John Lydgate's "Mumming at Windsor": Clothilda, Women's Steadfastness, and Lancastrian Rule
Lydgate’s “Mumming at Windsor,” performed before Henry VI and his household in 1429, is not the straightforward work of propaganda that it has been taken to be. Lydgate interjects ironic observations about women into his ostensibly earnest propaganda celebrating Henry’s Gallic roots. These observations may have awakened Lydgate’s audience from complacent spectatorship and invited them to question his sincerity throughout. Lydgate conveys a complex message, consonant with the troubled politics that emerge elsewhere in his writings, even as he trumpets his support for the English claim to France.
John Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, and the Making of Henry VIII
ABSTRACT Lancastrian and Tudor poets imagine authorship as a model for monarchy. They express this imagining through the figure of the poet-king whose ideal is established by John Lydgate in The Siege of Thebes, where the legendary Theban founder, Amphion, functions as a cipher for Lydgate’s own humbly pretentious poetics. Lydgate’s vision of poet-kingship is later remade by Stephen Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure, which tells the future Henry VIII a story of how its author rises to kingship by employing poetry in the pursuit of lust. Following Hawes, Henry comes to make poetry in the service of individual desires, but, unlike his forebears, Henry’s claim to the throne is assured by lineage. For Henry, the poet-king mantle offers not a means of claiming power but of consolidating it. His lyrics create a court where resistance to his wants constitutes an act of treason. In the end, the poet-king proves success and menace. It enables commoners to present themselves (however tenuously) at the apex of society and royalty does indeed take note. Yet, when the poet-king moves from fiction into reality, it loses its potential for imagining mobility to instead become an instrument for tyranny.
Fascism and the right in Europe, 1919-1945
This new text places interwar European fascism squarely in its historical context and analyses its relationship with other right wing, authoritarian movements and regimes. Beginning with the ideological roots of fascism in pre-1914 Europe, Martin Blinkhorn turns to the problem-torn Europe of 1919 to 1939 in order to explain why fascism emerged and why, in some settings, it flourished while in others it did not. In doing so he considers not just the 'major' fascist movements and regimes of Italy and Germany but the entire range of fascist and authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes present in the Europe of 1919-1945.