This article maintains that John Lydgate's Testament is not a rejection of his secular career but a literary palinode that attempts to impress a sense of coherence onto a diverse body of work. As the language of conversion, the repetitive litaneutical code at the end of the poem is vindicated by the earlier performance of poetic bravado. Lydgate's textual piety, which I show to be indebted to the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, is paradoxically sustained by the displacement of prior secular

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... forms. In a central gesture, the kneeling monk-poet presents his life's work to God, who acts as his patron. Finally, I demonstrate that manuscript illuminations depicting a kneeling Lydgate confirm the reception of such a pose as simultaneously pious yet secular. The Testament of Dan John Lydgate, which survives in sixteen manuscripts and in one inscription, is a poem of some 800 lines, broken down into five movements that deploy rhyme royal for the second and fourth parts, and octave stanzas for the remainder. 1 Written toward the end of John Lydgate's life, the autobiographical Testament offers a uniquely retrospective angle on Fiona Somerset's thoughtful comments on an earlier draft have greatly improved this essay. I am also grateful to the editors of The Chaucer Review and the two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. A version of this article was presented in Leiden in December 2012, and I thank Alasdair MacDonald for his incisive question about Chaucer's Retraction. 1. The manuscripts are listed in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, ed. Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova (www.dimev.net). Certain parts of the poem, in particular Parts 1 and 5, circulated independently. This is also the case with the stanzas in John Clopton's chantry chapel at Long Melford, which are limited to Part 5. On these fragments, see Shannon