John Lydgates (1 results)

Double sided leaf (28.5cm by 19cm), Ca 44 lines of script front and verso. Held in grey mount Size 38cm x 25.5cm In very good condition. Mount a little rubbed on edges, Leaf has some faint tanning to edges. John Lydgate's Fall of Princes is a version of Giovanni Boccaccio's Latin prose De casibus vivorum et feminarum illustrium, in English verse, via the intermediary French translation by Laurent de Premierfait, De cas des nobles hommes et femmes (c. 1409). Lydgate was a poet and the prior of Hatfield Regis. He wrote the Fall of Princes between 1431 and 1439 as a commission for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Boccaccio's original poem, written between 1355 and 1360 with modifications up to 1375, is a treatise in nine books on the caprice of Fortuna (Fortune). The author recounts tragic events in the lives of notable men and women from biblical, classical, and medieval history, from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the capture of King John of France by the English at Poitiers in 1356. Through the stories, De casibus provided moral lessons for readers, demonstrating both models of virtue and examples of vice to avoid. In his Fall of Princes, Lydgate did not simply translate Boccaccio's De casibus. Influenced by Premierfait's French translation of the text, as well as his own studies, Lydgate added stories from other authors including Ovid, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Gower. Focusing on the results of evil-doing in particular, the Fall of Princes became a kind of manual of advice for rulers on how to regulate their own lives and moral behaviour. Lydgate's poem proved to be tremendously popular; a remarkable number of copies of the text were made in the second half of the fifteenth century. 38 manuscript versions and nine fragments are currently known, as well as some extracts included in other manuscripts.