Lydgate’s Defamiliarizing Material Texts
“Defamiliarization” refers to the technique of depicting everyday objects in a way that differs from their usual presentation to provoke a more nuanced understanding of the familiar. The material text is often defamiliarized in late medieval Middle English lyrics. The images of the material text used in religious lyrics render its constituent parts alien to the reader or listener: ink becomes blood, pens become spears, letters become his wounds, and parchment or paper sheets become anything from tree leaves to body parts. The material text, once familiar, becomes strange. Conversely, the holy figures these books represent or interact with become, if not less strange, at least more comprehensible through their apparent similarities with the material text. Whilst others have stressed how John Lydgate (c.1370-1451) brings images and texts into conversation with one another, I will consider how he represents material texts, objects which are, by their very nature, textual and imagistic. In this paper, I argue that Lydgate’s depictions of material texts are often defamiliarizing, and that this defamiliarizing effect often promotes a meditative response that renders the reader’s engagement with devotional material both affective and intellectualised.
Date: 8 February 2022, 12:30 (Tuesday, 4th week, Hilary 2022)
Venue: Online via Zoom
Speaker: Eleanor Baker (St John's College, Oxford)
Part of: Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at The Queen’s College
Booking required?: Required
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Cost: Free
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Laura Spence, Belinda Clark