[In the following essay, Edwards contends that Lydgate was not an anti-feminist, as suggested by the critic Alain Renoir, and says that some of the attitudes in his work reflect the views of his audience and not the poet himself.]

A. Renoir has suggested that Lydgate's attitude to women varies according to the nature of his audience. He finds three distinct attitudes:

• 1) The attitude of the courtly audience: Women are wonderful.
• 2) The attitude of the clergy: Women are abominable.
• 3) The attitude that must have been his own: Women are like men; each one must be judged according to her own merit.¹

Renoir's views have gone unchallenged and he has felt able to re-state them recently.² But the assumption that underlies his approach seems open to question. The belief that a poetic convention like praise or condemnation of women necessarily implies an audience not amenable to opposing views is not in the case of Lydgate borne out by the facts. One cannot make invariable assumptions about the nature of his audience from his praise or blame of women.

Several instances bear this out. Bycorne and Chychevache³ is a satire on domineering wives, with echoes of the Wife of Bath. It was written as ‘þe deuise of a peynted or desteyned clothe for / an halle a parlour or a chaumbre / deuysed by Iohan / Lidegate at þe request of a werþy citeseyn of London /’.⁴ It is a poem that by the nature of its visual accompaniment has to be anti-feminist, but the anti-feminism seems to have very little to do with the attitude of the Church, with any didactic or homiletic spirit. Anti-feminism is here secular entertainment actually requested by a wealthy lay audience.

More striking is Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford,⁵ a dramatic complaint by oppressed husbands of the ‘wo that is in marriage’. Renoir is anxious to find some underlying seriousness in the complaints,⁶ without apparently realizing the significance of the poem's occasion. It was written.

… by wey / of supplicacioun putte to þe kyng holding his noble feest of Cristmasse in þe Castel of Hertford as / in a disguysing of þe rude vpplandisshe people compleynyng on hir wyves, with þe boystous aunswere of hir wyves, devysed by Lydegate at þe request of / þe Countrroullour⁷ Brys slayne at Loviers.

The Mumming is then an avowedly anti-feminist poem, but commissioned by a member of the court circle to be performed in the presence of the king. In the bastion of courtly love and praise of women we find their abuse encouraged. It is surely necessary to assume that Lydgate knew enough about his audience to know what he was doing, and that the anti-feminism is designed to reflect the attitude of his audience. As a poet dependent for his livelihood on the favour of the court (he did not receive a pension until 1438) he can be assumed unlikely to bite the hand that fed him.

Again Lydgate can be found praising women from the viewpoint of the Church. His Epistelle to Sibille,⁸ mixes admiring submissiveness with respectful admonition:

O yee wyves and wydowes moste entiere,
          And godely maydens yonge and fresshe of face,
What ever be sayd as in þis matere,
          Ful humbully I putt me in youre grace,
          And remembreþe, every houres space
þat moder of vyces is wilful ydelnesse,
And grounde of grace is vertuous besynesse.

(127-133)

The tone is didactic, the attitude of the Church, but it scarcely maintains that women are evil: indeed, the poem is based on a sense of the virtuous potential of women. It is presumably this quality of muted exhortation that earned him the frequent commissions of wealthy patronesses. It seems unlikely that devout women of influence would commission devotional or homiletic works from a poet who indulged in polemical attacks on women, any more than from one who asserted the charms of adulterous love.

These illustrations do suggest that Lydgate's attitude to women may well have been conditioned by occasion as well as by doctrine associated with a given milieu. Such occasional pressures cut across Renoir's definitions and remind us that Lydgate's art is not one that invariably admits of a symmetry between stated attitude and assumed audience.

Notes

1. ‘Attitudes to women in Lydgates poetry’. English Studies, xlii (1961), p. 8.

2. The poetry of John Lydgate, (London, 1967), 76-94.

3. The minor poems of John Lydgate, part II. Edited by H. N. MacCracken (E. E. T. S., O. S. 192, 1934), 433-38.

4. MS Trinity College Cambridge, R. 3. 20, p. 10.

5. Minor Poems, II, 675-682.

6. Art. cit., p. 11.

7. MacCracken, op. cit., 675, erroneously reads ‘Countre Roullour’. J. Norton-Smith identifies ‘Countrroullour Brys’ as John Brys, Controller of the Royal Household, (John Lydgate, Poems, Oxford, 1966, xiv). My transcription is from Ms Trinity College, Cambridge, R. 3. 20, p. 40.

8. The minor poems of John Lydgate. Edited by H. N. MacCracken, part I. (E. E. T. S., E. S., 107), 14-18. ‘Sibille’ is generally identified with Lady Sibille Boys, of Holm Hale, Suffolk—See W. F. Schirmer, John Lydgate, a study of the culture of the XVth century (London, 1961), 110-11.