2 - Social forms, literary contents: Lydgate's mummings

Summary

In Trinity College Cambridge MS R. 3. 20 may be found a series of short poems by Lydgate that its compiler, John Shirley, introduced with variations of the term “mumming” – “the devyse of a momyng,” “in wyse of mommers desguysed.” These include two performances before King Henry VI, at Eltham and at Windsor, and two spectacles in honor of Mayor William Eastfield of London, commissioned by the Mercers' and Goldsmiths' guilds. In his 1934 edition, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Henry Noble MacCracken added to these four a further three “mummings” – those at Bishopswood, London, and Hertford – creating a minor canon of Lydgate's dramatic works, all of which can be dated between the years 1424 and 1430. These texts have been little discussed, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they occupy an anomalous place within both literary and dramatic histories of late medieval England; lacking detailed performance records, historians of the theatre find the mummings intriguing but ultimately unrevealing, while literary critics have typically eschewed them in favor of Lydgate's more poetically ambitious texts, such as Siege of Thebes or Troy Book. But there is good reason for examining these poems more carefully. The very fact that they are performance pieces with an identifiable author makes the mummings stand out among medieval English dramatic texts.