When John Shirley copied the verses now known as the Procession of Corpus Christi, he included a headnote describing them as “an ordenaunce of a precessyoun of the feste of corpus cristi made in london by daun John Lydegate.”1 Welcome though they are as an anchor for what would otherwise be a free-floating set of verses, Shirley’s words are not without ambiguity. What he means by “ordenaunce” and “precessyoun” is not entirely certain, and his phrasing does not make clear whether it was the “precessyoun” that took place in London or the writing of the poem. Despite that cloudiness, what Shirley has preserved appears to be the only known example of a poetic account of a Corpus Christi procession in London. Shirley’s description of the Procession of Corpus Christi as an “ordenaunce” positions the verses at the intersection of visual spectacle and written exegesis, of ephemeral performance (open to multiple meanings) and durable text (presenting a specific interpretation). Lydgate’s verses, as this chapter argues, turn a fleeting procession of figures on Corpus Christi day, a procession that could be understood in a variety of ways by onlookers, into a poetic form that has not only the permanence of written record but also the apparent fixity of exegetical exposition. His stanzas capture not primarily the material details of the live performance they probably are based on but, more pointedly, its symbolic significance, both of which were caught up in questions about the understanding of the sacrament at a time when eucharistic belief was one of the most controversial of English theological issues. The meanings of publicly performed dramas may have been as varied as their spectators, but poetic description offered the promise of one determinate interpretation, even if that promise could not always be fulfilled once the text came into the hands of readers. What Lydgate provides in the Procession of Corpus Christi can be understood as a kind of gloss or reader’s guide, which uses figural interpretation and the appeal of meditative devotion to instruct viewers (now readers) about how to interpret—and use—what they have seen.
The feast of Corpus Christi, established by the Church in the early fourteenth century, commemorates the institution of the Holy Eucharist and falls on the first Thursday following Trinity Sunday (anywhere from late May to late June). Corpus Christi was widely celebrated throughout Europe with urban performances and processions, in keeping with the importance of the eucharist, especially for teaching the laity.2 Despite the feast’s popularity, London apparently never developed a citywide celebration for Corpus Christi or an elaborate set of plays associated with it, such as those mounted in York and other provincial towns in England. That might in part be because guilds and fraternities in London organized themselves around parish churches, not the cathedral of St. Paul’s, and thus lacked a central point of control or consolidation that could have mounted a large-scale performance.3 Fragmented into smaller communities centered around parishes, Londoners may have lacked the resources for or interest in banding together to produce vernacular cycle plays that, as records from York and elsewhere attest, required substantial outlays of time and money.
Another reason for the lack of city-sponsored Corpus Christi plays in London may have to do with the not entirely firm control exercised by the city’s merchant oligarchy. As Sheila Lindenbaum observes, late medieval London is best seen as a cultural field or site of social practices “where discourses not only converge but are strategically deployed by interested parties competing for power, status and resources.” While the years from 1400 to 1500 can be described as a period of “normative discourse” during which the city relied on clerks (such as John Carpenter, the city’s common clerk from 1417–38, compiler of the Liber Albus, and apparent friend of Lydgate, as his commissioning of the Daunce of Poulys shows) and poets to craft a common history by using a totalizing and uniform discourse, such efforts were driven by anxiety on the part of the merchant corporations about their hegemony and should be seen as the product of conflict as much as consensus. Much like the Lancastrians at court, Lindenbaum argues, London’s leaders felt compelled to legitimate their regime and could not rest assured of their dominance. The merchant corporations that held sway over the city in the years after 1390 may have had a monopoly on high civic office and may have presented a united front against the artisan guilds and other contenders, but such events as the rising of Londoners under John Oldcastle in 1414 could not help but raise the specter of an artisan revolt, and citizens of lesser guilds, in Lindenbaum’s words, “remained capable of mounting a challenge to the merchants as late as 1444.”4
