John Lydgate

This is fairly full selections from John Lydgate's Middle English translation and expansion of Guido delle Colonne's Latin Historia Destructionis Troiae based on Benoit de Saint Maure's French Roman de Troie based in turn on the post-Homeric Troy legends of "Dares and Dictys" which purported to be eyewitness accounts of the war and covered it much more fully than the surviving Homeric poems did. Considered as literature, like most of Lydgate, it is only middling, but it is very valuable as show more summing up what a late medieval English reader would have known about Troy. show less

Lydgate's version of the classical Thebes story --the "seven against Thebes," Greek heroes who attempt to take Thebes from King Eteocles son of Oedipus on behalf of his brother Polyneices, and fail., based not on Statius or the Greeks but on French popular retellings. He presents it as an addition to Chaucer' s Canterbury Tales, the first tales of the return journey (which Chaucer did not cover.)

Personally I greatly enjoy some of these, notably the complain of the uplandishmen against their wives.

Mehercule! 19 of us have this??