Isopes Fabules

John Lydgate’s Isopes Fabules is a fifteenth-century Middle English adaptation of Aesop’s Fables. Written early in Lydgate’s career during his years at Oxford, Isopes Fabules extends the material from his closest sources, namely Gualterus Anglicus’s Latin Romulus and Marie de France’s collected fables. Using a process known in medieval grammar schools as amplificatio, Lydgate embellishes his fables by versifying them in rhyme royal and adding mythological, scriptural, and philosophical allusions. Two themes, according to Edward Wheatley, unify the seven fables: the Boethian concept of suffisaunce, a virtue that eschews materialism in favor of remaining content with the bare necessities of life; and the vice of tyranny, perhaps commenting obliquely on the reign of Richard II. These themes appear repeatedly in the morals that conclude each of the animal fables. Isopes Fabules synthesizes various literary traditions—continental and insular, scholarly and popular, pagan and Christian—to create the first fable collection in English.