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John Lydgate's Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in
Its literary and Political Contexts. By Nigel Mortimer. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 360. $110.
The upsurge of scholarly interest in fifteenth-century English literature
shows no signs of abating. The year 2001, for example, saw the publication
of two separate monographs devoted to thomas Hoccleve (ca. 13671426).
Less charmingly selfreferential and longer winded, Hoccleve's contemporary,
the benedictine monk John Lydgate (1371–1449), would have to wait
to match this scholarly attention, but in 2005 he has garnered his own
two monographs: along with the volume under review, Maura Nolan's John
Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture forcefully reminds us that,
while Hoccleve's poems may be more appealing to a postmodern sensibility,
Lydgate's massive oeuvre was decisively more important in its time.
Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Goshen College
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