The at least partially precarious grip on power held by London’s merchants extended to their influence over the city’s public culture, with Lollard bills and other forms of protest writing competing with civic-sponsored “normative discourse” and with parish affiliations exerting a centripetal pull away from craft and corporate structures.5 In the case of the most visible forms of public culture—citywide ceremonies, festivities, and entertainments—London did not follow the pattern found in cities like York, where a civic oligarchy oversaw play cycles collectively organized by guilds for the moral good and economic profit of the whole city. Apparently not feeling the need for or not able to pull off a centrally organized ceremony, London’s leaders left the entertainment needs of its citizens to private groups.6 While the mayor and aldermen of London were to all appearances individually pious, they did not take part in a citywide Corpus Christi procession or sponsor a drama cycle associated with that feast as did the leaders of other towns.7 Instead, London’s civic entertainments tended to take the form of street pageantry devised for the entry into the city of royalty and other important visitors, an expected part of the city’s relationship to the crown that, by the fifteenth century, was occurring almost every seven years.8 Such pageantry, while no doubt requiring the assistance of many artisans, craftsmen, and performers, was planned and executed by the city government, offering small scope for participation by other groups. In other words, London’s public sphere was not defined by any large-scale communal entertainment of broadly shared responsibility, to which many groups might contribute and which might be expected to express their concerns.9
What London did have, however, besides street pageantry, was a variety of dramatic activity related to parish churches, including boy bishop ceremonies, Palm Sunday prophets, customs such as Hocking and Maying, and pageants at Easter and Corpus Christi.10 The fraternity at St. Botolph’s Aldgate, for instance, which was dedicated to Corpus Christi, owned a vellum roll with various pageants that may have been performed on the feast.11 All Hallows Barking owned several pageants, a term that, as Mary Erler notes, encompasses a variety of kinds of constructions ranging from pageant wagons used as platforms for cycle plays to portable pageants that could be carried to hangings or banners; records show that Barking’s pageants, which the parish used in its Corpus Christi procession, were desirable enough to be sought out for rental, including by the Holy Trinity Priory, the Skinners’ company, and, apparently, John Scott, who had a five-member troupe that played at court through 1509.12
A tantalizing potential dramatic link with Lydgate’s poem can be found in the Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well plays. The area around Clerkenwell, to the northwest of the city, just beyond its walls and not far from Smithfield and the priory of St. Bartholomew, had a long association with popular gatherings and entertainments. In the late twelfth century, William FitzStephen commented on the area’s popularity among students and young men, noting that wells were customary places for leisure-time activities and mentioning Clerkenwell as among the most famous. Around 1300, the prioress of St. Mary’s, Clerkenwell, complained to the king about the damage caused to the priory’s property by Londoners trampling fields and hedges while attending “miracles et lutes [wrestling matches]” there.13 Janette Dillon has shown that Clerkenwell was an important site for the development of theater in London from the medieval period up through Bartholomew Fair and the Fortune playhouse, which was built by Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men in 1600, and that its location outside the city walls contributed to its popularity for purposes of entertainment.14
Among those entertainments was a performance centered on biblical events that was apparently being performed outdoors in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries at Clerkenwell/Skinner’s Well. Records imply that London parish clerks were regularly performing in Clerkenwell by 1384 when a five-day “ludum valde sumptuosum” by the clerks of London is mentioned; a 1390 performance describes “a play of the Passion of our Lord and the Creation of the World;” and a 1409 performance is described as a “great play showing how God created Heaven and the Earth out of nothing and how he created Adam and on to the Day of Judgment,” performed before the king, prince, and nobility, who sat on wooden scaffolding.15 Anne Lancashire argues that these records provide evidence for the supposition that by the late fourteenth century, a religious play at Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well (apparently interchangeable names by this date) was a major annual or at least recurring spectacle that lasted several days and attracted audiences that included royalty and nobility. If there was a recurring biblical play, Lancashire notes, its development may have been influenced by the church’s establishment in the early fourteenth century of the Feast of Corpus Christi. From the early fifteenth century, Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well was the site of the priory of St. John, headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller in England, a wealthy and powerful religious house, and just to the south was the priory of St. Bartholomew. Lancashire speculates that the priory of St. John may have decided “to make its mark in England in part by sponsoring” major religious plays for London and Westminster, perhaps in collaboration with the priory of St. Bartholomew. The only mention of the Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well play in the fifteenth century is in 1409, when it appears to have been a multiday event that may have been watched by Henry IV.16
While civic London may have had a hand in the 1409 production, since there was a close association between St. John’s Priory, which was dedicated to John the Baptist, and the Merchant Tailors (then just the Tailors), who were also closely associated with the royal court (Henry IV and Henry V were members), Lancashire suggests that the play was not organized by the city government but by parish and other clerks. Whatever the precise reasons—the financial troubles of the priory of St. John, the costs of the royal and other entries of the fifteenth century that drained resources for entertainments, or the city’s nervousness about large gatherings in one place (during royal entries and processions, everyone was spread out and livery companies lined the streets in part as crowd control)—it appears that the Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well play was abandoned after 1409.17
