John Skelton's Inclusive Poetics

What is it about?

This essay explores how an early English poet laureate reframed what it meant to be English by including commoners and foreigners within the national body politic, at a time when xenophobia and elitism ruled over England.

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Why is it important?

The article places a poem that is often dismissed as farcical into conversation with cultural history and critical theory to show how "Elynour Rummyng" resists exclusionary models of national identity during the English Reformation. In the process, it also complicates easy assumptions about the role of laureate poetry in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance.