Two Troy Books: The Political Classicism of Walsingham’s Ditis ditatus and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

Thomas walsingham, the benedictine monk best known for his chronicle accounts of late fourteenthand early fifteenth-century English political culture, composed a number of texts on classical poetry and prose that have gone almost entirely unnoticed by scholars. Between 1380 and 1394,1 while precentor and head of the scriptorium at St Albans, Walsingham wrote the Prohemia poetarum, which is an accessus ad auctores, or ‘‘introduction to the authors,’’ comprising some twenty-nine excerpts, with commentary, from classical and medieval writers: the Historia Alexandri magni principis, a life of Alexander the Great modeled in part on the popular Historia de praeliis romance; the Archana deorum, a complete summary of and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is often indebted to Alberic of London’s mythography; De bello civili, a short summary of Lucan’s Pharsalia; and Ditis ditatus, which is a prose narration, with much digressive commentary and