According to John Stow, the Skinners, whose religious and social fraternity was dedicated to Corpus Christi, were connected with the Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well biblical play, and it is possible that their involvement turned at some point in the 1390s into their annual Corpus Christi procession.18 In any event, after the play ended in 1409, the procession, which is first mentioned in the Skinners’ 1392 Company Charter, continued, lasting into the sixteenth century.19 The Skinners’ feast-day procession began at their hall in Dungate Hill and moved through the city to St. Antholin’s Church in Watling Street.20 Stow claimed that the procession included the Skinners themselves, carrying wax torches, with more than 200 singing clerks and priests, followed by sheriffs, the mayor, aldermen, and others, all accompanied by minstrels outfitted with wings.21 No surviving records describe tableaux or pageants, which makes it impossible to say whether or not representations of biblical figures were part of the procession, although the model of other processions, including Sunday Prophets, suggests they might have featured either costumed processioners or figures painted on cloth banners or portable pageants with three-dimensional images that were carried in the procession.22
Although Shirley’s headnote does not mention a patron, Lancashire raises the alluring possibility that the Skinners at some point asked Lydgate to record their procession, a possibility that gains additional weight from the fact that the Skinners’ fraternity of Corpus Christi had links to royalty and nobility, including Lydgate’s patrons Henry V, Henry VI, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester.23 If the Skinners did in fact make such a commission, it must have been before the early 1430s, the completion date of Trinity MS R.3.20, into which Shirley copied Lydgate’s verses.24
As descriptions of an actual performance, the verses leave much to be desired, since they omit nearly everything we might want to know about the appearance and movement of the procession. Lydgate mentions almost nothing about the procession route, the participants, the features of the pageants, or other “externals” of the procession and instead concentrates on “the meaning of the festival,” as Walter Schirmer noted.25 Lydgate’s intent apparently was not to create a verbal picture of what onlookers saw during the Skinners’ procession but rather to “explain the significance of the various pageants in the procession,” as Derek Pearsall has argued, or, as Andrew Cole has more recently put it, to engage in a “poetical-theological enterprise” centering on the meaning of the eucharist.26
Despite the absence of details about the physical event of the procession that may well lie behind the verses, the idea and form of a Corpus Christi procession is essential to the poem’s structure and theme. The first stanza, which functions as a kind of introduction, declares that the poem’s aim is to “magne-fye” the “hye feste” (l. 1) being celebrated on this day, a choice of terminology that links celebration with praise, as in the definition in the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440) of magnifien as “make mykyl of thynge yn preysynge.”27 The following stanzas take up one biblical or ecclesiastical figure per stanza (Abraham, Moses, Paul, Matthew, Pope Gregory, St. Ambrose, etc.), giving a brief description of his attributes and exhorting readers to reflect on the meaning of each figure the better to appreciate the significance of the feast day. The “hye feste,” while not explicitly named, is obviously the feast of Corpus Christi, which Lydgate calls the “Feste of festes” (l. 2) and which he vigorously defends throughout the poem.
Phrases such as “Seoþe and considereþe in youre ymaginatyf” (l. 10) and “Remembreþe eeke in youre Inwarde entente” (l. 17) are commonplaces of meditational instruction that ask readers to reflect on the meanings of what they are seeing or hearing, and they may appear to suggest that what Lydgate is writing is a meditation on the feast of Corpus Christi. Lawrence Clopper in fact thinks the verses are “a sermon, or ‘process,’ centered on imagined figurae or pictures of them,” not a description of a procession.28 Cole similarly reads the verses as a text that adopts the processional form (but does not necessarily describe an actual procession) as a way of exploring eucharistic theology beyond the orthodoxies imagined by Archbishop Arundel and others.29 While both Clopper and Cole correctly identify an essential feature of Lydgate’s verses—there is certainly something sermon- or treatise-like about them—pointing to the way they are shot through with exegetical terminology and deeply engage theological questions about the eucharist, I would like to suggest that in the Procession of Corpus Christi, Lydgate plays on the concept of the “figure” as a term for symbolic and material representation and that what he has written are verses that assume, and perhaps even require, knowledge of a real-world procession to be fully legible. We may never be able to know with certainty whether Lydgate wrote these verses for the Skinners, but the verses offer sufficient textual evidence to make a connection with an actual procession likely.
