John Lydgate

John Lydgate, Benedictine monk and prolific author of Middle English poetry, finished writing The Siege of Thebes in the early 1420s. An apocryphal Canterbury Tale, The Siege is Lydgate’s counterpart to Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and remains the only extant Middle English retelling of the struggle between Oedipus’s sons. Across its four parts, The Siege unfolds the aftermath of a paternal curse and the conflict between two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, over their father’s throne. As the follow-up to Lydgate’s Troy Book, The Siege adopts some of the moralizing practices of that earlier text, as well as interrogating issues of poetic authority. It is Lydgate’s most political poem and boasts a lasting influence on Caxton’s printed edition of The Historie of Jason. This edition, based on MS Arundel 119, presents readers with an accessible approach to The Siege of Thebes.

To introduce John Lydgate's landmark poem the Troy Book to students and non-specialist readers, the editor has selected the essential passages from the poem and bridges any gaps with textual summaries. Also included are an introduction, gloss, notes, and a glossary. John Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem, an ambitious attempt at recounting the Trojan War in Middle English, in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales (later King Henry V), and completed it in 1420. The poem is an interesting study for those interested in medieval approaches to classical sources, as well as for its often contradictory and complicated take on contemporary chivalry.

The Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, a romance that in its Boethian sensibility and treatment of love and friendship bears comparison to Chaucer's great works Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, is one of Lydgate's most accomplished works. In Guy of Warwick, Lydgate breaks with romance tradition, presenting the heroic English knight-pilgrim and his last great battle against the dread giant Colbrond from an historical point of view.