Humanities Grant Funds UT Research on Medieval Poet
Associate Professor Ryan Perry is researching one of the most prolific English poets and enabling UT graduate students to train as medieval scholars.
Associate Professor R. D. (Ryan) Perry has received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for research to create a new scholarly edition about one of the most prolific and well known medieval English poets.
Part of the NEH’s Scholarly Editions and Translations program, the grant will fund initial work on what Perry expects to be at least a two-volume work titled “A New Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Shorter Works: Popular Culture and Lyric Poetry in the Later Middle Ages.”
A member of the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Perry is project director for the nearly $300,000 grant and will collaborate with scholars at Colby College in Maine and the University of North Carolina. The research is expected to encompass Lydgate manuscripts located across the globe, many not yet available in digital form.
Graduate students at UT will provide assistance such as transcription, which is expected to include thousands of pages of text. “We designed the project specifically to get graduate students involved, and indeed, the bulk of the funding will go toward that,” Perry said. “It will be training for the potential next generation of medieval scholars.”
Lydgate’s English Literature Legacy
A monk and historian who wrote extensively in the 15th century, Lydgate was as well known and regarded as Geoffrey Chaucer but fell out of favor during the Reformation, Perry explained.
“Lydgate was, in some ways, the first popularizer of English literature,” Perry said. “He was the first person who consciously and self-consciously tried to write for the broadest possible audience.”
He wrote pieces that were commissioned by the king of England and works such as an ode to a laundress. Lydgate focused on many of the issues and problems of his time, including the Hundred Years’ War and plague outbreaks, and he wrote poems such as one complaining about a young student who sleeps too late and drinks too much.
“He was writing for people that were doing laundry, for the households in London, for the guilds, the people that made stuff. He thought that literature was for everyone, and he was trying to write and speak to as many people as possible,” Perry said. “That, I think, makes him a really interesting figure to think with and through, especially at a moment where people are reading less. What is literature for? Lydgate gives us one of the earliest answers in the English literary tradition to that question.”
In most cases, no one has looked at all the manuscripts of Lydgate’s shorter poems—those less than about 2,000 lines—and the scholars will not only be determining the most authoritative version and providing textual notes but also sorting out works misattributed to him and potentially uncovering new authors. The project aims to increase the understanding of Lydgate and access to his work.
While the Early English Text Society is expected to ultimately publish the volumes from this research, Perry said there also will be an online component. A website will provide not only transcriptions of the manuscripts but also map information such as who commissioned works and where they were produced, providing a glimpse into the social networks of 15th century England.
Undergraduate Interest
Perry was drawn to study medieval literature as an undergraduate after taking a class centered on Chaucer from a favorite professor. “It was a different way of imagining and understanding the world,” Perry said. “The Middle Ages tell us that the world was constituted in a different way before, and so the world can be changed. They give us a hopeful sense of the human capacity for change.”
The research on Lydgate’s work also may become part of an undergraduate class for a new publishing concentration in the Department of English. For example, Perry said, an assignment might present three different versions of a Lydgate poem to give students insight into the editorial process in deciding what to publish.
Bringing real research and publishing scenarios into the undergraduate classroom will engage students in cultural history while preparing them for future careers.
By Amy Beth Miller