Troianalexandrina

Medieval Latin historiography belongs to textual genres in which the transmission, transformation and spreading of references to the Trojan war, the fall of Ilion and the migrations of the Trojans played an important role. In Northern Italian historiography, the emphasis on cities' Trojan origins became a fairly widespread phenomenon from the late twelfth century. In order to highlight how this trend actually mirrors very different contexts, traditions and actors, this paper analyzes and contextualizes the Trojan passages of the Cronica written by Sicard of Cremona and Martin da Canal's Les Estoires de Venise. By comparing these two cases and their diverse "success", the general question of what might be considered favorable or unfavorable circumstances for the multiform and polyfunctional references to the "knowledge" about Trojans in high Medieval communal backgrounds is also dealt with.

This paper focuses on the uses of the Troy story for dynastic debate in late medieval England, with special attention to the transition from the Ricardian to the Lancastrian period. As the new dynasty sought to gather around itself the symbols of chivalric legitimacy –including the manuscripts and sometimes even the very "auctors" of the matter of Troy– the value of the classical inheritance was subverted and displaced. The paper first briefly describes the Troy world of the 1380s and 90s before moving on to a set of early fifteenth-century writers whose application of the Trojan motif to the new kings is variously voluntary or compelled, commissioned or cajoled into being –but is in all cases resistant to the theme of Lancastrian valor.

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.

Compared to the continent, the matter of Troy features relatively late in vernacular English literature. In fourteenth-century Britain, we argue, Troy becomes a privileged site for poetological investigations into the nature of literary and historiographical innovation. Troy assumes this role in insular narratives because of a complex dynamics of literary tradition and innovation already present in the older Troy traditions. Fourteenth-century writers use Troy to construct and question a panorama of competing antiquities –a panorama which sustains a sense of literary competition that foregrounds the construction of temporalities, especially the relationship of "old" and "new". Using Bruno Latour's concept of temporal hybridity, we claim further that Troy continues to be a central discourse to raise meta-poetic questions until well into the sixteenth century. We demonstrate this by readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame and William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece. We read Chaucer's Fame as a productive confrontation of literary tradition insofar as the poem questions seemingly authoritative knowledge regarding the Trojan War. The poem offers an epistemological legitimization of a poetics of innovation that remains productive at least until the Renaissance. Shakespeare's Lucrece, for example, is highly traditional, that is, late medieval, in the way it uses Trojan topoi to comment on the relationship of originality and tradition. The poem's Trojan ekphrasis, we argue, demonstrates the complex interactions of different temporalities, as it engages with classical as well as medieval intertexts, especially Chaucer's Fame.

This paper intends to show how Federico II Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, used the iconographic theme of the Trojan War in 1536-1538 to convince, in different ways, emperor Charles V to definitely attribute the Montferrat to the Gonzaga family. The Sala di Troia in the Ducal Palace, painted by Giulio Romano and helps, developing a pro-Greek point of view, may be a far more polysemic space than historians of art and literature have demonstrated.