Roman De Troie Research Articles

Touch and Temporality in Selected Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and the Roman d’Eneas

Abstract This article considers the intimate connections between proximity, temporality and metanarrative in selected thirteenth- and fourteenth-century multi-text manuscripts of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1165) and the Roman d’Eneas (c. 1155), arguing that all display a desire for narratives of the past to construct collective meaning in the later medieval present. It uses the phrase romance historicity/ies to explore the compilatory metanarratives that these books construct, arguing that romance as a genre displays a multifaceted concept of history that combines linear chronology, thematic repetition and narratives of heroic individuals, which is demonstrated in varying degrees in these manuscripts. It highlights that although genre is indeed an important organising principle in such narratives, the relationship between romance and history is fluid even within this generic horizon of expectation.

Getting in Touch with Troy in Fifteenth-Century France: The First Prose Version of the Roman de Troie in the Manuscript F°26 of the Abbey of Maredsous

Abstract This paper considers how the codex as a medium, specifically via its illustration and layout, translates into material forms the literary and textual choices of the texts it transmits in order to make its version of the Troy story tangible, and thus intelligible for its medieval readers. It takes as an example the first prose version of the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, probably composed in the last quarter of the thirteenthcentury in Frankish Greece, and focuses more specifically on a late manuscript of Prose 1, recently rediscovered, the manuscript F°26 from the Abbey of Maredsous (Belgium), made almost two centuries later, c. 1450, in the Burgundian Netherlands. This paper argues that this codex, in its specific context of production and within its textual and visual traditions, allow its audience to come into contact with the long-lost city of Troy, and the narrative that evokes it.

Une gemme parmi les gemmes : sur un portrait d’Hélène dans la cinquième mise en prose du Roman de Troie

On trouve, dans la cinquième mise en prose du Roman de Troie, un bien curieux portrait d’Hélène : le texte s’attarde très longuement sur le riches cercel d’or a riches pierres precieuses que porte le personnage, et prend, en décrivant minutieusement les gemmes, des allures de lapidaire. Or ce détour sert pleinement la description de la Tyndaride : d’abord parce qu’il permet à l’auteur de rendre justice à la beauté de son personnage ; ensuite parce que les vertus magiques des gemmes font sortir Hélène de la passivité qui lui est traditionnellement dévolue.

Out of Time: Ekphrasis, Narration, and Temporal Experience in Twelfth-Century Romances of Antiquity

This article considers the affective and conceptual work demanded in sophisticated moments of ekphrasis that abound in twelfth-century Old French romances, with particular attention to Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (1180s) and to two of the trio of romans d'antiquité, composed in French at the court of Henry II in England: the Roman de Thebes (c. 1150) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (1165). Of concern is the description of mechanical artefacts or tents that are depicted with representations of temporal progression, in the light of Virgil, Aeneid 8, and Homer, Iliad 18, available to twelfth-century Latins via Baebius's abbreviated Latin epitome. Narrative time stops for these ekphrastic moments which describe the pictorial representation of time. Henri Bergson's concept of duration (durée) and Boethius's representation of human and divine time in Consolation of Philosophy, 4 are used to think through the productive tension between time as forward movement, as represented through narration, and time as juxtaposed stasis, by which events all happen simultaneously, as represented through pictorial representation. Beyond that, the cosmic implications of these temporal questions bring out the relationship between twelfth-century literary ekphrasis and the medieval reception of the cosmogony of Plato's Timaeus. Particular attention is paid to the marvellous tents of Adrastus in the Thebes and of Alexander the Great in the Alexandre; to the chariot of Amphiaraus in the Thebes with its depiction of Ovidian myth and Macrobian cosmos; and to the astonishing cosmogrammatical automaton in the Troie's Chamber of Beauties. Ekphrases of artefacts representing time and the world clearly resonated with medieval audiences; rather than being superfluous to the action, they appear as fundamental to the composition and performance of historical narrative in French romance.

