Troianalexandrina

The Crónica Troiana, a Castilian prose translation of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie commissioned by Alfonso XI in 1350, is considered a text of fundamental importance for the transmission of Trojan material in Medieval Spain. Nevertheless, this work has not been studied in depth, so far to the extent that the text lacks a critical edition in the modern sense of the term. In this article we present such a critical edition, of chapters selected from all four of the codices which transmit the Crónica Troiana. Besides giving the edited text (in the latter part of our essay), we will present the most relevant loci critici. Through the analysis of the latter, we refute previous filiation theories and propose our stemma codicum.

There are many versions of the myth of Ganymede in Greco-Latin classical literature. In spite of the differences detected in the Iliad, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among others, every written source coincides in describing Zeus carrying off a Trojan boy of unparalleled beauty, who he falls in love with and to whom he offers both immortality and eternal youth. The literary sources are varied, but the iconographies that range between the most solemn forms presenting the kidnapping concealed either as a storm or as an kidnapping eagle, or the more risqué ones showing Ganymede seduced by Zeus have been more diverse. However, the most important iconography of the myth of Ganymede is the one showing him in the trade he was assigned on arriving at Olympus: serving nectar at banquets. This iconography, transformed to the constellation of Ganymede, Aquarius, passed to the Middle Ages and has survived till nowadays. During classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque and neoclassical periods, Ganymede was used as a vehicle to express very diverse attitudes towards homosexuality, artistically and literarily, going from clear acceptance to heroic exaltation, passing through more or less explicit erotic visions.

The allegorical glosses of Arnulf of Orléans and Johannes of Garland are the basis of chapters 468, 475, and 476 of the General estoria II, in which Alfonso X develops his interpretation of the Ovidian myths relating to the story of Medea. After identifying the sources of the Medea section used by Alfonso X, the motives for their inclusion in the interpretive chapters will be examined based on commentaries on the Metamorphoses by these two Latino-Medieval authors. Each of the exegetic glosses of the aforementioned chapters are then reviewed, contrasted with the the corresponding ones in the Allegoriae and the Integumenta and the modifications made by the authors of the General estoria II are noted. By comparing the Alfonsine text with its models it is possible to arrive at a greater understanding of the tales taken from the Metamorphoses in the historiographical work, the way in which Alfonso’s team of scribes collate their sources and the manner in which they use them. It also helps us to understand the way in which the incorporation of the exegetic chapters alters the meaning of the Ovidian tale, the hermeneutic methodology used, the amplificatio techniques or motives underlying the selection of some sources over others, the origin of the Alfonsine team’s familiarity with the Allegoriae and the Integumenta and the repercussions of the incorporation of this type of exegetic chapter side by side with the Ovidian material. Other matters related to the formal and thematic originality of the General estoria are clarified by this comparison.

The following is a study of classical onomastics contained in the Castilian cancioneros from the 15th century and the amorous attitudes represented by various persons mentioned in the text. It discovers, from a general perspective, the stylistic and ideological development of the literature of this century. At the same time, looked at from a more limited point of view, the study reveals the peculiarities that the use of onomastics acquires throughout Spanish lyrical poetry of the late Middle Ages as compared with other medieval poetic traditions, including all connected with the composition principles that are employed, as well its conceptions relating to courtly love. Thus, one can observe the importance that the moral component takes on lyrical tradition of the era along with the cultivation of allegorical poems of Italian origin in which the enumeration of celebrated people proliferates.

El Victorial by Gutierre Díaz de Games contains some excerpts from the Libro de Alexandre. Although the existence of these quotations has been common knowledge about since the nineteenth century, when R. S. Willis published his edition in 1934 the textual tradition of the Victorial was not totally clear, so for that reason the American academic only employed two testimonia. Using the research of R. Beltrán as a starting point, the three main copies of the Alexandrine passage in the work of Díaz de Games are now to be edited in the following.