John Lydgate's 'Dance of Death' and Related Works

Late medieval England and France, marked by plague and the Hundred Years War, saw a surge in literature treating death as a dominant theme. From this milieu emerged the danse macabre, a tradition of death poetry defined by themes of social satire, death as the great equalizer, and confrontations between the living and the dead. This volume brings together new editions of both texts of John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century poem, the Dance of Death, with related Middle English works from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also includes a new facing-page translation of Lydgate’s French source, La Danse macabre. These poems showcase the power and versatility of the danse macabre motif, offering a vivid window into life and death in late medieval Europe. In vivid, often grotesque, and darkly humorous terms, these poems ponder life’s fundamental paradox: while we know that we all must die, we cannot imagine our own death.