1. The making of this history has been well described by Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England”; Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, esp. 1–9; Lerer, “William Caxton”; Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice”; and Strohm, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition.’ ” Summit, Lost Property, 12, notes that the making of this history began as early as John Skelton, one of the first English writers “to conceive of English literature as a body of texts linked by a common national and linguistic identity” and centered on Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. See Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints, esp. 6–7, for a compelling critique of this standard history through analysis of the impact of a female-centric religious and dramatic culture.
2. For a broader conception of vernacular writing that considers popular and female audiences as well as the impact of Lollardy, see Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy; Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience; and Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” esp. 342–45.
3. For a history of the REED project along with a critique of its assumptions, see Coletti, “Reading REED”; for similar archival work in Germany, see Linke, “A Survey of Medieval Drama and Theater in Germany,” esp. 39 ni; and for continental archival recovery efforts with an emphasis on France, see Symes, “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre.”
4. The record containing the Lübeck play and its significance for early drama have been discussed by Simon, “Organizing and Staging Carnival Plays in Late Medieval Lübeck,” 71–72.
5. See Enders, “Spectacle of the Scaffolding,” 163.
6. Symes, “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre.”
7. Clopper, for one, has cautioned against too readily assuming that every reference to performance in the documentary record points to a play; see his “Miracula and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.”
8. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.”
9. Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” in The Whole Book, ed. Nichols and Wenzel, 47.
10. For recent studies of the rise of the vernacular, three useful collections of essays are Kullmann, ed., The Church and Vernacular Literature in Medieval France; Somerset and Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue; and Salter and Wicker, eds., Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300–1550.
11. Lerer, “The Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality.”
12. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II”; Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century.”
13. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 285.
14. Important contributions to the field of material philology have been made by Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant; Nichols, “Why Material Philology”; and Nichols and Wenzel, eds., The Whole Book.
15. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness; Clark and Sheingorn, “Performative Reading”; and Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France.
16. Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints.
17. See, among others, Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, who examines the literary impact of Wyclif’s ideas and argues for the centrality of Wycliffism to the English literary canon.
18. Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing.”
19. For work on regionalism in England, see Barrett, Against All England, on Chester; Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, on East Anglia; the extensive scholarship on York, including most recently King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City; and the essays in Rogerson, ed., The York Mystery Plays.
20. Nichols and Wenzel, eds., The Whole Book, 1.
21. See, for example, Coletti and Gibson, “The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama,” which discusses recent reassessments of the Chester and Towneley cycle plays.
22. For an example of work on performance as a means of dispersing and increasing access to written texts, see the essays in Vitz, Regalado, and Lawrence, eds., Performing Medieval Narrative.
23. The most widely used anthologies of medieval plays, Bevington’s Medieval Drama and Walker’s Medieval Drama: An Anthology, include no works by Lydgate; similarly, most collections of scholarly essays on medieval performance, such as Simon’s Theatre of Medieval Europe, omit Lydgate or offer only passing mention of his dramatic writings.
24. See MPJL; Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 163; and Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue, 7, in which Lerer discusses a Lydgatean echo of Boethius’s tendencies.
25. Symes, “Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays,” has demonstrated how slowly scribal conventions for recording dramatic texts developed.
26. See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. Revisionist readings can be found in Emmerson, “Eliding the ‘Medieval,’ ” esp. 30–33, and White, “Reforming Mysteries’ End.”
27. Flanigan, “Comparative Literature and the Study of Medieval Drama,” esp. 57–63, provides a thorough overview of these processes.
28. Lerer, “Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality,” and Epstein, “Lydgate’s Mummings and the Aristocratic Resistance to Drama.”
29. On Chaucer’s use of drama, see Ganim, “Drama, Theatricality and Performance,” and Lindhal, Earnest Games.
30. Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints, 4.
31. LaCapra, History and Criticism, 19–20.
32. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, esp. 1–6.
33. Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, 71.
34. See, for example, the essays in Brown, McMillin, and Wilson, eds., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, and Symes, A Common Stage.
35. Ebin, John Lydgate; Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449); and Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate.
36. Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture; Scanlon and Simpson, eds., John Lydgate; Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt; and Cooper and Denny-Brown, eds., Lydgate Matters.
37. Scanlon and Simpson, eds., John Lydgate, 8.
38. Cooper and Denny-Brown, eds., Lydgate Matters, 1–11; the quotation is from 4.
39. Sponsler, ed., John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments; my earlier essays are discussed and cited in the following chapters, when relevant to the discussion at hand.
40. Scanlon and Simpson, eds., John Lydgate, 8.
1. Boffey, “Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies,” 71, notes that Lydgate’s practice contrasts with that of Froissart, Machaut, and Hoccleve, “whose methods for organizing their minor poems can be partially documented.”
2. For a history and critique of the REED project, see Coletti, “Reading REED”; for REED’s limited impact on scholars of early modern drama, see Holland, “Theatre Without Drama.”
3. Johnston has summarized these outcomes in “ ‘All the World Was a Stage,’ ” esp. 118–19.
4. Bevington, “Castles in the Air,” 106.
5. See Beadle, “York Cycle,” esp. 89–91, and King, York Mystery Cycle, esp. 2–4, for discussion of the relation between the York Register and other information about the York pageants. Records from Coventry show cycle plays as early as 1420 but do not specify the cycle’s content or how many plays it included; Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Craig, xi–xiv, put it at ten, but Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 173, counts eight, and from their contents concludes that Coventry’s play was chiefly a Passion Play with some additional material. The Towneley manuscript, named for its seventeenth-century owners, appears to contain a cycle of plays from one town, which in the past was identified as Wakefield from references in the manuscript (two pageants have the name “Wakefield” written in rubrics at the head of their texts, and there are what seem to be local allusions in some of the plays); various idiosyncrasies in the manuscript have undermined any connection to Wakefield, as Palmer, “ ‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield Cycle’ Revisited,” notes. The five nonidentical manuscripts of the Chester plays were copied by antiquarian scribes from the city “Regenall,” apparently a city register of scripts from which plays could be chosen to put together a cycle that might vary each year; see Mills, Recycling the Cycle. For the late dates of the manuscripts of the biblical cycle plays, see Coletti and Gibson, “Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama.”
6. In addition to these extant texts, several plays survive in miscellaneous manuscripts, including the Norwich Grocers’ Play (two versions dated 1533 and 1565); the Brome Abraham and Isaac (late fifteenth century); the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1461); Dux Moraud (ca. 1425–50), a player’s part for a moral play about incest; and some fragments (including the Ashmole fragment, which may be from a play of St. Lawrence). For a discussion of the southern plays, see Coldewey, “Non-cycle Plays.” The southern plays have been edited by Baker, Murphy, and Hall, Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160; Eccles, Macro Plays; and Spector, N-Town Play, all of whom discuss ownership of the manuscripts.
7. Johnston, “What If No Texts Survived?” 3.
8. We know almost nothing about how roles were learned before the development of a fully commercial theater in London; York’s records suggest that guilds in that city held the copy of their pageant, which was presumably used as a master text for the learning of parts, and other extant scripts show signs of annotation for performance, but we do not know if actors worked from written copies of plays or learned their parts aurally.
9. For Young’s reliance on rubrics, see Dunn, “French Medievalists and the Saint’s Play,” 55.
10. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 300–306. Baker, “When Is a Text a Play?” has also noted the problem of recognizing plays in manuscripts.
11. DTR, xxxiii.
12. Which of Lydgate’s works were dramatic remains a matter of debate. To cite just one example, Nelson, Medieval English Stage, 4–5 and 173–74, regards the Procession of Corpus Christi as a description of a series of plays, while Clopper, Drama, Game, and Play, 164 n67, believes that it describes a series of literary figurae “presented” for the reader.
13. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 2.
14. Symes, “Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays,” 778.
15. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness.
16. See Coletti and Gibson, “Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama,” for a concise summary of these findings and their implications for theater history.
17. The quotation is from Mills, “ ‘The Towneley Plays” or ‘The Towneley Cycle’?” 95. See also Happé, The Towneley Cycle, 88; Palmer, “ ‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield Cycle,’ ” esp. 325–28; Parkes, cited in Palmer, “Recycling ‘The Wakefield Cycle,’ ” 96; Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle; and Clopper, “The History and Development of the Chester Cycle.”
18. Shirley did, however, copy Lydgate’s “Ballade” and “Roundel” for the 1429 coronation in Trinity MS R.3.20, raising the question of why he omitted the subtleties. The 1432 entry was written too late for inclusion in R.3.20 and may not have been of interest to Shirley by the time he was compiling Bodleian MS Ashmole 59 in the late 1440s.
19. The former interpretation rests on an entry in the rental of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, compiled in 1456, which states that Shirley rented a large tenement in the middle of the courtyard with four shops; see Doyle, “More Light on John Shirley,” 96.
20. Connolly, John Shirley, 193.
21. For a list of the contents of the three manuscripts, see Connolly, John Shirley, 30–31, 70–74, and 146–49.
22. A point made by Connolly, John Shirley, 33.
23. See Pearsall, John Lydgate, 160–71, for Lydgate’s ties to Beauchamp.
24. See Connolly, John Shirley, 84–85.
25. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” 121.
26. For Pinkhurst’s work, see Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe”; the sole surviving manuscript copy of “Chaucers Wordes unto Adam his owne Scriveyn” was made by Shirley, in Trinity MS R.3.20. Edwards, “Lydgate Manuscripts,” 17, describes the most prolific of the scribes copying Lydgate’s works in the region of Bury St. Edmunds as “a co-ordinating scribe capable of drawing upon the services of a number of proficient artists and decorators to adorn his work.” We do not know how Shirley came to be the copyist for some of Lydgate’s works, although Greenberg, “John Shirley and the English Book Trade,” 375, speculates that some of the poet’s work was sent to London to be copied and published by Shirley.
27. During the period in the late 1420s and early 1430s, when Lydgate was writing most of his performance pieces, Shirley appears to have settled in or near London but to have maintained contact with Beauchamp’s household; see Connolly, John Shirley, 52–53.
28. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” esp. 75–76.
29. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 165.
30. See Burrow, Gestures and Looks, esp. 182–83, for the problem of reproducing the aural and visual in writing in the medieval period and beyond.
31. In addition to the seminal work on sound in Smith, Acoustic World of Early Modern England, see the essays in McInnis and Hirsch, eds., Embodying Shakespeare, for a good overview of recent work on the experiential aspects of early drama.
32. Lindenbaum, “Drama as Textual Practice,” 386, 388.
33. For “making” applied to mummings, see “þe Duk of Surrey, þe Duk of Excestre . . . & oþir moo of hir afinite, were accorded to make a mummyng vnto þe King . . . and þere þay cast to sle þe King yn hir revelyng” (The Brut, ed. Brie, 2:360, l. 32) and “certayne personys, called Lollers . . . hadde caste to have made a mommynge at Eltham, and undyr coloure of the mommynge to have dystryte the kyng and Hooly Chyrche” (Historical Collections, ed. Gairdner, 108).
34. MED, devisen v. 4(a): “To design or plan (sth.)” and (5): “To form (sth.), fashion, shape, or construct; compose (a letter, poem, etc.); portray (sth.).” Device is used in the following century to describe the speeches written by George Peele for pageants carried before the Lord Mayors of London in 1585 and 1591; see Peele, Device of the Pageant Borne Before Woolstone Dixi and Descensus Astraeae. “The Knight’s Tale,” Riverside Chaucer, l. 1901.
35. See “A Ballade, of Her That Hath All Virtues,” “whiche þat Lydegate wrote at þe request of a squyer,” and “That Now Is Hay Some-tyme Was Grase,” “a balade which Iohn Lydgate the Monke of Bery wrott & made at þe commaundement of þe Quene Kateryne,” MPJL, 2:379–81 and 2:809–13.
36. Shirley sometimes fails to make that distinction: Lydgate’s translation of “So As the Crabbe Goth Forward,” for example, which is preceded by the French original, is described by Shirley as having been “made in our englishe langage” by Lydgate, and another translated poem, “Gaude Virgo Mater Christi,” is described as “þe translacyoune . . . made by” Lydgate; MPJL, 2:464–67 and 1:288–89.
37. Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men,’ ” 32.
38. Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow?’ ” 119.
39. MPJL, 2:649–51 and 1:290–91.
40. Stern, Documents of Performance, esp. 1–3.
41. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 92.
42. Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, 34.
43. See Doyle, “More Light,” 93–101, and “English Books,” 176–78; Boffey and Thompson, “Anthologies and Miscellanies,” 284–87; and Edwards, “Lydgate Manuscripts,” 19–21. One example of Shirley’s interaction with the texts he is copying can be seen in the Mumming at Windsor, when Shirley responds to a misogynist comment of Lydgate’s with the mocking question: “A daun Iohan, est y vray?”
44. See Seymour, Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, 40.
45. For a detailed discussion of the contents of Trinity MS R.3.20, see Connolly, John Shirley, 69–101. The manuscript was probably produced in 1430–32 and consists of twenty-four gatherings and 373 pages (it was paginated, not foliated) that were once part of a larger collection, the other parts of which can be found in London, Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.44 (now at Lambeth Palace) and in London, British Library, MS Harley 78, fols. 80r–83v. It contains a mix of English and French poetry, some Latin, and a few recipes, prayers, and instructional material.
46. Connolly and Plumley, “Crossing the Channel,” 314.
47. Connolly and Plumley, “Crossing the Channel,” 322.
48. Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics, 66, believes Shirley used a written exemplar for at least one of the French songs in Trinity MS R.3.20, but Connolly and Plumley, “Crossing the Channel,” 321–23, argue that the existence of these French lyrics in the song repertoire of the period “should not be overlooked” (323).
49. Symes, “Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays,” 778.
50. For instance, the Courtois d’Arras, which modern scholars call a play, has no dramatic apparatus (stage directions or character designations) in its four extant manuscripts and circulated as a lai or fabliau (see Symes, “Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays,” 782). Dame Sirith (ca. 1300) was never identified as part of the canon of English drama but perhaps should be. See also the Anglo-Norman vita of St. Catherine preserved in Manchester, John Rylands Library MS French 6 (ca. 1250), which has some speech tags but is a narrated text; Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 305, calls it a ludus, not a play, but its status seems ambiguous.
51. Although the reliability Shirley’s information has been questioned, Pearsall, John Lydgate, 77, believes that “where he can be checked,” Shirley “is very accurate in his attributions.”
52. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 268.
