262 REPORTS ON INVESTIGATIONS AND PROJECTS. 



LITERATURE. 



Bergen, Henry, Brooklyn, New York. Grant No. 793, allotted January 19, 

 1912. Completion of the preparation for publication of the text of 

 Lydgate's Fall of Princes. $1,800 



Dr. Bergen has been engaged in collecting bibliographical data concerning 

 the manuscripts and printed editions of Lydgate's Fall of Princes, and such 

 facts of biography and literary history in regard to Giovanni Boccaccio and 

 his Latin prose De casibus virorum illustrium, and Laurent de Premierfait 

 and his two French versions of Boccaccio's work, as are necessary to an 

 understanding of Lydgate's position as English translator and editor of 

 Laurent's second version; also in examining and collating the manuscripts 

 of Lydgate's Fall of Princes, in order to discover which is best adapted as 

 a basis for the present edition, and in describing the four printed editions 

 of the Fall of Princes and a book issued early in the sixteenth century by 

 Wynkyn de Worde, called the Proverbs of John Lydgate, containing extracts 

 from the Fall of Princes. 



Of the work thus outlined, he has practically finished the collection of 

 bibliographical data in regard to the manuscripts and printed editions of the 

 Fall of Princes, and has made progress in the study of the Latin De casibus 

 and its author, as well as of Laurent de Premierfait and his second French 

 version. Although a special study of Lydgate's sources would extend far 

 beyond the scope of the present undertaking, it is nevertheless a matter of 

 considerable interest to point out some of the more important differences in 

 the attitude of these three mediaeval authors and scholars to the world about 

 them and its problems. 



The Fall of Princes, written between the years 1432 and 1440 by John 

 Lydgate, is an adaptation in English decasyllabic verse, arranged in seven 

 and eight line stanzas, of a French paraphrase, done in 1409 by Laurent de 

 Premierfait, of Giovanni Boccaccio's prose Latin De casibus virorum illus- 

 trium. The latter was one of the most popular works of the fifteenth and 

 sixteenth centuries. Translated three times into French, as well as into 

 English, German, Italian, and Spanish, it circulated in hundreds of manu- 

 script copies, some of which are among the most magnificent that have come 

 down to us from the fifteenth century, and passed through nineteen different 

 printed editions, the last of which was issued in 1579. The avowed intention 

 of the author was to exert a moral, humanizing influence on the rulers, civil 

 and ecclesiastical, of his own and future times, by holding up to them, as a 

 mirror of their own very probable fate, the terrifying examples of the many 

 distinguished men and women of history ("beginning at Adam and ending 

 with King John, taken prisoner in France by Prince Edward"), who came to 

 a violent and often miserable end because of their tyranny, vices, cruelty, or 

 uncontrolled ambition. It is obvious that, as a patriotic citizen of the Flor- 



