In 1406, when twelve-year-old Princess Philippa set sail for Helsingør to marry the Scandinavian king, Eric VII, she departed from the Norfolk city of Lynn along with, as an anonymous chronicler reports, “Ser Richarde, þe Dukeʒ brothir of Yorke, and Ser Edmunde Courteneye, bishop of Norwiche, and mony oþer lordiʒ, kniʒtis and squyers, ladieʒ and gentilwymmen, as perteyneth to such a worthi Kingis douʒtir.”¹ Still more notables, including her father, Henry IV, and her brothers Henry, Thomas, and Humphrey, traveled as far as Lynn to see her off. Among the crowds who strained to catch a glimpse of the princess...

In 1358 William Flete was a scholar on the rise. Having obtained one of the Augustinian Friars’ coveted slots at Cambridge, he had attained his bachelor of divinity degree and was on the verge of becoming magister, the culmination of almost two decades of rigorous study.¹ His final disputation was to take place in October. That summer, however, the thirty-three-year-old Flete had an epiphany that caused him to withdraw from the university and a year later to leave England, resolved to sever all ties to the past and never return.

Flete settled in Tuscany, at the Augustinian monastery of Lecceto,...

Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (ca. 1412) opens with a dialogue that supposedly takes place between himself and a “poor olde hoor man” who accosts him on an early morning walk.¹ The Old Man tries everything to strike up a conversation—he cajoles, reasons, philosophizes, and promises sound advice—but Hoccleve rebuffs each overture and bids him go away and mind his own business. At last, however, the unwanted interlocutor finds a way to loosen Hoccleve’s tongue: he questions his orthodoxy. Hypothesizing that his moody companion may be succumbing to “swich thoght lurkynge thee withynne, / That huntith aftir thy...

Circa 1450, a certain gentlewoman requested that Capgrave translate for her “treuly oute of Latyn” the life of Saint Augustine of Hippo, “grete doctoure of þe cherch”¹ As Capgrave recalls the conversation in his prologue to the resulting Life, the “noble creature” desired a life of Augustine because she was born on his feast day and had determined that Capgrave, being of Augustine’s order, was just the man to write it. Though Capgrave never names his patron, evidently she made a great impression on him, for when he refers to this life of Augustine elsewhere in his oeuvre, it is...

“I heard the voice of the churches, and the ringing of bells, when the birth of our king was made known in London, for I was then studying there, in the fourth or fifth year after I was raised to the priesthood; and the rejoicing of the people has not yet faded from my memory.” Thus Capgrave remembers the jubilation that greeted the birth of Henry V’s son and heir in December, 1421.¹ The infant’s future must at the time have seemed brilliant indeed. His father’s astute management of domestic affairs, bolstered by stunning successes in the war against France...

It is easy to understand why Capgrave was nearly forgotten. He wrote almost exclusively on religious subjects, and what he wrote on those subjects was, by modern tastes, boringly orthodox. His prose style is unornamented, and he is not particularly adept at verse. Today, he is mostly known for a book he didn’t write—the Nova Legenda Angliae—while those he did write have been examined more as historiographical, linguistic, or codicological artifacts than as literature. Even the recent surge of interest in fifteenth-century writers has done little for Capgrave; Kempe, dramatists, and the self-proclaimed Chaucerians, such as Hoccleve, Bokenham,...