A new critical edition of john lydgate's shorter works: popular culture and lyric poetry in the later middle ages [this grant will support the production of a new critical edition of the shorter works…

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the University of Tennessee $294,640 on June 1, 2026, under the Promotion of the Humanities Research program (CFDA 45.161) to support production of a new critical edition of the shorter works of John Lydgate, a fifteenth-century Middle English poet, to be published by the Early English Text Society in cooperation with Oxford University Press.

The project runs through May 31, 2029, with performance taking place in Tennessee. The edition will include approximately 180 poems and will feature transcriptions of manuscripts, an apparatus criticus recording substantive variations among manuscripts, introductory material, descriptions of manuscripts used, and an index of names and places.

The University of Tennessee subgranted portions of the work to two collaborating institutions. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, through Dr. Taylor Cook (Associate Professor and grant co-director), will supervise a UNC graduate research assistant working ten hours per week, review manuscript transcriptions against original images, construct the apparatus criticus for each poem, draft the edition's introduction, produce manuscript summary discussions, and assemble the index. Colby College will contribute through Dr. Megan Cook's work on checking collations and designing the project website. The University of Tennessee's Dr. Ryan Perry will perform complementary editorial labor. This division of transcription, collation checking, and editorial work aims to ensure transcription accuracy and streamline workflows across graduate student workers and faculty collaborators.

A new critical edition of john lydgate's shorter works: popular culture and lyric poetry in the later middle ages [this grant will support the production of a new critical edition of the shorter works of john lydgate, to be published by the early english text society in cooperation with oxford university press. Lydgate was the most important middle english poet of the fifteenth century and, thanks to his work as a poet, dramatist, and translator, he serves as the central node in the socio-literary networks crisscrossing fifteenth-century england. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lydgate?S reputation and fame hinged upon the brief lyrics and poems of instruction that can be found everywhere in the collections of medieval and early modern readers. So popular were these shorter poems that their dissemination introduced a universe of learning to an english reading public that was clearly hungry for IT. For this same reason, the shorter works remain important today?and not just to scholars of middle english, but to scholars of medieval religion, history, and other european literatures.]