Historia Destructionis Troiae Research Articles

The Hand that Touched Troy: Using Maniculae in Latin and French Manuscripts (Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Guido delle Colonne’s Historia and their Respective Prose Versions)

Abstract In Auch, BM, 10, more than 120 maniculae, or manicules, touch the text of the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido delle Colonne with their short or disproportionately long fingers. These maniculae are accompanied by brackets, notae, various remarks. They testify to an active reading of the work, which brushes against the writing as closely as possible, signalling and selecting passages, sometimes simply pointing out, sometimes recopying, summarizing, or commenting. This practice, which was by no means specific to the Trojan material, is far more apparent in manuscripts of the Latin work compared to those of its French source (Benoît de Sainte-Maure) and in the French prose versions that stem directly from it. By examining manuscripts of both the Latin and French traditions, and while also taking into account the methodological biases that this approach implies, this article interprets the presence of reading marks (maniculae, underlining, notes) in Trojan texts. I retrace various types of reading, which include character-focused, historical, moral or rhetorical modes of reading. I demonstrate that specific readerly profiles emerge, and more specifically, that such marks of reading turn out to be topical teaching tools or otherwise present a more subjective interaction with the textual matter. In short, I examine how these hands touching the words might inform our understanding of the reception of Troy during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Aproximación a un estudio estilístico de la fraseología representada en la Crónica Troyana (Juan de Burgos, 1490)

This article aims to contribute to the knowledge of Medieval Hispanic Phraseology by means of the stylistic analysis of the phraseological units, which are represented in the Crónica troyana (Juan de Burgos, 1490). To achieve this aim, this study is based on the methodological program proposed by Echenique Elizondo (2003), in order to tackle the historical and stylistic analysis of these units. From the selection of two passages referring to amor and to militia in the context of the Matter of Troy, the combinations contained in the Crónica troyana will be analyzed in contrast to the rest of peninsular versions derived from the Historia destructionis Troiae (c. 1287). This is intended to advance the knowledge of the phraseology represented in the narrative tradition of the Matter of Troy in the Hispanic domain.

Notes about the degree of castilianization of the Crónica troyana promoted by Juan Fernández de Heredia in the contrastive study of its phraseology

Among the set of texts that form the great Juan Fernandez de Heredia’s literary corpus, the specialized critics have established the principle that the Cronica troyana presents a high degree of castilianization in relation to other Heredian texts (Geijerstam 1989). Two explanations are offered to justify this strong presence of Castilian forms: On the one hand, the possible intervention of a bilingual translator is underlined, who would have left marks of his own idiolect in the text. On the other hand, some of the pre-existing Castilian versions of the Matter of Troy could have conditioned the final writing and forged a linguistic model closer to the Castilian language in the Cronica troyana. The purpose of this article is to deepen this second hypothesis through the historical study of the phraseology represented in this heredian work in contrast to the rest of the versions of the Matter of Troy derived from the Historia destructionis Troiae.

Episodis de matèria troiana en el manuscrit espagnol 13 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

This article focuses on the episodes related to the matter of Troy included in the manuscript Espagnol 13 of the Bibliotheque nationale de France (Paris) that contains, among other texts, a fifteenth century Catalan translation of Histoire ancienne jusqu’a Cesar, the great universal chronicle written in the early thirteenth century and attributed to Wauchier de Denain. Some considerations about the main features of the underlying model of this translation are singled out, and the most relevant features of the text are also analysed. Unlike the other Catalan translation of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’a Cesar that has come down to us (Ms. 352, in Biblioteca de Catalunya), this version does not offer a full translation of the Trojan section of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’a Cesar, but of just a few passages, those that seemed to be more interesting for the author/compiler. Thus, some hypotheses are offered -the knowledge of the Historia destructionis Troiae, Guido delle Colonne’s latin version, or maybe of the other Catalan version- in order to explain why this Catalan translation is missing the core of the story, precisely the most narrative section with all the details and circumstances of the Trojan War. The study is completed with the edition in an appendix of those episodes related to the matter of Troy, so far unpublished, of this Catalan version of the great French universal chronicle.

