SOURCE: Walsh, Elizabeth. “John Lydgate and the Proverbial Tiger.” In The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, edited by Larry D. Benson, pp. 291-303. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

In the following essay, Walsh provides an analysis of several of Lydgate's works to show that his use of recurrent tiger imagery marks a distinction between Christian and pagan heroes.

In his collection of Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases B. J. Whiting gives fourteen entries having the tiger as the central focus of the expression.¹ The fourteen entries contain fifty-four citations. In his survey of Scottish proverbs² he lists seven tiger entries which include eight citations, three of which have been repeated in the larger work. Hence, there are fifty-nine references in all. Of these, forty are drawn from the works of John Lydgate, the monk of Bury St. Edmunds. The greater part are contained in...