Over twenty years ago, James Simpson observed that John Lydgate was a “thoroughly public” poet, one whose “corpus was riven by distinct, often exclusive, generic and discursive commitments.” This essay grows out of Simpson's insights about Lydgate's adaptable style and public orientation, although it considers a poem that is a far cry from the maximalist work for which Lydgate is best known today. This is the so-called Dietary, a ten-stanza lyric about the many benefits of honest dealing, personal hygiene, a healthy diet, and clean living. A poem that survives in at least fifty-six manuscripts, the notional topic of the Dietary is “the gouernans of man,” as rubrics to the text often put it, and many of its lines are indeed given over to the proper habits that a person ought to keep up if they wish to remain in sound physical health. For instance, we are told to wear a hat when it is cold (1), to keep away from the “eyre of pestelens” (42), to go to bed early (7), and to take it easy on the salt (69–70). At the same time, however, the Dietary also devotes about half of its space to the voicing of conventional moral sentiments – by making comments, for instance, about such things as the need to remain “content with suffisaunce” (14) or to shun “mowthes þat ben doubill” (25) – and this mixture of proverbial wisdom with wellness advice has prompted some debate about what Julie Orlemanski terms the “generic flexibility” of the poem. Some scholars have suggested that it is a courtesy text, or even a text designed to appeal to a new type of consumer, while others have contended that it is a work of medicine at heart.5 What both positions tend to have in common, however, is a tacit assumption that, as Derek Pearsall once put it, this is a poem for which “literary criticism” has “no part.”6 In each case, that is, the operating premise is that the Dietary must have been popular because it was useful for some instrumental end, and not because it appealed to the aesthetic or literary sensibilities of its readers.