Anti-Virgilianism in Late Medieval English Troy Narratives

Late medieval English traditions of Troy material are each anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist. The three principal Troy traditions in late medieval British writing are as follows: (i) the elegiac tradition of Ovid's Heroides (pre-2 BCE); (ii) the tragic tradition, derived from Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae (1287); and (iii) the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1136). The anti-Virgilian, anti-imperialist thesis applies to each tradition. In the elegiac tradition anti-Virgilianism and indifference to the imperialist enterprise are all but explicit. In the second, tragic tradition, Trojan narratives are not anti-militarist, but they are fundamentally anti-imperialist: imperialist claims derived from Virgil, and an aggressive chivalric ethos, are, for authors in this tradition, extremely dangerous. The third late medieval British Troy tradition, the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, seems, on the face of it, both imperialist and para-Virgilian. Even here, however, Virgilian imperialism turns to catastrophe; the energies that might lead to imperial ambition in fact provoke lethal internal fractures within the imperial polity. This tradition is initially drawn to the Virgilian project, but finally repelled by it.

El romance de la reina Elena en el siglo XVI

Abstract: The Spanish ballad of Helen of Troy has been transmitted in five chapbooks of the 16th century. An analysis shows that all of them derive from an already faulty common ascendant, presumably a lost chapbook. A critical edition of the poem is presented, and a study follows. This ballad uses imagery first introduced in Spanish vernacular literature by devotional poetry, namely Fray Inigo de Mendoza’s Coplas “De vita Christi”, the date of which is pinpointed to 1474, and Diego de San Pedro’s La Passion trobada, also composed in the 1470s. A study of the sources for this ballad shows that it is mainly based either on the Coronica troyana (a Castilian translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae ascribed here to Pero Lopez de Ayala’s initiative, fragmentarily preserved) or on the Cronica troyana first printed in 1490 (a text combining the 14th-century Sumas de historia troyana attributed to Leomarte and the above-mentioned Coronica troyana). Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, the most likely explanation is that there was a first fashion of Trojan ballads ca. 1491 inspired by the incunabular Cronica troyana. The ballad onthe Abduction of Helen, as well as the contemporary one on the Judgment of Paris, were composed at that time, becoming quickly popular and entering Sephardic oral tradition.Keywords: ballads, matter of Troy, chapbooks, textual criticism.

Icelandic Dares, Swedish Guido. The Reception of the Trojan Matter in the North

The present article aims at a presentation of the Old East and West Norse texts related to the Matter of Troy. As such, it introduces the most important East and West Norse litterary genres, allowing the possibility of placing Old Icelandic Trojumanna and Old Swedish Historia Trojana in its context (there is no Old Norwegian Trojan translation, and the only Danish one is postmedieval). The Old Icelandic tradition is twofold, and its textual sources vary. As usual with translations of historiographical texts into Old Icelandic, both traditions show an adaptation to the so-called Icelandic family saga style, briefly presented here. The Old Swedish text from the beginning of the 16th century is based on Guido de Columnis' Historia destructionis Troiae and also underwent considerable changes in the process of translation, for which it may be possible to identify the author responsible. The changes concern both additions and, above all, omissions, expecially of passages showing the source author's personal interests and his misogyny. The scholarly reception of the two very differing Trojan traditions presented can be judged typical of the difference in interest between West and East Norse literature.

«Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda»: Appunti sugli argonauti di Dante

This article seeks to address the question of why Dante likens Paradise to the quest of the Argonauts, even though Jason is the hero who deceives Hypsipyle and Medea with false, underhanded rhetoric. After analysing the role played by the figure of Jason in Fiore and in Inferno, the article goes on to consider the relationship between Dante’s Argonauts and the version that emerged in the Trojan cycle of the late Antiquities, in which Jason’s expedition was viewed as an antecedent to the Trojan War. The influence of this tradition on Dante seems to be supported by a passage from the fifth epistle, in which Dante considers the Argonauts’ quest as representing the historical premise for universal monarchy. Some textual clues seem to support the theory that Dante’s vision of the Argonauts was taken at least to some extent from Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae. One possible solution to the question at hand is then proposed, based on the view that Dante’s Paradise represented a means through which the author could promote an ideal Christian monarchy, just as the quest of the Argonauts had favoured the advent of Augustus’ universal Empire.

«Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda»: appunti sugli Argonauti di Dante

This article seeks to address the question of why Dante likens Paradise to the quest of the Argonauts, even though Jason is the hero who deceives Hypsipyle and Medea with false, underhanded rhetoric. After analysing the role played by the figure of Jason in Fiore and in Inferno, the article goes on to consider the relationship between Dante’s Argonauts and the version that emerged in the Trojan cycle of the late Antiquities, in which Jason’s expedition was viewed as an antecedent to the Trojan War. The influence of this tradition on Dante seems to be supported by a passage from the fifth epistle, in which Dante considers the Argonauts’ quest as representing the historical premise for universal monarchy. Some textual clues seem to support the theory that Dante’s vision of the Argonauts was taken at least to some extent from Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae. One possible solution to the question at hand is then proposed, based on the view that Dante’s Paradise represented a means through which the author could promote an ideal Christian monarchy, just as the quest of the Argonauts had favoured the advent of Augustus’ universal Empire.

El rastre de laHistoria destructionis Troiaede Guido delle Colonne en la versió catalana de laHistoire ancienne jusqu’à Césardel ms. 352 de la Biblioteca de Catalunya

The paper analyses the influence of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (HT) on one of the two extant Catalonian translations of Histoire ancienne jusqu’a Cesar (HAC), as it appears in manuscript 352 of Biblioteca de Catalunya. The analysis focuses mainly on the episodes related to the adventures of Jason, the Argonaut, in the Quest for the Golden Fleece, narrated in fragments inserted in that Catalonian translation of HAC, which are directly derived from delle Colonne’s work. The analysis makes it possible to ascertain that the Catalonian translator/compiler of this version of HAC used the Latin text of HT rather than Jaume Conesa’s Catalonian translation despite the fact that he combined it with some details from the Catalonian translation of Seneca’s Medea, a work also included in this Catalonian version of the compendium history. The narrative, based on the Latin text of HT, which is an innovation with regard to HAC, was therefore structured in a curious way by including elements taken...

La Crónica Troyana de Juan Fernández de Heredia como amalgama de géneros

The Cronica Troyana by Juan Fernandez de Heredia is an Aragonese adaptation of the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido de la Columna, from which it takes the speeches and all the narrative stoff necessary to understand them completely. Otherwise the Aragonese text approaches a great variety of literary genres and anticipates some of the caracteristics of the incoming Humanism.

Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance by Alex Mueller (review)

