"His guttys wer out shake": Illness and Indigence in Lydgate's Letter to Gloucester and Fabula duorum mercatorum

Abstract

The term poetry . . .can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss.-Georges Bataille, ''The Notion of Expenditure'' So metime after 1431, or so the generally accepted timeline has it, John Lydgate wrote to his patron Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and asked him for money.The monk and poet of Bury St. Edmunds had been, at Humphrey's request, hard at work writing the Fall of Princes-the poem that would by 1438 become a nine-book encyclopedia of noble tragedy-and he found himself short of funds. 1 It was, he I presented an early version of this project at the 2006 ACMRS conference ''Poverty and Prosperity'' at Arizona State University, and thank Mark Cruse for his hospitality and intellectual generosity there.I also owe thanks to Andrea Denny-Brown for spending time and energy on my work at the expense of her own, and I am very grateful to the two anonymous readers for SAC for their many helpful comments and suggestions.The greatest debt I have incurred in writing this essay is to Lynn Festa; her gift to me of many a brilliant insight significantly enriched what would have otherwise been a much more impoverished study. 1 My epigraph is from Georges Bataille, ''The Notion of Expenditure,'' in Visions of Excess: Selected

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