Troianalexandrina

The impact that Alfonso X’s General Estoria had at the court of Avis is made evident in João I’s Livro da Montaria, through quotations in Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Crónica dos feitos da Guiné, and the identification of a “Estoria Geral” in the inventory of King Duarte’s library. A new reading of the Infante D. Pedro’s Livro da Virtuosa Benfeitoria provides an interesting metaliterary reference offering what appears to be another indirect influence of Alfonso X’s universal chronicle. This study analyses an allusion in that work to a “liuro da troya”, leading to considerations about narrative modes in the lnfante D. Pedro’s treatise.

The manuscript RAH, Aemilianensis 60 (end of the 9th century), famous for including the “glosas emilianenses” (10th-11th century), contains in fols. 64r-67r an Interrogatio de nobissimo, a short millenarian text which is presented as the prophecy of a bishop named Alexander to the king Aristotle. Our article offers some hypotheses about this invention, relating it to the pseudo-Aristotelian epistolary tradition; it also attempts to insert the prophecy into the literary tradition of the Pseudo-Methodius, the Apocalypse of Daniel, the Visio Pauli, the Tiburtine Sibyl and some related texts, as well as in a possible Islamic context (Dajjal's description).

It would be an arduous task to compile all the academic research ever published about Chaucer and his use of sources in the creation of Troilus and Criseyde. But there are still many aspects of Chaucer’s relationship with his sources that have been left largely unexplored. In particular, there is yet much to unearth in how the scribes, Chaucer’s earliest readers and fundamental agents in the shaping of the poem as we know it now, mediated the allusions that Chaucer, openly or otherwise, introduces in his text. In this paper, I explore the different scribal approaches to two of the most notable Latin sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: the portraits of Troilus, Criseyde, and Diomede in Joseph of Exeter’s Daretis Phrygii Ylias de bello troiano, and the summary of the twelve books of the Thebaid. The annotations analyzed in this article allow us a unique glimpse into the process of composition of the poem, as well as the twists and turns of its textual history, and the expectations had by all the agents involved in the creation, transmission, and interpretation of Troilus and Criseyde. Furthermore, they illuminate different aspects of the familiarity of the reading public with the classical authors in fifteenth-century England.