Roman De Troie Research Articles

La matière troyenne en Italie et en italien le Roman de Troie, des traductions anonymes à Boccace

The Italian medieval texts linked to the matter of Troy, in their variety and diversity, depend on the same French material that goes back to the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure. However, the style and context of these works can be surprisingly different. This proves that the original material has gone through many filters, drawing tortuous and entangled paths. If Binduccio dello Scelto follows its source (Prose 2) extremely faithfully, the Istorietta troiana, which derives from another prose version of the Roman de Troie (Prose 3), treats its model with much more freedom. This text displays a brilliant and effective rhythm, as well as a lively language and an original narrative style, and tends to free itself from the French model. The young Boccaccio is particularly sensitive to the charm of the matter of Troy. In his Filostrato, he isolates for the first time the love story of Briseida, a personage invented by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. The starting point is the same, but this poem is an original reworking from the multiple suggestions offered by the author's vast readings. Boccaccio's personality allows him to develop this secondary episode, to deepen it on a psychological level and to enrich it with various cultural influences, from Ovide to the Dolce Stil Novo. The emphasis on elegiac and lyrical tones betrays the author's cultural background, testifying to his debt to the tradition of the Istorietta troiana and the Heroides of the ms. Gaddi 71.

Hector chef de guerre: une figure en évolution

The Trojan king Priam makes his son Hector commander-in-chief of the army to fight the Greeks who came to lay siege to Troy. In the Roman de Troie, written by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the twelfth century, Hector is an idealized leader and a model for the knights reading his text. Hector is fearless and his feat is exceptional. The third prose version of the Roman de Troie, written in the thirteenth century, introduces a slight change. His portrait as a leader changed. Indeed, Hector’s impetuosity is less glorified and even considered as a danger for the Trojan army.

Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Edited by Jon Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi+317.

<i>Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period</i>. Edited by Jon Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi+317.

La eclosión de la materia clásica en las letras peninsulares bajomedievales. Compilaciones troyanas no autónomas

The purpose of this article is to review, as much as possible in an updater way, peninsular medieval texts that incorporate, a greater or lesser extent, different motives of Trojan matter in their discursive line, from the first Latin manifestations (11th-13th) to the various vernacular works, especially literary character (as the Libro de Alexandre) and historiographic (as the Libro de las generaciones, the Estoria de Espana, the General Estoria and the Grant Cronica d’Espanya). Therefore, it is about the works that operate in this sense as compilation receptacles of different discursive materials, including that relating to the Trojan cycle, what involves the movement of these legends non-autonomously into the peninsular literature, while they were emerging various vernacular translations and reformulations proceeding from the great medieval European and classical works (as the works of Dictys and Dares, the Roman de Troie or theHistoria Destructionis Troiae).

Remembering the Trojan War: Violence Past, Present, and Future in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie

At the intersection of literature and history, three “antique romances” initiated a new genre in the mid-twelfth century by transposing into French the great stories of Greek and Latin epic: the fratricidal war of Oedipus's sons in the Roman de Thebes, the founding of Rome in the Eneas, and the Roman de Troie's Trojan War based on Dares and Dictys. Rejecting Homer's version for these “eyewitness” accounts, Benoit de Sainte-Maure translated the full history of the Trojan War from its beginning in the tale of Jason and the Argonauts to the annihilation of Troy and the victors’ unhappy homecomings. The myth of Trojan descent claimed by many European rulers, including the British and Normans, gives Benoit's translation more than entertainment value for his first public, the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Indeed, while repeatedly assuring his readers that this great estoire, story and history, will provide pleasurable enjoyment, Benoit also signals a more serious intent by invoking Sol...

Tears for Hector: Where Pathos Meets Piety in the Margins of the Roman de Troie

Depictions of tears and drops of blood are common elements of late medieval religious imagery, prompts for religious meditation connected to the growth of affective piety. In the margin of a copy of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, the fifteenth-century annotator of BnF, fr. 1450 references this iconography with teardrops drawn in the margin beside the text at the moment of Hector’s death. In doing so, the annotator cultivates a powerful aesthetic and emotional effect in a non-religious romance. This use of a technique developed primarily for devotional practice demonstrates the importance of such imagery as a tool not just for worship but for aesthetic interpretation.

The Influence of the Trojan War Story on the Nibelungenlied: Motifs, Characters, Situations

Herbort von Fritzlar’s Liet von Troye was composed shortly after 1190, commissioned by Landgrave Hermann von Thüringen (1190 – 1217). It is presumed that this new German Trojan War story, based on the French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, was supposed to add the events preceding Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit. Veldeke was mentioned by Herbort. Since the Liet von Troye was the first German rendition of the Trojan Wars (although Konrad von Würzburg’s Trojanerkrieg became more famous in 1287), I believe that it could well have influenced the Nibelungenlied of 1200/1205. It seems to me that the idea for the final version of the Nibelungenlied by the anonymous Austrian poet, based on old Germanic sources, could have been to write an epic that was native to Germany, but which would have the epic dimensions and the model of the classic Trojan War story, the Iliad. There are no epics other than the Nibelungenlied and the Iliad which end in destruction like this. In the Iliad, the Greeks destroy Troy; in the Nibelungenlied, the Burgundians destroy Attila’s fortress. In both epics, hardly anybody of the royal dynasties and their friends stays alive, excepting Eneas in the Iliad and Dietrich von Bern in the Nibelungenlied. Although the two epics are not identical in their plots, enough similarities could be enumerated to show an influence of the Trojan Wars on the Nibelungenlied.