In providing an interpretation of processional figures, Lydgate was continuing the practice of genre and media mixing that I considered in the previous chapter. Shannon Gayk has argued that in his Testament, Lydgate juxtaposes genres, not in a way that points to what James Simpson has identified as “a problem of narrative,” but instead as a kind of “poetic display and play, intended to highlight the relationships between various forms of texts.”30 What Gayk sees in Lydgate’s final poem also can be found in the Procession, as Lydgate plays at the borderlands of genres and forms, drawing together performed and written representation in a way that is especially apt for a text focused on the eucharist, which bears a complex material and symbolic status of its own that was the basis of theological disputes over transubstantiation in the later medieval period.31
The mixing of symbolic and material representations and Lydgate’s play with forms begins immediately in the first stanza of the Procession, which announces that “gracyous misteryes” that are “grounded in scripture” shall be “fette out of fygure” in “youre presence” and “declared by many unkouth signe,” and the final stanza repeats that “theos figures” have been “shewed in your presence” (ll. 6–8, 217). Although Clopper warns that while “fygures” may suggest “images” to a modern reader and that Lydgate uses the term throughout his poem in the technical sense of figurae, Lydgate might be deliberately exploiting the ambiguity of the term as well as the slippage common in meditational texts between things seen with the physical eye and things imagined by the mind’s eye. He does this elsewhere, in a poem on the imago pietatis, where, as Gayk has shown, a material “figure” is used to “prompt a series of figural interpretations of the Passion.”32 In the Procession, Lydgate’s language suggests that some sort of material representation (the “figures”) have been displayed (“fette out” and “shewed”) before spectators (in “youre presence”) in some way. Some of the stanzas contain what seem to be descriptions of the figures and their tableaux: Ecclesiastes is depicted with his castle enclosed by a red cloud, Zacharia holds a censer, and Moses has his golden horns.33 Others stress immediacy and visible presence, through the use of the words here (ll. 40, 54, 105, 162) and this to introduce the various figures (e.g., “Þis blessed Mark, l. 129). Once Lydgate even invokes the act of looking, with an exhortation to “Beholde” (l. 81). These terms to some degree mimic the imaging techniques of late medieval meditational practice that stress the power of images, and yet Lydgate seems to be exploiting their multiple senses by deliberately conjuring up not just mental images but material presences. Even someone as healthily skeptical of too quickly assuming a text’s connection to a dramatic enactment as Clopper accepts that possibility: while arguing that “shewed” need mean nothing more than “presented” or “demonstrated,” he admits that “diuers likenesses” may suggest “something more tangible.”34
While the poem draws on and seeks to spark meditative devotion, especially at the outset, subsequent stanzas suggest that Lydgate’s fuller aim is to gloss the processional figures, from Adam to Thomas Aquinas, around whom the poem is structured. Lydgate is apparently not satisfied with a purely meditative register, and the poem’s opening emphasis on “Inwarde entente” (l. 17) and the “ymaginatyf” (l. 10) quickly gives way to poetic discussion of the meanings of the processional figures, retelling of their background stories, and disquisition on their attributes. Thus, we learn that Abraham is an example of hospitality, that Jacob saw angels going up and down a ladder, that Mark is associated with a lion, and so on. Lydgate is glossing processional pageantry, not Scripture, yet the basic technique of medieval exegesis in which the literal is linked with its allegorical sense still holds. Each processional figure requires an explanation to reveal the symbolic meaning beneath the surface, a meaning that was authorized by modes of scriptural analysis. At the heart of each of Lydgate’s glossing stanzas is an attempt to connect the processional figure to the themes of Corpus Christi, and thus the wine and bread of the sacrament, along with the allegorical association of Christ with grain and milling, make recurring appearances, with the processional figure of Jeremiah, for example, being described as carrying a chalice with “Greyne in þe middes, which to make vs dyne, / Was beete and bulted floure to make of bred.”
Shirley’s use of the term ordenaunce to describe the Procession suggests that in copying the poem, he was aware of the yoking of live performances and written texts that Lydgate’s glossing verses depend upon. On the performance side, an “ordenaunce” could refer to preparations for various important occasions such as birth, marriage, or funeral; it could refer to acts of planning or arranging; or it could point to traditional customs and practices. On the written side, “ordenaunce” could describe the ordering of things into a pattern, including the arrangement of chapters or lines in a book. Shirley could be describing the Procession as a set of directions for the arrangement of a procession on Corpus Christi, in which case Lydgate’s verses could be read as setting out the order of the pageants or banners in the procession and offering a brief description of each of them.35 But like the verses Lydgate wrote describing the pageantry Londoners put on for Henry VI, which Shirley also described as “ordenaunces,” the Procession may not be a set of instructions for the design of a performance but rather an after-the-fact account of it. In this case, the aim seems less an official commemoration than an attempt at fusing spectating and reading—and devotional activity—through the mechanisms of exegesis and instruction.
