Joan M. Ferrante and Robert Hanning translate the medievalized French of Statius' Latin Thebaid from the fourteenth-century manuscript created for the battling condottiere Bishop of Norwich, Henry le Despenser, the anti-Lollard colleague to Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, responsible for the executions by hanging, drawing and quartering of John Litester, King of the Commons, in 1381 and the burning in chains of William Sawtre, Margery Kemp's curate, in 1401. The classist chivalric text is particularly interesting as Geoffrey Chaucer alludes to it as a parallel tale and mise en abyme in his Troilus and Criseyde while presenting its sequel in the Canterbury Tales' Knight's Tale, from Boccaccio's Teseida; and because its constant disparagement of peasants and craftspeople (p. 51, ll. 17-18; p. 137, l. 3530; p. 140, l. 3627; p. 153, l. 4158; p. 196, l. 5902; p. 199, ll.6048-6054) so devastatingly counters Julian of Norwich's concept of one's "even-Christian," that Gospel and Wycliffite sense of Christian democracy, the equality of all in God's image, that she shares with Chaucer's Parson and in Chaucer's Retraction. These stories, too, reflect on Richard II's reign, deposed by Albion's Conqueror, Henry IV, returned from exile. The manuscript's text and its patron also parallel modern events in its discussion concerning chivalric allegiance where the liege lord has himself violated his oath of office, in Eteocles' case to share the kingdom of Thebes in alternate years with his brother Polynices; and in Parliament's successful temporary impeachment in 1383 of the Bishop of Norwich for his failure in the Flanders Crusade to capture the town of Ypres, the Bishop obstinately denying all charges against himself.
The manuscript's text (British Library Add 34114, MS S) begins by paying homage to medievalized versions of Homer, Plato, Virgil and Cicero ("et danz homers e danz platons/ Et virgiles e cicheronis"), while omitting Statius, and announces it will not speak of tanners, peasants or shepherds but instead of Eteocles and Polynices and of their parentage by Oedipus in incest with Jocasta which will result in the destruction of their city of Thebes, their entire Kingdom, of others about them and finally of both themselves. Thus it presents in French the story that had been told by Sophocles in Greek and by Statius in Latin. Ferrante and Hanning are careful to note the omissions and additions in the French, originally composed in the twelfth century in the Angevin milieu of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, from the Silver Age Latin text by Statius, their noting also the anachronistic additions of Crusading places, persons and battles into the fabric of the epic romance, though the "mouvance" of the tale through differing cultures could be studied more deeply.
Eteocles and Tydeus, both in exile, arrive at the court of Adrastus in a great storm, fight, then reconcile and marry the daughters of the king. Tydeus next goes as ambassador to Eteocles for Polynices but is betrayed by the tyrant who has him ambushed, 'taken out', at the Sphinx's place. Tydeus, alone, then defeats the tyrant's men, one messenger left to tell the tale and berate Eteocles for his treachery, for which he is sentenced to death but who kills himself before that execution. Ferrante and Hannning note the parallel of the Bishop of Norwich's role to that of the medievalized priest prophet Amphiaraus in the text. This pagan archbishop prophesies the deaths of Capaneus, Polynices, Tydeus, Hypomedon, Parthenopeus, and many others, of the Seven Against Thebes. In the drought-stricken lands they find Hypsipyle and the child she tends, she guiding them to a spring, the abandoned child killed by a snake. In Latin Statius the babe is cremated in the Greek mode, in the French Romance he is placed in a sarcophagus in the Roman mode. Elaborate funeral games follow in Statius. While in the medieval French version we find the ecphrases of the king's tent (130-131, 157-159) and Amphiaraus' chariot (175-177), embroidered and chased with tales within tales. The romance collapses time and space, referring to Crusading battles against Muslims and Turks (p. 192, l. 5748, etc.), the bishop Theodamus has the pallium (p. 188, l. 5597), the king crosses himself and Ismene, at Atys' death becomes a nun, founding a monastery (223). I pass over the remainder of the plot, to come to its conclusion with the arrival of Duke Theseus from Minerva's Athens, the defeat of Creon, and the burial of the fratricidal carnage, of a Chaucerian and Shakespearian "mouvance" with the Knight's Tale and in Midsummer Night's Dream.
The crux of the poem is the treachery of King Eteocles who has foresworn his oath to his brother Polynices (162, 255-299), contradicting the principles of feudalism. An impeachment trial is held but Eteocles' lieges, though criticizing his barbarism in oath-breaking, remain loyal in theirs to him with the one exception of Dares, for the sake of his son captured by the Greeks. Often the text wildly exaggerates, but at times writes with astute geopolitics, as in pp. 304-305, where the Greeks lament they have no ships, while Thebes in its siege is being provisioned by sea. But Thebes in reality is in the middle of land. The "creative anachronism" of the French text is much like that in the Riccardian Library manuscript 1538, in which classical histories by Sallust and Lucan are illustrated with medieval knights in armor identified by their heraldry, enabled, with the invention of the stirrup, to fight on horseback (p. 213, l. 6631), as discussed by Lynn White Jr in Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1962. Greeks fought naked on foot, Romans in only half-armor, both with sword, helmet and shield, both also using horse-drawn chariots as we see in Statius' verses. Nevertheless reading the two versions, the Latin of Statius, the French of the Roman, side by side, one sees it is the identical story though medievalized, even that version in turn become anachronistic with the use of gunpowder in the Bishop of Norwich's day, as at Ypres.
Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, 1978, presented a stirring narrative at the center of which was the cardboard figure of Enguerrand VII de Coucy. The training of a knight, of the nobility in general, consisted in an early and traumatic separation from their family, as page, squire, finally knight, in another's household, their cultural education sacrificed for that of constant training in combat readiness in full armor resulting in a psychological "flatness of affect." The Etonian education of the upper classes is still in this mode, the Classics being a gentlemanly veneer seeped in Plato's myth and lie of the metals that they are gold and silver, while their underlings, the servants, helots and slaves, are taught to internalize themselves as being mere stupid iron in chains. The literate clergy lived in a different sphere, not needing to be of noble birth. William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History; Studies in Modes of Perception, 1966, notes the difficulties these opposing spheres, one of stance, the other of cause and effect, would have had in understanding each other. Of the two spheres, Knight and Priest, it is clear that the Bishop of Norwich and this manuscript emblazoned with his Despenser arms belong to the first, not the second, and certainly not to the third sphere, that of the Ploughman. The great pilgrim epics of the fourteenth century, Dante's Commedia (which used Statius and his episodes of Capaneus blaspheming against the gods,Inferno XIV.61-72, the duelling flame of Eteocles and Polynices for Ulysses, Inferno XXVI.52-57, and Menalipus devouring the head of Tydeus for Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggiero, Inferno XXXII.130-132,), Langland's Piers Plowman, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, are instead democratic, peaceable, inclusive comedies, in opposition to the martial epic, the courtly romance, which was literature only for the aristocracy, of the lacrimae rerum of tragedy.
The book gives on its cover the incipit of the manuscript with Bishop Henry le Despenser's arms (seen also on the Despenser Retable for St Luke's Chapel, Norwich Cathedral, commissioned at the time of the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt, a careful introduction, suggested further readings, and, following the translation of the work, samples from the text in the original French, and an alphabetic index of the proper names with a brief explanation of their characters.