53. Lerer, “Chaucerian Critique.”
54. See Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes, ed. Louis.
55. Other copyists did the same thing, for instance the fifteenth-century scribe who copied the verses from Queen Margaret’s entry into London into a copy of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, thus converting spectacle into literature; see Kipling, “London Pageants,” 11.
56. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 197. Also see her “Scribes and Booklets.”
57. For this and other information about Vale and Cook, see Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Provenance.” Among the goods confiscated from Cook after his arrest were many tapestries, including a splendid one of the Siege of Jerusalem, which Cook had once declined to sell to Lord Rivers’s wife, the duchess of Bedford, and which had cost Cook 8,000 pounds; see Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Provenance,” 90.
58. Stubbes, “Clare Priory,” 23.
59. Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Provenance,” 104.
60. Ibid., 111–12. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 190 n19, notes that the activities of Shirley and Vale can be compared to those of another secretary and man of affairs of this period, William Worcester, “who like these two men kept up his antiquarian and scribal activities after the death of his patron, Sir John Fastolf.”
61. Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, 21.
62. Ibid., 26.
1. For recent readings of Lydgate as a London writer, see Benson, “Civic Lydgate”; Sponsler, “Alien Nation”; and Strohm, “Sovereignty and Sewage.”
2. The mummings and disguising are extant in a single manuscript, Trinity MS R.3.20, printed in MPJL, 2:695–701, with commentary 1:201–3. For the dating of the manuscript, see Connolly, John Shirley, 77–80; for Estfeld’s mayoralty and the dates of the mummings, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 121, and Schirmer, John Lydgate, 91.
3. In the Disguising at London, the gift giving associated with mumming takes the abstract form of gifts of virtue, which will reside “in this housholde” (l. 335) for the year. Although the disguising was apparently intended for a national, not a municipal, occasion, its values according to Benson “are practical and bourgeois,” emphasizing “the sort of pragmatic, decent, and well-regulated communal behavior advocated by medieval London citizens”; see Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 160.
4. Watson, “Politics of Middle English Writing,” 331, 333.
5. Ibid., 337.
6. See Scanlon and Simpson, eds., John Lydgate, 7–8; Scanlon and Simpson point to the “conflicting constraints” of the three Lancastrian monarchs (Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI) within and for whose reigns Lydgate wrote, as well as the three centers of cultural power he crossed (London, Paris, and Bury), noting that his ornate style seems to have been in response to the Lollard use of a plain form of Middle English. Norton-Smith, John Lydgate: Poems, 195 n1, suggests that Lydgate may have become interested in an ornate liturgical English style through the influence of Edmund Lacy, dean of the Royal Chapel at Windsor from 1414–17 and bishop of Exeter from 1420.
7. Stanbury, “Vernacular Nostalgia,” 96.
8. Norton-Smith, John Lydgate: Poems, 194.
9. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” esp. 94–95; Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, 3–5; quotations on 3 and 5.
10. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 154, 163.
11. For a seminal use of reader-response notions of the successive audiences to interpret medieval texts, see Strohm, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition.’ ”
12. For Chaucer’s inability to imagine London, see Wallace, “Chaucer and the Absent City.”
13. Anderson, Imagined Communities, esp. 48. Since Anderson’s larger project is to explain the rise and spread of nationalism, he locates the emergence of imagined national communities in the late eighteenth century, but the notion of imagined communities less directly linked to modern nationalism has become widespread in the thirty years since his book was published and can be usefully applied to earlier historical periods.
14. For representative views, see Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” 295, who views London as disunited and lacking a unified voice; Hanna, London Literature, xvii, envisions it as “a resistant and fragmented locality.”
15. Bolton, Alien Communities in London in the Fifteenth Century, examines and reassesses the surviving evidence, charting the nationalities of London’s aliens, their occupations and places of residence, and their proportion of the population, which Bolton judges to have been at least 6 percent of the likely population of 50,000 in the late fifteenth century (1–40; estimate of percentage on 8).
16. See Reddaway and Walker, Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 107.
17. Thrupp, “Aliens in and Around London,” 120. Also see the discussion of alien merchants in London, and the overseas trade, in Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 14–16, 84–117; Barron notes that not until the sixteenth century did the privileges accorded to alien merchants by royal policy “cease to be an issue between the city and the Crown” (16).
18. Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 357. Edward III actively encouraged alien merchants, sending emissaries to Flanders to entice Flemish weavers to England and subsequently protecting aliens against the hostilities of native clothworkers; see McKisack, Fourteenth Century, 367–68.
19. For these terms, see Thrupp, Merchant Class, 2–3.
20. Bolton, Alien Communities, 39, notes that violence against aliens coincided both with trade recessions, as in 1468, and with moments of national and political crisis, as in 1381.
21. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 72–73.
22. See Thrupp, “A Survey of the Alien Population of England in 1440”; quotation on 264.
23. RP, 3:578b.
24. The privileges enjoyed by Italians in the wool trade, with agents riding around the Cotswolds competing with English buyers for the best crop, was a source of insular hostility, in part responsible for the riots of the mid-1450s, which caused many Italians to leave London for Southampton and Winchester; see Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 352–55.
25. For a discussion of the stoning, which is described in the contemporary Brut, see Griffiths, “Breton Spy,” 222–23.
26. McKisack, Fourteenth Century, 359, 378.
27. Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, Minute Book A, 165 and 155, respectively, cited in Reddaway and Walker, Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 108–9, 123–24. Bolton, Alien Communities, observes that complaints against aliens often centered on the claim that they were a community apart and that they did not intermarry, ran a closed shop by employing only other aliens, and deprived Englishmen of jobs (35).
28. Reddaway and Walker, Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 122, 107–8.
29. See Campbell, “English Goldsmiths in the Fifteenth Century,” 44.
30. See Minute Book A, 201–20 and 190, respectively, cited in Reddaway and Walker, Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 138, 148.
31. “Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London,” l. 46.
32. The wager is described in Herbert, History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies, 2:197.
33. Barron, London, 192; for the location of Bishopswood in Stepney, see Stow, Survey, 99.
34. See Rosser, Medieval Westminster.
35. Stow, Survey, 99–100.
36. On gifts in aristocratic culture, see Rosenthal, Purchase of Paradise. For a reading of the mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths as literary and performative examples of the interlocking and at times competing discourses of colony, empire, and nation within Lancastrian England, see Sponsler, “Alien Nation.”
37. Wickham, Early English Stages, 3:48–49.
38. See Sutton, Mercery of London, and Keene, introduction to Imray, Mercers’ Hall, 1–13. In the fifteenth century, the Mercers were a mixed company of shopkeepers and merchants, who by the reign of Henry VI had become dealers in silks and velvets; see Herbert, History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies, 1:233–34.
39. Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 312 and note to 146, l. 13.
40. As noted by Coleman, “Coronation Plate,” 49.
41. Barron, London, 144.
42. For the payments, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 42, and for mercers’ interest in the puy, see Imray, Mercers’ Hall, 12, 438 n29.
43. Welsford, Court Masque, 55.
44. The image of London as a fitting end point to this majestic grand tour and as a refreshing place where visiting merchants can take the air meshes interestingly with Lydgate’s view in his Troy Book of what Strohm aptly calls the “purified” city with its “holsom eyr” and fresh breezes (Troy Book, 2:668–79); see Strohm, “Sovereignty and Sewage,” esp. 59–60.
45. See the discussion of the mumming for Richard II in Wickham, Early English Stages, 3:49.
46. For the social and political uses of Epiphany performances, see Greenfield, “Festive Drama at Christmas,” 36.
47. The shift to the vernacular in English letters has been described by Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 22–47.
48. See Lawton, “Gaytryge’s Sermon,” for the influence of the ars dictaminis on the style of Middle English vernacular writing. Steiner, Documentary Culture, 57, notes that dictamen studies in England had less influence than on the continent and tended to be practically minded, yet were still linked to poetry and literary activity.
49. Deansley, “Vernacular Books in England,” has shown that writing bound as books was likely to be pious, while writing on loose sheets was likely to be bureaucratic or for business purposes.
50. See Cohen, Ballade, 226–27.
51. As Fisher notes, most people encountered not belletristic but bureaucratic writing; see his “Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English,” 894.
52. Steiner, Documentary Culture, 48.
53. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 41.
54. See Kretzmann, Liturgical Element in the Earliest Forms of the Medieval Drama, 53–59, for early liturgical plays on Epiphany, including Magi and Stella plays.
55. Kipling, Enter the King, 118.
56. The quotations in this and the preceding paragraph are from Nolan, John Lydgate, 102–4.
57. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 161.
58. See Sutton, Mercery of London, 164–73, for mercers’ education and book-owning habits. On Pinkhurst’s work for the mercers, see Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” 119. See Meale, “Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,” 187–88, for a discussion of manuscripts owned by mercers, and 192–98, for a discussion of guild dramas.
59. By the late fourteenth century, a number of mercers were heavily involved in overseas trade, and the Mercers’ Company records show that they traveled around the Low Countries, particularly in search of cloth to buy; see Sutton, Mercery of London, 157.
60. See Butterfield, “Chaucer’s French Inheritance,” 27.
61. A point made by Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 161.
62. Connolly, John Shirley, 181–82.
63. Sutton, Mercery of London, 162–65. Carpenter compiled the Liber Albus of the city’s laws, customs, and usages; was lay brother of the convent of the Charterhouse of London and of the fraternity of the sixty priests of London; and associated with poets and the mayor.
64. Besides the N-Town play, the extant Middle English Purification plays are as follows: Chester Play 11, lines 176–718 of the Coventry Weavers’ Pageant, York Play 17, Towneley Play 17, and the Digby Candlemas Play. David and the twelve tribes of Israel were traditional and expected themes for Candelmas ceremonies; see Sponsler, “Alien Nation,” 235.
65. See Rastall, Minstrels Playing, 106, for a discussion of the “Nunc dimittis” song.
66. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 22.
67. Nolan, “Performance of the Literary,” 185.
68. Appleford and Watson, “Merchant Religion in Fifteenth-Century London,” 204, 205.
69. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 162, notes that these gifts are linked to ideals of proper civic governance; Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 163, adds that their focus is especially on justice.
70. See “Calendar of Dramatic Records,” ed. Robertson and Gordon, 139; Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 45–46; and Osberg, “Goldsmiths’ ‘Chastell.’ ” Herbert, History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies, 2:234–39, notes that the Goldsmiths’ hall was on Foster Lane and lists expenses and menus in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for feasts on St. Dunstan’s day (the company’s principal election feast).
71. See Wardens’ Accounts, ed. Jefferson, 178, 196, 532–34.
72. Unwin, Gilds, 178.
73. See Reddaway and Walker, Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 79, 139.
74. For Orewell’s crozier, see Barron, London, 72; for Isabella’s visit, see Wardens’ Accounts, ed. Jefferson, 186–91.
75. In the headnote that he included in his copy of the mumming in BL MS Add. 29729, Stow dropped the phrase “in wyse of balade,” referring to the verses simply as “a lettar made by Iohn lidgat,” perhaps suggesting that the distinction between vernacular forms that mattered to Shirley no longer carried weight in the sixteenth century. Reflecting similar linguistic drift, Stow also changed Shirley’s “mommed in right fresshe and costele welych desguysing” to “shewyd.”
76. See Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 164. The mumming differs from the one Lydgate wrote for the Mercers in using its biblical material to place the mayor in his proper relation both to God and to the goldsmiths; see Nolan, John Lydgate, 96–97, whose reading stresses the mumming’s emphasis on the need of the powerful for humility.
77. For the growing use of English by the chancery, see Richardson, “Henry V, the English Chancery, and Chancery English,” 727.
78. Nolan, John Lydgate, 89.
79. For bills and libels, see Scase, “ ‘Strange and Wonderful Bills’ ”; for the 1381 rebels, see Justice, Writing and Rebellion, esp. 29; and for Lollard texts, see Hudson, Premature Reformation.
80. Oliver, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering, 194.
81. Fredell, “ ‘Go litel quaier’ ”; quotations on 53 and 60.
82. See DTR, “An Index of Playing Places and Buildings to 1558,” no. 90, for Bishop’s Wood.
83. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 120, 262 n27.
84. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 51.
85. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 121–22.
86. See Connolly, John Shirley, 152.
87. Stow, Survey, 99; for the 1458 date of the first London May Game, see Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 160 n57.
88. See Wickham, Early English Stages, 3:50, and Ebin, John Lydgate, 87.
89. For the information about sheriffs in this paragraph, I am indebted to Barron, London, 161–62; quotation on 147, citing the Liber Albus, 399.
90. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 276 n32.
91. Compare the Mumming for the Goldsmiths, in which the mayor is addressed as “youre hyeghnesse” (l. 75). If the honorifics in Bishopswood were directed toward the two sheriffs, Lydgate’s use of the singular is puzzling.
92. See, for example, the “sovereigns” addressed in the Banns to the Croxton Play of the Scarament (l. 8), the “sovereigns that sit” in Mankind (l. 29), and the “Sofreynes and frendys” addressed by Contemplacio in N-Town Play 29 (l. 1). Butterfield, “Chaucer’s French Inheritance,” 22, notes that like the French kings Jean II and Charles V, Richard demanded more elaborate forms of address such as “your majesty” and “your highness” drawn from the discourse of courtoisie.
93. Horrox, “Urban Gentry in the Fifteenth Century,” has argued for a shared culture linking urban and landed gentry, while Doyle, “English Books in and out of Court,” has shown that courtly and urban readers had similar tastes.
94. Norton-Smith, John Lydgate, 124.
95. Butterfield, “Chaucer’s French Inheritance,” 21, 34. The influence of French poetry on Chaucer has been assessed by a number of scholars, from Muscatine’s 1957 study (Chaucer and the French Tradition) to more recent work such as Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries.
96. For an analogous example, see Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 37–44, who describes how Lydgate adapts Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus to an English context, particularly through a reshaping of nationalist sentiments.
97. Lydgate was in France in the mid-1420s, although exactly when and for what reason is unknown; see Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 44 n93. For performances by French courtiers, see Crane, Performance of Self, 155–65; for one example of drama associated with a confrérie and puy in Arras, see Symes, Common Stage, 216–27, who notes that some of the procedures of the London puy, documented by Andrew Horn, who was city chamberlain from 1320 to 1328, may derive from those of the Arras confrérie (220). Sutton, “The Tumbling Bear and Its Patrons,” suggests that the London puy may have had links to mercers.
98. Nolan, John Lydgate, 114 n54.
99. For a concise yet example-filled discussion of the connections between French and English court culture in the late Middle Ages, see Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,” esp. 210–3.
100. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 104, and Pearsall, John Lydgate, 186.
