Lydgate's Virtual Coteries: Chaucer's Family and Gower's Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century.

Author/Editor
Perry, R. D.

Title
Lydgate's Virtual Coteries: Chaucer's Family and Gower's Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century.

Published
Perry, R. D. "Lydgate's Virtual Coteries: Chaucer's Family and Gower's Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century." Speculum 93 (2018): 669-98.

Review
The "virtual coterie" that Lydgate constructs in his "Pilgrimage of the Life of Man," Perry argues, comprises the people named or alluded to in the poem--Chaucer, Guillaume de Deguileville, the Virgin Mary, and Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury--the people who as source, inspiration, or patron had agency in producing the work, lending it validity or authority and, in turn, enabling Lydgate to exert his own kind of agency to give his patron advice and to shape literary tradition at the same time. Outlining the concept and coining the term, Perry describes virtual coteries as the lists of names given in a poem, often in a prologue or dedication: "a record of distributed agency that details what a poet, a patron, or a source does to make a poem." Virtual coteries are "rhetorical performances, poetic displays that associate different individuals . . . . living and dead, real and fictional, local and distant," and allow for "a complex mediation between writer and patron." In the case of Lydgate's "Pilgrimage," the coterie allows Lydgate to advise Salisbury about the war in France and to influence "the Chaucerian tradition as it is being constructed in the fifteenth century" (671). Much of the "complex mediation" Perry explores in the "Pilgrimage" depends upon the fact that Salisbury was husband to Chaucer's granddaughter, Alice, and it is hard to imagine too many other poets being able to construct a virtual coterie of quite this sort or in quite this way, a limitation, perhaps, in more general application of the concept, despite its usefulness for describing Lydgate's roles as advisor to his patron Salisbury and as "Chaucerian" poet. Gower occupies an odd place in Perry's argument and perhaps in Lydgate's coterie, as Perry tells us: it is "unclear whether Gower is a member of this or any other of Lydgate's virtual coteries. Lydgate never mentions Gower [although he does in "Fall of Princes" 9.3412] and it is unclear whether Lydgate's audience, specifically Salisbury here, would have recognized Gower's technique in Lydgate's hands" (695). Yet, Perry argues, "In Praise of Peace" [IPP] is a major thematic and stylistic influence on Lydgate's "Pilgrimage": as Gower "praises the nobility while critiquing their actions at the same time" (689), so does Lydgate, and the younger poet adapts the "formal device of dual address" (695) modeled in Gower's IPP. "Lydgate's aims are Gower's," Perry tells us, "the earlier poet's pacifism an inspiration to the later one at a different time in the same war" (695). Praise and advice are a familiar combination in the mirrors of princes tradition (especially those addressed to a patron), and it is not unusual to find a writer addressing particular and universal audiences simultaneously. Moreover, Perry may be stretching things to call a dual audience a "formal device," especially since he acknowledges that Lydgate's technique only "resembles" Gower's, indeed "inverts" it: "Gower's dual mode of address speaks for a class, Lydgate's for a coterie" (694). Some verbal echoes would help to establish Perry's case for IPP as a source of the "Pilgrimage," although his argument that Lydgate "silenced Gower" and thereby "bolsters Chaucer's positon in literary history, while diminishing Gower's" (695) is a new take on an important issue. Perry's analysis of reciprocity between patronage and poetry is valuable--discussing the virtual coterie of Lydgate's "Title and Pedigree of Henry VI" as well as that of the "Pilgrimage"--and his discussion of Gower's IPP adds dimension to what Robert R. Edwards has called the "Trace of Gower" in Lydgate (South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 [2015]: 156-70; see eJGN 35.1) while clarifying Lydgate's virtual coteries as one facet of the Chaucerian tradition. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2018

Gower Subjects
In Praise of Peace
Influence and Later Allusion