SOURCE: Miller, James I., Jr. “Lydgate the Hagiographer as Literary Artist.” In The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, edited by Larry D. Benson, pp. 270-90. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

In the following essay, Miller maintains that previous critics have overlooked Lydgate's conscious literary artistry and notes in particular the design and control the poet shows in Lives of St. Edmund and St. Fremund.

John Lydgate is notorious as a poet in want of design and control, but the allegation, however time-honored and well established as a “fact” of literary history, is by no means unassailable. Indeed, it may not stand up at all under more searching examination of his poems than has usually been accorded them. In discussing the epic legend St. Edmund and St. Fremund,¹ W. F. Schirmer says of the miracles which occupy the second half of the third book (848ff...