101. Nolan, John Lydgate, 21; Simpson, Oxford English Literary History, 55.
102. See Stevenson, ed., Herald in Late Medieval Europe, 3; and Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages.
103. For a discussion of the role of heralds and pursuivants in private ceremonies, see Warnicke, “Henry VIII’s Greeting of Anne of Cleves,” 570–72. Kipling, Enter the King, 175 n126, notes that in the royal entry of Henry VI into Paris in 1432, a herald represented the city of Paris.
104. Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:192–95.
105. Connolly, John Shirley, 194–95; quotation on 195.
106. Greenberg notes that the annual Bartholomew’s fair (22–25 August), in existence since Henry II, may have sold books; see “John Shirley and the English Book Trade,” 376.
107. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 47 n65. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 186, believes the disguising may have been written for the parliament that opened at Westminster on 13 October 1427. There is also a chance it was not associated with any parliamentary meeting; see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 122–23 n33.
108. Watts, Henry VI, 23, notes that the four cardinal virtues were conventionally urged on late medieval kings and took precedence over the “theological” virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, since they were seen as more socially useful. Scanlon’s description of the tradition of the king as the moral center of the realm in the “mirror for princes” genre helps explain Lydgate’s use of that genre in a performance for “gret estates” concerned with the young Henry VI’s ability to rule; see Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power.
109. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 160.
110. Nolan, John Lydgate, 143.
111. See Binski, Painted Chamber, 41–43, and Barron, Medieval Guildhall, 27 and plates 9a, 9b, and 10.
112. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 143.
113. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, 158, n39.
114. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 98.
115. Nolan, John Lydgate; quotations on 130 and 134.
116. Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, esp. 14.
117. The earliest surviving petition in English for which the date is known is the “Mercers’ Petition” of 1388, delivered during the Merciless Parliament; see Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, 73–74.
118. Nolan, John Lydgate, 3. Nuttall, Creation of Lancastrian Kingship, notes the emergence of “close-knit communities of royal household staff, bureaucracies and political representatives” (121), many of whom would have watched the same ceremonies and performances and who were “documented readers” of vernacular poetry in the Lancastrian period (123).
119. Sacks, Widening Gate, 4.
120. Simpson, “The Other Book of Troy,” 401.
121. Nolan, John Lydgate, 3–4, makes the quite different argument that instead of notions of “common profit,” Lydgate attempts to assert the sovereignty of the king.
122. See Galloway, “John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism,” 445–47; quotation on 445. Galloway’s reassessment of Lydgate’s engagement with his classical sources builds on Renoir, Poetry of John Lydgate, 1967, who viewed Lydgate as a transitional figure bridging the “medieval” and the “humanist” (44) and, more recently, Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, who argues that Lydgate adopted the vocation of humanist inherited from Petrarch.
123. See the discussion of sources for Serpent of Division, in Nolan, John Lydgate, esp. 37, e.g., “Lydgate relies on medieval rather than classical texts.”
124. The latter point is made by Galloway, “John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism,” 446.
125. For this definition and further discussion of the term as it is used in cultural studies and anthropology, see Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” 496.
126. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 148.
1. Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, in Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 662, l. 42. For varied forms of reception of poetry, see Coleman, Public Reading, among others, and for the importance of sound to Middle English verse, see Coleman, “Aurality,” in Middle English, ed. Strohm.
2. For the fourteenth-century development of optical and semantic ideas, see Tachau, Vision, esp. 16–20, where she discusses Bacon’s understanding of how words, as opposed to images, signify; for the centrality of visual experience to late medieval culture, see Stanbury, “Regimes of the Visual,” esp. 266–68.
3. See Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness; Clark and Sheingorn, “Performative Reading”; Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntynge”; and, for a study that emphasizes the reciprocity between art and drama, Stevens, “Intertextuality of Medieval Art and Drama.”
4. See Sheingorn, “Visual Language of Drama,” for the importance of visual features of plays for audiences, and Weigert, “ ‘Theatricality,’ ” esp. 225, for the homology between the viewing experience of those two representational forms.
5. For the history of medieval tapestry, see d’Hulst, Flemish Tapestries; Jubinal, Recherches sur l’usage et l’origine des tapisseries; and Lestocquoy, Deux siècles de l’histoire de la tapisserie.
6. Both examples are cited in the MED, steinen v. 3(a).
7. Kightly, “ ‘Hangings About the Hall.’ ” Also see Sponsler, “Texts and Textiles,” for a discussion of wall hangings and Lydgate’s tapestry poems.
8. As an example of the former, Weigert, “ ‘Theatricality,’ ” 226, cites the municipal authorities of the Burgundian city of Nevers, who paid two of its members to travel to nearby Moulins to study the tapestry of the Nine Worthies in the collection of the count of Bourbon; upon their return, they organized a performance on the same theme.
9. Caxton, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, 14.
10. The work on devotional images and late medieval spirituality is extensive. For a sampling of the most important work, see Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages; Camille, The Gothic Idol; and Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary.”
11. These examples are cited by Hammond, “Two Tapestry Poems by Lydgate,” 22, although it is impossible to know whether these phrases formed part of the tapestries themselves or were scribal descriptions of the scenes in each tapestry.
12. For the inventory of Gloucester’s goods, which were seized from his Essex castle of Pleshy in 1397, see Dillon and Hope, “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels.” The inventory lists fifteen items under the heading “Draps de Arras”; their subjects include scenes from romances and histories, such as the battle of Gawain and Lancelot, the siege of Jerusalem, the story of St. George, and Judith and Holofernes, as well as religious scenes such as the nativities of Jesus and Mary.
13. Stanbury, Visual Object of Desire, 79–80.
14. Ibid., 94.
15. For a useful discussion of the functions of the medieval devotional image that engages the views of art historians such as Erwin Panofsky and Sixten Ringbom, see Belting, Image and Its Public, 41–64.
16. Rubin, Corpus Christi, esp. 135–36.
17. For a discussion of interactions among images and acts of devotion, see the essays in Cornelison and Montgomery, eds., Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices. In a related study focused on art and drama, Collins, The N-Town Plays and Medieval Picture Cycles, compares the iconography of medieval picture Bibles and the N-Town plays. Focusing on East Anglian drama, Scherb has discussed the overlap between devotional images and vernacular plays; see his Staging Faith, esp. 41–65.
18. Camille, “Seeing and Reading,” 43.
19. Gertsman, “Visual Space,” 32.
20. “Colart de Laon.”
21. The poems have been printed in MPJL, 1:216–21 (“Cristes Passioun”), 1:250–52 (“The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun”), 1:290–91 (“The Image of our Lady”), and 1:77–84 (“On De Profundis”).
22. MPJL, 2:660–61.
23. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 136–48, provides an overview of preachers’ debates for and against images; for Pecock’s defense of images, see his Repressor.
24. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 84.
25. Stevens, “The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama,” 318.
26. The St. Albans manuscript is now Bodleian Library MS Auct.F.2.13; see Clifford Davidson, Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580, 50–56, for a discussion of it. Whether the St. Apollonia miniature represents a play or not has been debated; see the exchange between Graham Runnalls and Gordon Kipling in Medieval English Theatre (1997) over the relation of Fouquet’s painting to drama. The “Dance of the Wodewoses” has been recently discussed by Crane, Performance of Self, 155–59. Collins, The N-Town Plays and Medieval Picture Cycles, examines some of the shared iconography linking plays and medieval art.
27. Knight, “Manuscript Painting and Play Production,” 196.
28. Bal, Reading Rembrandt, 189, notes that the work of art traditionally is assumed to have three sets of relationships: “one with the cotext or the literary and artistic environment, one with the historical context that frames it, and one with the preceding artistic tradition, the pre-text.”
29. For Lydgate’s travels to Paris, see Pearsall, John Lydgate, 166–69.
30. See Trinity MS R.3.21, fol. 278v.
31. Stow, Survey of London, 1:327.
32. See Gertsman, “Visual Space,” 2–5, for illustrations of some of these murals.
33. For the Pardon Churchyard, see Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral, City and State,” 35–36.
34. Appleford, “The Dance of Death in London”; quotations on 287 and 295. Barron and Rousseau, “Cathedral, City and State,” 36, noting that there is no direct evidence for why Carpenter made this benefaction and that his will does not show any particular affinity for St. Paul’s, conjecture that he may have commissioned the paintings in his capacity as executor of the will of Richard Whittington (d. 1423); they further observe that the whole commission “seems to have included a strong civic element” and suggest that the paintings may even have depicted features of the city’s landscape (36).
35. See Marchant, La Danse macabre; for the mural at Stratford, see Puddephat, “The Mural Paintings of the Dance of Death.” The source for Stow’s claim may have been the headnote to the version of Lydgate’s verses in Trinity R.3.21, a manuscript associated with John Shirley (see Warren, Dance of Death, xxiii n2). An inventory of 1529 from the church at Long Melford mentions “three long cloths hanging before the Rood Loft stained or painted with ‘the dawnce of Powlis’ [elsewhere called the daunce of Paule]”; see Parker, The History of Long Melford, 86. Gibson, “Long Melford Church, Suffolk, 105, interprets “Powlis” as “pole” and links the cloths to pole dances associated with parish May Day festivities, but Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 117, connects them to Lydgate’s Dance of Death verses.
36. Gerstman, “Visual Space,” 4. Gertsman’s essay includes photographs of the mural that clearly show the dominance of the pictorial image over the written text.
37. See Appleford, “Dance of Death,” 304.
38. See Connolly, John Shirley, 104 and 180–81.
39. Warren, ed., Dance of Death, xxiv–xxxi, identifies twelve manuscripts of the poem, a list that is expanded by Seymour, “Some Lydgate Manuscripts,” 22–24. Appleford argues that the A version was probably made soon after 1426 for a courtly audience (as suggested by the inclusion of the figure of the Tregetour), while the B version represents Lydgate’s revision for St. Paul’s, “seemingly with a powerful London civic audience in mind” (“Dance of Death,” 295).
40. Simpson, Oxford English Literary History, 54.
41. Gertsman, “Visual Space,” 24, 30; Chaganti, “Danse macabre and the Virtual Churchyard,” 15.
42. For a discussion of the use of visual terms to describe the inner images produced by imaginative literature and the attendant anxieties about “textual reification,” see Zeeman, “The Idol of the Text,” esp. 43–44, and 62.
43. For Clopton’s biography and his building efforts related to the Long Melford church, see Parker, The History of Long Melford, 43–33. For the verses painted in the chantry chapel, see Trapp, “Verses by Lydgate at Long Melford,” 2.
44. See Gibson, Theater of Devotion, esp. 87, where Gibson notes that “it would not be surprising” if the Cloptons “owned a manuscript of Lydgate’s devotional poems.” Although it does not discuss Lydgate’s verses, Gibson’s early article, “Long Melford Church, Suffolk,” considers other visual imagery, including alabasters and stained glass, in the Long Melford church.
45. For a detailed description of the chantry chapel, see Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 44–51. Gibson, “Long Melford Church, Suffolk,” 105–6, discusses the inventories; quotation on 105.
46. Trapp identifies the figure as Mary Magdalene, not the Virgin Mary, but Gibson corrects him; see “Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle,” 81 n145.
47. Trapp, “Verses,” 4; Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 162–69.
48. Trapp, “Verses,” 4; Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 50.
49. Trapp, “Verses,” 5.
50. Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 120–21; Maddern, “ ‘Best Trusted Friends’ ”; Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 83.
51. Binski, “The English Parish Church and Its Art in the Later Middle Ages,” 19.
52. Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 101.
53. Gibson, Theater, 87. See MPJL, 1: 329–62, for the version from BL Harley 218, collated with other manuscripts. Trapp, “Verses,” 5–11, matches the Long Melford stanzas to those printed by MacCracken in MPJL 1:329–62.
54. Trapp, “Verses,” 5; Marks, “Picturing Word and Text in the Late Medieval Parish Church,” 167.
55. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 119. Gayk believes that images may have originally accompanied the text, but no surviving evidence allows us to know for certain.
56. Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” 21. For writing on early modern walls, see the discussion of graffiti and the conflation of word and image in its use in Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, esp. 60–62.
57. See Marks, “Picturing Word and Text,” 183–87, for a discussion of the visual and verbal representations in churches and their role in instruction of the laity.
58. For a discussion of the connection of images to indulgences and charms, see Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art, 169–80.
59. Floyd, “Writing on the Wall,” 99.
60. See the discussion of Puttenham’s notion of “posy” in Fleming, Graffiti, esp. 19. Wall writing was among the least durable of textual forms, susceptible to erasure, removal, or whitewashing; see Fleming, Graffiti, 75–76.
61. Shirley’s Trinity MS R.3.20, with his headnote; Trinity MS R.3.21; and Bodleian MS 2527 (Bodley 626).
62. For the texts of Legend of St. George and Bycorne and Chychevache, see MPJL, 1:145–54 and 2:433–38.
63. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” esp. 81–84.
64. Hammond, “Two Tapestry Poems,” 21–22; Floyd, “St. George and the ‘Steyned Halle,’ ” argues that halle referred exclusively to wall hangings in the early fifteen century, but contemporary sources suggest it could also mean a room.
65. See OED, stained, ppl. a.3, and the discussion in Engleworth, History of the Painter-Stainers Company, 46–47. The MED also gives as one meaning of the verb steinen “to ornament (fabric, a garment, etc.) with an embroidered, stenciled, or woven design or pictorial representation; also, stencil or embroider (a figure on fabric),” making it possible that Shirley’s headnote could be describing either a painted or a woven cloth.
66. Marshall, Medieval Wall Painting, points out that armor styles reflect current trends in other parish church paintings of George: the fourteenth-century George at Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire sports fourteenth-century chain mail while the fifteenth-century George at Hornton in Oxfordshire wears the full plate that became popular in this later period.
67. Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, 33–35.
68. The Hunt of the Frail Stag, Southern Netherlands, 1495–1510, and “Scenes from The Story of the Trojan War,” Southern Netherlands, 1470–90; discussed in Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, 347–58 and 229–49, respectively. The poet-figure is reproduced on 354; Cavallo endorses the current view that it functions as an epilogue at the end of the tapestry-poem, although he notes that when the fragments were first exhibited in 1904, it was treated as the first, rather than the last, panel in the series (350).
69. See Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries, 234. Clark and Sheingorn, “Performative Reading,” esp. 133–41, point to the speaking images next to the first lines of speech in illustrated play manuscripts.
