John Lydgate. Mummings and Entertainments

John Lydgate. Mummings and Entertainments. Ed. Claire Sponsler. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Pp. vi + 186. $15.00. The desire to read or teach John Lydgate can be challenging because there are no current critical or student editions of much of his work. The Middle English Texts Series (METS) sponsored by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) has improved this situation with recent editions of Troy Book selections, The Temple of Glas, The Siege of Thebes, and now from Claire Sponsler the Mummings and Entertainments. This edition is not purely a critical edition, as the Middle English Texts Series remains accessible to a student reader, but it has a reasonably complete textual apparatus, excellent and well-researched notes, and a thorough bibliography. Mummings and Entertainments effectively shows the growth of this series to an interesting compromise between student accessibility and scholarly thoroughness, while avoiding the incomprehensibility of many critical editions. Sponsler presents as readable a text as is possible, and there is no question that this particular group of documents might fit nicely into a number of possible courses--certainly this book would supplement an anthology in a medieval drama class, or could be more central in a course looking at the discourse of the Lancastrian affinity. If METS/TEAMS publish much more Lydgate, a dedicated seminar on the poet will also become possible. This edition will support further scholarship on these verses: the notes and bibliography provide an effective orientation to critical work on Lydgate's occasional poetry.