That Corpus Christi is the ceremony at the heart of the poem intensifies the impact of Lydgate’s connecting of what appears to have been an actual performance with a poetic gloss on it, since the sacrament of the altar hinges on a similar yoking of things present and things imagined, of the material and the symbolic. Erler has argued that a characteristic of eucharistic procession is that it “focuses the gaze on the sacrament” and thus “acknowledges the viewer’s own status as affiliated,” hence the procession tends to be an “instrument of conservatism.”36 Lydgate’s verses achieve a similar effect by focusing the reader’s attention on the processional figures, which serve to affiliate the reader into a textual community organized around shared assumptions about the meanings of those figures. The effect Lydgate seems to seek is to create for the reader a powerful interpretation that is itself “an ‘event’ that actualizes the ethical behavior of a reader, absorbs the reader into its own ethical system, and stimulates, among other ethical acts, its own reenactment.”37
The absorbing focus of Lydgate’s verses is of course the eucharistic story from its prefigurations in Jewish history, through the Last Supper, early Christian history, and medieval theological concerns, a story that comprises, as Miri Rubin notes, “a well-wrought piece of vernacular didactic composition.”38 The poem’s second line, which describes Corpus Christi as the “Feste of festes moost hevenly and devyne,” introduces an extended defense of eucharistic devotion, conveyed through a series of exemplary figures whom Lydgate links to the sacrament of the eucharist and to the Passion. As Cole points out, Lydgate’s history of the sacrament includes “some predictable scriptural figures,” especially biblical authorities whose presence suggests that Lydgate is employing the usual allegorical pattern of prefiguration whereby Old Testament acts serve as instances of “eucharistic foreshadowing.”39 The treatment of Adam, the first figure in the poem, is emblematic of Lydgate’s slanting of his figures toward eucharistic ends. Lydgate ignores most of the Genesis story to focus solely on “Adams synne” (l. 10), which provides the opportunity to move immediately to the crucified Christ, whom Lydgate envisions as an echo of the Edenic fruit hung on the tree of life, and—making the leap to the eucharist—as “oure foode” and “cheef repaste of oure redemption” (ll. 15–16). Other figures are chosen—or, as with Adam, their stories are recast—with a similar aim of creating a series of examples of the power of the eucharist. Melchizedek, the second figure in the poem, is remembered for his offering of bread and wine (drawn from Genesis 14, where he is described as bringing bread and wine to Abraham when Abraham returns from his battle with the four kings who besieged Sodom and Gomorrah) and, in his role as a type of Christ, as offering his own body and blood to his apostles when he returned “Steyned in Bosra” (l. 20), literally, “dyed red in Bosra,” a reference to Isaiah 63:1–7, where God returns from battle in a blood-stained robe, a passage often interpreted as applying to the crucified Jesus. While these biblical figures are treated in a fairly conventional way, Lydgate’s description of postscriptural authorities, starting with Peter Lombard, is far less orthodox, as Cole has shown. These figures offer defenses against heresy and for transubstantiation (such as the twenty-second stanza, which describes Jerome’s work against heretics and contains lines that present the orthodox doctrine of transubstantiation), yet Lydgate often adopts unorthodox—or at least complicatedly orthodox—positions (such as, once again in the description of Jerome, when he “takes the contemporary issue of Christ’s indivisible, fleshly body as it inheres in the host and reframes it with an . . . understanding of Christ’s body as a social body”).40 Lydgate’s treatment of the eucharist, especially his citation of specific figures as authorities on debates about transubstantiation, in the end offers an alternate, not thoroughly orthodox reading of the sacrament, one that, like the procession itself, affiliates believers to a particular version of the religious community.
If the Skinners requested this particular slant on the eucharist, was it because they wanted an interpretation of their procession that sided with an acceptably orthodox yet communal version of the sacrament? Cole suggests that in the Procession, Lydgate may be writing a sort of “urban theology” that was echoed in Corpus Christi processions and that stresses the suturing of “social divisions and hierarchies in the name of a sacrament of unity and community,” a poetic position that might have appealed to the Skinners both because of their long association with Corpus Christi and because of that feast’s more recent associations with disruption.41 Lancashire speculates that the Clerkenwell/Skinners’ Well plays may have ended because of nervousness about large gatherings (the priory of St. John was burned down in the 1381 revolt, although it continued to be a political force and was partly rebuilt by 1399).42 And while the procession that appears to have replaced the plays may have seemed a more manageable alternative, an emphasis on orthodoxy might still have been desirable. As Steven Justice has shown, the 1381 uprising coincided with the feast of Corpus Christi and included aggression against the prelacy and church possessions in ways that seemed to echo the Wycliffite challenge to the sacrament of the eucharist.43 Many chroniclers took particular note of the timing of the revolt within the period of celebration of the feast, and Margaret Aston believes that timing was both intentional and critical, pointing to the fact that during the same year, the Wycliffite challenge had come to center on the sacrament of the altar and had suggested that worship of the eucharistic host amounted to idolatry. Corpus Christi processions were in the background of the revolt, Aston reminds us, and in an inversionary form, processions shaped the movements of the rebels, as they marched on London. Processions even made their way into accounts of the revolt, such as Gower’s, which sounds like a procession in the way that the author recounts the unfolding of the events in 1381.44 Any account of the Skinners’ procession that Lydgate may have written would probably not have been seen as an immediate response to the troubles of the previous century, yet a lingering sense of heretical and rebellious behavior may still have surrounded the procession and have urged the sort of poem Lydgate provided, a poem that would have accorded with the Skinners’ place in the government of London and, by extension, in the city’s ceremonial culture as one of the so-called Twelve Great Companies.