‘Dat romen van troyen quam’

Jacob van Maerlant concludes his Historie van Troyen (HvT, ‘History of Troy’, ca. 1264) with an adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid. De Ceukelaire (1991, 1996) has demonstrated the importance of translatio imperii in understanding Maerlant’s decision to follow book II of the Aeneid for the fall of Troy rather than the trusted Roman de Troie (ca. 1165) by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. In this paper, I further explore translatio imperii in Maerlant’s adaptation through a comparative close-reading with Aeneid books IV and XII (HvT vs. 36.826-37.065 and vs. 40.035-40.795). I find that in HvT the transfer of empire is driven by a conception of love which pushes Aeneas away from Dido in book IV and pulls him towards Lavinia in book XII. A dynamic of amour and chevalerie notably coincides with the fulfilment of Aeneas’ translatio imperii. HvT follows the development of chivalric romance and confirms the historical importance of the Trojan matter in Maerlant’s time, thus strengthening the place of the Low Countries in these European traditions.

Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie by Maud Burnett McInerney

Reviewed by: Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie by Maud Burnett McInerney Sylvia Federico maud burnett mcinerney, Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie. Gallica Vol. 47. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. xii, 228. isbn: 978–1–84384–615–4. $99. The central argument of this study is that Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s translation of the Troy story ‘from Late Latin into Old French, from Late Antiquity to the twelfth-century Renaissance, and from prose into verse also translates history into romance, reconfigures narrative time, and causes the appearance of unexpected textual objects’ (p. 2). Acknowledging that her subject is very well-traveled ground, McInerney claims a narrower path of interest for the present book: not the ‘external, political effects’ of the medieval Troy story but ‘its internal, narrative effects’ with special emphasis on how ‘what I call Trojan time’ . . . ‘shapes the temporality and spaciality of its own telling and that of the new genre, the romance, that it helps create’ (p. 2). Following this statement of intent, the Introduction reviews medieval translation theory and the curiosities of temporality it permitted and disallowed, with supporting reference to Gérard Genette, Paul Ricouer, and Jorge Luis Borges. Chapter One reviews the historical contexts of Benoît’s poem and summarizes the author’s claims about his identity, purpose, and source; the evidence for the fraudulence of ‘Dares’ and ‘Dictys’ as eye-witnesses to the Trojan War is reiterated. The main argument in this section is that Benoît fills the ‘gaps’ left by his prose sources with ‘the themes and techniques that animate the Roman de Troie: heroism, courtly love, and a passion for ekphrasis’ (p. 46). Chapter Two summarizes the central conceits and contexts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum, including its linking of Troy to Britain, its specious claims to veracity, and its author’s political relationships with his dedicatees. Geoffrey’s notoriously inventive and elaborate prophecies are compared to the ‘brief and somewhat dismissive’ (p. 80) approach to the material in the Dares text. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Matilda Bruckner’s assertion regarding Benoît’s embedded technique with regard to prophecies. In Chapters Three and Four, McInerney treats ‘heterosexual erotics’ (with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of ‘romance time,’ p. 89, n. 3 and passim) and ‘queer time’ in the Dinshawian sense (p. 123, n. 2 and passim), respectively, to show how Benoît expands on the topics of sexuality as presented by other versions of the Troy story. Ultimately, McInerney claims, the Roman de Troie ‘is a romance in which the heterosexual system of courtly love . . . fails’ (p. 154). The fifth and final chapter turns to Benoît’s use of ekphrasis ‘to turn epic and history into romance’ (p. 190). A short appendix reviews the manuscript history of the poem through reliance on Marc-René Jung. Few readers would be surprised by any of the points raised in McInerney’s study. Its themes and its arguments are readily familiar, drawn as they are from some of the criticism (of the poem itself and of the medieval Troy story) published largely between 1985 and 2000, with further sampling from the early twenty first century. Students who are unfamiliar with the Roman de Troie and its traditions will benefit from this book: it handily summarizes the content of the story and offers an extremely selective and [End Page 81] digested version of its existing critical analysis. Seasoned readers of Benoît and experts on the matter of antiquity in the Middle Ages may enjoy the stroll down memory lane, renewing with fondness our reflections on this poet’s treatment of ‘Troy time.’ Sylvia Federico Bates College Copyright © 2022 Arthuriana

