“De francés en castellano”: la tradición manuscrita de laCrónica troyana de Alfonso XI

Abstract

The fourteenth-century Castilian version of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie known as the Crónica troyana de Alfonso XI is part of a complex textual and codicological web that also includes a later Historia troyana carried out for Pedro I and the contemporaneous prosimetrum we usually call Historia troyana polimétrica. All of these works have as a common antecedent a lost Western Iberian rendition of the Roman de Troie, often presumed to date from the late thirteenth century. Drawing on the latest research efforts on the topic, this essay reviews the relationships between the different witnesses of this tradition, using them, on the one hand, to follow the networks of personal and political relationships that account for these works’ creation and circulation; on the other, as a starting point to reconsider the problem of the language and creation environments of both the Western Iberian Roman de Troie and the Crónica troyana de Alfonso XI. In this way, the article illuminates some features of the courtly cultural and political life of mid-fourteenth-century Castile, in which the Trojan narrative came to play a central role.