shirley’s phrasing implies that Lydgate was more broadly responsible for coming up with the scheme (the device) for whole display, which was “ymagyned” (conceived, visualized, planned) by him. Although devyse had various meanings, in its technical sense, which is how Gordon Kipling argues Shirley is using it here, the word referred to the plan or design that served as a guide for artisans in producing a painting, performance, or building. Shirley describes two of Lydgate’s other performance pieces as devices: the Mumming at London, which he refers to as “þe deuyse of a desguysing,” and the Mumming at Windsor, called “þe devyse of a momyng.” If Kipling is right, then Lydgate seems to have been charged with supplying the plan for the visual display as well as with making the verses that accompanied it, functioning as both poet and deviser for the commissioned piece.63
Of the wall hanging itself, only a few traces can be teased out. Despite Stow’s note, written at the top of the page in Trinity MS R.3.21, which suggests that the paintings were murals, the “steyned halle” was probably a painted cloth, as Hammond thought and as Floyd has more recently argued. (Although its meaning had changed by Stow’s time, causing him to confuse wall paintings with painted cloths, in Lydgate’s day, halle could refer not only to a hall but also to a cloth hanging.)64 Staining and painting seem to have been separate arts in the early fifteenth century, the former involving the use of pigments that penetrated the surface of the cloth.65 Surviving wall paintings from parish churches (a more durable medium than painted textiles) offer a glimpse of how St. George could be represented in visual art of the period, which, befitting his status as patron saint of the Armorers, often included showing him in up-to-date armor.66
The scenes that accompanied Lydgate’s verses and illustrated the legend of St. George may have been made to order or adapted from existing compositions. We know that in tapestry making—which has been more fully documented than has the making of painted cloths, in part because woven tapestries have survived in greater numbers—scenes and figures were frequently borrowed from painted or, later, print sources, which formed the basis for the full-size pattern in color that was painted on paper or cloth (called the “cartoon”), used by weavers. Designs could also be adapted from plays or tableaux, and the pageants built for royal entries and other civic spectacles are an especially useful source to consider for the Armorers’ hanging, since they often incorporated placards bearing “scriptures” or verses explaining the scene being represented, which functioned similarly to the verses Lydgate supplied describing St. George’s deeds. Evidence shows that the artists who designed civic pageantry also sometimes designed tapestries, as in the case of Jacquemart Pilet, who was trained in the atelier of Bauduin de Bailleul in Arras and was commissioned in 1468 by the aldermen of Arras to paint fourteen narrative scenes on paper that that would be acted out by members of the city corporations during the entry of Charles le Téméraire into the city in the following year. Pilet was later commissioned by parishioners of the church of Saint-Géry in Arras to design tapestries of the Life of Saint Géry based on a written account they gave him.67
The phrase “made with þe balades” does not make entirely clear how Lydgate’s verses accompanied the “steyned halle” or where they were positioned on the cloth along with illustrations of St. George’s life, but the verses may have appeared in scrolls or panels beneath the images. A late fifteenth-century tapestry called The Hunt of the Frail Stag, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a suggestive analogue. Four surviving fragments of the Hunt tapestry depict episodes in an allegorical hunt along with verses on a scroll that describe the visual depiction. Another fragment from the same tapestry shows a male figure, who presumably represents the author of the verses that appear on the tapestry fragments and who stands next to a tablet on which is inscribed the moral of the allegory. Another tapestry depicting scenes from The Story of the Trojan War, also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, similarly incorporates verses woven onto banners at the top and bottom of the panels and includes a final panel depicting what Adolpho Cavallo argues may be the poet or deviser, in the tradition of figures accompanying moralizing verses found in other Netherlandish tapestries of the period.68 The words “þee poete first declareþe,” which precede the first stanza of Lydgate’s ballades on St. George, may point to the image of such a poet-figure, and Shirley describes a similar poet-figure in connection with Bycorne and Chychevache.