Le Roman de Troie en prose: prose 5. Édition critique par Anne Rochebouet

Résultat d’une thèse de doctorat, cette première édition critique complète de la cinquième mise en prose du Roman de Troie est accompagnée par un apparat critique minutieux et bien organisé. La matière troyenne en prose, dérivée du roman de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, comprend cinq adaptations composées à partir de la seconde moitié du treizième siècle. Par rapport aux autres versions, Prose 5 se fait remarquer par son contenu mais aussi par sa féconde diffusion dans le monde méditerranéen, jusqu’au seizième siècle. Composée en Italie vers 1330–40, elle combine Prose 1 et 3, auxquelles s’ajoutent l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César et les Héroïdes. La tradition manuscrite est soigneusement présentée dans l’Introduction qui a le mérite d’esquisser une image globale de tous les témoins, tout en établissant des couples de manuscrits apparentés. Cette étude s’ajoute aux travaux partiels de François Avril, pour les cycles iconographiques, et de Luca Barbieri et Marc-René Jung, et reprend les conclusions d’une recherche plus ample dédiée aux hypotextes du roman, que Rochebouet est en train de publier. Le plus ancien témoin sur un total de dix-sept existants, Londres, British Library, MS Royal 20 D I, a servi de base pour l’établissement du texte, sans qu’il soit l’ancêtre commun dont descend l’ensemble de la leçon manuscrite. L’analyse linguistique soulève quelques problèmes liés à la langue et au caractère supposé italienisant du texte, tout en soulignant l’intérêt de la tradition manuscrite pour l’observation du passage de l’ancien au moyen français. L’hypothèse d’un scribe italianophone est rejetée en faveur de celle de la production du manuscrit dans le milieu francophone de la cour angevine de Naples. L’appartenance du manuscrit de base au foyer napolitain fait l’objet d’une soigneuse étude visant à montrer les particularités du français utilisé à la cour de Naples, où il est, à la fois, une langue véhiculaire et prestigieuse, liée à une production écrite tout aussi prestigieuse. La particularité linguistique du plus ancien manuscrit de Prose 5 est également le résultat de facteurs internes, liés à la genèse du texte et à la pratique de la compilation qui a comme effet l’hétérogénéité de la langue. C’est une langue conservatrice qui manifeste plutôt l’influence du français d’Outremer que des influences locales. L’apparat critique est organisé sur trois étages et s’avère un outil précieux pour le lecteur. Le premier étage contient les variantes rejetées, tandis que le deuxième offre une place privilégiée aux variantes à trouver dans les manuscrits de contrôle, visant à offrir une image complète de la tradition textuelle. Au troisième sont signalés les hypotextes, permettant au lecteur de situer chaque fragment dans la matière troyenne. Le texte est suivi par une consistante section de notes critiques, tout aussi riches que le reste de l’apparat critique, et par un glossaire très utile. Les notes dédiées aux références géographiques et aux realia sont particulièrement pertinentes, car elles offrent au lecteur l’accès aux contours spatiaux du roman et de dégager les références au contexte politique contemporain.

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad by Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle

Reviewed by: Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad by Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle Andrew Taylor Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. By Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad emerged from a large collaborative research project that initially set out to explore the varieties of medieval French in manuscripts produced outside of France and their transmission along “two main axes: a northern route that stretches from England across the Low Countries to Burgundy and the Rhineland; a southern route across the Alps to Northern Italy and out into the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, to the Middle East” (http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk). So far the project has compiled data for the bulk of the manuscripts of Guiron le courtois, the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the Roman de Troie, and the Tristan en prose, and is working on the Lancelot en prose and the Roman d’Alexandre. This volume shows where the project might eventually take us, sketching out a new literary history that supplants the most familiar texts (the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and the Tristan of Thomas) with histories and the later prose romances. Shifting focus from Paris to the Low Countries, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean, it treats manuscripts as participants in complex, shifting, and contested networks. The book follows what has become a familiar trajectory—insisting that Old French “belongs to no one” (26), rejecting nationalist histories of the development of standardized French—but it goes further. Moving away from the recent emphasis on French’s relation to English, the authors challenge the model of westward translatio studii (a master narrative for both medieval and modern France), showing instead that texts emanated from or circled back to eastern cultural centers. The metaphor that structures the database—that of two axes—gives way, in the book, to the metaphor of the network, which the authors explore, in ever subtler ways, from one chapter to the next. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad is an extraordinarily stimulating and ambitious book—not so much a comprehensive literary history as an exploration of how such a history might be written. The volume draws on a wealth of theoretical models, most of them mentioned too briefly to permit full critical assessment, but Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory is central. Gilbert, Gaunt, and Burgwinkle approach the manuscript as an actant, “an entity which induces mediation [End Page 343] or translation, therefore not simply an ‘actor’ or ‘agent’” (201–2)—in other words, quoting Latour, as “mediators [that] render the movement of social visible to the reader’” (202). Similarly, the French language, always varying, localized but with global associations and ambitions, is seen as “an actant, a means and a message, a double agent” (242). A fuller discussion of Latour’s terms and the questions they raise would have been helpful, but the overall direction is clear. The authors focus on manuscripts not as points of origin but as objects in transition that acquire new meanings as they move from one cultural situation to another. They emphasize the multiple paths along which the manuscripts moved; the routes of trade, crusade, and pilgrimage; and the complexities of shifting political situations. Yet, following Latour, they also stress the role of “the aleatory, contingent, and unpredictable” in these movements and the ways in which the movements often “take priority over the immediate concerns or intentions of their makers or owners” (197, 202). The book highlights the diversity of medieval French, which it analyzes with philological precision, as well as the political and cultural work performed by these various kinds of French in specific locations at specific moments. Places matter a great deal in this approach, individual human agents less. Each of the book’s six chapters offers a number of micro-studies to illustrate these networks. Chapter 1 explores two texts emanating from what might once have been considered the periphery of the medieval francophone world and written in what might once have been considered impure French. The first, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in what is sometimes almost franglais; the...

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

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.

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

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 (Thèbes, Troie, Énéas, Alexandre), specifically 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. This version, known as Prose 5, forming one part of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, circulated at least until the sixteenth century. The base manuscript used for this edition is ms. London, BL, Royal 20 D.I., the Histoire ancienne, copied in Naples at the Angevin court, sometime between 1335‐1340 with illustrations by Cristoforo Orimina. Prose 5 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.

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

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.

The Romance of Thebes (Roman de Thèbes) by Joan M. Ferrante Robert W. Hanning

 Reviews cognitive activity leads directly to relevant selection. It is not, aer all, rational inferential processes alone that determine emergent structure as understood by blending theory. Nor is metaphor simply a matter of broadening and narrowing. Because relevance theory is historically grounded in reaction to the conduit metaphor of communication and constrained by its reliance on conscious conceptualizations , it needs to embrace more openly the theories of third-generation cognitive linguistics that draw more generally on recent research in the neurosciences , psychology, phenomenology, semiotics, and cognitive metaphor. at said, these reservations should not distract from the important contribution this volume makes to the understanding of relevance theory and its relation to literary interpretation. It shows explicitly what relevance theory shares with other cognitive approaches and how it differs. In respecting the power of literary language as ostensive performance, it invites rather than imposes interpretative strategies that inform the best of literary criticism. M I  C   A M H. F e Romance of ebes (Roman de èbes). Trans. by J M. F and R W. H. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. e Roman de èbes first appeared between  and  and remained popular throughout the next two centuries. It claims to be a translation of Statius’s ebaid but frequently deviates from its source material to create a decidedly medieval milieu. With this in mind, it is particularly welcome that this publication contains not just a new translation of the text, but also a critical introduction to the work’s historical context. Joan M. Ferrante and Robert W. Hanning provide an outline of the poem’s place within the twelh-century literary scene, a comparison between ebaid and èbes, and discussions of the concepts of courtoisie and representations of feudal issues. e analysis of the work’s characters is particularly well done, and special attention is paid to the female characters who are so central yet have frequently been overlooked. e introduction also lists èbes’s extant manuscripts, overviews the modern editions, and provides specificities of the particular manuscript upon which the translation is based: London, British Library, Add. . is late fourteenth-century manuscript was commissioned for Henry Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, colloquially known as the ‘Fighting Bishop’. A description of Henry, his career, and the conjectures as to his attraction to èbes adds some interesting colour and brings the text to life as a work that really did play an influential role in medieval lives. e list of manuscripts containing èbes is a helpful starting point, but unfortunately the description of their contents is incomplete: for example, Paris, BnF, fr.  is described as containing èbes ‘followed by Roman de Troie, Athis et Prophilias, and Roman d’Alexandre’ (p. ), but actually this manuscript contains over twenty additional texts to which no reference is made. Nevertheless, there is sufficient information for most readers, and those wishing to explore further are provided with a list of suggested further reading. e translation MLR, .,   itself strikes a good balance between faithfulness to the text and a pleasing modern readability. It is a shame that there is still no English translation of èbes that includes the original text in a facing-page arrangement, as, for example, there is with the modern French translations. However, the fact that Ferrante and Hanning have maintained the verse structure of the original text, and that this text was edited in a widely available edition (Roman de èbes, ed. by Francine Mora-Lebrun (Paris: Livre de Poche, )), means that readers wishing to make comparisons will find it relatively easy to cross-reference. Overall, this translation is a welcome addition to the field, and will be particularly valued by students and non-specialists looking for an introduction to èbes’s characters and stories. H-U  B S H La Correspondance d’Émilie Du Châtelet. Ed. by U K and A B.  vols. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. .  pp. (vol. );  pp. (vol. ). €. ISBN –––– (set). is new critical edition of Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence is a scholarly compendium of the highest value. Replacing the carefully edited, but sparsely annotated and partly outdated Besterman edition (Voltaire...