The extent to which Lydgate emphasizes in the Procession a nuanced religious orthodoxy that is presented as inclusive rather than divisive, creating a community of readers presumed to share the same values, can be seen at the level of his choice of address to readers. Most of Lydgate’s other public poems and performance pieces address an audience or an individual and thus make frequent use of the second-person pronouns, with occasional reminders of the voice of the author through scattered interjections of “I.”45 Robert Meyer-Lee has observed that in devotional works, it is common for the “I” to be “generic and hence occupiable by any reader who wishes to use the poem in his or her devotions.”46 In the Procession, in contrast, while “youre” and “I” both make appearances, the consistent perspective is that of “us” and “oure,” pronouns that address a community united by a common religiosity and that includes the poet. This use of the first-person plural works to construct an imagined religious community based on a shared understanding of eucharistic devotion, a community to whom Lydgate speaks as if he himself is also included. This communal perspective may have been part of what led Schirmer to link the poem to Lydgate’s monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, but it would also have suited the occasion of commemorating the Skinners’ procession and its urban setting.47 It is worth noting in this context that unity was central to the feast and idea of Corpus Christi, and that unity may have been part of what inspired John Ball and the other rebels to seek a material as well as spiritual leveling.48
Lydgate’s verses on the Corpus Christi procession are unusual given that in his other poems for Londoners, Lydgate rarely speaks “as if” to the entire community, as Anne Middleton argues Ricardian public poets did, and often remains distanced from the urban groups for whom he is writing. This distancing is particularly visible in Lydgate’s tendency to address Londoners less intimately than he does Henry VI and Queen Catherine in the royal entertainments. Every stanza of the Mumming at Eltham, for instance, in which this intimacy is most pronounced, directly speaks to either Henry or his mother, liberally using “you” to create a sense of closeness between the speaker and those addressed. Verbal intimacy of this sort has the effect of personalizing the promise of “Pees with youre lieges, plente, and gladnesse” that the mumming promises to Henry and the increase of “ioye and gladnesse of hert” that is the wished-for gift for Catherine. Among the London entertainments, only the Disguising at London includes sustained reference to a “you” who is being addressed (“yee may see,” l. 1; “in youre presence,” l. 139; “which yee heer see,” l. 213) and is additionally unusual in being one of the rare instances in which Lydgate explicitly uses the language of “common profit” (directly mentioned at l. 251) that Middleton views as the essential component of Ricardian public poetry and that she notes is the usual phrase for translating res publica or “the public.”49 While the Disguising at London speaks of the “communalte” that Fortitude will establish on a ground of truth and of the “goode comune” she will help maintain (ll. 236–39), Lydgate does not extend that expression of a common voice to his other London entertainments, and it is only in one of his royal mummings—the Mumming at Windsor—that he includes himself in the collectivity he is imagining, referring at one point to “oure” realm of France (l. 4).
The community constructed through Lydgate’s use of pronouns lent itself not just to commemoration of a live performance but also to meditative reading. Shirley may have copied the Procession for the same reasons he gathered many of Lydgate’s shorter works into his anthologies: to make them available for the circle of readers he expects will find them entertaining and instructive and to preserve and collect them as part of Lydgate’s poetic corpus. But Lydgate himself seems to have imagined that the poem would have an afterlife beyond that of the procession it describes, an afterlife that would harness glossing to the purposes of devotional reading. Although the poem’s stanzas concentrate on explication, Lydgate’s aim of encouraging a devotional response as the end result of his instructional glossing can be seen in the poem’s repeated calls to meditate on the meaning of the biblical and ecclesiastical figures in the procession. He urges readers to take the figures in the procession as “token and signe” (l. 62) of the eucharist that can be inwardly and imaginatively re-created and calls on readers to become like spectators viewing processional figures that are “shewed” in their “presence” (l. 217). The poem collapses the acts of looking inward and outward, meditation and spectatorship, so that there is no functional difference in terms of affect. Both afford the “counforte and consolacyoun” (ll. 78) that is the promise of reflection on the eucharist, whether that reflection is triggered by public performance or private reading. As the last stanza emphasizes, remembrance is a crucial part of the devotional process in which the act of reading works as an aide memoire that helps the reader call to mind previous sensory experiences, in this case the viewing of processional figures who explain and exemplify beliefs about the eucharist. Repeatedly, the verses exhort the reader to reflect on external signs and on poetic re-creation of them (“Resceiueþe hem with devoute reverence,” l. 219) and to use them as spurs to internalized devotion.