One scholar has suggested that the poet- or narrator-figures woven into tapestries might have derived from the theater; at the very least, they are evidence of the porous boundaries of various representational media and the overlapping nature of the terms used to describe them.69 While the line “þee poete first declareþe” in the Legend of St. George probably points to a visually depicted poet-figure, it might also suggest that Lydgate’s verses were recited, perhaps to accompany the unveiling of the wall hanging when it was first installed or on feast days related to St. George, when the wall hanging might have been used as a backdrop to the festivities and even perhaps to an enactment of the St. George story. The terminology used in this single line, which is the only remaining example of the “histories” (i.e., the instructions for the painter)—if that is what “þee poete first declareþe” is—that remains in the three manuscript copies of the St. George device, is not much help in sorting out these possibilities, since the verb declaren can be used to describe spoken or written words, as in the phrase “as bokes us declare” (e.g., Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.799), or to signify nonverbal means of making something known, in the sense of “reveal, show, display.”70 Thus, like a similar line in Bycorne and Chychevache, in which the poet-figure is described as “seying” three balades, “declareþe” may point to written or painted words or to words spoken by a presenter, who may or may not have been identical with the author of the verses.71
A similar blurring of genre distinctions and terminology occurs in relation to the audience. The first stanza of the Legend, for instance, addresses a group of people (“O yee folk þat heer present be,” l. 1), but are those “folk” viewers of the pictorial representation, spectators gathered for some sort of performance related to it, or simply the verbal residue of an oral tradition? Subsequent lines, however, stress the visual, inviting the audience to “haue Inspeccion” of the life of St. George, through whose story they “may beholde and see / His martirdome and his passyon” (ll. 2–4). The word “Inspeccion” implies a kind of attentive spectatorship or intent looking that involves careful perusal or scrutiny, while the phrase “may beholde and see” promises that viewers will have scenes on which to turn their gaze.72 While these phrases are consistent with the assumption that spectators gazed at images and words on a wall hanging, they may also point to a live performance. Anne Lancashire notes that the wall hanging of St. George’s life might have been accompanied by a mimed performance—perhaps one similar to that recorded in 1585 at an election feast of the Armorers and Brasiers, where an armed boy representing St. George and a lady leading a lamb accompanied by drum and flute marched around the hall and gave a speech—a suggestion that the first verses of the poem do not rule out.73 Exhortations to “behold” and “inspect” may also point to meditative visualization of the sort that accompanied devotional reading, as in the case of the wall paintings at St. Paul’s and Long Melford.
Despite its appeals to visualization, the Legend is full of references to reading and to the literate milieu from which it derives. Lydgate frequently alludes to his sources (“As þat myn Auctour lykeþe for to expresse,” l. 18; “As the story of hym list to endyte,” l. 23; “As clerkis of him wryte,” l. 26; “þe story dooþe devyse,” l. 211; “we fynden in his lyff,” l. 218; etc.) and, more broadly, to the acts of reading and writing. Lydgate’s chief source, from which he draws liberally, is the Legenda Aurea, which he uses in telling two interrelated stories: St. George’s rescue of a king’s daughter from a dragon, along with the subsequent conversion of her city, and George’s encounter with the tyrant Dacian, who tortures the saint for his beliefs (George escapes all harm, destroys the pagan temple, and converts Dacian’s wife, before finally being beheaded, after which Dacian is stricken and dies).74 The poem also emphasizes exegesis and interpretation, for example, in its unpacking of the two meanings of George’s name in the third stanza and in its invitation to link the story of St. George with the founding of the Order of the Garter by Edward III. The poem also tells a relatively complicated story, beginning with St. George’s birth in Cappadocia, through his battle with the dragon, and his martyrdom.
