f 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 Benoît 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 Benoît'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 Benoît 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 an example of the survival of archaic models of depiction which go beyond the literal meaning expressed in the text. The vitality —even in a potentially hostile environment— of the imaginitive mode which underlies the creative process in the Roman de Troie can thus be shown, as well as its generative power on the level of literary fiction.