Troianalexandrina

The depictions of Troy in the Crónica Troyana de Alfonso XI (1350) —a Castilian illuminated manuscript with the Spanish version of the Roman de Troie— provide an exemplum to analyze the function of anachronism as a rhetorical device in Arts and Literature. Moreover, these urban images have an unmistakable Islamic appearance which allows us to go deeper into the comprehension of the multicultural context of the Iberian Peninsule, as well as into its singular artistic consequences.

Two capitals included in the iconographical programme developed in the first chapel in the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela (1075-1088) illustrate Alexander’s military expedition to India. One of them shows his ascension to Heaven and the other represents the meeting between Alexander’s army and the mysterious “ladies from the waters”. Those women seduce the warriors leading them to their death. In both episodes it we note the intention to illustrate passages from Alexander’s roman. As we are speaking of the eleventh century, this would be the first time it was represented in romanesque European sculpture.

Although critics have given great importance to amplificatio in the writing of the Libro de Alexandre, its opposite abbreviatio is another crucial technique in the poem. Ancient rhetoric put emphasis on the value of brevitas in the treatment of material of great length, as a way to play down or hide long-windedness. In the Alexandre this strategy can be seen in the topoi of the inventio, as well as in structural devices of dispositio and the elocutio of the discourse.

This article focuses on the establishment of early rhetoric in Germany during the renaissance of Charlemagne. Alcuin and his pupil Rhabanus Maurus were prominent in the establishment of rhetoric and artes liberales. The conception of education under Charlemagne was on the one hand based upon artes liberales. On the other, this renaissance of ancient education was arranged under a different political system in comparison with the roman and greek one. So the educational concept itself contains the interest of adornment and honour of the king perfectly used in the rhetorical dialogue between the king and the scholar Alcuin of York and in the works of the first ´Praeceptor Germaniae´ Rhabanus Maurus.

The essay traces the reception of the myths of Muses and Sirens in Medieval Literature by discussing some significant examples from Boethius’ Consolatio (ca. 524) to the Middle-High-German romance of Tristan by Gottfried von Straßburg (ca. 1210). The medieval Muses and Sirens commonly function as mythological representations of memory, poetic ability and erotic seduction. By revealing complex conceptions as well as an ambivalent status of art and music, they go beyond, and sometimes subvert, the purposes and strategies of meaning intended by the texts.

The present study sets out to identify and then comment on the various examples of inscriptions to be found in two thirteenth-century anonimous texts, the Libro de Alexandre and the Libro de Apolonio. Both texts make repeated use of epigraphs carved in stone, wood or diverse metals at key moments in the lifes of Alexander the Great and Apollonius of Tyre. This analysis of literary inscriptions, that reiterates the practice of medieval epigraph writing, will serve to allow us to understand with greater clarity the attitude expressed by both poets as regards the use of such inscriptions and to suggest the respective contexts of reception of the Libro de Alexandre and the Libro de Apolonio.

Character, in contrast to the nuclear position it holds in the literary experience of reading, has not been the target of a deep critical reflection as the one seen for other literary elements. This situation seems the result of the traditional crossroads of extreme positions where its analysis has been located, that is, the conflicting approaches called mimetic (character as a textual representation of human beings) and immanent (character as a plain set of semes), that converge on the very same cancellation of its specificity. This cancellation is even more remarkable in the case of medieval character, because one often avoids its historical alterity by practising a retrospective reading of it from the parameters of modern character, that pushes it into the status of proto-character. The aim of this essay is to provide an approach to medieval poetological reflection on character as a means of recovering its historical thickness. To this end an overview is given where that poetological reflection is divided roughly into three parts: rhetoric, poetics, and methods of textual exegesis. A reversal of the Aristotelian hierarchy mŷthos/character will be seen thanks to this overview, this being reversal favored even by the Arabic transmission of the Aristoteles latinus, in the sense that the object of poetic imitatio is located in êthos, and not in práxis, by medieval poetology. Finally, the importance of this reversal is discussed in the light of their links with philosophia moralis, Augustinian transmission of Aristotelian thought, or a particular literary production, ignored by 12th and 13th centuries artes poetriae (Arthurian literature), which is, precisely, one of the main medieval contributions to the idea of the individual.