Although this reliance on called-out sources, narrative complexity, and exegesis may seem to argue against the use of the poem on a wall hanging, other features of the poem suggest that it could well have accompanied painted images. At thirty-five stanzas, it is considerably shorter than the Daunce of Poulys and only slightly longer than the Testament. Moreover, various textual details signal that, as Derek Pearsall argues, Lydgate has reshaped his source material “as befits the occasion and the audience.” Pearsall observes that the poem “is remarkably straightforward and free of the amplification that Lydgate generally introduced in purely literary treatments of saints’ lives.” The rhyme-royal stanzas are lively, full of action, and move smoothly to the saint’s final prayer. The verses are also carefully calibrated stylistically—in a way that recalls the poetic sophistication Lydgate assumed London’s Mercers and Goldsmiths would appreciate—as can be seen in the degree to which Lydgate’s treatment of George’s martyrdom contrasts with the colloquialism and violence of the version in the South English Legendary. The torture scene in this and the next stanzas, for instance, avoids the physical detail and appeal to emotions of the Legendary and, in Pearsall’s words, “deflects the edge of suffering” through the use of conventional literary phrasing such as the absolute constructions of lines 174–75, which make the actions seem preordained rather than humanly planned. Similarly, the saint’s prayer on behalf of those who venerate him (ll. 232–38) is a conventional motif, but its “abstraction and generality” differ from the “homely practicality” of the South English Legendary.75
Lydgate’s stylistic choices and the verses’ references to reading imply that the habits of literacy we tend to associate solely with words on a page could extend to other media, including wall hangings or even mimetic performance. Lydgate’s reshaping of his material may show not just a willingness to write for the occasion, as Pearsall argues, but to write for multiple possible occasions. In the St. George verses, Lydgate seems to show an awareness of the presentational versatility of poetry in the period and to have envisioned that what he wrote might at various times be read silently from a page, listened to as it was read aloud, gazed at on a painted representation, or watched in performance. The scene of reading, Lydgate appears to have grasped, could be ever-changing.
The poem’s treatment of time and its choice of verb tenses underscore this seeming awareness of multiple presentational modes. After the first stanza, which is grounded in the present (“O yee folk that heer present be,” l. 1) and the immediate future (“Wheeche of this story shal have inspeccion,” l. 2), the remainder of the poem is narrated in the past tense in a way that calls attention to the already enacted nature of the events being narrated. That sense of events past provides a counterpoint to any visual images or accompanying performance that, by virtue of their form, always fully inhabit the present. There is a constant reminder in the poem of the temporal unfolding of George’s actions—this happens, then that, and later this—which creates a flow of events that lends itself to reading, hearing, or watching the life of the saint.
The broad appeal of St. George made him especially well suited as subject matter for multiple audiences and varied representational media. St. George’s chivalrous protection of women, his piety, and his generosity to the poor assured him popularity among the knightly classes, and in the 1340s, Edward III dedicated his Order of the Garter to St. George (as the second stanza of Lydgate’s poem mentions). By the end of the fourteenth century St. George had become the patron saint of England, and in 1415, after the English victory at Agincourt, where troops had carried the banner of St. George, Archbishop Chichele raised St. George’s day (23 April) to the status of a Great Feast and ordered it to be celebrated on par with Christmas. St. George was the Armorers’ patron saint, and Lydgate’s verses may have been commissioned for one of their feasts in his honor, perhaps, as Floyd argues, the one that coincided with completion of construction on a new hall for their guild, in other words, perhaps on 23 April 1430, a date that would assign the poem to the period when Lydgate was energetically making other London entertainments.76
Like the verses Lydgate provided for entertainments for the Mercers and Goldsmiths, written possibly just a few months earlier, the Legend would appeal to prosperous and civic-minded, as well as aspirational, Londoners. St. George is described as “protectour and patroun” (l. 5) and as lodestar of knighthood (l. 6), a flattering reminder that the Armorers’ patron tied them to the aristocracy. The second stanza adds more reminders of George’s elite status, linking him to Edward III’s founding of the Order of the Garter and to the tradition of twenty-four knights dressing in livery to celebrate his feast day each year, while the third stanza stresses that George’s name signifies not just holiness but also knighthood and renown. The description of George as the king’s daughter’s “Chaumpyoun” (l. 96) is consistent with Lydgate’s depiction of St. George as a model of chivalry. A “champion” was someone who engaged in battle for another’s sake; the term was drawn from judicial duels or trials by battle in which, under English law, representatives (champions) of the two parties would fight to determine the case, with divine intervention assigning victory to the rightful side.77 Lydgate also links the saint to the Virgin Mary (l. 85) and works in a reminder about the need to honor priesthood (ll. 144ff), as we might expect given his frequent defense of orthodox religion, which may have resonated with the poem’s patrons.
