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Karen Smyth
University of East Anglia
Email: k dot smyth at uea dot ac dot uk
This paper will explore how imaginings of women in John Lydgate’s de Casibus text, The Fall of Princes, are affected by and influence the prolific textual fragmentation and dissemination of the narrative in the fifteenth century. De Casibus narratives (by authors such as Boccacio, Jeun de Meun, Laurent de Premierfait, Chaucer, Baldwin and Sackville) are encyclopedias of moralized tragedies, illustrating the crushing blows dealt by Lady Fortune to well known mythical, classical and Biblical figures, as a means to advise on wisdom and virtue. It is not, however, the moral sententiae of these historical biographies that are of interest to me. Rather, what I shall investigate are the multiple patternings and variations that reveal ideas about women’s role in cultural processes of revising and adapting the history of religious and secular rulers, as there is a high level of textual mobility. Lydgate’s Fall relates nearly five hundred examples of legendary figures, beginning with Adam and Eve and ending in the fourteenth century with King John of France. With the exception of a couple of recent studies, the centrality of women in this tradition has been largely neglected; yet in Lydgate’s text alone almost half of the heroic or tragic figures are female, they have often fallen from power and grace due to the caprice of Lady Fortune, or a female is the cause or victim of a hero’s downfall. This paper will focus on how to read women when the narrative is fragmented and reintegrated into other verse and manuscript contexts. The influence on such rewritings will be addressed by examining such issues as to whether adaptations, developments or departures in women’s centrality in the narrative can be attributed to different manuscript and narrative contexts, to scribes, to those owned by different communities, especially by female patrons; or if there are any differences or similarities due to geographical or ethnic provenance. My principal objective here is to reconsider medieval attitudes towards processes of cultural translation, that is, towards the processes of reinscribing and/ or reinventing the role of women for present and future communities.