Le Eroidi glossate del ms. Gaddiano reliqui 71: dalla tradizione ovidiana francese alla novella italiana

The analysis of the glosses accompanying the fourteenth-century Italian translation of the Heroides preserved in the MS Gaddiano reliqui 71 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence sheds new light on the literary amalgamation between matiere de Troie and Ovidian works, a phenomenon that goes back to some of the prose versions of the Roman de Troie, direct source for the Italian text. Given their distinctive nature and probable chronological decalage, the commentaries found in the MS Gaddiano reveal the existence of what appear to be diverse layers of glosses, since it is possible to recognize here moralizing notes characteristic of clerical commentaries next to lyrical quotations such as those frequently found in transalpine romances a farcitura, in addition to some mythological glosses whose unusual narrative development betrays remarkable affinities with several sections of the Ovide moralise and the French vernacular versions of the Ars Amatoria. By means of merging materials derived from their transalpine precedents with classical apologues, some of these glosses function as brief narrative units of their own that depart from these French models in their degree of stylistic re-elaboration, paving the way for the first examples of the Italian novella that will end by converging and culminating in the compilation known as the Novellino.

Reificações da descriptio pulchritudinis puellae na Crónica Troiana

In this brief article, I aim to show how the depiction of women in the Crónica troiana (the Galician version of Benoît de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie) are built according to the topos of the descriptio pulchritudinis puellae. Within this focus, then, the principal characteristics of this topos as defined by medieval grammarians (i.e., Matthieu de Vendôme and Geoffroi de Vinsauf) are sketched; this is followed by a study of the image of women in the Crónica troiana, in particular that of Polixena. A further support for the study of this image and its assimilation to rhetorical principles is found in a diachronic and comparative analysis of the Priam’s youngest daughter in the epitome of Dares Phrygius, in the Roman de Troie and in the Crónica troiana.

Criseyde's Descriptions and the Ethics of Feminine Experience

Some of Chaucer’s portrayals of Criseyde appear contradictory. Two especially demand elucidation lest readers become confused. The first introduces Criseyde as “an hevenyssh perfit creature,/That down were sent in scornynge of nature” (I, 104–5);1 the second mars her perfection by endowing her with joined eyebrows (V, 813), a physical flaw that carried weight with medieval authors if not their ancient counterparts.2 To complicate matters further, Chaucer omits telling readers about Criseyde’s imperfection until Book V, although his source for joined eyebrows, Benoit’s Roman de Troie, mentions Briseida’s blemish from the beginning, whereas Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, Chaucer’s main source, does not mar Criseida’s beauty in this way. What is one to make of such competing representations? SunHee Kim Gertz has argued that Chaucer “narrativizes the ordinarily static descriptio” of the beautiful romantic heroine (also known as beauty catalogue or, in the sixteenth century, blazon) to “rejuvenate the literary system” with new narratives derived from traditional material.3 While Gertz recognizes Chaucer’s manipulation of literary conventions as a source of “fresh

La muerte de Ulises en la General Estoria (III Parte): parricidio y perdón en la obra y en la vida de Alfonso X

This article studies the episode of Ulysses’ death at the hands of his son Telegonus (General estoria, Part III) by means of a systematic comparison of the Alphonsine passage with the Roman de Troie in order to determine the nature of the Castilian compilation’s version of the French original. The passage displays substantial changes when compared to its model: these innovations transform Ulysses’ attitude towards his sons, soften Telemachus’ imprisonment and emphasize the pardoning of Telegonus. The article relates this chapter to the historical conflicts between Alphonse X and Sancho.

Resistencias: hacia una poética del espacio cortés: el Roman de Troie

The following essay attempts, using the tools of literary history, hermeneutics and phenomonology, to explore the poetics of courtly space in medieval Romance literature. Thus, the Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie is taken as a model, since it subsists as a cornerstone within the literary and iconographic tradition of the theme of the City of Troy, stretching between Antiquity and the end of the Middle Ages. In particular, we delineate how the urban space of Troy in Benoit's work is constituted through a rewriting and reimagining of the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation, whose meaning affects the reading of the poem as a whole. Outside the verse Roman de Troie this form of reading is unproductive, and the symbolic space created by Benoit is trammelled by the estoire and impulses towards rationalization. In spite of this, the iconographic tradition (such as Alfonso XI's version of the Historia troyana) shows the survival of a conflict between symbolic and rationalizing interpretations, and provides...