The Legend of St. George was in all likelihood painted onto a wall hanging that was displayed in the Armorers’ hall, and it may also have been read aloud, perhaps along with a mimed performance, on feast days. It was certainly read by at least some of those whose hands held one of the three manuscripts in which it survives. For all three modes of reception—viewed as pictures, heard as spoken poetry, read silently from the page—Lydgate’s verses work at conveying the meaning of the saint’s story. Because they do, they offer a reminder of the pervasiveness of late medieval genre blurring and media mixing, a blurring and mixing of which Lydgate himself seems to have been fully aware.
Much of what can be said about the Legend applies to Bycorne and Chychevache as well, despite its quite different narrative. The poem tells the satiric story of two legendary beasts: one who dines on patient men, the other on submissive women. Like the Disguising at Hertford, the poem is part of a misogynist tradition of complaints about unruly women and of advice on marital behavior, and in at least one instance appeared in a manuscript context (in Trinity MS R.3.19) that included the conduct poems How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter and How the Wise Man Taught His Son that share some of its emphasis on social behavior. Bycorne also echoes Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “Clerk’s Tale,” with explicit references to patient Griselda and the question of sovereignty in marriage. While no direct source has been identified, Lydgate might have known French versions of the story, such as the Dit de la Chincheface.78 Pearsall notes that the story of Bycorne and Chychevache, already widespread by Chaucer’s time, became popular in murals and tapestries of the fifteenth century, the most famous example being the mural paintings in the castle of Villeneuve-Lembron in France where the verses are written on scrolls between the pictures.79 Lydgate’s poem consists of nineteen stanzas written in rhyme royal: the first three stanzas are narrated by an “ymage in poete-wyse,” while the following stanzas consist of direct speech from, in turn, Bycorne, a group of husbands, a woman who is being devoured by Chychevache, and, finally, Chychevache and an old man whose wife has been eaten. Prose headings between stanzas describe what is being portrayed by the verses. Like the identity of the worthy citizen of London for whom Shirley says it was written, the poem’s date is unknown, although it may plausibly be dated to the late 1420s, the period of Lydgate’s other London poems.80
In his copy of the poem in Trinity MS R.3.20, Shirley identifies Bycorne and Chychevache as a “deuise of a peynted or desteyned clothe for an halle a parlour or a chaumbre / deuysed by Iohan Lidegate at þe request of a werþy citeseyn of London,” suggesting that the verses were meant for a wall hanging. If Shirley is using device in the technical sense, then the verses he copied may represent the plan for the wall hanging, with iconographical descriptions in prose (“histories” or instructions to the painter) and verse scriptures (“reasons,” which represent the words that are to be inscribed by the painter along with each image).81 The resulting wall hanging would have had nineteen seven-line stanzas painted onto it and, if Shirley’s rubrics accurately represent the instructions to the painter, seven painted images showing the following: a poet; the two beasts, one fat and the other thin; Bycorne speaking; a company of men coming toward Bycorne, speaking; a woman being devoured by Chychevache, speaking to “alle wives”; a thin, long-horned beast (i.e., Chychevache); and a husband trying to rescue his wife from Chychevache. Presumably, the painter would have drawn the images in such as way as to accommodate the varying number of stanzas that went with each of them.
