SOURCE: Renoir, Alain. “The Binding Knot: Three Uses of One Image in Lydgate's Poetry.” Neophilologus 41, no. 3 (July 1957): 202-24.

In the following essay, Renoir claims that Lydgate uses the image of a binding knot to express permanence of union, and argues further that this metaphor is used to serve different purposes in The Temple of Glass, Mumming at Hertford, and “A Gentlewoman's Lament.”

The literary critics of the nineteenth and twentieth century have taught us to look upon John Lydgate as the most inept writer in the English language. One recalls Joseph Ritson's scathing account of him, in Bibliographia Poetica (London: 1802), as “a voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk” (p. 87) and George Saintsbury's elaborate condemnation of his “dull, hackneyed, slovenly phraseology,” in the Cambridge History of English Literature. More recently, a contributor to Shenandoah (1955, VI, No. 2) unhesitatingly picked a passage from Lydgate to illustrate the inferiority of late Middle-English poetry...