Reviewed by: Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance by Alex Mueller Kevin J. Harty Mueller, Alex, Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2013; cloth; pp. 253; R.R.P. US$69.95; ISBN 9780814212219. This original, well-written, and well-argued study is the latest to challenge the monolithic view – popular when I was in graduate studies in the 1970s – of the so-called ‘Middle English Alliterative Revival’. Alex Mueller first grounds his study, which is as much political as it is literary, in a thoughtful and original rereading of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, which he argues is the foundational text for an alternate reading of the import of Troy and its fall to medieval England’s image of itself. While for Chaucer and his courtly contemporaries, the fall of Troy established the foundation for their own civilisation – England was the New Troy – the alliterative writers expressed marked scepticism about such received wisdom, and resisted any linear view of history that saw their country’s direct descent from fallen Troy and its glorious successor, imperial Rome, as something in which to glory. If anything, the alliterative writers, taking their cue from Guido, offered a provincial critique of the wisdom behind such courtly claims to an imperial legacy for England. Medieval England knew Guido’s text through the alliterative Destruction of Troy, which would, in turn, prove the source for the ways in which the authors of other alliterative poems would read the destruction of Troy; that reading finds not a glorious genealogy upon which to expand but a moral lesson warning against usurpation, siege, and broken vows. Mueller applies this general reconsideration of the glory that was not Troy to specific poems that reflect the generic possibilities embraced by English alliterative romance: John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy, The Siege of Jerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Clerk, positioning himself as an authority intent upon telling the whole story of the fall of Troy, challenges his readers, initially predisposed as they are to revel in the alleged glories of their Trojan ancestry, to question the true value of such a chequered legacy. The Siege of Jerusalem advances the Trojan narrative to its incorporation as the founding myth of the Roman Empire. [End Page 340] Building upon the accepted critique of the poem for its anti-Semitism, Mueller also argues that the notable examples of anti-Semitism within the poem show the poet’s disgust with the cruelty of Rome, and elicit sympathy for the plight of the Jews under the harsh rule of their imperial conquerors. The alliterative Morte Arthure establishes King Arthur as the continuation of the so-called glory that was Rome. But the portrait that the poet offers of Arthur is complex. Juxtaposing signs of empire with scenes of cruelty, the poet sees in Arthur’s rise further evidence of the inseparability of imperial authority and the death of the innocent. Mueller concludes his examination of alliterative texts by focusing on the Trojan frame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The central Arthurian tale of the testing of Camelot, Mueller argues, is ultimately disconnected from that frame and obscures the images of death, destruction, and conquest that the frame summons up. In sum, Mueller argues that the provincial alliterative romances offer a markedly different and totally pessimistic view of England’s Trojan legacy. That view stands in sharp contrast to, say, that of Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, which is indifferent to Trojan history because it is more concerned with courtly love than with military history. Just as the alliterative poets asked their readers to re-engage with their concept of the role Troy played in their history, so Mueller asks us similarly to re-engage with our expected assumptions about the poems that he discusses. In doing so, Mueller has given us an important study that should go a long way toward encouraging further studies and reassessments of these always challenging (in several senses of the word) literary texts. Kevin J. Harty La Salle University Copyright © 2015 Kevin J. Harty

Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages (review)

Reviewed by: Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages R. F. Yeager (bio) Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages. By Wolfram R. Keller. Heidelberg, DE: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008. 659 pp. Wolfram R. Keller's tracing of the Troy story is a massive undertaking; but then, how could a study that covers such a vast deal of chronological and geographical ground as this one be anything else? Casting his view backward into antiquity, toward Homer and especially Ovid and Virgil, and reaching forward into the early modern as far as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Keller crisscrosses seas and continents in the most ambitious examination of this material published to date. His book thus supersedes what has been, until now, the comprehensive standard, C. David Benson's The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne's "Historia destructionis Troiae" in Medieval England(1980). One has every expectation that Keller's fine effort will sustain its premier position for many years to come. As he makes clear in his title, Keller's concern is the Troy story itself and the several ways it was milked and adapted to fit the demands of [End Page 250]different authors and readerships in separate, ever-shifting centuries and circumstances. The challenge of all such undertakings is to curb the allure of centrifugal sprawl. Selves and Nationsis Keller's dissertation, still bearing many marks of a rigorous and—clearly—enlightened supervision, a genesis usually inauspicious in its promise but uniquely advantageous here. Keller's format is rigid and semi-mechanical. There is a general introduction to the work entire, three large sections, each with a separate introduction that both summarizes what has gone before and outlines the argument to come, and a conclusion, which draws together the section's major claims and indicates the direction of the section to follow. These two decisions, first to approach his subject in this way, and second to carry over this structure from dissertation to published volume, prove happy ones. Each one of the three sections ("Masking Identities: Selves and Nations in the Middle Ages," "Masking Troy: Making Personal and Collective Identities in Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae," and "Deconstructing Troy: Ovid, Virgil, and Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood") is replete with original, insightful argument and supportive Wissenschaft, sufficiently so, indeed, that in this new age of the publisher-preferred short monograph of plus-or-minus two hundred pages, each could easily have been rendered a volume unto itself. Not a book to dip a toe in, then, and in general, all should be grateful to Universitätsverlag Winter for leaving Keller thus unrestrained. In his first section, Keller sets out the theoretical paradigm he follows throughout. This is arguably the weakest of the chapters, in which he struggles most to cast off the as-yet-to-be-digested residue of dissertation. A great deal of energy and ingenuity is expended in the first hundred pages to theorize a sociocultural scaffolding from sources as disparate as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul de Man, Ciarán Benson, Hans Robert Jauss, Martin Heidegger, Paul Eakin, Marshall McLuhan, Slavoj Žižek, Rom Harré, Lee Patterson, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Lanham—a graduate student's earnest nightmare, in short—in which he delivers terminology and critical distinctions between, for example, persona and "the prosopagraphical self" ("autobiographical self, self narrative, and masks … fuse into one concept: the prosopagraphical self" [46], the clear result of reading too much de Man) or "transparency" and "opacity" (Ciarán Benson applied to Trojans and Greeks, respectively). The latter pair, a duality far more useful in Keller's argument, for the most part turn out synonymous with "emotionally driven" and "rationally driven," with obvious implications for the behavior of "heroes" (e.g., Hector vs. Achilles, Circe vs. Ulysses, Troilus vs. Diomede, Criseyde vs. Pandarus), polities (Troy vs. Greece, autonomy vs. empire), and poetics (Ovidian vs. Virgilian, multivocal vs. monovocal). The straining required to [End Page 251]heave these novelties into the reader's line of sight and sustain them there is, nevertheless, all too evident in the first of Keller...

