Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

This revisionist literary history of late-medieval and Renaissance poetry offers in-depth analyses of six major poets – Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, and Wyatt – and reconstructs their ideas about the proper way to write. It sheds new light on the question of what these poets thought literature itself was made from.

---

What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question preoccupied the English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was 'matter,' while the term they used to describe their labor was 'making,' or the act of reworking this matter into a new – but not entirely new – form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of late- medieval and early modern court poetry. It reconstructs premodern theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as 'authorship.' It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that the court tradition used for its matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that the early English court poets drew attention to their source materials as a literary tactic, one that stressed the process by which a poem had been made.