Writing on the wall: John Lydgate's architectural verse

This dissertation investigates the extracodical life of late-medieval verse, restoring our sense of the intimate connections between architecture and literature in fifteenth-century England. Each chapter focuses on lyrics by John Lydgate that were written for or employed within architectural-decorative schemes. Chapter One considers the deployment of Lydgate's Quis dabit and Testament within the Clopton chantry chapel at Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk. The verses, coordinated with the chantry chapel's architecture and visual-decorative program, illuminate Lydgate's role in fostering the lively, affective, but carefully orthodox devotional life of East Anglia, particularly in his careful negotiation of the signifying possibilities of the aesthetic surface.;While the first chapter focuses on how patrons deployed verse to shape the experience and significance of devotional spaces, Chapter Two turns to civic architectures, exploring how the Armourers of London coordinated their commission of a "steyned halle" and "balades" of the Legend of St. George with the construction of a new guild hall, in the process engaging the lively spectacular life of fifteenth-century London. Chapter Three brings the focus into the home, exploring how the early material history of Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache embodies the relationship between household books and "literary" interior decor, deepening our sense of the place of verse within the household.;By intensely interrogating the patronage, early presentation formats, and reception of each set of verses during the fifteenth century, I excavate the rich life of lyric as a constituent component of devotional, civic, and domestic architectures. At the end of the project, I turn my attention back into the book. I consider how the study of extracodical poetry and the intersections among architecture, literature, and the decorative arts can inflect our readings of architectural ekphrasis within poems such as Chaucer's Book of the Duchess or Lydgate's Henry VI's Triumphal Entry. Finally, I argue that the deep connections between literary and literal spaces made it possible for architectural spaces to serve as models for the structure and organization of reading space within the manuscript and early printed book, a dynamic I examine in relation to Books of Hours and early printed sermon compendia.