Linking Letters: Translating Ancient History into Medieval Romance

Abstract This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Medieval Section. In his prologue to the late fourteenth‐century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers. Professing to tell the true story of Britain's ancient ancestors, he invokes the fiction of translatio imperii, in which the power of empire passes from Troy to Rome to Britain. According to Clerk, his translation of Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae provides vernacular readers access to historical truth that had not previously been available to them. Clerk's assumption of Guido's history separates his romance from the historiographic tradition of the vastly influential Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia regum Britannie celebrates Britain's Trojan ancestry and promises future glory to the Britons. Rather than venerate Troy as a font of imperial power, Guido condemns the martial policy of the Trojans that causes their defeat, characterizing Troy as a tainted origin of Western civilization. By comparing Clerk's text with another translation of Guido's Historia, John Lydgate's Troy Book, I argue that Clerk's translational method, which he calls a ‘linking of letters’, reflects a commitment to connecting a destructive past with an English present.

Lorenzo Tornabuoni's History of Jason and Medea series. Chivalry and classicism in 1480s Florence

This article examines the set of spalliera panels representing the Greek legend of Jason and Medea, which were commissioned by the Florentine patrician Giovanni Tornabuoni to commemorate his marriage to Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1486. Unlike Medea, Giovanna degli Albizzi was famed for her chaste virtues, and modern art historians have devised theories of increasing complexity and ingenuity to explain such a choice of subject. However, detailed iconographic analysis suggests that these panels depicting an ancient story are not based on ancient sources. Instead their origins can be found in several late medieval chivalric texts, Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae and Raoul Lefèvre's Histoire de Jason (the latter was written for the Burgundian court, celebrating the origins of the Order of the Golden Fleece). Thus Lorenzo Tornabuoni's Jason and Medea spalliera series elides the two most prestigious cultural value systems of late fifteenth‐century Florence: Greek and Roman antiquity and chivalry. The paintings still vividly celebrate the complex interaction and mingling of classicism and chivalry that was such a salient, but still underestimated, characteristic of Florentine culture in the Vasarian ‘Golden Age’ of the 1470s and 1480s.

“Una nota sobre el manuscrito 8566 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid”

The 8566 manuscript of the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional (olim X-152) contains both a short imago mundi, whose authorship is not clear, and a Latin copy of the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido delle Colonne. Both texts were copied separatedly and put together afterwards. The version of the Historia destructrionis Troiae presents so many transmission and binding problems that the text becomes completely unreadable.

The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century EnglandJames SimpsonJames Simpson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 73, Number 2Apr., 1998 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2887158 Views: 17Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1998 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jonathan J. Price, Margalit Finkelberg, Yuval Shahar Rome: An Empire of Many Nations, 140 (Aug 2021).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108785563Margitta Rouse (Un)Veiling the Veil: Trojan Temporalities, Chaucerian Ekphrasis and Literary Innovation in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, (Sep 2018): 59–88.https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737008969.59Katherine Heavey Medieval Medea, (Jan 2015): 22–50.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466242_2Alfred Thomas Dangerous Amazons: Sexual and Textual Rivalry in “The Knight’s Tale” and The Dalimil Chronicle, (Jan 2015): 111–137.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542601_5E. Buckley 'Live false Aeneas!' Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage and the limits of translation, Classical Receptions Journal 3, no.22 (Sep 2011): 129–147.https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clr003Elizabeth Allen Framing Narrative in Chaucer and Lydgate, (Jan 2005): 83–109.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04479-2_4

The Medieval Medea by Ruth Morse

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the vernacular. The battle over truth-claims between the paternal and maternal tongue are ultimately conservative, since they simply reverse, and do not question, the structures of institutional dominion of Latin literacy. Thus historicized, the question of the "female patron of ver­ nacularity" has paradox to offer. The contributors, especially Madeline H. Caviness, John Carmi Parsons, and Ralph Hanna III, attempt to grapple with the contradic­ tions of a too easy and unhistoricized assumption of agency for the "fe­ male patron," but they stop short of articulating a crucial theoretical question posed by the volume: How does patronage function as a set of textual and material relations long inflected by gender? Readers who wish to follow through with this question will find suggestive parallels in Helen Solterer's study of the "female master" in her book The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Christine dePizan, a "female mas­ ter" and a "female patron," can instruct us about the risks to contem­ porary medieval scholars of leaving unaddressed the contradictions of agency embedded in the duality of the "female patron." Christine in­ sisted on calling herself the son (le fils) of her father. In so doing she marks the homosociality of genealogy and patronage while at the same time resisting it through disclosure. Such tactics raise questions for the readers of this volume who read it in the "corporate" academy of the late 1990s, in which patronage rules as government and other funding for feminist and queer scholarship and pedagogy becomes increasingly scarce and contested. KATHLEEN BIDDICK University of Notre Dame RuTH MORSE. The Medieval Medea. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996. Pp. xvi, 267. $72.00. Ruth Morse is a meticulous scholar, and in The Medieval Medea she has produced a study worthy of her thoroughness. Hers is a sweeping sub­ ject: as she establishes elaborately, the story of Jason and the Argonauts is the earliest secular quest narrative recorded in Western literature. Over it looms the inescapable presence of Medea, constantly (as Morse 300 REVIEWS has it) infusing the tale with a ubiquitous dark vitality even on those few occasions when Jason is center stage alone. In format the book has an almost old-fashioned feel, scarcely uncom­ fortable but not much encountered these days when, like as not, ideol­ ogy is pressed upon us more frequently than scholarship. Morse unfolds her study chronologically, piecing together the beginnings of the Jason legend from what we find remaining in Pindar, Euripides, and Apollonius of Rhodes among the Greeks, and then tracing its develop­ ment at the hands of Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca. In this process of "hand­ ing down," Medea became not only a single character but a topos as well: the eponym for the woman possessed by passion and driven by it to ter­ rifying excesses of every kind. Also along the way a great deal of what passed for history was transferred, and Morse guides us here through Dares and Dictys and Benoit de Sainte-Maure (the Argonauts and their Colchian cargo reach modernity via Troy) to Guido delle Colonne (whose Historia Destructionis Troiae "was the direct source of so many medieval interpretations" [p. 92}) to Christine de Pizan in the Mutacion de Fortune. What Morse is intent upon showing is how "what we might categorize as mythographical material [becomes} the highest-prestige medieval historiography" (p. 102). Nor is she interested in doing so without com­ menting sharply here, as in her earlier study Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality and Representation (1991), on the tendency of contemporary historians to misread the past according to their own conventions. What Morse offers instead (indeed it might be the core con­ cept of the book) is a Heisenbergian caveat about the dangers of believ­ ing what you can see to measure, and an appropriate antidote: to follow the bloom back to the root, to focus especially on the context. Since a great deal of the context Morse must examine is provided by Ovid, she devotes two chapters (out of five) to a careful scrutiny of the Roman poet and his subsequent Christian adaptors...

Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: Women and the Theban Subtext of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: Women and the Theban Subtext of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Catherine Sanok Vniversity ofCalifornia, Los Angeles hen Pandarus first v1s1ts Criseyde to inform her of Troilus's love in book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde, he interrupts his niece and her companions as they listen to a maiden read "the romaunce of Thebes," a text that turns out to be Statius's Thebaid. Throughout Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer borrows widely from the Latin epic, em­ ploying Statian invocations and incorporating into his poem elaborate references to the Theban story. In a text replete with allusions to the Thebaid, however, the most explicit and extended of them are associated with women. Criseyde reads Statius's poem in book 2, and Cassandre recounts its argument in her interpretation of Troilus's dream of Criseyde's betrayal in book 5. Indeed, the narrative of the love of Troilus and Criseyde is bracketed by the Thebaid: Criseyde's reading marks the beginning of the affair, and Cassandre's explanation of Troilus's dream marks its end. These two extended references and most of the incidental allusions to the Thebaid are original to Chaucer's version of the story. In fact, the Theban subtext may well be the most significant addition Chaucer makes to Boccaccio's Filostrato.1 Although the groundwork for an analy­ sis of Chaucer's use of the Latin epic was laid in 1911 with Boyd Ashby Wise's study, The Influence ofStatius upon Chaucer, subsequent attempts to refine his work were until recently largely confined to tracking down 1 The Filostrato is Chaucer's primary source. He also used Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie and Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae. Chaucer's engage­ ment with Boethius is, of course, also highly important. Winthrop Wetherbee suggests the Divine Comedy as another significant source ofinfluence; Chaucerand the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 41 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER rather than interpreting Chaucer's Statian references.2 A renewed interest in the Theban material in Chaucer's poem has prompted a reconsideration of Statius's influence, especially in the important work of David Anderson and Winthrop Wetherbee,3 but has perhaps also served to obscure the marked relationship between the Latin epic and women. Anderson does link Criseyde's reading of the Theban story to Cassandre's summary ofit, but he finds the significance of this juxta­ position in a comparison ofPandarus and Cassandre, not Criseyde and Cassandre. Wetherbee is interested in the issue ofTheban references in the poem, those derived from Dante and Ovid as well as from Statius, and his broader area of inquiry also obscures the particular conjunction of these two scenes. As the scenes of Criseyde's reading and Cassandre's interpretation suggest, the relationship between women and the Statian epic is highly textual,4 and a broad interest in allusions to Thebes-or what Lee Patterson calls "Thebanness"-rather than the Thebaid, tends to obscure it. But it is also the strangeness of Chaucer's use ofthe Thebaid that has obscured its striking association with women in Troilus and Criseyde. Statius's epic seems at first an extraordinary text to give to female char­ acters, especially to the heroine of a love story, even one as ambiguous as Criseyde. Epic is hardly a genre associated with women in modern critical canons,5 and Statius's poem, with its vividly gory account of the 2 Boyd Ashby Wise, The Influence ofStatius upon Chaucer (New York: Phaeton Press, 1911; rpt. 1967), especially pp. 4-36. 3 See David Anderson, "Theban History in Chaucer's Troilus," SAC 4 (1982): 10933 , and Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, esp. ch. 4, "Thebes and Troy: Statius and Dante's Statius." See alsoJohn Fyler's discussion in "Auctoritee and Allusion in Troilus and Criseyde," RPLit 7 (1984): 73-92. A. C. Spearing questions the assumptions that under­ write the interpretations ofFyler and Wetherbee in "Troilus and Criseyde: The Illusion ofAllusion," Exemplaria 2 (1990): 263-77. Paul Clogan discusses Criseyde's book and Cassandre's interpretation in relation to the Thebaid and the Roman de Thebes...