Despite the apparent clarity of Shirley’s headnote, questions about the representational form the poem took are raised by the other two extant versions of Lydgate’s verses, which do not identify it as intended for a painted cloth. In addition, a close look at Shirley’s headnotes for the poem (which presumably are the “histories” instructing the artisan) in R.3.20 as well as Lydgate’s text reveals features that point to multiple possible forms of representational display. Some scholars have argued that Bycorne may have been intended for dramatic presentation, perhaps as a pantomimed mumming, a claim encouraged by the running titles in Trinity MS R.3.19, which identify the text as being in the form or manner of a disguising or in the guise of a mumming, as well as by the direct speeches of the poet-like figure and the characters in the poem.82 The use of “seying” in the first prose description and of variations on it in some of the subsequent headings may indicate that the verses were spoken aloud, but as with the Legend’s use of “declareþe,” the word “seying” may simply refer to words painted on the cloth. Similarly, moments of direct address by the figures to an audience—“Felawes takeþe heede and yee may see,” “Alle humble men, boþe you and me,” “O noble wyves, beoþe wel ware / Takeþe ensaumple nowe by me,” “you for to swalowe,” “O cely housbandes! woo deon yee!” and the entire last stanza that speaks directly to patient husbands—could be literary conventions preserving traces of an oral tradition or could be words painted on a cloth to represent the speeches of painted figures; they also would not be out of place in a live performance.83 That the “ymage in poete-wyse” is described as standing while all of the other figures are said to be portrayed could signal that the poet-figure served as a presenter who introduced the story, while the other characters acted their parts, although stonde might also refer to a painted poet-figure. The verb portraien had a range of meanings—including to draw, to paint, to depict, or to create a mental image or verbal description—and thus does not help decide the final form of Bycorne, but Pearsall believes that its use here (in contrast with the words “showeth,” “kometh,” and “demonstrando,” which Shirley employs in the rubrics to the poems he explicitly calls mummings and disguisings) points to painted images.84
As with the other poems designed for visual display discussed in this chapter, the location of the Bycorne and Chychevache wall hanging is crucial for its potential meanings. Shirley’s headnote indicates that the wall hanging was for display in “an halle a parlour or a chaumbre,” a comment echoed by John Stow in his note at the end of the copy of the poem in Trinity R.3.19, where he states that the ballades were designed “to be paynted in a parlor” (see Figure 3). A hall was an assembly or banquet room, while a parlor was a semi-private room off a hall; as its etymology suggests, a parlor was often used for conversation: one version of Piers Plowman complains about the newly fashionable preference of rich people to eat alone in a parlor rather than to dine collectively in a hall.85 A chamber was a private apartment for personal use, such as a bedroom, but it could also refer to a room used for transacting business. Any of these rooms could have been found in a prosperous private residence, and thus the image-poem could have been viewed by a range of passersby in the household, including apprentices, servants, guests, and family members; if it was installed in a parlor or chamber, its chief viewers would have been the intimate members of the household, especially the husband and wife, whom the poem may most directly engage with its representation of gendered power imbalances and consumption of material goods.86
Shirley does not identify the piece’s patron, leaving the “werthy citeseyn” for whom the wall hanging was designed unnamed, but by using that specific combination of adjective and noun, Shirley gives us solid evidence for assuming that the wall hanging was designed for a prosperous resident of London. Worthy had connotations both of status and moral worth, suggesting someone of standing who is also distinguished or honorable (e.g., “the seid Maire, Shiref, Baillifs and the worthimen of the Commune Counsell aforeseid”). A citizen was technically any freeman of a town or city, and the term was often used interchangeably with burgess, but it could be used more broadly to indicate any established inhabitant of a city or town (e.g., “Þe citezeins and burgeys of Caunterbury”). In a narrower sense, citeseyn could be used to describe members of the city government, as in phrases such as “John Brokley, late Citecein and Aldreman of the Citee of London.”87 Since he elsewhere names mayors or guildsmen or sheriffs as recipients of Lydgate’s poetic labors, Shirley’s choice of words suggests either that he did not know the precise identity of the patron, including his guild affiliation or whether he held a public office, or that the patron was not prominent enough—or of enough interest to the readers Shirley envisioned as reading the anthology into which he copied the verses—to warrant mention by name.