70. MED, declaren v. 4.
71. Any evidence that Lydgate might have been the presenter as well as the poet and deviser is purely circumstantial and not conclusive. Lydgate’s abbot kept a townhouse in London, he composed at least one of his works in the city, and he had ties to influential citizens, but none of that implies he was the presenter.
72. The poem’s other direct reference to vision, which comes in the phrase “whoso list to looke” (l. 32) is an ambiguous formulation that may refer to looking at the visual images of his life or to looking at a written narrative of his life, or may simply be a handy phrase to fit the meter.
73. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 124.
74. For Lydgate’s use of the Legenda Aurea, see Schirmer, John Lydgate, 157 n1. Lydgate’s immediate source could have been either the Latin Legenda or Jean de Vignay’s close fourteenth-century translation, the Légende Dorée.
75. Pearsall, John Lydgate; the quotations are from 181, 277, and 278, respectively. Lydgate’s Legenda-based version also differs from the story found in Mirk’s Festial.
76. For the battle of Agincourt and the carrying of the banner of St. George, see A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, 228. Floyd, “St. George,” 144. The poem is undated but Pearsall assigns it to what he describes as Lydgate’s London period (1427–29), during which he wrote verses for various individuals and groups in London.
77. MED, champioun n. 2(a).
78. Printed by Jubinal, Mystères, 1:390.
79. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 179–80; also see the discussion of various prints and tavern signs featuring the two monsters, including the wall painting of “Le dit de la chiche face” and “Le dit dela fame” (his companion-beast) at Villeneuve-Lembron, in Jones, “Monsters of Misogyny,” 205–8.
80. Pearsall favors a date of 1427–29 for Bycorne; see John Lydgate (1371–1449), 31.
81. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 82; also see Hammond, “Two Tapestry Poems,” 21, who believes that Shirley is working from an exemplar that Lydgate had made for the artisans who would create the hanging or performance.
82. See Schirmer, John Lydgate, 98–100, and Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:191 and 1:205. Only Shirley’s Trinity MS R.3.20 contains a headnote identifying the verses as intended for a wall hanging. BL MS Harley 2251 omits the headnote, and Trinity MS R.3.19 omits the headnote as well as the seven headings (or “histories”) before stanzas but includes running titles across the top of the page, describing the poem as “þe couronne [a mistranscription by MacCracken of “fourome”] of disguysinges contrived by Daun Iohan Lidegate. þe maner of straunge desguysinges, þe gyse of a mummynge” (MPJL 2:433–38).
83. The impression that the text points to some sort of performance was shared by its first editor, Isaac Reed, who added the version found in BL MS Harley 2251 to his 1780 edition of Joseph Dodsley’s Old Plays; it was also included on a list made c. 1820 of pre-1700 plays reputedly owned by John Warburton (1682–1759) that were destroyed by his cook; see Folger Library MS W.a.234 and the discussion of the destruction of the manuscripts in Freehafer, “John Warburton’s Lost Plays.”
84. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 179–80 and 191 n34. Goulding, “Picture-Poems of John Lydgate,” notes that Bycorne and Chychevache resembles the verses of Henri Baude, who a few years later kept on hand “Dictz moraulx,” ready-made inscriptions to accompany possible tapestries or wall paintings; in each case, a provision is made for someone who expounds the morality (41–42).
85. Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, ed. Skeat.
86. Denny-Brown, “Lydgate’s Golden Cows,” 35.
87. MED, worthi adj. 3(e); MED, citesein n. 1.
88. Denny-Brown, “Lydgate’s Golden Cows,” 35.
89. Bycorne and Chychevache is the second-to-last item in quire 14 of Trinity R.3.20 and comes just before Lydgate’s “A Wicked Tong will Seye Amis” (see Connolly, John Shirley, 70–74); it also appears in Trinity R.3.19 and Harley 2251. The Legend of St. George is the last of three items in quire 28 of Trinity R.3.20 and follows immediately after the Mumming at Windsor (once again, see Connolly, John Shirley, 70–74); it is also found in Trinity R.3.21 and Bodleian 2527.
90. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles; and Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness.
91. Stevens, “The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama,” 328.
92. For the overlap of forms, see Wickham, Early English Stages, 3:125, and Schirmer, John Lydgate, 100.
93. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 130.
94. “Mayster Thomas More in his youth deuysed in hys fathers house in London, a goodly hangyng of fyne paynted clothe, with nyne pageauntes, and verses ouer euery one of those pageauntes.” See Edwards, “Middle English Pageant ‘Picture’?” quoting from More, Workes, ed. Wilson.
95. For example, a scribe’s note in Cambridge, St. John’s College MS 208 (H.5), refers to “vi payentis iic. Champis, vi, iii.c. paragraffis v.” in a usage that points to the six illustrations that appear in the manuscript. See Edwards, “Middle English Pageant ‘Picture’?” 25–26.
96. The Brut, ed. Brie, 2:426.
97. For this argument, see Clark and Sheingorn, “Performative Reading.”
98. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 84.
99. Pecock, Repressor, 1:212–13. Lydgate, “On the Image of Pity,” MPJL 1:298–99, l. 19.
1. See MPJL, 1:35–43.
2. For Corpus Christi processions and plays, see Rubin, Corpus Christi; for a discussion showing the development of Corpus Christi as an expression of urban and social ideologies, see James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body.”
3. See Barron, “The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London,” 25.
4. Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice”; the quotations are from 285 and 293, respectively.
5. Barron, “Parish Fraternities,” 34, notes that parish guilds were separate from craft guilds and were basically communal chantries that were mainly middle class and artisanal (few members of Great Companies joined parish fraternities) and were markedly female; they were also “expressions of parish, neighbourly solidarity” that, if bequests can be taken as evidence, were more important than any other civic ties.
6. See Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 39–40.
7. Barron, London, 2. The closest London seems to have come to public drama of the sort found in provincial cities was the London puy of ca. 1300, a social and religious society devoted to the Virgin Mary and to musical composition and performance in her honor and with membership drawn from royalty, nobility, clergy, and urban elites, evidence of which is preserved in the Liber Custumarum; see Sutton, “Merchants, Music and Social Harmony.”
8. While expensive, such pageantry must have provided work for artisans, laborers, and provisioners and attracted crowds that generated business for inns, taverns, and other purveyors of goods, so much so that the prevalence of pageants and processions may explain why Londoners did not need the sorts of play festivals put on in York, Coventry, or Chester; see Barron, London, 22.
9. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 161, argues that the king’s dominance over London is a factor in the kinds of drama it developed.
10. For the range of parish dramatic activities, see Erler, Ecclesiastical London, xxiii–xxxiv, and for a concise overview, Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 160–61.
11. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 238, citing the Fraternity Register, 56. Records of payments from various London parishes in the fifteenth century for canopy, fringes, flags, garlands, banners, torches, pack-thread, and so on offer further evidence for processions or performances on Corpus Christi day; see Blair, “Note on the Relation of the Corpus Christi Procession to the Corpus Christi Pageant,” 88–89.
12. Erler, Ecclesiastical London, xxxii–xxxiii. Erler notes that Scott may have intended to use the Barking pageants in performances by his own troupe.
13. FitzStephen, Descriptio nobilissimae, 27; the complaints of the prioress are cited in DTR, no. 543.
14. Dillon, “Clerkenwell and Smithfield as a Neglected Home of London Theater.”
15. DTR, nos. 544, 546, and 538.
16. The “pleye at Skynners Welle, whiche endured Wednesday, Thorsday, Fryday, and on Soneday it was ended” is mentioned in the chronicle found in BL MS Harley 565, fol. 68v, published as A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, 91, and in the chronicle in BL MS Julius B.i., where it is referred to as “Clerkenwelle.” See the detailed discussion of evidence for the play and its possible sponsorship in Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 54–62. I find Lancashire’s arguments persuasive, but for a more skeptical reading of the evidence, see Clopper’s “London and the Problem of the Clerkenwell Plays,” which argues against a cycle and in favor of the Clerkenwell play as “probably some sort of parish fund-raiser held in conjunction with the fair of St. Bartholomew’s Priory, just one of the sights among the usual games” (300).
17. See Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 57–70, for these hypotheses about the play’s disappearance.
18. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 59–60, believes Stow’s assertion is correct and that the Skinners’ procession developed out of their involvement in the Clerkenwell play. The Great Chronicle (see Guildhall MS 3313, fol. 72r) claims that the Skinners organized “a grete play” for Corpus Christi that was said to have lasted from Wednesday to Friday with further celebrations on Sunday.
19. The procession is mentioned every year until 1540–41; Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 277 n43.
20. Unwin, Gilds, 125.
21. Stow, Survey, 1:230–31.
22. See Erler, “Palm Sunday Prophets,” esp. 64–70, for a discussion of costumes, hangings, and labels used in Palm Sunday celebrations.
23. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 124. See Lambert, Records of the Skinners, 54, for the fraternity’s links to royal and noble persons.
24. Shirley tells us that he was working from an incomplete exemplar, saying after line 224 “Shirley kouþe fynde no more of this copye.” Perhaps information about the commissioning of the poem may have been given or implied in the missing verses, as at the end of Lydgate’s verses on Henry VI’s triumphal entry, which conclude with praise of the mayor, demonstrating the civic impetus behind that poem.
25. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 175.
26. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 188; and Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, 135.
27. Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. Way, 2:325.
28. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 164. Clopper believes the verses do not record an actual procession, on the grounds that none of the Corpus Christi processions for which we have documentation are “patterned on an orderly and chronologically disposed set of Old and New Testament figures (not to mention a series of Fathers and commentators)” (164–65 n67).
29. In Literature and Heresy, Cole argues that in the Procession, Lydgate “addresses the common eucharistic problems of his day” and resolves them not by taking sides but by “placing the problems in the hands of earlier authorities” (135), with the result being an alternative to the official eucharistic theologies of his day (146)—Cole even detects a whiff of Wycliffism in the verses (135).
30. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 114–15; quotation on 115. Also see Simpson, Oxford English Literary History, 455–56.
31. For an overview of ideas about the nature of the eucharist, including debates over Christ’s physical presence in it, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 12–35.
32. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 104. For meanings of the word figure, see the MED. As Gayk notes, Lydgate uses the word to mean both material representation such as statue or image (see Troy Book 2:1015–16) and symbolic form such as writing (see “On De Profundis,” MPJL 1:79, ll. 41–42).
33. The Latin Vulgate’s mistranslation of the Herbrew word qaran in Exodus 34:29 as “horns” rather than “rays” led to the Christian representation of Moses with a ram’s horns.
34. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 164–65.
35. This is the reading of Goulding, “Picture-Poems of John Lydgate,” who believes that the directions in the Procession of Corpus Christi describe a procession for one of the more important London churches, possibly St. Paul’s or Westminster (66 n2).
36. Erler, “Palm Sunday Prophets,” 60, 78.
37. Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture, 21; Dagenais is here arguing (following Judson Boyce Allen’s arguments in The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages) for a view of all medieval literary texts not as verbal icons but as active, “ethical” agents and does not have Lydgate specifically in mind, although his claims are in my view particularly apt for the Procession.
38. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 276, and for a discussion of Lydgate’s Procession of Corpus Christi, 229–32.
39. Cole, Literature and Heresy, 136.
40. Ibid., 142. Cole notes that Lydgate’s solution to “the common eucharistic problems of his day” is not to take sides but to place “the problems in the hands of earlier authorities” (135), which allows him to fashion an alternative to the official eucharistic theologies of his day (146) while still retaining an orthodox position.
41. Ibid., 142, drawing on Rubin, Corpus Christi, 259–71, and Beckwith, Signifying God.
42. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 58.
43. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, esp. 158, describes how the rebels “transformed the feast’s clerical concerns into a public language of their own” and made it part of the insurgency.
44. Aston, “Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni,” esp. 7–9.
45. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Sponsler, “Lydgate and London’s Public Culture,” 13–33.
46. Meyer-Lee, “Lydgate’s Laureate Pose,” 41.
47. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 175, linked the procession to the London Skinners’ Corpus Christi procession (the “great annual festival at which the holy sacraments were escorted through the streets by members of the furriers’ guild”) but without explanation asserted that the verses were commissioned by Lydgate’s monastery. Schirmer’s assertion may also have been inspired by knowledge of Bury’s interest in Corpus Christi; Gibson, “Bury St. Edmunds,” 60–61, notes that late medieval Bury had both an interludium and a procession of Corpus Christi.
48. Aston, “Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni,” 19–20.
49. Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry,” 96.
50. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 122.
51. Zeeman, “The Idol of the Text,” 44.
52. See the similar point made by Beadle, “ ‘Devoute Ymaginacioun,’ ” 7, comparing Nicholas Love’s The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ to such dramatic characters as Contemplacio in the N-Town Mary Play.
53. Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading,” 61.
54. See the discussion in Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform, 164–65.
55. Cole, Literature and Heresy, esp. 137–40.
56. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 14–15.
57. Connolly, John Shirley, 178–82.
58. Hammond thinks Lydgate did not retain the texts of shorter works such as the Procession and that they did not circulate; see “Two British Museum Manuscripts,” 24.
59. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 227.
1. Although some scholars (e.g., Ebin, John Lydgate, 83, and Schirmer, John Lydgate, 139–43) have thought that Lydgate helped plan the event, it seems unlikely that he devised any of the pageants. He may have witnessed the entry, however, since he occasionally offers information not given in Carpenter’s letter (e.g., the fifth pageant and the accounts of the church processions at the entry’s end), although he could have acquired that information from other sources; see Kipling, Enter the King, 142–69, and MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 95. The extant copy of Carpenter’s letter is in Guildhall Letter Book K, folios 103v–4v; for a printed version, see Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, 3:457–64. Carpenter’s letter includes a closing address to a “reverende frater et amice praestantissime,” which scholars take as indication that the letter was designed to assist Lydgate in crafting a different style of, but still in some sense official, commemoration. MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 11, and Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 87–89, discuss Carpenter’s role in providing a description for Lydgate’s use. For the entering of Carpenter’s letter into the London letter book, see Barron, London, 21.
2. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 170; Nolan, John Lydgate, 235.
3. The phrase is from Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs,” 50, which argues that in the poetics of the Dream of the Rood tradition, inscription and performance “contrast with each other to reveal a deeper interaction: each contains the possibility of the other.”
4. The quotation is from Camille, “Signs of the City,” 13, quoting Francesca Canadé Sautman.
5. For analyses of the themes and purposes of the entry, see Bryant, “Configurations of the Community in Late Medieval Spectacles”; Kipling, Enter the King, 142–69; and Nolan, John Lydgate, 184–255.
6. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 133, notes that with only one possible exception, no royal visitor made an entry into London from 1400 to 1500 without being ceremonially met outside the city’s walls, usually at Blackheath.
7. Dillon, The Language of Space in Court Performance, 19.
8. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, 225.
9. Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, 4.
10. Kingsford, Chronicles of London, 303, note to p. 106, l. 28.
11. An influential early reading of processions as engines of social wholeness can be found in James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body”; for a more skeptical interpretation, emphasizing dissent over consensus, see Lindenbaum, “The Smithfield Tournament of 1390.”
12. Barron, “Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture,” 230–31. Blackheath was the customary place at which the mayor and citizens welcomed visiting royalty.
13. Lydgate’s verses do just that, styling the giant as a “sturdy champeoun,” ready to protect the king against all “foreyn enmyes” (ll. 74–77).
14. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.
15. Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 57, argues that Gloucester asked for the pageant as part of his educative plans for the young king.
16. The phrase is Manley’s in Literature and Culture, 237.
17. Ashley and Hüsken, eds., Moving Subjects, 17.
18. The quotation is from Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 47; for the political and symbolic importance of the procession routes in London, see Manley, Literature and Culture, 225–41.
19. Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, 4.
20. For an overview of royal entries in London, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 43–50.
21. Kipling, Enter the King, 143–69. The refocusing comes across in all of the extant accounts, with the exception of the Latin version in MS Lambeth 12, which stresses the messianic aspect of Henry’s rule in ways absent from other accounts, as Osberg, “Jesse Tree,” has demonstrated, and as I discuss later in this chapter. For the notion of Henry VI as messiah, see new coins struck in 1422 to defend the dual monarchy, which featured an angel announcing to the Virgin the coming of a savior who was Henry VI; see McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy,” 145–51.
22. Kipling, Enter the King, 144.
23. On this point, see Evans, “The Production of Space in Chaucer’s London,” 52. Evans argues that the body in medieval towns was “energetic, sensual and defiant: it takes up space,” and that “bodies also transform spaces, just as spaces transform them” and “this reciprocal effect is crucial.”
24. Dillon, The Language of Space, 20.
25. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 267ff.
26. For London industries, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 263–65.
27. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 263.
28. See Barron, London, 22, who also speculates that the economic benefits of royal entries made large-scale religious performances less important for Londoners.
29. See Manley, Literature and Culture, 222, citing Rappaport’s use of invariance to describe a canonical quality of timelessness.
30. Wylie and Waugh, Reign, 267.
31. See Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 132–34. Kipling, Enter the King, 143, who has argued for the liturgical and typological significance of royal entries in general, sees the 1432 entry as a dramatic “epiphany of Henry’s transcendent majesty.”
32. For a broad look at the rites and festivities associated with the ritual year, see Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England; the influential article by Phythian-Adams, “Ceremony and the Citizen,” was one of the first to link processions and other seasonal rituals to the social life of a town.
33. Kipling, “London Pageants,” 5, notes that the continental style seemed strange to English observers, as one herald complained when witnessing the entry of Margaret of York into Sluys in 1468.
34. The scriptures were from the Vulgate but were sometimes recorded in English; Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:348, says “mimed direct address” characterized English civic triumph as early as 1392, but there is no definitive evidence for that claim.
35. See Kipling, “London Pageants,” 25 n8.
36. MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 80–81, thinks that Lydgate’s improvements to the speech were made with the mayor’s help. Lydgate omits the section in which Carpenter describes the song of the clergymen.
37. Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, 123–24; quotation on 124.
38. For the link to Gog and Magog, see Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 302, note to 100, l. 4. An antelope atop a pillar and wearing a shield of the royal arms around its neck was one of the figures on the bridge in the entry of Henry V in 1415; see Gesta Henrici Quinti, 60–67. Lydgate’s phrase, “gan manace” (l. 76), suggests that the giant moved. For the bowing giants of the 1421 entry, see Vita Henrici Quinti, 297–98.
39. Carpenter’s letter suggests that the doves were actually released (“per emissionem septem albarum columbarum”). The 1431 Paris entry included the gift of three hearts to the king, which opened to release birds and flowers; see Wolffe, Henry VI, 60.
40. The account in Trinity MS 0.9.1 makes clear that Henry was given actual objects by Nature, Grace, and Fortune. For the resemblance to dressing of a knight and coronation, see McLaren, London Chronicles, 54. While courtly ceremony obviously dominated, the second pageant projected a civic message that emphasized bourgeois values of comfort and prosperity, as Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 156, has argued.
41. Osberg notes that Carpenter’s account relies heavily on a pastiche of Vulgate verse and phrases to describe not just the pageants but even the participants (e.g., the twenty-four aldermen are described as “viginti quatuor seniores siue senatores,” echoing Apocalipsis 19:4), in the tradition of “cento” passages from earlier poets woven together. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 256, and for the “cento” tradition 257 n6, citing Raby, History of Christian-Latin, 16.
42. MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 98. There is no record of who played the roles of the seven maidens and sang the roundel, but some forty years later, the boys of St. Magnus the Martyr sang for the entry of Elizabeth Woodville; see DTR, no. 942.
43. Kipling, “London Pageants,” 6.
44. McLuhan, Understanding the Media, 84.
45. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 156, notes that the castellated conduit in Cornhill was built in 1282 as a prison for night-walkers and in the fifteenth century still featured a timber cage used for that purpose, with stocks and a pillory for fraudulent bakers.
46. For this suggestion, see Griffiths, Reign, 144; Osberg, “Lambeth,” 266.
47. The Great Conduit stood at the intersection of Poultry and Cheapside; Stow says it was built around 1285 (Survey, 1:17 and 1:264). Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 87, thinks that Mercy, Grace, and Pity were introduced by the pageant maker to solve the problem of a disorderly scrambling for the wine, while also adding allegorical significance and ceremony to the dispensing of wine to the king when he approached this pageant; Carpenter’s letter does not include them, because he is working from the original device for the entry, which did not envision that problem.
48. Dagenais, “ ‘That Bothersome Residue.’ ” Arguing against Walter Ong’s claim that while “ ‘written words are residue,’ ” orality “ ‘has no such residue or deposit’ ” (246), Dagenais argues that the physical text is “the beginning, place of residence, and residue” of the processes of both writing and reading (255).
49. Ibid., 255–56.
50. The first tree displayed Henry’s English and French ancestry (Carpenter says that these ancestors were represented “per personas vivas”), a reminder of the legitimacy of Henry’s claim to the dual monarchy, while the second was a Tree of Jesse, showing the genealogy of Christ. The Jesse Tree seems to have been controversial, as Lydgate’s defense of it—absent from Carpenter’s account—suggests. In describing the Jesse Tree, both Carpenter and Lydgate downplay messianic themes. Carpenter writes “Iustum titulum . . . dominum nostrum Regem linealiter deuolutum,” which Lydgate renders as “the degree be Iuste Successioun . . . Vnto the kyng ys now dessended dovn,” while the version in Lambeth MS 12 reads “nostrum Regem linealiter stabilitum,” with the use of “stabilitum” expressing in Osberg’s view “more potently than ‘deuolutum’ ideas of affirmation and confirmation” (“Lambeth,” 262). Lydgate adds a defense of the Jesse Tree, perhaps at Mayor Welles’s request in response to complaints that had been raised about it; see MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 93, who also argues that Lydgate may have included the Jesse Tree defense because he devised the pageant himself.
51. For the letter, see Wardens’ Accounts, ed. Jefferson, 532–34.
52. In the 1392 reconciliation entry, after leaving St. Paul’s, Richard II and Anne continued toward Westminster and came to a platform at Temple Bar representing a desert with St. John the Baptist surrounded by various kinds of trees and a menagerie of strange beasts; Withington notes that the mayor that year was a grocer—William Stondon—and that the pageant mingles biblical imagery, tournament themes, and trade symbolism (Withington, English Pageantry, 131).
53. See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 77; and for the 1431 rebellion’s use of literacy, Summit, “ ‘Stable in Study,’ ” 210.
54. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 24.
55. See Scase, “ ‘Strange and Wonderful Bills,’ ” 226–27, 238–39, and 246.
56. Summit, “ ‘Stable in Study,’ ” 211.
57. Camille, “Signs of the City”; quotations on 23 and 9, respectively.
58. See Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England.
59. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 234, notes that by the middle of the fifteenth century, London tradesmen are being described as litteratus (i.e., as having a minimal ability to read in Latin); for writing by merchants and artisans, see Richardson, Middle Class Writing in Medieval London.
60. Barron, “Pageantry on London Bridge,” 96 and 94–95. Barron thinks the expenses may have been hidden elsewhere in the wardens’ accounts, but it is also possible that some expenses were paid for by the city, from the money loaned by Bederendene.
61. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 199.
62. For information on Holford, see Barron, “Pageantry on London Bridge,” 98.
63. Nagy, Poetry as Performance, 112.
64. Lydgate apparently finished the poem after the king had left Bury; see Pearsall, John Lydgate, 34.
65. Although Lydgate apparently works from Carpenter’s letter to a fellow cleric, presumably to Lydgate himself, he offers information not in Carpenter, suggesting either he may have been present (as MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 95, believes) or he is following a now-lost source distinct from Carpenter (as Ebin, John Lydgate, 83, assumes).
66. Lindenbaum, “Drama as Textual Practice,” quotations on 388, 390, and 391, respectively.
67. Twycross, “Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivities,” 7. For crowds at entries, see Wylie and Waugh, Reign, 267; Gesta Henrici Quinti, 112–13; and Lydgate, Troy Book, Bk. 2, ll. 4132–33: “Gret was the pres that abood to se / Of sondri folke that schove fast and croude.”
68. See Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 88, for the bias for Gloucester found in Lydgate’s version of the 1432 entry in MS Cotton Julius B.ii.; and Osberg, “Lambeth,” 262, for Lydgate’s reticence with biblical imagery.
69. For a discussion of these changes, see Osberg, “Lambeth,” 263–67. The fourth pageant was a representation of verses from Proverbs 20:28, as Lydgate recognizes when he corrects Carpenter’s misreading of Misericordiam (Mercy) as Memoriam; see MacCracken’s comments on this error, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry.”
70. Coventry: Records of Early English Drama, 29–30; Osberg, “Lambeth,” 264.
71. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 265; for messianic propaganda, see McKenna, “Henry VI of England,” 161; Wolffe, Henry VI, 50; and Rowe, “King Henry VI’s Claim to France,” 82–83.
72. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 266; the quotation is from the same page.
73. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 151–57.
74. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 266; between 1428 and 1436, London loaned the king 56,776 pounds (see Griffiths, Reign, 58–59).
75. Benson, “Civic Lydgate,” 149.
76. See Kipling, Enter the King, 15–16 and 143–44, for the significance of the comparison of Henry to the biblical King David and of London to Jerusalem. Andrew Horn, city chamberlain of London, described London as the “new Jerusalem” in writing of the reception of Edward II and Isabella in 1308 (Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, 152). Ganim, “Experience of Modernity,” 86–87, notes that in medieval literature, the city “was always being filtered through the ways in which the city of God was visualized.”
77. E.g., BL MSS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, Julius B.ii, and Harley 565.
78. For a reading of Lydgate’s use of the classical past in these verses, and especially his adoption of the Roman triumph as an exemplum relevant to the complexities of Lancastrian rule in the 1420s and 1430s, see Nolan, John Lydgate, 184–233.
79. The mayor’s speech is recorded in English by Carpenter, with slightly different wording; MacCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry,” 80–81, suggests that Lydgate’s changes, which improve the speech, were made with the help of the mayor. McLaren, London Chronicles, 55 n13, thinks that the description of London as the king’s chamber may imply that because coronations typically took place in London, “Londoners viewed London as the heart of the land and in this way bound to the king” while also suggesting that London is the king’s residence and thus more intimately his than other parts of the realm; as with the 1392 pageants for Richard II, the aim was in part for the city to win the king’s favor and assert its worthiness, as Lydgate’s concluding verses suggest.
80. See MED, quthen s.v. Nolan, John Lydgate, 238.
81. The envoy contains a conventional humility topos addressed to the mayor, asking forgiveness for the poet’s efforts (his “symple makyng,” l. 535); for a discussion of the fifteenth-century uses of this topos, see Lawton, “Dullness,” 762.
82. Nolan, John Lydgate, 137. For Lydgate’s use of the orchard, see Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:91.
83. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 89, argues that Lydgate’s changes did not so much alter the civic device’s meanings but added to the range of meanings he found in it.
84. The quotation is from Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading, xvii.
85. For the sources of material found in London chronicles, including ceremonies and pageantry, see Gransden, Historical Writing, 232–41, and McLaren, London Chronicles, 41–44. The wardens’ records are described in London Bridge, ed. Harding and Wright, esp. xxiv–xxviii. The most notable exceptions to the pattern of recording the 1432 entry in chronicles are the version found in Lambeth MS 12 and in College of Arms MS Vincent 25(1), a manuscript linked to Sir Christopher Barker (d.1550 as Garter) that includes descriptions of various ceremonies, among them the coronation of Henry VI in 1429 (fols. 103–6) and his London reception in 1432 (fols. 106v–7v); see Campbell, Steer, and Yorke, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the College of Arms, 1:263–65.
86. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, esp. 73.
87. Boffey, “Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies,” 81.
88. Kipling, “London Pageants,” 5. Kipling notes a case in which the same subjects were staged in different ways on the continent and in England—the “Judgment of Paris” in the Brussels pageant for Joanna of Castile in 1496 featured a tableau of the three goddesses posed on a revolving stage, while for Anne Boleyn in London in 1533, the story took the form of a debate between the three goddesses—the records of each reflect that visual/verbal difference, with the Brussels account preserving the visual design of the pageant, while the London account preserves the script (6).
89. For a discussion of possible official accounts, see Barron, “Pageantry on London Bridge,” 93. Barron, London, 20, believes that Londoners probably paid for Richard of Maidstone’s Latin poem describing the four pageants and the king’s reply to them in the reconciliation ceremonies, although it’s possible that Richard II commissioned them.
90. Fisher, “Language Policy.”
91. Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford. In his introduction, Kingsford notes that the parliament of 1399 is the most notable event described up to that point (viii).
92. McLaren, London Chronicles, 57–58. Later accounts of London processions continue this practice, as in the similar use of goodly in early modern ceremonies.
93. Published as “Text F” in The Brut, 2:461–65 (collated with Cambridge MS Hh.6.9). Under the year 1419, MS 0.9.1 contains a poem on Henry V’s victories not found in any other manuscript except MS Hh.6.9; in MS O.9.1, the poem on Henry’s victories is separated from the chronicle text, but in MS Hh.6.9, it is merged with the chronicle narrative.
