John Lydgate: Troy Book - Selections

by Robert R. Edwards (Editor), John Lydgate (Author)

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To introduce John Lydgate's landmark poem the Troy Book to students and non-specialist readers, the editor has selected the essential passages from the poem and bridges any gaps with textual summaries. Also included are an introduction, gloss, notes, and a glossary. John Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem, an ambitious attempt at recounting the Trojan War in Middle English, in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince show more of Wales (later King Henry V), and completed it in 1420. The poem is an interesting study for those interested in medieval approaches to classical sources, as well as for its often contradictory and complicated take on contemporary chivalry. show less

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antiquary 3,543 reviews

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 summing up what a late medieval English reader would have known about Troy.

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