Whatever the precise identity of the “werthy citeseyn,” Lydgate’s opening address to “prudent folkes” who are exhorted to “takeþe heed / And remembreþe, in youre lyves” (1–2) signals the expectation that he and other viewers of the Bycorne wall hanging will take to heart the poem’s messages, messages that move well beyond the stock misogyny often associated with the story of the two monsters and that speak to the needs and anxieties of a London household. As Andrea Denny-Brown has shown, Lydgate’s poem reshapes the misogynistic concerns found in earlier French versions by introducing an “appetitive register” that thematizes “the managing of desire and the innate mortal hunger for material (as opposed to spiritual) goods.”88 A poem about excess and dearth, a fat monster and a lean one, becomes in Lydgate’s telling both a warning against avarice and an opportunity to demonstrate the dangers of imbalances within the urban household: imbalances related to the distribution of gendered power, to moderation of bodily appetites, and to acquisition of worldly goods. As a piece of writing and a visual display, Bycorne and Chychevache circulates within contexts that are simultaneously material, historical, and ideological, and its meanings have to be understood as varying depending on whether it was viewed by an urban household or read alongside the other chiefly poetic texts of a religious or moral nature in Trinity R.3.20 (which also included the Legend of St. George).89 Yet even in its manuscript contexts, and especially in Trinity R.3.20, traces of its material presence on a “peynted or desteyned cloth” can still be detected, however faintly, waiting to activate the memory of an image or a performance once seen.
Figure 3. Bycorne and Chychevache (ll. 106–33, with Stow’s note at end). Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.19, fol. 159r. By permission of the library.
As objects of visual narrative that engage viewers in kinetic and even mimetic physical experiences, wall hangings overlap with other medieval performance genres. Given that overlap, the tendency of the manuscripts into which they were copied to blur genre lines and Shirley’s use of multiple terms for describing Lydgate’s picture-poem texts perhaps does not indicate confusion but rather reflects the determinedly mixed-media form of these texts, a form modern critical categories have had difficulty recognizing. Even though they were two-dimensional representations, such picture-poems encouraged performative looking, as I have argued, calling on viewers to activate the images and words painted on the mural or wall hanging. Performative looking of this sort was analogous to the performative reading practices that have in recent years been delineated by scholars such as Jeffrey Hamburger, who has described the Rothschild Canticles as a drama acted out by the reader, and Jessica Brantley, who has shown how theatrical practices informed private devotional reading.90 In many instances, the image-text being read or viewed on a manuscript page or a wall or cloth hanging must have resembled in its combination of words and pictures the Hans Memling’s Passion panel, which as Stevens has observed “does not signify an actual performance” but instead “represents the idea of a performance.”91 Paying attention to their interactive features and to the idea of performance embedded in them makes it possible to position picture-poems made for public viewing on a continuum that includes three-dimensional tableaux vivants and sculptural displays, as well as scripted plays, many of which were themselves structured as set speeches explaining visual representations.92
The term pageant usefully highlights the dilemma modern scholars face in trying to sort out the many and overlapping medieval representational forms that involved visual display. It is now often applied to the individual plays within the biblical cycles, but the use of pageant to refer to drama is a secondary meaning, derived from its initial use to designate something that was painted or ornamented.93 In medieval dramatic records, the word can refer to the decorated mobile object that functioned as a stage set (“pageant wagon”) or to a decorated object, such as a painted cloth, that was carried in a procession. Thomas More chose the word pageant to describe pictures on a painted cloth, accompanied by verses, that More in his youth devised for his father’s house.94 Although both the OED and MED seem to take their cue from the More quotation in defining pageant as “a scene represented on tapestry or the like,” the term could be used as a synonym for picture or illustration.95
