SOURCE: Wilson, Janet. “Poet and Patron in Early Fifteenth Century England: John Lydgate's Temple of Glas” Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies no. 11 (April 1975): 25-32.

In the following essay, Wilson argues that Lydgate modified the theme and organization of his courtly love poem Temple of Glas, injecting it with more realism, to suit the tastes of his middle-class audience.

Recent critics have identified the emergence of a new reading public in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, whose literary interests, it is suggested, became influential in shaping the literary fashions of those times. John Burrow adduced evidence from the manuscripts of Piers Plowman of the existence and influence of an audience other than the clerical reader. He remarked ‘there was growing up … a new kind of lay public, independent, like the audience of clerks, of any specific locality—the original...