Peter Idley: 'Instructions to His Son'

An updated edition of the works of an important poet whose career spanned the Wars of the Roses. Peter Idley’s poetry provides a unique window into the dynamics of art, civil society, religion, gender, and politics during a tumultuous and transitional period in English history. Based on newly discovered manuscripts and updated scholarship, this edition provides over 1700 lines of previously unedited English poetry; the text of Idley’s extensive Latin citations; and newly identified sources for Idley’s work. This edition also provides an updated critical apparatus for scholarly reference. Idley’s work survives in ten manuscripts, all of them highly variable, which give direct testimony to the diversity of his popularity. He worked and wrote in the environs of the powerful Duchess of Suffolk, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and his poetry circulated in the female religious community at Syon Abbey; magnate collections in the north and in Ireland; merchant households; and later Tudor and seventeenth-century literary collections. Peter Idley: Instructions to His Son provides new access to this valuable and understudied resource for understanding the culture of late medieval England as it moved into the early modern era.