Studies in Troilus: Chaucer’s Text, Meter, and Diction by Stephen A. Barney

REVIEWS conspicuously polarizes the classical and Christian elements that Spenser mixes together, thus emphasizing their mutual antagonism and putting it to creative use. {P. 185} In her "Conclusion" (pp. 211-15), Astell relates her complex thesis about "heroic poetry" in the Middle Ages to several earlier attempts by critics to explain the essential features of epic and romance. It would be churlish to fault a book that includes so much that is innovative and worthwhile for not having said everything. Nevertheless, a few omissions are puzzling. Because Astell is arguing for the continuity of "epic truth" in the later Middle Ages, one would have expected her to consider the influence ofHomer and Virgil not only as they were allegori­ cally refined into Boethian and Joban substitutes but also as they survived in works that treat the Homeric and Virgilian subject matter, albeit trans­ mogrified. Do Job and Boethius help account for works like Dictys's Ephemeridos be/Ii Troiani and Dares's De excidio Troiae historia {both ofwhich are mentioned briefly in passing on p. 73, without the further interpretive comment that seems called for); and what about Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie and Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae, nei­ ther of which is mentioned at all? A major study of epic and romance that Astell does not mention is Morton W. Bloomfield's "Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance" (in his Essays and Explorations: Studies in Ideas, Language, and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 97-128). One would like to know how Astell would extend the complex thematic argument she has put forward in Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth to account for the very different structural features of epic and romance that Bloomfield identifies. Judging by the quality of the present book, Astell's answers to these questions would be of interest not only to all medievalists, including Chaucerians, but to anyone inter­ ested in literary theory or the history of ideas. LAWRENCE BESSERMAN Hebrew University STEPHEN A. BARNEY. Studies in Troilus: Chaucer's Text, Meter, andDiction. Medieval Texts and Studies, vol. 14. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 167. $28.00. Stephen Barney is like many other Middle English textual editors: frus­ trated that not all (or even most) of their editorial labors may ever be 163 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER included as part of the apparatus of an edited text. Unlike these textual editors, however, Barney chose to do something about his frustration. Hav­ ing previously edited and annotated Troilus and Criseyde for The Riverside Chaucer, Barney in the present work presents a fulle_r exposition of his editorial methodologies in the Riverside. What is presented in the book becomes fascinating reading for any scholar who has had to wrestle with an array of variant readings for a text with multiple manuscript attesta­ tions and who thus had to "discriminate" often between scribal variance and supposed archetypal authority, or authorial intention and aesthetic preference. In the introduction Barney persuasively rationalizes the need for Studies by emphasizing the "foundational" role of textual, linguistic, and prosodic scholarship in understanding a Middle English literary document: such scholarship is "the technical retrieval of a poet's art [that} imitates the production of that art" (p. 1). Barney supplements this assertion with list­ ings of the sixteen important manuscript authorities for the poem (the most important of these manuscripts being, in descending order, the Mor­ gan Library , the Corpus Christi College, the British Library: Harley 2280, and St. John's College); the three early printed editions of Caxton, Thynne, and Wynkyn de Worde; and eight important modern editions (most im­ portantly the editions of Root, Robinson, Donaldson, and Windeatt). Also included are briefdefinitions ofsuch editorial terms as "archetype," "exclu­ sive common ancestor," and "convergent variation," altogether a succinct·' overview of the Gregian model of textual criticism for the beginning editor. Following the introduction are six chapters that present at least three broad arguments. The first argument-in chapter 1 ("Two New Editions of Troilus"), chapter 2 ("Discrimination"), and chapter 4 ("Glosses")--is a cautious yet pointed critique of Windeatt's edition. In chapter l, Bar­ ney particularly criticizes Windeatt...