Troianalexandrina

Castilian “libros de caballerías” of the sixteenth century are a good example of the survival of the Trojan legend in peninsular literature. Its presence is found in Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula. But those books belonging to the Amadisian family also have recourse to the characters and well-known episodes of this tradition. In these chivalrous sequels, writers choose the most famous Greek and Trojan characters’ deeds or love affairs as a term of contrast in order to emphasize their own characters’ superiority. Well-known creatures, such as Medea, added to Trojan subject-matter by medieval writers, Achilles or Pantasilea appear in Renaissance stories of chivalry in wonderful adventures and in episodes with a remarkable allegorical value. Although their narrative function may be considered a secondary one, there are some chivalry books which repeat again the conflict between Greeks and Trojans arising from Helena’s kidnapping. If Castilian authors of the sixteenth century give an account of their literary culture by rescuing past classical and medieval topics, the Trojan legend finds in the chivalry genre an ideal way to gain renewed diffusion.

The article focuses on the account of Alexander’s conception and birth in medieval Alexander romances, analyzing different versions of the Nektanebus-episode in MHG texts in comparison with their common pretext: the Latin ‘Historia de preliis’. Besides showing the similarities and differences of these ‘prehistories’ of Alexander, I focus on the functioning of the Alexander romance as a genre, considering the Nektanebus-episode as a paradigm for the medieval Alexander tradition. Alexander texts and especially the ‘Historia’ carry a huge amount of inconsistencies, or rather allow for inconsistent interpretations, but it is exactly this inconsistency which is used by redactors and/or translators to create ‘new’ texts. They form ‘their Alexander’ in response to their particular source, mostly by disambiguation. Yet these attempts usually are restricted to single elements of the story and often create new narrative problems. Thus, the appalling quality—as George Cary and others might have suggested—not only of the medieval, but perhaps as well of the classical Alexander romance, could be seen as some sort of productive impetus and creative possibility. The Alexander tradition becomes a potentially infinite text helix, an entanglement of bequeathed irritation and irritating tradition.

Since 1976, when the last volume of the Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre was published, none of the manuscripts of the Roman has been thoroughly studied. The present paper deals with ms. F (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, parm. 1206), written in Italy in the first decades of the fourteenth century, and concentrates on its most outstanding textual features: 1. the verses written in the margin (probably by the copist himself); 2. the peculiar Venjance Alixandre that follows the Roman. Both features will link F with ms. B, written in Italy at the end of the thirteenth century, one of the two manuscripts which preserve, at their beginning, the old and celebrated version décasyllabique of the Roman d’Alexandre.

Arnoul d’Orléans’ commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses consists of an accessus to the work of the Latin author on the one hand, and of the interpretation he gives of each fable in the Allegoriae super Metamorphosin on the other. This commentary paves the way for the moral interpretation of Metamorphoses around the mid-twelfth century. The interpretation in allegorical, historical and, above all, moral keys Arnoul gives of Ovid’s fables allows him to reveal the integumentum, the true writing intentions of the Latin auctor, namely, the will to edify his readers by showing them the divine punishment of vices, the eternal struggle between vice and virtue and the value of a virtuous life.

The analysis of the story of Oedipus, which comes as an introduction to the medieval rewriting of Stace’s Thebaïde, demonstrates that the characters are not subjected to the blind Fate of the Ancients. They are faced with various signs —material or verbal ones— which they fail to interpret or do not even see. Indeed, their emotions, consisting mostly in concupiscence on Jocasta’s part and irascibility on Oedipus’s, check their rational faculty. The issue of free will is thus raised in Christian terms: as events seem to follow one another in accordance with an apparently implacable determinism and as the future of the characters is predicted to them, their free will, put into play by the presence of signs they come across on their various ways, enables them to construct their destinies. The structure of the beginning of the Roman thus reveals that, for medieval rewritings of classical stories, everyone’s role in History is closely related to their decoding of signs, a thorough analysis of which would throw light on the medieval grammatical theories the author favored.

This article deals with some examples of the contrasting ways in which the Narcissus myth is reconsidered in the later Middle Ages. Evrart de Conty, in his Livre des Echecs amoureux moralisés, raises different interpretations from the case of Narcissos case, according to the integumentum doctrine and to an encyclopaedic manner. He (a physician) tends towards a rationalistic judgment about love. Froissart, in Le joli buisson de jeunesse, thoroughly transforms the myth: he presents Narcissus as a perfect courteous lover, who died of grief caused by the premature death of his beloved Echo. This "Ovidian" invention, not the only one in Froissart's literary work, is deliberate; it tends, in a playful way, to make Narcissus an inverted double of the poem's narrator. The anonymous Istoire de Narcisus et de Echo carries the Narcissus myth onto the stage and definitely chooses a ludicrous tone, thanks to the Fool who comments on the action. Narcissus is presented as the male counterpart of the famous "Belle dame sans merci" imagined by Alain Chartier in 1424. These three versions of the Narcissus myth are typical of the later Middle Ages as a period of critical reassessment of its literary heritage, and raise a crucial question about the ambiguity of signs.

In this second work devoted to the study of the medieval character I analyze the issue of voice, i.e., how the character’s words are quoted. Firstly, I consider how modern narratology has dealt with the medieval character’s voice and, secondly, how medievalism has examined this very same issue. In both cases, the main practice applied is a “retroreading” of medieval character from the parameters of the modern character’s voice. By means of a systematization of sententiarum and verborum exornationies (elocutio, a strange location that has contributed to the scant influence of these theories), I discuss the importance of actio, a real medieval “latent theory” when it comes to understanding how a character works. In this regard one can see the crucial importance of the changes produced by textual criticism in the voice of medieval characters.

This article analyses the onomastics of characters in medieval Galician prose. For this purpose I have selected the most representative texts of the period and I have compared the Galician texts with their versions in Latin, Spanish and French in order to see how translators manage to adapt proper names in their translations. Thus, we can perceive in this study that the adaptation is easy with common Galician names, whereas difficulties increase with exotic or uncommon ones. I have extracted an extensive number of examples, out of all possible ones, to make clear either the skilfulness or the unskilfulness of the translators or copyists involved.

In the Códice de Azagra, one of the most important Hispanic manuscripts in Medieval Literature, we can find a planctus, a lament poem entitled Versi Acilli, where a woman mourns the death of Achilles. This study will try, on the one hand, to establish who is the crying woman, that is to say, the lament lyric voice, and, on the other hand, to analyse the structure of the poem such as the influence of other literary genres we notice in different elements (words and expressions) which belong to epitaphium, elegiac or epic poetry. Finally, I will show the connection between Versi Acilli and any other contents of the Códice de Azagra, like some African school writers— Verecundo de Junca, Draconcio, Nemesiano and some poems in the Anthologia Latina (Epistula Didonis ad Eneam, Pervigillium Veneris) that are not in the Códice— and other lament poems of some non- African writers like Eugenio de Toledo or Venancio Fortunato.