John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts by Nigel Mortimer (review)

REVIEWS templation and ethical action. Thus when readers are faced with the undecidability of the tale—marriage exemplum vs. spiritual exemplum —‘‘no explanation is totally persuasive, no decision sufficiently justified , no response good enough . . . so that responsibility will have about it an air of irresponsibility’’ (p. 135). The problem Mitchell delineates in the Clerk’s Tale might productively be extended to the rest of the book, to enrich that difficult problem of how one gets from text to action. Perhaps Mitchell’s answer, like that of Gregory the Great in his homilies, is that examples work on the mysterious energy of inspiration —an answer that might lend strength and complexity to his argument about the circumstantial nature of exemplary discourse. Gower is the governing presence in Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, even though Chaucer occupies more chapters. The book joins an ongoing critical exploration of contradiction in the Confessio: from systematic accounts in which particular tales resolve into moments of conversion (Olsson) or the conflict between reason and will brings about an integrated identity (Simpson), scholarship has moved toward an emphasis on Gower’s moral contingency (Bullón-Fernández, Watt, myself). Mitchell lays out a useful basis for this emphasis in philosophy and rhetoric , lends credibility to the medieval method of reducing stories to their moral nuggets, and makes a welcome contribution to the developing conversation about narrative and ethics in the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Allen University of California, Irvine Nigel Mortimer. John Lydgate’s ‘‘Fall of Princes’’: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vx, 360. $110.00. A recent spate of critical productivity has placed Lydgate at the forefront of Middle English literary criticism and history, a position he has not occupied for almost six centuries, since his days as ‘‘Laureate Lydgate ’’ (Derek Pearsall’s memorable label), when he wrote poetry for kings, princes, abbots, lords, and ladies. In part this flowering of interest reflects a recalibrated understanding of the relationship between medieval and Renaissance literary cultures, with Lydgate now recognized not PAGE 531 531 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:42 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER only as a crucial link between Chaucer and Shakespeare but also as an important influence in his own right on sixteenth-century poetry and drama. Nigel Mortimer’s reassessment of the Fall of Princes adroitly places Lydgate in both his medieval and early modern contexts; it is a study that will be inestimably valuable, not only for medievalists but also for those Renaissance literary critics who take seriously the influence and persistence of medieval traditions in the early modern period. After an introductory survey of the state of play in Lydgate studies and a summary of Lydgate’s career, Mortimer turns to the major source texts for the Fall of Princes, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes. In so doing, he sets in place a principle for reading the Fall to which he will adhere throughout the book: Lydgate’s text cannot be understood without a very precise knowledge of its sources, particularly Laurent’s Des Cas. We see this intertexual method begin to pay off in chapter 3, which addresses Lydgate’s position as a Lancastrian court poet and focuses on a varied assortment of texts, ranging from the Serpent of Division to Lydgate’s treatment of Lucretia to the role of Caesar more generally in the Fall of Princes. But it is in chapter 4 that Mortimer’s intertextual work and his concern for historical context come together and illuminate the Fall of Princes in an entirely new way. As he tells us, Lydgate was particularly concerned in the Fall to address the relationships between spiritual and secular authority, so much so that he altered his sources a good deal in order to emphasize the importance of Church hegemony over secular rule. Throughout the chapter, Mortimer builds a convincing case for this claim by painstakingly comparing Lydgate’s exemplars to his sources and showing minutely how those source texts were altered and reshaped in order to make the Benedictine case. Taken alone, these examples would be...