The Assembly of Gods - Authorship and Date

Authorship and Date

The authorship and the exact date and of the poem are unknown though both questions have enjoyed considerable speculation. In his first printing of the poem, de Worde added the colophon ‘Thus endeth this lytyll moralized treatyse compiled by dan Iohn Lydgat somtyme monke of Bury on whose soule have mercy.’ He removed the colophon in later printings, but early catalogers of the poem perpetuated the attribution of the poem to Lydgate (Lydgate Assembly xi). Triggs argued for Lydgate’s authorship in his introduction, but scholars since that time have challenged the attribution so convincingly that the poem is no longer considered part of the Lydgate canon.

The belief that Lydgate was the author of the poem heavily influenced early attempts to fix a date for the writing of the poem, as scholars speculated about which period of Lydgate’s writings the poem seemed most likely to have come from. More recent attempts to fix the date of the poem suggest that it was probably written after Lydgate’s death, in the second half of the fifteenth century.