The educative bent with which Lydgate approached devotional activity in the Procession is expanded and enriched by the series of Latin marginalia in the manuscripts that call attention to scriptural references linked to the figures. Next to the description of Abraham, for example, a marginal note from Genesis appears: “ponam bucellam Panis / Genesis xliiie” [And I will set a morsel of bread (Genesis 18:5)]. Next to the verses describing Jacob, another note from Genesis is added: “pinguis est panis Christi / Genesis xl. ixe” [The bread of Christ shall be fat (Genesis 49:20)]. Similar verses appear in the margins of Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London, where they point to the biblical text on which the entry’s various pageants were based and to the “scriptures” that appeared on those pageants. We can only speculate as to whether the marginalia in the Procession similarly took the form of “scriptures” that accompanied the figures in the procession, if indeed Lydgate’s poem describes an actual procession, but these marginal glosses undeniably add an extra dimension to the reading experience, by situating the verses in a broader liturgical context and coupling the figures in the procession to scriptural authority.
As practiced by scholastics and clerics, glossing attempted to translate or explain passages in a text by means of comments written in the margins, between the lines, or sometimes over the text itself. To gloss was to intervene in the potential meanings of the text and to shape them in specific directions. In this regard, glossing was, in Carolyn Dinshaw’s words, “a gesture of appropriation; the glossa undertakes to speak the text, to assert authority over it, to provide an interpretation, finally to limit or close it to the possibility of heterodox or unlimited significance.”50 Dinshaw’s remarks clearly apply to the marginalia written into manuscript copies of Lydgate’s Procession, which by linking his vernacular words to scriptural sources both pin them down and invest them with the ultimate authority, that of biblical derivation, but they also extend to the entire text of Lydgate’s poem.
What is in fact unusual about the marginal glosses that appear in the manuscript copies of Lydgate’s Procession is that they comment on a poem that is itself already a commentary on another text. “Glossatory practices in reading and writing,” Nicolette Zeeman has argued, “mean that medieval thinkers are aware that things can be said in many ways and that all commentary and textual ‘retelling’ involves refiguration.”51 Lydgate’s poetic retelling or refiguring of a Corpus Christi procession functions as a verbal gloss on a performed event. Similar glossing was sometimes directly incorporated into performances, and although Lydgate’s verses stand outside a performance context, the narrative voice he adopts for his glossatory efforts bears some resemblance to expositors of doctrine in medieval plays who comment on and explain the doctrinal significance of what the spectator is watching.52 The instructional impulse behind Lydgate’s Procession would have fit not just the immediate context of providing a poetic gloss for the Skinners’ procession, if indeed his poem comes from such a commission, but his larger and ongoing interest in expounding the meanings of religious ceremonies. A number of his religious poems take as their subject church rituals, which Lydgate undertakes to explain and, implicitly, defend, whether he is writing about the paternoster, listing the significance of the festivals of the church year, or providing commentary on the mass. Despite the tendency of glosses to restrain meanings, whether understood as marginal comments or, in the case of the Procession, entire texts, glossing also provides a chance for intervention and engagement with a text. As John Dagenais has argued, glossing in medieval manuscripts reveals “a textual world that is not self-sufficient, not completed, not even intended to be complete,” until an individual reader intervenes and thus engages with the text in a direct way, in the present moment.53 Lydgate’s Procession can be seen as just such an intervention, one that assumes the performed procession that is its apparent antecedent is “not self-sufficient, not completed,” but available for reshaping and reinterpretation.
One reason Lydgate may have felt the need for such an intervention may be found in attitudes toward visual representations, such as images and pageants in processions. Traditional apologists for images argued that images are useful for teaching, remembering, and arousing devotional feelings. Lydgate’s Procession does not contradict that three-part defense but may come closer to Reginald Pecock’s belief that images are useful as mnemonic devices but less functional for instruction than vernacular writings.54 Such a view of the limited efficacy of images as tools for instruction perhaps lies behind the Procession’s aim of explicating the meanings of visible signs such as representations of biblical and other figures shown in processional display to “enlumyne” “al derknesse” (l. 4) as the opening stanza states. The privileging of writing as a vehicle for conveyance of the truth can be seen in the frequency with which Lydgate represents the processional figures as authorities who are authoritative precisely because they wielded the pen. Many lines emphasize learnedness and the act of writing, as Lydgate describes how Paul “wrytethe in his scripture” (l. 153), reminds that Peter Lombard is called “maystre of sentence” (l. 161), and recalls that Jerome “Wryteþe and recordeþe” (l. 170), Augustine “reherseþe in sentence” (l. 185), and Ambrose “with sugred elloquence, / Wryteþe with his penne and langage laureate” (ll. 193–94), among many other similar usages. Cole is correct in pointing out that Lydgate’s reliance on a layering of theological and historical authorities is part of what gives Lydgate’s position on the eucharist such complexity, but a crucial aspect of Lydgate’s use of these authorities is his emphasis on their status as learned commentators and writers.55 What those authorities have “rehearsed” in writing, Lydgate now does as well, glossing the spectacle of a procession by commenting and expounding on it.
