Abstract
John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1431–38) is both ambiguous and articulate about the eventful matters it chronicles. Recounting scores of verse tragedies—from the loss of Eden through to fairly recent events in European history—Lydgate’s Fall depends for its contents and effects on so many spectacular reversals of fortune. Lydgate’s immediate source for the work is Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas de nobles hommes et femmes (1409), a French prose redaction of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–60), yet from the standpoint of the fiction itself all the historical narratives contained in the work originally come down to medieval writers as gifts of Fortune. The sixth book of Lydgate’s Fall represents the scene of the initial donation. Fortune comes as an apparition—in an episode clearly evocative of Lady Philosophy’s visitation at the beginning of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy—to bestow on the de casibus author (“Bochas”) the very substance of the work, or at least part of the work, that is the Fall of Princes.3 As we will see, in this particular book the poet becomes a recipient of over a dozen histories drawn from Fortune’s store of tragic occurrences, her “secre bosum … ful of stories” (6.309). Lydgate looks on these gifts with considerab le suspicion, but he is expressly indebted to them when it comes to his stated aim.
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