The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte- Maure: A Translation. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess, Douglas Kelly. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2017. Gallica, 41. 486 pp.

In his Roman de Brut (1155), the Norman Robert Wace of Caen recounts the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy to the end of legendary British history, while adapting freely the History of the Kings of Britain (1136) by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace’s Brut inaugurated a new genre, at least in part, commonly known as the “romances of antiquity” (romans d'antiquité). The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d’Énéas, one of the three such romances dealing with themes from antiquity. These creations initiated the subjects, plots and structures of the genre, which subsequently flowered under authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît’s version of necessity deals with war and its causes, how it was fought and what its ultimate consequences were for the combatants. How to explain its success? The author chose the standard and successful poetic form of the era—octosyllabic rhyming couplets; he was fond of extended descriptions; he could easily recount the intensity of personal struggles; and, above all he was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of love, a passion that affects several prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilus and his affection for Briseida). All these elements combined to contour this romance in which events from the High Middle Ages were presented as a likeness of the poet’s own feudal and courtly spheres. This long-awaited new translation, the first into English, is accompanied by an extensive introduction and six-page outline of the work; two appendices (on common words, and a list of known Troie manuscripts); nearly twenty pages of bibliography; plus exhaustive indices of personal and geographical names and notes. As the two senior scholars assert (p. 3), By translating Benoît’s entire poem we seek to contribute to a greater appreciation of its composition and subject-matter, and thus to make available to a modern audience what medieval readers and audiences knew and appreciated.

Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe ed. by Stephens, Walter and Earle A. Havens

