Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to SidneyHardcover, 31 July 2023

What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question fascinated English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was 'matter, ' while the term they used to describe their labor was 'making, ' or the act of reworking this matter into a new - but not entirely new - form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of early court poetry. It reconstructs their theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as 'authorship.' It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that these poets used as matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that early court poets drew attention to their source materials for aesthetic reasons, and not because of any lapse in technique.