Miss Dorothea Brooke wants to do something great in the world. She knows that women cannot do great things on their own, and so she marries a man twice her age, who, she believes, is engaged in a great work of scholarship. Around the same time, young Dr Lydgate comes to Middlemarch. He wishes to do great work for medical science, but he meets and falls in love with Rosamond Vincy.
Inspired by the example of his predecessors Chaucer and Gower, John Lydgate articulated in his poetry, prose and translations many of the most serious political questions of his day. In the fifteenth century Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as dominating the cultural life of the nation. Thus the new literary forms and modes developed by Lydgate and his contemporaries helped shape the development of English public culture in the fifteenth century.