While Lydgate may privilege written text over visual display, he by no means dismisses the latter, and the final stanza of the Procession seems to me to indicate the importance Lydgate places on material representational forms such as images or pageants. It seems difficult to read this stanzas in any way other than as an explicit underscoring of the physical presence of the figures he has been glossing, as he asks readers to reverently receive “þeos figures shewed in youre presence,” which have been shown in “diuers liknesses” (ll. 217–18). Lydgate emphasizes the immediacy of the “figures” and “liknesses” of the biblical and ecclesiastical personages he has described in his verses, and the phrase “shewed in youre presence” seems to make clear that he is pointing to representations that readers would have seen in more than their mind’s eye. If this reading is correct, then the poem has come full circle, back to the actual procession that Shirley identified as having been the impetus for Lydgate’s verses. By the last stanza, the symbolic meanings of the processional figures have merged with the material forms that spectators presumably saw on painted banners or pageants carried in the Corpus Christi procession, as poetic gloss and live performance join together to create meaning for the reader. Lydgate’s verses take off from, and rely upon, the physical experience of watching a procession, without which the verses’ glossing would have smaller impact and make less sense. The gloss needs the performance, as a physical ground for their interpretation of the meanings and significance of what was displayed in the procession. Just as the final stanza of the Procession urges readers to “receive” not just the figures that have been shown in their presence but the eucharist as well, so too Lydgate brings together the sensual experience of a live procession and the instructive gloss of the poem to trigger the reader’s active participation in meditative devotion on Corpus Christi.
Lydgate’s gloss-on-performance poem can be viewed as an example of the process of textualizing, as described by Mary Carruthers, “in which the original work acquires commentary and gloss” within the context of a textual community; this is also a process of “socializing” a work of literature that involves processing and transforming words, which come through sensory gateways, into memory, thus making them one’s own.56 The poem stands as evidence of Lydgate’s having made the procession his own, but did his work of textualizing have an effect within a community of readers, whether the Skinners or others? Although we have no testimony from medieval readers with which to answer that question, we can glean some clues about the readers who encountered Lydgate’s verses from the manuscripts in which the Procession is extant. All three surviving copies of the Procession are linked to Shirley, who included it in the first of his anthologies, Trinity MS R.3.20. Another copy survives in BL MS Harley 2251, a miscellany derived from R.3.20 that was made by a professional London copyist after Shirley’s death. The third copy of the Procession is in Stow’s BL MS Add. 29729, for which Trinity R.3.20 was a partial exemplar.
The manuscript evidence suggests that the Procession circulated in the 1430s and thereafter among two groups: first, the readers linked to Beauchamp’s household who may have used Trinity MS R.3.20 in the years after it was compiled and, later in the century (in the 1460s and beyond), Londoners and others who commissioned manuscripts like MS Harley 2251 that were copied in part from Shirley’s manuscripts. John Vale, secretary to the draper Sir Thomas Cook, who was mayor of London in 1462–63 and a friend and associate of Shirley’s brother-in-law, Avery Cornburgh, apparently was the original owner of MS Harley 2251.57 If the Skinners ever owned a copy of the Procession, it has not endured, and if Lydgate kept a copy for himself, it too has vanished.58 It is possible that some of those readers, and even Lydgate himself, may have seen the Skinners’ procession, but even readers who had not would have been able to understand and respond to the verses Lydgate wrote, since the poem re-creates the shape of a live procession through an interplay of visual and verbal material and through the poem’s processional form.
It may seem curious that Lydgate’s poem does not survive in any official guild or city records, unlike Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry, which was copied into a number of chronicle accounts. Perhaps accounts that may originally have contained the Procession have been lost or destroyed. But it may also be that the Procession was never entered into any official records because, unlike the Triumphal Entry, it is not a souvenir text. Its aim is less to preserve details of a past performance so as to increase the honor of the group that sponsored it than to offer a commentary on the performance and thus enhance meditative devotion. That difference between souvenir and instructional text can be seen in the tenses Lydgate used when writing the two poems: while the Triumphal Entry uses the past tense throughout, the Procession is cast in the present tense, creating the sense of a Corpus Christi performance that is always still happening, whenever a reader casts an eye on the poem.
Carruthers suggests that medieval literary texts were formed around “a recollecting subject, a remembered text, and a remembering audience.”59 Lydgate as glossing poet, the actual or imagined event of a Corpus Christi procession, and the readers who would have recalled such processions while absorbing Lydgate’s verses formed the textual community united by those processes of writing, spectating, and reading. Whether or not Lydgate’s verses were written to explicate a particular performance, they endure as a gloss on eucharistic devotion, offering a guide readers could return to again and again whenever they chose.