That range of meanings is a useful reminder of the fluid nature of representational forms in the period. Verses could be written for a wall hanging and also read aloud or mimed when the hanging was displayed. Wall hangings were themselves an integral feature of medieval performances and ceremonies, and extant records show how tapestry made its way into performances in the form of banners and hangings used to decorate halls and streets. A mid-fifteenth-century continuation of The Brut describes the pageants and other honors that greeted the entry of Henry V and Catherine of Valois into London in 1421 where they saw “euyry strete hongid rychely with riche clothis of gold and silke, and of velewettis and cloþis of araas, the beste that myght be gotyn.”96 Lydgate’s verses for the royal entry of Henry VI in 1432 similarly recount how the king, riding to the middle of the bridge, came to a tower “arrayed with welvettes soffte, / Clothis off golde, sylke, and tapcerye, / As apperteynyth to . . . regalye” (ll. 103–5). Although we do not know what was depicted on these pieces of cloth, their images might well have amplified, supplemented, or perhaps even qualified the performances unfolding in front of them, with spoken verses, tableaux, tapestry images, and verses displayed in writing all combining to create the performance. Play-scripts themselves may have been designed to evoke a collective memory of live performance or even to invite the reader to take on various roles.97 The mixing of so many different types of visual display suggests that narratives were purpose-built to take different forms: a long romance might have been enacted as a play and then shortened for wall decoration and truncated even more for subtleties.
Lydgate himself seems to have been particularly alert to the power of visual representation. On at least three occasions, he remarks on the impact that images had on him, especially as spurs for his writing. He tells us in the opening verses of the “Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary” that he was stirred by a meditation with pictures that he happened to read in a book one night (ll. 1–35). His Testament recounts an earlier instance that occurred when, at fifteen years of age, he saw a crucifix “depicte upon a wall” of a cloister with the word “vide” written beside the phrase “Beholde my mekenesse, O child, and leve thy pryde” (ll. 744–46), which in old age moved him to write a “litel dite” in remembrance (ll. 750–53). And the “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep” was inspired, Lydgate says, by a scene in a wall painting he had recently seen (“a similitude / Ful craftily depeyntid vpon a wall,” ll. 18–19). Besides drawing inspiration from images, Lydgate often describes his poetic making in terms drawn from the visual crafts: as Gayk points out, he often “represents his writing as painting intended to help his readers see.”98
Writing in the 1440s, Lydgate’s near contemporary, Reginald Pecock, saw the advantage of pictorial representation over writing in its speed of apprehension. What might take six or seven pages’ worth of reading to “bringe into knowing or into remembraunce” could be quickly grasped by looking at an image or “a storie openli ther of purtreied or peintid in the wal or in a clooth.” Pictorial representations, in Pecock’s view, made it possible to absorb more “mater” with less labor than if a story were written. Accessibility was another advantage, for just as a man who can read, Pecock explains, can understand a long story more easily through his own reading rather than being read aloud to by someone else or listening to himself read aloud, so those who cannot read will not find someone who can read aloud to them as easily as they can find the painted walls of a church or a “clooth steyned.” The clincher for Pecock was that images and paintings make a stronger impression than words and thus have much more potency, a sentiment echoed by Lydgate’s claim that images were designed so that stories might “rest with ws with dewe remembraunce.”99
Those claims for the virtues of images offer a corrective to the dominance of the written word in our own era, which along with the unavoidable fact that written texts remain our best, and often only, source of information about medieval culture has led us to downplay the importance of other representational media within late medieval culture and to overlook their frequent intermingling. Lydgate’s poems for visual display remind us that written words, the visual arts, and performances were not mutually exclusive representational forms but instead were mutually supporting. In light of the blurring of boundaries of what we now tend to think of as formally and functionally separate cultural productions, perhaps we ought to expand our understanding of what it meant to be a writer in late medieval culture, adding to our sense of the poet the notion of writer as fabricator—or weaver and painter of words—whose writerly craft could be both inspired by the visual and embodied within it.
