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.
New historical literary study : essays on reproducing texts, representing history
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of ContributorsIntroduction: The Historicist Enterprise3Ch. 1Generating Literary Histories39Ch. 2Texts and Works: Some Historical Questions on the Editing of Old English Verse54Ch. 3Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate69Ch. 4Shakespeare Bewitched108Ch. 5Re-visioning the Restoration: Or, How to Stop Obscuring Early Women Writers136Ch. 6Re-presenting the Body in Pamela II151Ch. 7Fictions and Freedom: Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romanticism178Ch. 8Beyond the Valley of Production or, De factorum natura: A Dialogue198Ch. 9Literary History as a Hybrid Genre216Ch. 10Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice230Ch. 11Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading267Ch. 12Exiling History: Hysterical Transgression in Historical Narrative292Ch. 13Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations316Index331
Politics and poetry in the fifteenth century
In examining political verse of the fifteenth century, Scattergood gives occasional attention to Gower. He provides a brief overview of Gower's work (19) and refers sporadically to Gower's views on such topics as Henry IV's accession to the throne, the need for peace among European rulers, the papal schism, and the possibility of a new crusade against the infidel. Scattergood's main focus is on "In Praise of Peace." [CvD]