The Premodern Literary: Matter and Form in English Poetry 1400-1547

In poetry—so the story often goes—form is more important than content. After all, poets and critics since the early modern period have said so. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that content and form should be “organic” friends, with form the more important friend of the pair. Philip Sidney thought that the poet should make the “brazen” stuff of nature into better, “golden” forms of his choosing, as God himself might do. How did such an apparent preference for form over content happen? This dissertation suggests that one answer might be found in a study of pre-modern ideas of content, or what, in the literary criticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was called matere, or “matter.” In the later Middle Ages, matere referred at once to a writer’s source materials, her broader topic, and the parchment and ink with which she worked. A thing both physical and metaphysical, matere was seen to possess its own agency and force, and was held to be an equal partner to form in the making of poetry. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these ideas of matter and form shifted. Since the Scholastics, medieval English poetic theory had held to a roughly Aristotelian notion of matter and form, wherein form inhered within matter. Poets could change the appearance of matter, but not its inner essence. An influx of Humanist and Neo-Platonic thought at the end of the fifteenth century, however, led to a different view in the sixteenth. Form came to be seen as an eidos, or “idea,” that was separable from matter—partly, because Humanist theory stressed style over content, and partly because of the renewed influence of these Platonic notions of form. My dissertation traces these different attitudes towards form, matter, and the literary over the course of four chapters, each focused on a single poet who wrote between 1400 and 1547: Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Skelton, and Thomas Wyatt. Where Hoccleve and Lydgate are shown to prioritize matter over form in their visions of poetry, Skelton and Wyatt gradually turn away from matter and towards form in their work. A consideration of each poet’s theoretical attitudes towards matter is paired, in each chapter, with a careful study of his practical treatment of source matter and manuscript materials. My introduction focuses primarily on those broader intellectual historical shifts that may have contributed to evolving conceptions of matter and form during the late medieval and early modern period. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that, while early modern poetry remains as concerned with matter as it is with form, there is an ideological move away from ideas of materiality in the literary arts during the sixteenth century. This, in short, is the reason that Elizabethan poets claim that their work is, in Sidney’s words, “golden” rather than “brazen.”Englis