ABSTRACT
John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes represents the last medieval adaptation of the Theban legend. Written in 1422, midway through Lydgate’s literary career, the Siege has been viewed as a conservative work: it takes as its source a historical account of the Theban war derived from the very first vernacular Theban narrative, the OF Roman de Thèbes of 1155-60; it employs established medieval methods of didactic historiography, in particular the mirror for princes; and it appears to have absorbed little of the proto-humanistic tendencies manifest in its immediate predecessor in the Theban tradition, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, particularly in how it envisions classical antiquity.1