94. See McLaren, London Chronicles, 120, for the 1415 poem, and 54, for the claim that it offers eyewitness accounts. McLaren notes that there are several examples in the London chronicles of eyewitness reports and hearsay material; London Chronicles, 44–45.
95. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 259; also see James, Descriptive Catalogue, 26, and Ker, Medieval Libraries, 73.
96. For the conduit change, see Osberg, “Lambeth,” 262.
97. Such connections included Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, who was appointed chancellor of England on 16 November 1422, who played an important role on the council until at least 1426 and thus might have had an interest in Henry’s 1432 royal entry; see Osberg, “Lambeth,” 259–61.
98. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 266–67.
99. For a description of the manuscript, see Campbell, Steer, and Yorke, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the College of Arms, 1:263–65.
100. McLaren, London Chronicles, 107.
101. Kingsford, “Historical Collection,” 505.
102. McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 46.
103. McLaren, London Chronicles, 104. The London chronicle has been published as Historical Collections, ed. Gairdner, and is linked to BL MS Arundel 19(2) and the chronicle in BL MS Vitellius A.xvi.
104. For an account of the “quite extraordinary” beginning of vernacular chronicle writing in London, see McLaren, London Chronicles, 94ff.
105. Boffey, “Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies,” 71.
106. Fifteenth-century chroniclers acquired their information in various ways, including from eyewitness and oral sources, newsletters and official city records, copies of parliamentary statutes and decrees of the king’s council affecting London, and material copied from city archives; see Gransden, Historical Writing, 238–41. McLaren, London Chronicles, 40–41, notes that there is little explicit evidence for the use of the city of London’s letter books or other city records as sources, although enough implicit echoes exist to suggest that chronicle writers had access to city documents.
107. McLaren, London Chronicles, 43–44.
108. See Gransden, Historical Writing, 243, on the chroniclers’ outlook.
109. McLaren, London Chronicles, 56.
110. Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading, xvii. MacCracken’s edition of the poem is in MPJL 2:630–48. For the date of the manuscript, see Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, ix.
111. Fragments from the chronicle have been published in Six Town Chronicles, ed. Flenley; see 59–60, for the dating. For a discussion of the manuscript, see McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 67, and London Chronicles, 108–13. McLaren, London Chronicles, 110 n35, notes that we know that one other manuscript, College of Arms MS 2M6, was owned by a herald.
112. Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, ix.
113. See McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 64, who dates the chronicle manuscript to 1425–75.
114. McLaren, London Chronicles, 109.
115. See McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 66, for information on the manuscript.
116. McLaren, London Chronicles, 101. The chronicle has been published as Great Chronicle of London, ed. Thomas and Thornley. Guildhall 3313 appears to be the product of a workshop or professional scribe commissioned to write up the chronicle (which could later be added to). The chronicle also has what appears to be an eyewitness account of the procession of Henry VI in 1471. See Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 79–90, for a discussion of the relations among the various London chronicles.
117. The 1516 edition includes partial and altered versions of Lydgate’s verses for the 1432 entry: it contains selected “scriptures” and verses that are recorded as speeches for the pageant characters, downplays the Jesse Tree pageant, and turns attention away from associations of king and Christ; see Osberg, “Lambeth,” 267. McLaren, London Chronicles, 263–67, discusses the manuscript and urges caution about assuming that Fabyan was the author of the Newe Cronycles, as was first proposed by Rastell.
118. For discussions of the manuscript, see Klinefelter, “Newly Discovered 15th-Century English Manuscript,” and “ ‘Siege of Calais’ ”; as well as Robbins, “Middle English Diatribe,” quotation on 135.
119. Osberg, “Lambeth,” 267. Lydgate’s verses were published in revised form in 1542, and this revision provided the basis for the 1547 entry into London of Edward VI (the Jesse Tree was replaced by “England,” who urges Edward to follow in his father’s footsteps); see Parry, “Continuity,” 224, and Anglo, Spectacle, 285. Lydgate’s verses may also have been the source of Thomas Middleton’s Triumph of Truth; see Herbert, History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies, 1:92, 200, and Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:75, 83.
120. Dagenais, “ ‘That Bothersome Residue,’ ” esp. 252, which argues for a shift from the study of “text” to “the individual, unique, concrete manuscript codex.” In Goodman’s scheme, allographic writing stands in contrast with the “autograph” in which the typeface or script (the “type”) and the meaning (or “token”) are inseparable, so that if the former changes, so does the latter; see Goodman, Languages of Art, 132–34.
121. McLaren, London Chronicles, 49.
122. See the discussion of the translation of visual spectacle into written form by McLaren, London Chronicles, 45–49; the quotation is on 51.
123. Coleman, “Talking of Chronicles.”
124. McLaren, London Chronicles, 47.
125. Nolan, John Lydgate, 241.
1. For the “mimic queen,” see DTR, no. 932.
2. See the account in BL MS Egerton 650; printed in The Brut, 2:450–51.
3. The most detailed description of the coronation ceremony is in the so-called “Gregory’s Chronicle,” from BL MS Egerton 1995, printed in Historical Collections, ed. Gairdner, 165–68; Dymmock’s role in the banquet is described on 168. For the council’s writ of 4 November 1429 authorizing Dymmock’s service, see PPC 3:6–7. In 1399, Thomas Dymmock played a similar role at the coronation feast of Henry IV; see BL MS Julius B.ii, fols. 46r–46v, in Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, 49–50.
4. For crowds at Catherine’s coronation banquet, see The Brut, 427.
5. The abbot of Bury St. Edmunds was one of the assigned triers of petitions in the 1429 parliament (PROME: 1429; item 7).
6. See Letter Book K, fol. 70. Estfeld bequeathed the cup in 1445 to his grandson, John Bohun; see his will in Calendar of Wills, ed. Sharpe, 2:509.
7. See McKenna, “Henry VI,” 157.
8. Griffiths, Reign, 190.
9. Lancashire makes this suggestion in London Civic Theatre, 125. Goulding, “Picture-Poems,” notes that the MS Lansdowne 285 version of the coronation subtleties has no description of the subtleties themselves, just the verses with the title “The baladis of the same,” perhaps indicating that the verses were read aloud by a master of ceremonies (26, n1); a subtlety with dialogue, at Ely in 1479, offers evidence of the use of speech in such displays (cited in DTR, no. 642).
10. For brief mentions of a variety of subtleties and their obvious resemblance to pageantry, with which they often shared the same subjects, see Withington, English Pageantry, 1:82–84. Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:210–15, provides a concise discussion of subtleties and their overlap with other visual and dramatic forms, such as tapestries and pageants. Also see Henisch, Fast and Feast, 220–26.
11. See Epstein, “Eating Their Words,” 371, for a discussion of the “spectacular textuality” of the subtleties.
12. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Playing to the Senses,” esp. 1–3.
13. Reed, “The Edible Monument.”
14. Austin, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, x, says that subtleties “were devices in sugar and paste, and apparently in jelly, and were, at any rate at times, made to be eaten,” but Hammond, Food and Feast, 142, believes that “sometimes it was an ornament wholly made of sugar or ‘marchpane’ (marzipan) that was eaten. They were not, however, always restricted to edible materials—the cook probably used whatever was necessary to make his design.” Chaucer’s Parson describes in an anatomy of the sin of pride: “Pride of the table appearth . . . ful ofte . . . in . . . swich manere bake-metes and dish-metes brennynge of wild fir and peynted and castled with papir,” in The Canterbury Tales, Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 301, l. 443.
15. For the 1399 subtleties, see BL MS Harley 279, fol 45; for 1403, see BL MS Harley 279, cited in Strutt, Honda Angel-cynnan, 2:100; for the subtlety of the stag, man, and tree, see BL MS Harley 279, fol. 48v; for 1416, see BL MS Cotton Caligula B.ii, reprinted in A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, 159; for 1421, see A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, 164; and for 1431, see Monstrelet, Chronique, 5:6.
16. For the St. George subtlety, see BL MS Arundel 334; for the godhead subtlety, see Austin, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, 69.
17. Burrow, Ages of Man, 29–30.
18. See Russell, Boke of Nurture, ll. 690–794; the quotation is at ll. 781–86. Furnivall notes that the first word of “towse” is “neither a clear t nor c, though more like t than c. It was first written Couse (as if for cou[r]se, succession, which makes good sense) or touse, and then a w was put over the u” (Boke of Nurture, 53 n3). Furnivall’s version is edited from BL MS Harley 4011, fols. 171ff. In the versions found in BL MS Sloane 1315 and 2027, different subtleties are given and Russell’s description of the four subtleties on the four seasons is omitted (see Boke of Nurture, lxxiii).
19. Reed, “The Edible Monument,” 143, notes that prints depicting baroque banquets “often show the elaborate arrangements of food, sugar, and ice sculptures along the tables as if they were small festival floats in a long procession.”
20. Short English Chronicle; see DTR, “Doubtful Texts and Records,” no. 1781. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1:224 and 2:132, 396–97, cites A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, to show this was a subtlety.
21. BL MS Cotton Julius B.i, in A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, 164–65 nLL.
22. DTR, no. 642.
23. Wickham, Early English Stages, 3:125.
24. See MED, sotilte n5.
25. Lydgate, Pilgrimage: “To thys Sect [Epicureans] yt ys endwed, With rost somwhyle, and with stewyd, To be seruyd, and metys bake, Now to ffrye, now steykes make, And many other soteltes.”
26. Crane, Performance of Self, esp. 128–32.
27. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 125–26.
28. Henisch, Fast and Feast, 75, 101–2.
29. See, for example, Forme of Cury, ed. Hieatt and Butler, 20.
30. Lupton, “Thinking with Things,” 76–77.
31. The Brut describes a dearth of wheat, beef, mutton, and other meat in 1429 lasting until Lammas and high prices for bread in London (450). For norms of food consumption, see Dyer, Standards of Living, 90.
32. Epstein, “Eating,” 360.
33. For the serving of food at a banquet, see Tannahill, Food in History, 221–22.
34. For “leches” and “custade rooial,” see Austin, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, 134–35 and 55, and Hieatt, “Making Sense of Medieval Culinary Records,” 110; and for fritters, see Scully, Art of Cookery, 136, and Hammond, Food and Feast, 136.
35. Hammond, Food and Feast, 137, argues that the 1429 banquet “seems to have had particularly heraldic food.”
36. For the two quotations, see Epstein, “Eating,” 365 and 363, respectively, and on this point more broadly, also see Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism. As Epstein points out, the beginnings of this conflation are described by McNiven, Heresy and Politics, while its effects are charted by Strohm, England’s Empty Throne. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 48–49, notes that the central Christian meal was not the luxurious feast but the frugal repast of commensality, and thus there was an inherent even if submerged tension in the Lancastrian attempt to link church and crown in the coronation banquet. The subtleties also represented a carnivalesque excess that refused the ascetic disciplines of medieval Christianity and evaded regimes of dietary surveillance that were developing for the middle classes, which Lydgate himself helped promulgate in his “Dietary”; see Sponsler, “Eating Lessons.”
37. Fabyan, Newe Cronycles. BL MS Egerton 1995 describes the verses as a “reson” (fol. 176v).
38. BL MS Julius B.i. describes Lydgate’s verses as “this resoun.” Fabyan says the kneeling Henry had “this balade takkyd by hym” (Newe Cronycles, fol. 189).
39. Griffiths, Reign, 190.
40. The years 1429–31 marked a period of increased concern about Lollardy. The opening sermon on the first day of parliament on 22 September 1429, which Henry VI attended, was given by the chancellor, John Kemp, archbishop of York, whose central theme was heresy and in particular the Hussite actions in Bohemia, as well as errors and heresies at home, too.
41. Epstein, “Eating,” 366; Epstein reads the banquet as ritual meal and secular mass, “a performance of secularized, politicized communion” in which the guests are both audience and performers.
42. BL MS Egerton 1995 says she held “in every honde a crowne” and does not specify that the king was kneeling (fol. 177v). Fabyan, Newe Cronycles, describes the figure of Henry as “beryng in hande thys balade” (fol. 189v). The subtleties at the banquet in Paris that followed Henry VI’s French coronation in 1431 would also feature one of the Virgin Mary and the crowned king, another of a crowned fleur-de-lis held up by two angels, the third “une dame et ung paon,” and the fourth a woman and a swan; see Monstrelet, Chronique, 5:6.
43. Epstein, “Eating,” 374; McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy,” 161. Epstein notes that while such an equation of the king with Christ might seem too blasphemous to be intentional, it has a precedent in a coin made in 1423 for the infant Henry VI on which the figures in the Annunciation image common to such coins are reversed, putting the angel Gabriel on the viewer’s right and the Virgin on the left, a switch that places the angel behind the arms of England and the Virgin behind those of France in a way that McKenna argues politicizes the Annunciation, with Henry VI in the role of the infant Jesus.
44. Beckwith, Signifying God, 29.
45. On the eating of nobles in effigy, see Weiss, “Edible Architecture, Cannibal Architecture.” Weiss describes a feast hosted by Casanova, which ended with a cake covered with the images of European nobility: “Casanova’s passion for royalty was symbolically manifested in this attempt at complete devoration” (165). Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 125, argues the coronation subtleties were probably read aloud, for the benefit of everyone in the hall.
46. Fabyan, Newe Cronycles, fols. 188v-189v.
47. MED, resoun, n2, 9a.
48. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” 84.
49. Ibid.; see Wolffe, Henry VI, 51, and Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 29, for the coronation plans.
50. MPJL, 1:xxviii and 2:623, although in MPJL MacCracken mistakenly dates the subtleties to 1432.
51. Epstein, “Eating,” 367–68.
52. Reed, “The Edible Monument,” 143.
53. See Barron, “Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture,” for London’s indifference to aristocratic chivalry and its development of its own brand of chivalric spectacle in the form of midsummer watches and “ridings” of the mayor to take his oath (225–26, 228–29).
54. See Historical Collections; in his introduction to the edition, Gairdner notes that the manuscript may originally have been in two volumes (1–11). The subtleties are on fols. 176v–177v, immediately after a detailed description of the coronation ceremonies that ends with the description of the costumed Dymmock offering himself as the king’s champion. Although William Gregory, a member of the Skinners’ Company and mayor of London in 1451–52, has usually been taken as the chronicle’s author, McLaren has argued that the evidence does not support that assumption (“Textual Transmission,” 59).
55. McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 59–60.
56. Connolly, John Shirley, chap. 8, and Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 184–85. For Egerton 1995’s links to other London miscellanies, see Parker, Commonplace Book in Tudor London.
57. The chronicle has been published as A Chronicle of London, ed. Nicolas and Tyrrell, and in Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford.
58. Published as Great Chronicle of London, by Thomas and Thornley, who believed it to be a Main City Chronicle, a notion that is no longer accepted (see McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 38ff).
59. McLaren, London Chronicles, 101.
60. McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 60.
61. McLaren, London Chronicles, 102.
62. There are also four different marginal hands (McLaren, London Chronicles, 100); Lydgate’s ballades for the subtleties appear on fols. 79–80. The years 1444–83 of the chronicle in Julius B.i. have been published in Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, with the subtleties as note TT (168–69). The chronicle ends on fol. 90; several of the subsequent leaves are blank, while others contain copies of various documents, including a list of mayors and sheriffs.
63. Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, xiii.
64. The St. John’s manuscript is described by Flenley, Six Town Chronicles, 60–62, and Hanna, Descriptive Catalogue, 75–77, among others. The manuscript was at one point owned by John Davenport, a play-loving tavern keeper (Shakespeare stayed at his inn) and mayor of Oxford (d. 1621), who presented the manuscript to St. John’s College (Flenley, Six Town Chronicles, 60).
65. Mooney and Matheson, “The Beryn Scribe,” 353. On the Trinity College manuscript, see Boffey and Thompson, “Anthologies and Miscellanies,” 288–90; and Mooney, “Scribes and Booklets.”
66. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 86–87; McLaren, London Chronicles, 100, notes that several chronicle manuscripts predate it; Mooney and Matheson, “The Beryn Scribe,” 354. St. John’s MS 57 was “compiled soon after 1430” (Lester, “Grete Boke,” 27). McLaren, London Chronicles, 100, says the chronicle is in one neat hand and is probably a copy since it contains some typical copying errors.
67. Mooney and Matheson, “The Beryn Scribe,” 355, 362. St. John’s MS 57 appears to be the product of a workshop or of a scribe writing on commission; see McLaren, London Chronicles, 101.
68. See Abbott, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, 76. Part of the chronicle has been published as Bale’s Chronicle in Flenley, Six Town Chronicles. Robert Bale wasn’t recorder of London and didn’t die in 1461, as Tanner thought, but Kingsford argues he was the London scrivener mentioned in several fifteenth-century Chancery Proceedings; see Kingsford, “Robert Bale, the London Chronicler,” 126–28.
69. McLaren, London Chronicles, 107.
70. McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 46. From 1424–29, Cecil 281 agrees with Harley 565 and, from 1429–37, is “a superior version of” the text in Egerton 1995 that offers a better reading of Lydgate’s three ballades (Kinsgford, “Historical Collection,” 508–9).
71. See McLaren, London Chronicles, 100 n5.
72. Bühler, “Sir John Paston’s ‘Grete Booke,’ ” argued that Lansdowne 285 is not Paston’s “grete boke” but another manuscript with very similar contents that represent an early example of “mass production” (351); the current consensus is that Lansdowne 285 is the work described in the Paston letters; see Lester, “Grete Booke.”
73. See Bartlett, “Translation, Self-Representation, and Statecraft,” and Lester, Earliest English Translation, 22–23.
74. See Bühler, “Sir John Paston’s Grete Booke,” 347–49, for a description of the contents of Morgan 775.
75. Lester, “Grete Boke,” 34. But Edwards, in a review of Lester’s book, finds no identifiable connection between Astley and Paston (700). Lydgate’s ballades for the subtleties appear on fols 14–15 and 24.
76. Boffey and Edwards, “Middle English Verse in Chronicles,” 126–27.
77. Epstein, “Eating,” 368–69.
78. McLaren, “Textual Transmission,” 62, 63.
79. This is to some degree unsurprising, given that in their lack of attention to the visual features of performance the subtleties resemble other dramatic texts from medieval England, which are seldom illustrated in their manuscript contexts, unlike continental dramatic manuscripts, such as the Jour de Jugement, which as Emmerson has observed seemed to have sought to transmit to readers “a lost theatrical performance”; see Emmerson, “Visualizing Performance,” 246.
80. Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser.” Kipling argues that this device was passed to Lydgate, with the request for suitable verses.
81. Chaucer, “The Complaint of Venus,” in Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 649, l. 80.
82. See MPJL, 1:215.
1. For a brief overview of women and medieval drama, see Sponsler, “Drama.”
2. See Muir, “Women on the Medieval Stage,” and Davidson, “Women and the Medieval Stage.”
3. For early convent drama, see Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 63, and Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama, 148–54; for the Barking Easter performances, see Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 19, and Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, 1:165. Ogden, “Women Play Women in the Liturgical Drama of the Middle Ages,” has identified twenty-three music dramas dating from 1100 to 1600 that were performed by nuns.
4. Goldberg, “Craft Guilds, the Corpus Christi Play, and Civic Government,” 145–47; his argument rests on the fact that mentions of men playing female roles first appear in the late fifteenth century. For the Chester wives, see Chester: REED, 22.
5. See Coletti, “A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles,” 79; as well as Evans, “Body Politics: Engendering Medieval Cycle Drama” and “Feminist Re-Enactments: Gender and the Towneley Uxor Noe.”
6. Korda, Labors Lost.
7. Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 41–44.
8. See ibid., 44–48, and Muir, “Eye of the Procession.”
9. See Bryant, “Configurations of the Community,” for a discussion of the Lancastrian spectacles of the 1420s and 1430s as forms of political propaganda.
10. McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy,” 156.
11. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, 74.
12. These are the known entries into London for women before 1500; see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 186–94, for a list of major royal and other entries into London from 1400 to 1558.
13. Kipling, Enter the King, chap. 6.
14. For Catherine’s ceremonial appearances, see Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 2:146–47 (Henry V’s funeral procession) and 2:148–50 (processions with her son in the early 1420s).
15. Catherine was in France visiting her parents when Henry V died near Paris and traveled back to England with his body. Meanwhile, Henry V’s brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and his uncle, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, were already in England and primed to take a guiding role in the upbringing of Henry VI; see Griffiths, Reign, 12–13.
16. Henry was present at the opening of all the early parliaments, except for the first in 1422; he led processions through London in 1425 and 1428 and again at his coronation in 1429 (see Griffiths, Reign, 57). For the parliaments, see RP 4:261, 162, 196, 316; The Brut, ed. Brie, 452; and the Great Chronicle of London, ed. Thomas and Thornley, 128, and, for the London processions, 132.
17. See Facinger, “Study of Medieval Queenship”; McCartney, “King’s Mother and Royal Prerogative”; and Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers.
18. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 95.
19. See Green, “Three Fifteenth-Century Notes,” 14–16.
20. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 105; Schirmer believed Brice was killed in a skirmish at Louviers in 1430. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 184, and Ebin, John Lydgate, 89, date the Hertford disguising to 1430.
21. PRO, E28/50/22, cited in Griffiths, Reign, 64 n17.
22. Their visit to St. Albans is described in Amundesham, Annales monasterii S. Albani, 1:21. The king’s itinerary has been established by Christie, Henry VI, 375ff.
23. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 28.
24. Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, 144–45.
25. Sharp distributed “bills” in London, Coventry, Oxford, and elsewhere and gathered a band of followers at Abingdon in his “rising” shortly before Whitsuntide in 1431; see Amundesham, Annales monasterii S. Albani, 1:63.
26. In Early English Stages, 1:204, Wickham argues that a presenter speaks on behalf of the husbands and a wife on behalf of the wives; Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, 160 n44, note that despite the appearance of direct speech, the wives’ answer “is also a ‘bill’ by way of replicatio, which could be delivered by a representative.”
27. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 107.
28. See Schirmer, John Lydgate, 90, for Lydgate’s involvement with the court.
29. His most recent effort on their behalf had been the translation of a French poem by Lawrence Calot stressing Henry VI’s descent in the line of St. Louis, commissioned by the earl of Warwick in 1426; see “The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI,” MPJL, 2:613–22. For a discussion of the ways in which Lydgate’s poetic identity was intertwined with Lancastrian monarchical identity, see Patterson, “Making Identities.”
30. Under the Lancastrian kings, almost all legislation developed out of petitions presented to parliament; see Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 409.
31. See Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:197. Nolan, John Lydgate, argues that the real subject of Hertford is not gender or contemporary politics but genre “conceived in the broadest sense as a mode of organizing the historical” (167); thus, the lack of resolution at the end of the disguising “enacts the failure of one mode of Chaucerian discourse, the comic, to remain adequate to the representation of the present in the face of dramatic historical change” (171).
32. For the practice of peasant plaint in royal courts, see Scase, Literature and Complaint, 11–17, and for its use in vernacular poetry, 33–41.
33. The typical response of a king to a rejected parliamentary petition was le roi s’avisera (“the king would advise himself”), a polite way of saying no; see Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, 161. The formel in the Parliament of Fowls asks for “respit for to avise me” (l. 648).
34. For boy-bishop rituals, see Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 8–12, and Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain, 5–10. Harris, Sacred Folly, makes the revisionary argument that the role reversal associated with the Feast of Fools was reverential, not mocking, an observation that helps explain the mingling of the carnivalesque with the serious in the Hertford disguising.
35. The castle was situated in flat, low-lying land on the south bank of the River Lea; it was apparently built after the Norman Conquest as part of a defensive ring around London. The internal arrangements of the castle shown in an Elizabethan plan of around 1582–92 in the PRO reveal main apartments grouped around a central courtyard, with the great hall on the east. The castle seems to have been a timber-framed building, the hall an aisled building of three bays with screens and two porches at the northern end and a square oriel and a fireplace at the southern end. The great chapel was probably on the first floor of one of the wings shown projecting eastward from the building. Hertford had decayed rapidly during the fourteenth century and by 1438 was a rural manor more than a town; see the Victoria History of the County of Hertford, 3:502–3.
36. For Henry V’s insistence that Catherine play an active role in her son’s upbringing and reside in his household, see RP, 4:280–82, and Griffiths, Reign, 56. Catherine’s domestic household was financed out of English lands granted as part of her dower—income from these lands appears to have been about 4,360 pounds—and presumably also from income from holdings in France, as guaranteed by the Treaty of Troyes. She also received 2,300 pounds annually from the exchequer, a sum that during the financially hard-pressed years of the 1420s might have been grudgingly given. For Catherine’s income, see Griffiths, Reign, 56 and Crawford, “King’s Burden?” 44–45.
37. Griffiths, Reign, 56.
38. The services of his nurses and two chamber women were so valued that in 1428, they were admitted to the confraternity of St. Albans abbey, which was patronized by the royal family; see Griffiths, Reign, 52.
39. Wolffe, Henry VI, 45–46.
40. Griffiths, Reign, 55–56.
41. Incerti Scriptoris, ed. Giles, 4:17.
42. See Crawford, “King’s Burden?” 37.
43. Griffiths, “Queen Katherine of Valois and a Missing Statute of the Realm,” 106–7.
44. In 1425, a quarrel between Gloucester and the duke of Burgundy quickly escalated to the point of a duel. To forestall bloodshed, the quarrel was handed over to Bedford and to the dowager queens of England (i.e., Catherine) and France for arbitration; see Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 226. Catherine had earlier interceded on behalf of James I of Scotland during her coronation-feast in 1421; see Strickland, Lives, 135–38. Did it signal a decline in Catherine’s public fortunes that Lydgate dared to produce the anti-matrimonial Hertford disguising at her own residence where her son was fast becoming more guest than resident, newly absorbed as he was within his own male-centered household?
45. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 101, dates the Mumming at Eltham to 1424, as does Ebin, John Lydgate, 86; Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449), 29, prefers 1428.
46. Descriptions of Eltham palace and the plan of the great hall can be found in Hasted, History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 1:463–68. Froissart, Chroniques, describes a meeting of parliament at Eltham in 1395.
47. There is some question as to whom the tenth and eleventh stanzas are addressed; they begin with the words “To Youre Hyenesse,” which might seem to refer to Henry, but their content seems better geared toward Catherine, especially since the twelfth stanza, “Lenvoie,” directly addresses Henry (“Prynce excellent,” l. 78).
48. For the role of East Anglian women as patrons and readers, see Delany, Impolitic Bodies, on Bokenham’s “Legend of Holy Women,” commissioned by women in Suffolk; Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century, on that author’s patronage by women, including the Gilbert nuns at Sempringham; Gibson, Theater of Devotion, on East Anglian women as patrons of devotional material; and Hanna, “Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, ca. 1390–1440.”
49. See Pearsall, John Lydgate, 71, 168–69.
50. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 114. Lydgate may also have been the author of a “Complaint for my Lady of Gloucester and Holland,” copied by Shirley in Trinity MS R.3.20 and linked with Lydgate in a marginal note by Shirley in MS Ashmole 59 version; the poem defends Jacqueline after Gloucester’s divorce of her and subsequent marriage to Eleanor Cobham, one of her ladies in waiting; see Connolly, John Shirley, 81–83.
51. The poem is undated, but Schirmer, John Lydgate, 200, conjectures it was written in 1424.
52. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 69.
53. Horrox, “Urban Patronage and Patrons,” 148–49.
54. Greenfield, “Festive Drama at Christmas.” Since pressures on the local neighborhoods through which the household passed were considerable, especially at Christmas when there were numerous guests, with the household requiring food and drink—often paid by credit, which resulted in a good bit of local loss and animosity toward purveyors—the gift-giving rituals enacted in and by seasonal household dramas might have offered a pointed commentary on those uneasy economic relations; see Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 41–46.
55. Westfall, Patrons and Performance, 34–37. In an anecdote designed to reveal Henry’s modesty, Blacman notes that once at Christmas, a certain lord mounted a dance or show featuring young women with bare breasts; Henry’s reaction was to avert his eyes and leave the hall. See Blacman, Henry the Sixth, 8.
56. For the suggestion that Lydgate was a member of Henry V’s chapel royal, see Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 88.
57. Westfall, Patrons and Performance, 34–37.
58. Household of Edward IV, ed. Myers, 133–36. Information on Henry VI’s royal chapel comes from the Liber Regie Capelle written for presentation to Alfonso V of Portugal in 1449; see Liber Regie Capelle, ed. Ullmann, 59–60, for a discussion of the chapel’s duties at feasts and on special occasions.