Reviewed by: Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe ed. by Stephens, Walter and Earle A. Havens Claire Konieczny (bio) Stephens, Walter and Earle A. Havens, eds., assisted by Janet E. Gomez. Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450– 1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 312 pages. When thinking of the term "forgery," most people's minds turn to counterfeit documents—or works of art—that have been fashioned in an attempt to falsify their origins. While this traditional definition of forgery has a place in Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800, this collection of thirteen different essays complicates the idea of forgery. This book's essays show that forgery can not only be the act of making a document seem older than it really is, but that the idea of forgery can also encompass stories that were invented to promote certain ideas or fashion a history. Literary Forgery also highlights the imaginative and innovative aspects behind forgers' falsified ideas and stories and shows the impact that popular forgeries had on scholarship. Throughout the book, Literary Forgery emphasizes that forgeries are a literary genre that deserves to be studied in its own right. The first essay of Literary Forgery is written by Arthur Freemen, an avid collector of literary forgeries who bequeathed his collection to the Johns Hopkins University library; this collection, now known as the Bibliotheca Fictiva, serves as the inspiration for the essays contained in Literary Forgery. Freeman provides his reflections on the various terms associated with forgery. In addition, he grapples with where forgery begins and another genre—such as pure fiction or hoaxes—ends. The second essay of the collection is written by one of the book's editors, Earle Havens. This essay too provides the reader with intriguing reflections on the nebulous genre that is literary forgery, as well as a small overview of some of the forged works contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection. ________ The third essay of the collection, written by Frederic Clark, deals with the peculiar case of the Cosmographia. The Cosmographia was originally written in the Middle Ages by Aethicus Ister, but was published in print for the first time in 1575. Clark unwinds the long and complicated history of this text, its authorship, and the misattributions made in the Renaissance regarding this book. Clark deems the Cosmographia a case of "secondary pseudonymity—that is, a conflation or confusion between author and text indirectly occasioned by a primary or original act or forgery or falsification" because the print edition [End Page 826] of the Cosmographia was falsely attributed to Ister, and thus further confusion regarding the work ensued (77). The subsequent contribution deals with Guido delle Colonne's late thirteenth-century forged Historia destructionis Troiae. The author of the essay, E.R. Truitt, delves into the possible motivations of the forger. Truitt claims that Guido's odd additions to his history of Troy were an effort "to establish his own credibility as a historiographer," as well as to distance himself from another popular history of the Trojan Wars that was produced in the mid-twelfth century, Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (101). Next, James K. Coleman explores the case of a forgery that was not, in fact, written with the intent to deceive its audience, Laudivio Zacchia's fictitious correspondences of Sultan Mehmed II. Coleman contends that Zacchia's letters would have been clearly recognized "as a playful fiction and an elegant rhetorical exercise"—that is, an imitation of classical writing—by erudite readers. Less learned readers, however, mistook the letters as a true correspondence; thus, Zacchia's work was misconstrued as a forgery. The next four essays of Literary Forgery deal with one of the most (in)famous and popular forgers of the fifteenth century, Annius of Viterbo. Shana D. O'Connell writes about Annius' Antiquities, a creative forgery that effectively turned an Etruscan god into the biblical figure of Noah, and then continued on to claim that Noah himself had founded Annius' hometown of Viterbo, Italy. O'Connell exposes how Annius used both legitimate and forged sources to produce this tale. Anthony Grafton turns his attention to Annius' claim to know both...

The Romance of Thebes (Roman de Thèbes), trans. by Joan M. Ferrante and Robert W. Hanning. The French of England Translation Series (FRETS), 11. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018, ix, 365.

Much of high medieval culture was deeply influenced by the reception of classical literature, as best represented by the genre of the romans antiques, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d’Enéas, and the Roman de Troie. These were based, in turn, on the Thebaid of Statius (92 C.E.), Vergil’s Aeneid (after 19 B.C.E.), and the story of Troy as retold by Dares Phrygias and Dictys Cretensis (in Greek, first century C.E., lost today; in Latin, fourth century C.E. [Dictys] and sixth century C.E. respectively [Dares]). Two of the most respected medieval French scholars, Joan M. Ferrante and Robert W. Hanning, now provide new access to the Roman de Thèbe through their English translation, which they have based on the personal copy owned by Henry Despenser (1370–1406), Bishop of Norwich, well known especially for his ruthless suppression of the Peasant Revolt in 1381. This manuscript is today housed in the British Library, London, under Add. 34114, fol. 164a-226d, and it was critically edited by Francine Mora-Lebrun with a facing page modern French translation in 1995. Ms. A (Paris, BnF, fr. 375) was recently edited by Luca di Sabatino (2016), which could not be consulted here for obvious reasons. Ms. C (Paris, BnF, fr. 784) was edited by Guy Reynaud de Lage in 1966, 1968, then re-edited along with a facing-page modern French translation by Aimé Petit in 2008).

