Papers by Robert Meyer-Lee
This article explores the relation between Chaucer’s socioeconomic location as lay controller of ... more This article explores the relation between Chaucer’s socioeconomic location as lay controller of customs and the dazzling metapoetics of the House of Fame. It emphasizes the social ambiguity of Chaucer’s movement out of court to the customs house and hence what he would have to gain, in an intertwined socioeconomic and aesthetic sense, from the dissemination of this poem. It argues that the latter--in addition to its skeptical and comic engagement with poetic tradition--represents Chaucer’s experimental attempt to shift the parameters of the literary field of late medieval English court poetry to better advantage someone in his then rather peculiar, liminal position
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 2022
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2020
The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, 2018
The Medieval Review, 2016
The Medieval Review, 2009
Exemplaria, 2017
This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate's Troy Book is m... more This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate's Troy Book is more interested in political legitimation or admonition have not understood the form of the poem. It claims that this form is, surprisingly, akin to that of postmodern memorial monuments, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which provide a framework for a trans-temporal communal negotiation of values that is ambivalent and underdetermined by design. Scrutinizing Lydgate's use of the term memorial and depiction of memorial monuments (especially those for Hecuba and Hector) across the breadth of the poem and in light of its source, the essay demonstrates how the poem's apparent contradictions or confusions are in fact expressions of its informing idea. In conclusion, the essay reflects on the implications of its argument and anachronistic methodology for the conceptual and methodological confines of synchronic historicism and, more generally, for the relation between historical contingency and aesthetic objects.
The Chaucer Review, 2014
This article explores the relation between Chaucer’s socioeconomic location as lay controller of ... more This article explores the relation between Chaucer’s socioeconomic location as lay controller of customs and the dazzling metapoetics of the House of Fame . It emphasizes the social ambiguity of Chaucer’s movement out of court to the customs house and hence what he would have to gain, in an intertwined socioeconomic and aesthetic sense, from the dissemination of this poem. It argues that the latter—in addition to its skeptical and comic engagement with poetic tradition—represents Chaucer’s experimental attempt to shift the parameters of the literary field of late medieval English court poetry to better advantage someone in his then rather peculiar, liminal position.
The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 2015
REVIEWS would enable the revivification of Piers Plowman does indeed 'demand cultural innovation'... more REVIEWS would enable the revivification of Piers Plowman does indeed 'demand cultural innovation' and might not be the sort that either scholars or students of the poem would recognize.
New Literary History, 2015
JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2010
It has often been observed about these and similar lines in Lydgate’s corpus how singularly focus... more It has often been observed about these and similar lines in Lydgate’s corpus how singularly focused they are on Chaucer’s stylistic and rhetorical accomplishments, to the exclusion of all other qualities.2 Thomas Hoccleve’s roughly contemporary eulogies of Chaucer—composed around 1411—are comparatively less hyperbolic in respect to this quality and include, for example, a nod to Chaucer as “heir in philosophie / To Aristotle.”3 Many
Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, 2007
Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, 2007
Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt
This study, most fundamentally, investigates why the idea of the poet laureate becomes so importa... more This study, most fundamentally, investigates why the idea of the poet laureate becomes so important in much of the English poetry of the fifteenth century and delineates the consequences that the development of this idea have had for the shape of English literary history. The most central figure in this investigation is John Lydgate, self-proclaimed disciple of Chaucer and monk of Bury, and the object of study may succinctly be termed Lydgatean laureate poetics. But considered from a broader perspective this study also seeks to account for fifteenth-century English poetry more comprehensively than is usual by using the notion of the laureate as a lens for tracing the trajectory and vicissitudes, over the course of more than a century, of that branch of this poetry that self-consciously presents itself as an object of high culture. From this view, this study examines what happens between the two earliest English literary encounters with that most definitive of poets laureate, Francis Petrarch: Chaucer's translation of at least one of Petrarch's sonnets in the 1380s, and the next English rendering of Petrarch's Italian in the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt, some 150 years later. The possible literary historical narratives that these two moments imply are many, but interpretations have most often fallen into one of two camps: either these moments chart the emergence of the English Renaissance, or they speak of literary continuity rather than rupture, of Wyatt recovering what Chaucer initiated rather than beginning anew with the same material. In either case, the role of Petrarch is the same: he signifies a literary sophistication whose most striking achievement is not the notion of the laureateship for which he was so much responsible but rather his rendering of a complex lyric subjectivity À one that is at odds with itself, consumed with self-definition as poet, and pervasively associated with a real (that is to say, extraliterary), historically specific person. A typical argument from the first camp contends that, because Chaucer puts Petrarch's words into the mouth of Troilus, Chaucer
Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, 2007
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Papers by Robert Meyer-Lee