Anne Rochebouet, ed., Le Roman de Troie en prose, Prose 5. Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. 1038 pp.

Abstract

Abstract: Anne Rochebouet offers here a valuable edition of an important medieval French work, a prose version of one of the foundational romans d’antiquité, the story of Troy as it was contained in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The narrative poem Le Roman de Troie, as recounted by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the late twelfth century, inspired the prose version edited here (along with 4 other versions) in the following two centuries. The base manuscript used for this edition is ms. London, BL, Royal 20 D.I., the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, copied in Naples at the Angevin court, sometime between 1335‐1340 with illustrations by Cristoforo Orimina. This version, known as Prose 5, forming one part of the Histoire ancienne, circulated at least until the sixteenth century. It exists in seventeen manuscripts described by Rochebouet in her most thorough introduction. Her linguistic analysis of ms. Royal 20 D.I. addresses the evolution of medieval French into Middle French as used in an Angevin Italian region during the reign of Robert I.