John Lydgate's Fall of Princes and the Politics of Translation

The paper analyses John Lydgate’s translation of Giovanni Boccaccio De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, better known as The Fall of Princes. The genesis of the work is analysed, especially as concerns the poet/translator’s relationship with his patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The Fall of Princes is seen as a work with many fathers: as a text in the mirror for princes tradition its main debt is with Boccaccio, but Lydgate himself acknowledges, in his Prologue, other medieval literary masters, such as Chaucer, Petrarch and the French translator of Boccaccio, Laurent de Premierfait, together with classical influences such as Cicero, Seneca, Ovid. For some of these writers Lydgate provides a list of their literary achievements, making his own work an invaluable source for scholars, a summa of late medieval learning. One the other hand, Duke Humphrey’s patronage becomes, particularly in the early stages of the work, palpable intervention and occasionally even interference with the poet, allowing us a glimpse of Humphrey’s own library and of the role it played in the shaping of the Fall. Beyond its admittedly controversial literary merit, Lydgate’s work is important as a sort of Lancastrian library, a chronicle of the intellectual life in early fifteenth-century England.