Carthage et Troie: transit et aboutissement des aspirations dynastiques

As a basis of Western Culture, Classical Antiquity nourishes Romance languages and literatures with its numberless heroic figures, whose motifs and deeds are recreated, in the field of French Language, in three romans of the XIIth century: Roman de Thèbes, Enéas, and Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure; these works share, in fact, such a clear doubt with Greek-Roman cultures that critics use the term antique to mention them. This phenomenon of rewriting antiquity matters is not lacking in interest, since its study puts forward some questions beyond the mere accuracy with respect to the source used. This article is focused, to these purposes, in the configuration of urban space in Eneas and in Roman de Troie, whose construction, or reconstruction, in the case of Troy, involves not only an aesthetic reflection, but also an ideological and political one.

Vie de cour et littérature: à propos de quelques enluminures de la Crónica Troyana d’Alphonse XI

Commissioned by Alfonso XI, great-grandson of Alfonso el Sabio, the “Crónica Troyana”, the Castilian translation of the French “Roman de Troie”, is finished and copied by 1350. Some of the seventy miniatures of the manuscript, which belongs to the Cámara Regia, illustrate the main activities in Court in peaceful times. They show some fundamental aspects of these activities, proper to the nobility in the Middle Ages: games, hunting, music and love. This article foregrounds how each of these aspects finds its reflection in the most important works of XIIIth and XIVth century Castilian literature.

Sulle relazioni testuali fra il manoscritto G della Crónica troiana galega ed i testimoni della Versión de Alfonso XI

The Galician Crónica Troiana (G, ms. 10.233), as Ramón Lorenzo stated in the introduction to his critical edition of this text, is a translation of the Castilian Versión de Alfonso XI. The strong textual link between these two Iberian prose translations of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie is obvious. Nevertheless, only a comparative study of the Galician text and one of the Castilian codes (ms. H.j.6, of the Escorial Library) has been carried out. In this work we study parallel loci critici selected from ms. 10.233 and the four manuscripts which transmit the Castilian Versión de Alfonso XI. Through their analysis, we suggest the Castilian manuscript which was closer to the model that the translator to Galician used to complete ms. 10.233.

Beyond Resistance: Azalais d'Altier, Christine de Pizan, and the "Good" Female Reader of Briseida

It is often inaccurate to apply the term "resisting reader" to the fictional objecting female audiences found in medieval literary texts, because the objections anticipated usually reinforce the patriarchal system of values instead of challenging them. "Self-differentiation" is a more accurate term. The "riche dame" in the audience of Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie is one example. Nor should modern feminists reject historical female readers and writers, such as Azalais d'Altier and Christine de Pizan, who do not conform precisely to the subject positions for female readers established either by Benoit or by the modern feminist idea of what it means to "read like a woman."

Les songes médiévaux au risque de la psychanalyse : écueil méthodologique ou enrichissement interprétatif ?

Anthropology and other social sciences have shown their value for the medieval dream; psychoanalysis, despite the risk of an accusation of anachronism, and keeping in mind Devereux’s advice to exploit complementarity where complex cultural concepts are at stake, also has much to bring to the understanding of literary medieval dreams, with their often oedipal underpinnings, as in Tristan and Yseult, or in Le Roman de Troie.

Penser l'histoire antique au xiiie siècle à la lumière de l'historiographie contemporaine

Reading the anonymous 13th century works Le Roman de Troie en prose (Prose I) and Les Faits des Romains with a modern critical perspective highlights their ambiguous status and generic ambivalence at a time when history was even more uncertain of its disciplinary particularities, and et the same time indicates the longstanding nature of the history/story dialectic.

“Per una edizione critica della Crónica troyana promossa da Alfonso XI”

The Crónica Troiana, a Castilian prose translation of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie commissioned by Alfonso XI in 1350, is considered a text of fundamental importance for the transmission of Trojan material in Medieval Spain. Nevertheless, this work has not been studied in depth, so far to the extent that the text lacks a critical edition in the modern sense of the term. In this article we present such a critical edition, of chapters selected from all four of the codices which transmit the Crónica Troiana. Besides giving the edited text (in the latter part of our essay), we will present the most relevant loci critici. Through the analysis of the latter, we refute previous filiation theories and propose our stemma codicum.

"I Am Not He": Narcissus and Ironic Performativity in Medieval French Literature

Scholars have discussed extensively the medieval French use of Narcissus and mirrors to figure love experience. However, the claim to be like Narcissus is often closely associated with a counter-claim to be unlike him. Focusing on Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Can vei la lauzeta mover', and Guillaume de Lorris's "Roman de la rose", the article argues that this counter-claim is caught up in a larger process of affirmation. For a loving subject really to become like Narcissus requires both the establishment and the negation of such an identification. Examining this dual movement entails a reconceptualization of Narcissus.