Stained glass features prominently in both Geoffrey Chaucer's celebrated dream vision The House of Fame and John Lydgate's fifteenth-century adaptation of it, The Temple of Glass. How are we to understand its function in these poems? While the walls of Venus's temple in Fame contain a single narrative of Troy, Lydgate's walls in Temple are packed with detail:

By my count, Temple makes explicit note of twenty-two stories captured in the walls, and even these are only a selection; the space is crowded with ‘many an hundred thousand here and there’ (144) who bring their complaints and supplications to Venus. This article, then, attempts to make sense of Lydgate's refashioning of Chaucer's temple as an almost excessively detailed and teeming environment.

A brief detour through the extant stained glass of Lydgate's era will help illustrate my reading of the aesthetic programmes of these texts. Great Malvern Priory in Worcestershire, England holds the largest complete collection of fifteenth-century stained glass on display in a parish church. But visitors eager to experience this remarkable reserve may soon be disappointed when they discover that, in fact, much of the glass has been subject to slipshod reconstructive techniques. Although the glass survived the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, by the nineteenth century the windows were in need of major repairs due to environmental damage, graffiti, and the general effects of time. Consequently, gaps in larger panels were filled with medieval glass from smaller windows, and a generally haphazard reconfiguration carried out by inexperienced glaziers has produced, in the present, something resembling a poorly executed jigsaw puzzle.

Yet the windows are still magnificent in their arrangement. It is not just the contents of the windows that convey meaning, but also the effect of light streaming through them, and the collective power of the ensemble. Like medieval drama, which does not depend on realism for its appeal but rather on the moral and ludic effects it has on its audience, medieval glass too found means of acting upon its beholders beyond conveying information or symbolic iconography.