Lydgate and the Lenvoy.
- Author/Editor
- Nuttall, Jenni.
- Title
- Lydgate and the Lenvoy.
- Published
- Nuttall, Jenni. "Lydgate and the Lenvoy." Exemplaria 30.1 (2018): 35-48.
- Review
- Jenni Nuttall's essay "charts the development of the lenvoy (or envoy) in English courtly verse in the fifteenth century, looking in particular at the poetry of Hoccleve and Lydgate" (35). Engaging Jonathan Culler's work on lyric, she concludes, "Form is thus an alluring fabrication of meaningfulness. Such self-generated authority is inculcated rhyme by rhyme, metrical line by metrical line, stanza by stanza" (35). For Nuttall's purposes, such self-authorization occurs in the envoy or lenvoy; furthermore, these textual apparatus serve as lines of communication between authors, readers, et al. (36). Chaucer and Gower establish the Middle English lenvoy. Nuttall asserts, "The lenvoy's flexible functions made this technical term of poetics usefully malleable, and Middle English authors and their scribes thus expand usage of the term beyond its strict definition as an optional element of a ballade" (37). Nuttall, at this point of her essay, shifts her focus to the new purposes for which Hoccleve and Lydgate will use the lenvoy. She considers how this structure uses the humility topos with conspicuous skill. Nuttall expands on Robert Meyer-Lee's discussion of such topoi, adding that they may serve as "affirmation of poetic license and self-authorization" and a "newly emerging license of form" (39, 40). After examining specific uses of the lenvoy in both Hoccleve and Lydgate (especially "Fall of Princes"), Nuttall provocatively concludes that the lenvoy might be a "significant location from which we might excavate Middle English literary theory and poetics" (45).] [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification