Over twenty years ago, James Simpson observed that John Lydgate was a “thoroughly public” poet, one whose “corpus was riven by distinct, often exclusive, generic and discursive commitments.” This essay grows out of Simpson's insights about Lydgate's adaptable style and public orientation, although it considers a poem that is a far cry from the maximalist work for which Lydgate is best known today. This is the so-called Dietary, a ten-stanza lyric about the many benefits of honest dealing, personal hygiene, a healthy diet, and clean living. A poem that survives in at least fifty-six manuscripts, the notional topic of the Dietary is “the gouernans of man,” as rubrics to the text often put it, and many of its lines are indeed given over to the proper habits that a person ought to keep up if they wish to remain in sound physical health. For instance, we are told to wear a hat when it is cold (1), to keep away from the “eyre of pestelens” (42), to go to bed early (7), and to take it easy on the salt (69–70). At the same time, however, the Dietary also devotes about half of its space to the voicing of conventional moral sentiments – by making comments, for instance, about such things as the need to remain “content with suffisaunce” (14) or to shun “mowthes þat ben doubill” (25) – and this mixture of proverbial wisdom with wellness advice has prompted some debate about what Julie Orlemanski terms the “generic flexibility” of the poem. Some scholars have suggested that it is a courtesy text, or even a text designed to appeal to a new type of consumer, while others have contended that it is a work of medicine at heart.5 What both positions tend to have in common, however, is a tacit assumption that, as Derek Pearsall once put it, this is a poem for which “literary criticism” has “no part.”6 In each case, that is, the operating premise is that the Dietary must have been popular because it was useful for some instrumental end, and not because it appealed to the aesthetic or literary sensibilities of its readers.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.

Scholars have often characterized John Gower as a moralizing and even severe poet, one for whom obedience to normative law is the sole ethical standard. I suggest that this is only half of the picture. On the one hand, Gower certainly relies on prescriptive forms, such as the exemplum, distinctio, and the microcosm, to make the ethical lessons of his poetry legible to the reader. But on the other, he also draws the reader’s attention to moments in his poetry when a strict obedience to normative forms of ethics leads his characters into moral error. Gower does this by staging for his reader moments in which these characters cry out to various figures of power, begging those figures to suspend ethical norms in the name of mercy and pity. I argue that, in his three long poems—the Mirour de l’omme, the Vox Clamantis, and especially the Confessio Amantis—this “crying voice” casts light upon Gowers views of ethics and poetics alike, by stressing at once the flexibility of Gowers moral views and his commitment to listening, if only in conceit, for the voices that are latent in the matter he reworks.

The epilogue considers the afterlives of “matter” and “making” in the Elizabethan period. Through brief readings of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, the epilogue demonstrates that both ideas continue to guide literary practice during this period. At the same time, however, the economic and political position of the Elizabethan poet differs markedly from the place that earlier court writers had occupied in the sphere of cultural production, and this shift in position motivates a gradual turn, in Elizabethan literary theory, away from notions of “making,” which draw attention to the material process by which literature is constructed, and towards notions of “authorship,” which hold instead that literature is produced by an autonomous figure whose type of work is categorically distinct from other kinds of labor. “Authorship” thus emerges from an ideological shift predicated, not upon a fundamental difference in literary technique, but upon a change in the conditions under which early modern poets worked.

Thomas Hoccleve has long been identified both as an autobiographical poet and as a poet who hoped that his writings would speak on his behalf to prospective readers and patrons. This chapter builds upon these insights by suggesting that Hoccleve felt certain literary materials could exercise a quasi-religious or even quasi-legal force, or “vertu,” in the social world. I argue that Hoccleve’s faith in this idea was motivated by his familiarity with two other late-medieval discourses in which certain words were believed to possess a direct and unmediated kind of power: the language of Lancastrian bureaucracy, which Hoccleve knew firsthand from his work at the Privy Seal, and the language of the church, and in particular sacramental language. I suggest that, in the Series, Hoccleve attempts to write a kind of poetry that will exercise an analogous kind of “vertu” upon his audience. By composing a book that will speak directly to the “prees” on his behalf, he hopes to circumvent the skepticism with which his own words have been received by his readers and patrons in the wake of his “wilde infirmitee”—even if he doubts that, in the end, the Series will do exactly what he wishes.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.

Throughout his work, Geoffrey Chaucer often returns to a well-known medieval commonplace: that “words” should be “cosyn” to the “deeds” they denote. After tracing the history of this commonplace and noting its prominence in fourteenth-century legal, philosophical, and literary discourse, this chapter turns to Chaucer’s use of the dictum in his Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales may be read as Chaucer’s free exploration of the different kinds of deeds, or matters, to which a poet’s words might be held “cosyn.” Different pilgrims take different positions on this question throughout the Tales, and this accounts, in part, for the variety of matter and styles employed in their narratives. This variety notwithstanding, I suggest the Tales ultimately posit that the proper “deed” of literature is historical in character. Chaucer comes to this insight over the course of Fragment Seven, and he makes his boldest claim for it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which suggests that poetry always retains the marks of the history that has produced its words and forms—no matter how autonomous or fictional that poetry may appear.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

Roland Barthes once argued that literary realism arises when a writer includes within his text certain trivial details and mundane events, not to denote an extratextual reality, but to connote its intratextual illusion. But is this the only kind of realism that a literary text may project? The work of Thomas Hoccleve offers us an occasion to revisit this question. For more than forty years, critics have struggled to reconcile the realistic aspects of Hoccleve’s work – its eye for detail, its concern with local place, and its autobiographical elements – with its resistance to the kind of realism that Barthes describes. Again and again, Hoccleve’s poems produce the illusion of the real within the diegesis of their textual frames, only to break that diegesis by calling attention, repeatedly, to the material things, actual persons, and historical places that lie beyond its scope. J. A. Burrow says it best, perhaps, when he claims that Hoccleve is interested less in the construction of ‘imaginary worlds’ within his texts than with the realistic evocation of what lies beyond them, ‘the non-imaginary worlds of public and private life’. In Burrow’s view, Hoccleve may be a realist, hear a knock upon his door, we can assume that someone is really there. This essay extends Burrow’s argument in two ways. First, it suggests that Hoccleve’s peculiar style of realism may have been inspired by the specific kinds of reading and writing he did at the office of the Privy Seal, where he worked as a clerk for more than forty years. The depictions of reality found in the documents that Hoccleve copied out bear a striking resemblance, as we will see, to the picture of late medieval life that he gives us in the poems: quotidian, exacting in detail, and full of local colour. Second, it argues that our best guide to the influence of the Privy Seal upon Hoccleve can be found in a book that is often discussed but little read. This is the Formulary, a massive collection of more than eleven hundred writs, grants, letters patent, and extracts that the poet assembled between 1423 and 1426, at the very end of his bureaucratic career. Because it is a compilation of templates intended to ease the writing of new documents by future Privy Seal clerks, the Formulary appears at first to be an anonymous and impersonal text.