As the story of the war between the sons of Oedipus and their cursed race, the Theban legend rivaled that of Troy in popularity and importance for medieval poets and audiences. Dominique Battles explores the vernacular Theban narratives of the Middle Ages, including the Old French Roman de Thebes (1154), Boccaccio's Teseida , Chaucer's Theban poems (Anelida and Arcite (1370s), the Knights Tale , and the Theban subtext of the Troilus (1380s)), and John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (1422). The Medieval Tradition of Thebes constitutes the first comprehensive study of the classical legend of Thebes in the Middle Ages. Far from representing a single consistent legend, the story of the civil war between Eteocles and Polynices took on a variety of forms and purposes, each of which presents its own historical paradigm. By tracing the relationship between these texts, Battles demonstrates how each succeeding adaptation of Thebes builds upon and challenges those before it.

As the first of the Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale has been the subject of a vast body of comment by scholars and lay readers. Monica McAlpine provides access to this material in the first of the Chaucer Bibliographies series to deal with a narrative portion of that author's best-known work.

The first comprehensive study of the classical legend of Thebes in the Middle Ages.

John Lydgate's The Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421-22, is the only Middle English poetic text that recounts the fratricidal struggle between Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices as they contend for the lordship of Thebes. The text reflects the problem of poetic authority and the political and ethical themes of Lydgate's poetic career in the 1420s, when he was writing as a Lancastrian propagandist and as unofficial royal poet.

The first epic poem written in Italian is the Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia) by Giovanni Boccaccio, the well-known author of the Decameron. Conceived and composed during the Florentine author's stay in Naples, it combines masterfully both epic and lyric themes in a genre that may be defined as an epic of love. Besides its intrinsic literary value, the poem reflects the author's youthful emotions and nostalgia for the happiest times of his life.

During the Middle Ages, the story of Cressida's infidelity to Troilus intrigued writers, and different versions of this tale continued to be retold and reworked through the Renaissance. This study focuses on the figure of Cressida in two fourteenth century works, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and devotes particular attention both to classical and medieval prototypes for Cressida and to each narrator's role in shaping her. The study's originality derives from its compelling demonstration of the tensions between a Cressida defined by literary history and convention and a Cressida recast through perceptually limited narrators. Offering Dido as a dynamic model for Cressida, this book provides an extensive treatment of Boccaccio's Dido.