59. PRO, E403/681 m.3; cited in Griffiths, Reign of King Henry VI, 64 n17.
60. Westfall, Patrons and Performance, 34–37. London companies performed at Eltham at Christmas in 1425 (see PRO, E404/44/334) and again in 1426 when Henry VI was entertained by Jack Travaill’s London players along with four boys, protegés of the duke of Exeter, playing interludes. The next year, the Travaill players were again at Eltham along with another company called the Jeues of Abingdon; see Wolffe, Henry VI, 37, 45, and Griffiths, Reign, 64 n17. Kipling has argued convincingly that disguisings at the medieval English court were designed and performed by professionals, not by disguised aristocrats, the latter being an innovation of Henry VIII; until then, aristocrats were spectators and performers were drawn from the ranks of household retainers; see Kipling, “Early Tudor Disguisings,” 3–8.
61. For the size of households, see Starkey, “Age of the Household,” 244.
62. Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485, 342. See also Morgan, “House of Policy.”
63. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 42.
64. Bumke, Courtly Culture, 4–6.
65. Vale, The Princely Court, 33, 165.
66. Westfall, Patrons and Performance, 11. In the 1420s, the lower-level members of Henry’s household might have wished for more than entertainments; pages and grooms were chronically underpaid and came close to resigning en masse in May 1426; see Griffiths, Reign, 54.
67. Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:223.
68. Schirmer, John Lydgate, 106, suggests the mumming was composed while Lydgate was in Paris and was performed at Christmas in 1429, and Green, “Three Fifteenth-Century Notes,” 15, concurs. Internal evidence supports this claim; see esp. ll. 84–88. The age at which medieval child-kings were expected to come of age remains uncertain; perhaps it was ten, as in the case of Richard II (see Watts, Henry VI, 120).
69. This was a gentler solution than that imposed on another superfluous queen by Henry V, who had imprisoned his father’s wife Joan of Navarre on charges of witchcraft apparently in order to seize her dower to meet the expenses of an overextended government; see Watts, Henry VI, 326 n278.
70. Although definitive evidence is lacking, it is tempting to imagine that the “very ancient arras” described by a Swiss visitor to Windsor in 1599 as a tapestry that the “English took from the French” and that tells the story of Clotilda, Clovis, and the fleur-de-lis was hanging in the hall when Lydgate’s mumming was performed; see Platter, Travels in England in 1599, 84–85.
71. Shirley annotates this line: “A daun Iohan, est yvray?”
72. For Joan of Arc’s effects on Henry’s hasty coronations, see Griffiths, Reign, 189.
73. See Griffiths, Reign, 61.
74. Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, 23, ll. 9–10. Barry Windeatt believes Margery and her husband were returning from seeing the 1413 York plays; see Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Windeatt, 305 n1.
75. For these and other examples, see Davidson, “Women and the Medieval Stage”; Muir, “Women on the Medieval Stage”; and Ogden, “Women Play Women.”
1. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xv; the manuscript is no. 599 in James, Western Manuscripts, 2:74.
2. Brown and Robbins, Index, and Robbins and Cutler, Supplement, list the sixteen unique texts (nos. 190.1, 267, 437, 928.5, 1172.5, 1238, 1838, 2148, 2254, 2311, 2384.8, 2588.5, 3493, 3807, 3983, and 4231). Mooney identifies another five texts not known from any other source, formerly all cited in the Index as 928.5, but which Mooney shows to be separate short lyrics; see Mooney, “ ‘A Woman’s Reply.’ ”
3. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xv and xxx.
4. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, esp. 78, and Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 80–83, discuss the manuscript’s regiminal and advisory preoccupations, and Mooney, “ ‘A Woman’s Reply,’ ” makes a case for female authorship of one of its poems.
5. See Brown, Register, no. 2448, and Brown and Robbins, Index, no. 3807; printed in Secular Lyrics, ed. Robbins, 110–13.
6. Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 37.
7. Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics, 267 n120.
8. See Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xv, xxvii, and xxx, and Livingston, “Sixth Hand.” For the Hammond scribe, see Hammond, “Two British Museum Manuscripts,” 27, and “A Scribe of Chaucer,” 27–30.
9. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xx. Fletcher, citing Greg, “Chaucer Attributions,” 539–40, says that foliation in what appears to be a fifteenth-century hand suggests that the booklets had been bound together by the time of George Wilmer’s ownership, who donated the manuscript to Trinity College (xx), and that the booklets were together in the present form by around 1480 (xxii). But also see Mooney, “Scribes and Booklets,” 266, for a different reading of the date of the foliation, which leads her to conclude that they remained separate up to Stow’s ownership.
10. For a discussion of the foliation, see Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xx–xxii.
11. Doyle argues that Trinity MS R.3.21 was produced in a “setting of John Shirley and his successors in the business of compiling manuscript miscellanies, based in a shop in St. Batholomew’s Close and employing local resources, aided by a network of personal relationships”; see “An Unrecognized Piece of Piers the Ploughman’s Creed,” 434. Mooney discusses what is known about the scribe of R.3.21 in “A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts,” 1028 n7–8, and “More Manuscripts Written by a Chaucer Scribe,” 401–7.
12. See Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 186–87.
13. Mooney, “ ‘A Woman’s Reply,’ ” 245. Also see Connolly, John Shirley, 181, who argues that the main scribe of R.3.21 was probably part of “a professionally-organised secular scriptorium or workshop” in London and had access to some of Shirley’s manuscripts; Hammond, “Two British Museum Manuscripts,” 27; and Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xxvii.
14. See Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, “Provenance,” 108–10, and for the association with Vale. In linking R.3.21 with Multon, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs follow the lead of Boffey and Thompson, “Anthologies,” 287–89. Mooney, “Scribes and Booklets,” 242, agrees that Multon and the Hammond scribe are one and the same.
15. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 189.
16. Ibid., 197.
17. Mooney, “Scribes and Booklets,” 252.
18. Ibid., 264. Mooney endorses Hammond’s view (“A Scribe of Chaucer,” 28–29) that the Hammond scribe must have been a professional working in a “publishing business” in London.
19. See Caxton, Prologue to Virgil’s Eneydos, 1.
20. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xx–xxii. Fletcher notes that the manuscript is composed of thirteen booklets, “each separately foliated in the same fifteenth-century hand” (xx), and believes that foliation and other features of the manuscript suggest that the booklets were linked together before the end of the fifteenth century (xxii). If Stow foliated R.3.19, Mooney thinks he did it “before taking apart the first two booklets of MS R.3.19 to use individual quires for copytext and then misplaced them in the order when he came to gather them together for the bindery” (“Scribes and Booklets,” 266).
21. Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 81 n54; see Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xxix–xxx; for Thorney’s life, see Bone, “Extant Manuscripts”; Bone notes that the Yorkist bent of R.3.19 may have appealed to Thorney.
22. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 189.
23. Mooney argues that the other Shirley-derived manuscripts “probably were not produced in the capital but were copied from Shirley or Shirley-derived exemplars that had been carried out of the metropolis by their owners; since they were outside the protection of metropolitan book-producing circles, they were dispersed and the exemplars not only separated from their copies but lost entirely” (“John Shirley’s Heirs,” 197).
24. Mooney, “John Shirley’s Heirs,” 184.
25. Connolly, John Shirley, 83.
26. Ibid., 196–203. Connolly provides a useful analysis of Shirley’s dialect, based on comparison with LALME, and locates his origins in the area of the southwest Midlands that encompasses southwest Shropshire, north and west Worcestershire, and northeast Herefordshire.
27. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xxvii, notes that there are, however, occasional Shirlean features elsewhere in R.3.19, including the heading to one poem (fol. 241r) and some spellings (Hyer, fol. 125r, l. 24; lyef, fol. 131r, l. 1).
28. Attributions were later added as follows: Parliament of Fowls, fol. 17r “by Chaucer”; “Reflections of a Prisoner,” fol. 41r “Written by George Ashby prisoner in the Fleet. A.D. 1463”; Assembly of Ladies, fol. 55r “By Chaucer”; Banquet of Gods and Goddesses, fol. 68r “by Lydgate”; “Belle Dame sans Merci,” fol. 98r “by Chaucer”; “Commandments of Love,” fol. 109r “by Chaucer”; “Nine Ladies Worthy,” fol. 110v “by Chaucer”; Legend of Good Women, fol. 114r “by Chaucer”; “Complaint unto Pity,” fol. 151r “Geof Chaucer”; “Craft of Lovers,” fol. 154v “Chaucer” with marginal note by Stow on fol. 156r “Chaucer died 1400”; a short poem, fol. 156v “Chaucer”; Bycorne, fol. 159r “Compyled by John Lydgate”; poems, fols 160r–161v, identified as by Chaucer; extracts from the Fall of Princes, fol. 171r “Translations from Bochas by Iohn Lydgate”; moral verses, fols. 205r, 205v, and 207r “Chaucer”; “Court of Love,” fol. 217r “by G.Chaucer.”
29. Mooney thinks that the tables of contents of R.3.19 and R.3.21 “certainly date from” Stow’s ownership (“Scribes and Booklets,” 266); the hand of the “Poemata” note differs from the hand of the table of contents. Greg, “Chaucer Attributions,” 539, assigns the attributions and titles in R.3.19 in bold roman and copperplate hand to Beaupré Bell, who derived them from Stow’s Chaucer and who entered Trinity College in 1722.
30. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xxx.
31. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 224–27; quotations on 225 and 227.
32. See Mooney, “ ‘Woman’s Reply,’ ” for a discussion of the courtly love verses.
33. Edited by MacCracken from the version in Trinity R.3.21; see MPJL, 2:724–34, and for Lydgate’s authorship, MPJL, 1:xxiii.
34. For the tradition, see Irwin, “Seven Sages.”
35. See Wilson, “ ‘Amonges Othere Wordes Wyse,’ ” 135.
36. Seneca had an important place in the curriculum of medieval schools and was considered “almost a Church Father” thanks to what was imagined to have been his correspondence with St. Paul; see Weiss, Humanism, 3, 132. In the “Fabula Duorum Mercatorum,” Lydgate refers by name to “Senek” (l. 603) and cites Seneca’s Epistulae (l. 611), while in the Siege of Thebes, pt. 3, l. 2972, he mentions “moral Senek”; in the prologue to the Fall of Princes, Lydgate lists prominent authors of tragedies, including “Senek in Rome.”
37. For a discussion of the author and author function as a classification system, see Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Whether it also mattered to the original readers of the Mumming of the Seven Philosophers is a topic for another discussion, although the work of scholars on late medieval authorship would say that it did; see, for example, Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, the seminal work on the scholastic tradition behind the ways in which vernacular writers presented themselves and were understood by readers and, more recently, the essays (and especially those that focus on codicological issues and the organization of manuscripts around a single author’s work) in Partridge and Kwakkel, eds., Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice.
38. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 108.
39. See Frere, Antiphonale Sarisburiense, plate 328; Hughes, “Antiphons and Acclamations,” finds a resemblance between this antiphon and coronation chants for Edward II.
40. Billington, Mock Kings, 93.
41. Kipling, Enter the King.
42. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 1:408. As Harris, Sacred Folly, has shown, however, much of the evidence for Christmas revels, and especially the Feast of Fools, has been misunderstood, with the result that the serious liturgical origins of the Christmas Feast of Fools ritual have been obscured.
43. See Billington, Mock Kings, 30–54, for a discussion of winter kings and lords of misrule. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 61–62, argues that Christmas lords of misrule found in fifteenth-century records may have been a reformist attempt to reign in rowdiness, even if they themselves later got out of hand.
44. Inns of Court: REED, 1:xix–xx.
45. See Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 1:261 and n4; also see Records of the City of Norwich, ed. Hudson and Tingey, 1:345–46. Although DTR, 1224, dates the masking to 5 March 1443, the exact date is uncertain, and it may well have taken place in late January, even though the document of 1443 from which the quotations come places the procession on Fastengong Tuesday, that is, Mardi Gras.
46. The record we have is the city’s appeal of the fine in 1448. The connections between seasonal festivity and rebellion have been extensively examined; see Pettitt, “ ‘Here Comes I, Jack Straw.”
47. For the tendency of mocking-rituals to mirror the social order they critique and to incorporate serious elements, see Lindahl, “Festive Form,” esp. 551.
48. See Streitberger, Court Revels, 8, and Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 269–70 n100.
49. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, esp. 126–27, where she notes that even though the coronation-year entertainments were “unusual in their authorship and occasions” they were not “unusual in their kind, as forms of entertainment common to both court and city in the first half of the fifteenth century” (127).
50. Connolly, John Shirley, 181.
51. Mooney, “Scribes and Booklets,” 241.
52. Ibid., 264–65. Someone, possibly Stow, later wrote a small “A” in the space left for a large initial at the start of “Attempt,” perhaps to guard against the confusion that would arise if the first word of the stanza were read as “ttempt.” Mooney discusses this presumed clientele in “A Middle English Treatise,” 1036–37. Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, ed. Fletcher, xv.
53. Riddy, “Mother Knows Best,” 81 and 81 n53, citing Horrox, “The Urban Gentry in the Fifteenth Century,” on the latter point.
1. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge,” esp. 8: “In the triangle of author, work and reading public the latter is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but even history-making energy.”
2. The scholarship on this topic is by now extensive, but for early and still important studies, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, for hybridity and mimicry in postcolonial contexts; Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation,” for the difficulty of restricting the circulation and use of cultural objects; and De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, especially the chapter on “Reading as Poaching,” 165–76.
3. The original practices movement is particularly visible in Shakespeare studies, where a number of contemporary performance groups define themselves as original practices companies. For a discussion of original-staging practice in relation to medieval drama, see Marshall, “Modern Productions of Medieval English Plays.”
4. For a discussion of the salvage impulse in anthropology, see Clifford, “Of Other Peoples”; for its influence on medieval studies, see Sponsler, “Medieval Ethnography.”
5. For accounts of nineteenth-century scholarly medievalism in England, Germany, and France, see, for England, Evans, History of the Society of Antiquaries; for France, Keylor, Academy and Community; for the Monumenta and Rolls series, Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises; and for Germany, Reill, German Enlightenment.
6. Lindenbaum, “Drama as Textual Practice,” 386.
7. Symes, “Toward a New History of Medieval Theatre,” 3–4.
8. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19.
9. Canning and Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past, 11.
10. For an overview of this issue that focuses on medieval liturgy, see Holsinger, “Analytical Survey 6”; the quotation is from Durham, “Reconnecting Text to Context,” 41.
11. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2.
12. Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
13. Holsinger, “Analytical Survey 6,” 274. Chaucer, “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 275, l. 998.