‘I Will Lead You to the River’: Women, Water, and Warfare in the Roman de Thèbes, Roman de Troie, and Early Chronicles of the First Crusade

<p class="p1">This article analyses the connection between women, water, and warfare in early chronicles of the First Crusade and two contemporaneous romances from the Old French Troy tradition. It considers the way women are shown providing water to men, using water for washing and cleaning services, and how they inhabit watery spaces. It contrasts the way in which women are overwhelmingly associated with water, while men seem to be associated with land and foodstuffs. It explores the idea that watery spaces are essentially feminised and duties that involve water are almost exclusively the domain of women. Could this feminisation have occurred because water, as well as being essential, could also be dangerous and threatening, mirroring a misogynistic trope that women were also dangerous and threatening? Perhaps the gendering of water in these 12th-century texts can be seen as participating in the larger debate over gender and women that was going on throughout the Middle Ages.

Emotions, History and Presence in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie

Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie is notable for its long descriptions of buildings and objects and for its focus on the emotions of characters. Drawing on historiographical work by Eelco Runia and Frank Ankersmit, amongst others, this article argues that the Roman de Troie represents a mode of history privileging a material and affective relationship to the past via engagement of the senses. Rather than representing the past as having a particular meaning for the present, the Troie transcends the difference between literature and history, encouraging sensory openness to history whereby the audience might be moved by the past and drawn into shared emotional vulnerability with the protagonists. The Troie makes the past present, conjuring it into being to allow for a sublime, traumatic experience of the past.

The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure by Glyn S. Burgess and Douglas Kelly

Reviewed by: The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure by Glyn S. Burgess and Douglas Kelly Cristina Politano Glyn S. Burgess and Douglas Kelly, The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2017) viii + 475 pp. The goal of this study is to offer an updated translation and recontextualization of one of the most widely-circulated romances of twelfth-century France, Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, a medieval retelling of the Trojan War. Loosely assimilated with the "Matter of Rome," a subgenre of the romans antiques that appropriates the literature of antiquity to a medieval framework, Sainte-Maure's vernacular adaptation of Latin sources on the Trojan War prevails as a subject of literary study, due not only to its distinctive merits but, also, to the sizable influence that it had on late Medieval and Renaissance texts across western Europe; Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida all borrow plots, themes, and structure directly from Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie. With this in mind, Burgess and Kelly's new translation is certain to prove a useful and appropriate text for medieval, Renaissance, and early modern scholars across disciplines. Given the importance of the Roman de Troie in its context, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that Glyn Burgess and Douglas Kelly should be the first to attempt a project of this nature. Robert Kay Gordon's Story of Troilus (Toronto: Medieval Academy of America, 1978 [1934]) compiled all the major medieval versions of Troilus and Criseyde and included a rare English translation of Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie. This sole English version of the twelfth-century Trojan war story, first published in 1934, was incomplete and in need of an update. Given the eminence of each scholar's background in medieval studies, the scope of their critical work, and the nature of the previous [End Page 229] texts that they had offered for translation, both Burgess and Kelly emerge as the most suitable scholars for the task. Douglas Kelly's vast output spans courtly literature and romance in medieval France, while some of Burgess' more recent contributions include a collaboration on the first English translation of Wace's Roman de Rou (St. Helier 2002), as well as his hagiographical works (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Each scholar brings a set of veteran eyes to the project, along with a panoramic view of the literature of the French Middle Ages. Before delving into the translated material, Burgess and Kelly supply an introduction and note on the translation, as well as an outline of the Roman. Their translated text is based on Léopold Constan's edition of the Roman de Troie. The primary text contains a Prologue, an Overview of the Plot, then proceeds to Part One (Causes and Effects), Part Two (The Trojan War), and Part Three (Settling Scores and Surviving), totaling nearly four hundred pages and over thirty thousand lines of translated text. The romance is followed by two appendices, a "Note on Some Common Words in the Roman de Troie," "Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie," an extensive bibliography, and indices of both personal and geographical names. These contain no known omissions, no small feat considering the lengthy and circuitous nature of the plot. It is the introduction and appendices that the advanced reader will deem the edition's most compelling contribution. The appendix on the common words assumes no prior knowledge of Old French, and yet it still contains edifying interventions for the advanced scholar. The appendix on manuscripts provides valuable information for those readers pursuing independent study in the archives. As a result, this volume contributes to the growing body of academic discourse on the romans antiques of the French Middle Ages, particularly as these texts dialogue with issues of Old French morphology, philology, and manuscript studies. Notwithstanding its more sophisticated interventions, this volume is well-suited to the undergraduate student. The translation balances fidelity to the Old French text with readability, thereby availing it to a wide Anglophone audience. The introduction, appendices, and extensive bibliography are...

Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period ed. by Jon Whitman

Reviewed by: Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period ed. by Jon Whitman Andrew James Johnston jon whitman, ed., Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 317. isbn: 978–1–107–04278–0. $55.76. Romance and History assembles a collection of essays on the relations between romance—both medieval and early modern—and history. The chapters are arranged according to subject matter and chronological order, with the 'Matter of Rome' followed by the 'Matter of Britain,' succeeded by the 'Matter of France and Italy,' and finally by sixteenth-century developments, thereby suggesting a vibrant cross-pollination between these different fields as European romance develops forms of sophisticated self-referentiality and becomes increasingly concerned with its own status vis-à-vis literary theory. In his thoughtful introduction, Jon Whitman takes his cue from Erich Auerbach's indictment of romance as lacking historical consciousness and argues in favor of a comprehensive reappraisal of romance's involvement with history. Christopher Baswell (chapter two) begins the collection proper with a discussion of how medieval romances dealing with themes from antiquity—the Roman d'Énéas, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman de Troie, the Roman d'Alexandre, and the Roman de Toute Chevalerie—seek to contain history within and through complex forms of material artifacts such as gates, walls, and elaborate tombs. The third chapter by Catherine Croizy-Naquet compares two thirteenth-century historical prose narratives, the Faits des Romains and the Roman de Troie en prose, with respect to their strategies of rhetorically and poetically conceptualizing history. While the Faits heavily borrows devices from romance, the Roman reduces the romance quality of its subject matter, seeking to minimize the literariness of the narrative. Next, Robert W. Hanning studies the importance of the young men in medieval romance, and in the fifth chapter, Adrian Stevens traces specifically Angevin resonances in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. Friedrich Wolfzettel's contribution then offers an interesting hypothesis on the fourteenth-century romance of Perceforest. Situated in pre-Arthurian Britain, Perceforest self-consciously turns its back on the grail motif and its ideological consequences for the 'Matter of Britain,' establishing instead a notion of history that combines an almost proto-humanist enlightenment with a foreshadowing of the advent of Christianity. In the chapter that follows, Edward Donald Kennedy scrutinizes ethical and ideological ambivalence in the Prose Brut, Hardyng's Chronicle, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Chapter eight sees Helen Cooper tease out the sophistication of Malory's response to England's political landscape during the Wars of the Roses. By analytically exploring the legal and ethical dilemmas and contradictions of his fictional Arthurian society, Cooper [End Page 82] argues, Malory constructs something akin to a political tragedy of nation-building. In chapter nine, Jean-Pierre Martin discusses the political aims of twelfth-century France's great aristocratic families as reflected in the elaborate genealogies presented in the 'Matter of France' texts, and Riccardo Buscagli's contribution betrays a similar thrust as it shows how the figure of Ruggiero is invented to buttress the Este family's claim to power. The eleventh chapter contains Marco Praloran's investigation into the development of entrelacement techniques in early modern European romance and how this impinges not only on the intelligibility of plot structures but also on the construction of temporalities. Chapter twelve, by Daniel Javitch, is interested in the ways in which Boiardo, Ariosto, and, especially, Tasso poetically handle and simultaneously theorize the marvellous in the service of claiming historical dignity for their romances. David Quint then enters into a similar discussion as he alerts us to the Gerusalemme's paradoxical juxtaposition of romance material and historical topicality, as embodied, for instance, in the complexities surrounding the depiction of Armida's chariot. Gordon Teskey examines the Faerie Queene's tensions between allegory and history, and, finally, in the single article that shows an interest in issues of gender and of cultural hybridity, Marina S. Brownlee investigates late medieval and early modern examples of Spanish romance—Pedro del Corral's...