Troianalexandrina

This article analyses Montalvo’s Amadís “compositio” on the frame of Trojan material, its literary tradition and its generic context in the Castilian and European Middle Ages. The article puts the question, always through the texts, about how Montalvo assumes this tradition and how he revitalized it for his readers. The matière antique and its formulation in the Middle Ages provide to Montalvo a poetic plot where to fixe his Amadís as a crossroads between fiction (fabula) and history-story (historia-estoria). In this way Montalvo scapes to the moral limitations and censures against chivalric fiction, parallels to the fiction development.

The history of the Troy Matter in Europe is characterised, on the one hand, by the continuous criticism to Homer and, on the other hand, by the appearance of a series of works which exerted an extraordinary influence beyond geographical and linguistic bounds. In this article I intend to present a brief outlook of the Troy Matter covering from the Iliad to the earliest days of the art of the printing, paying special attention to the authors who wrote about the Troyan War, and whose influence has been strongest throughout the centuries, like Dares Phrygius, Dictys Cretensis, Benoît de Sainte Maure or Guido de Columnis. This article will also deal with the main works of the Troy Matter in Spain.

Commissioned by Alfonso XI, great-grandson of Alfonso el Sabio, the “Crónica Troyana”, the Castilian translation of the French “Roman de Troie”, is finished and copied by 1350. Some of the seventy miniatures of the manuscript, which belongs to the Cámara Regia, illustrate the main activities in Court in peaceful times. They show some fundamental aspects of these activities, proper to the nobility in the Middle Ages: games, hunting, music and love. This article foregrounds how each of these aspects finds its reflection in the most important works of XIIIth and XIVth century Castilian literature.

Written in the mid fifteenth century, Jehan Wauquelin’s work about Alexander the Great, participates in the process of devising a political model for the Duke of Burgundy. Much as the rewriting of the legend in this new context is indebted to tradition, it incorporates a much more political meaning. At the same time, Wauquelin reveals his creative talent in the process of adaptation and modification of his literary sources.

As a basis of Western Culture, Classical Antiquity nourishes Romance languages and literatures with its numberless heroic figures, whose motifs and deeds are recreated, in the field of French Language, in three romans of the XIIth century: Roman de Thèbes, Enéas, and Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure; these works share, in fact, such a clear doubt with Greek-Roman cultures that critics use the term antique to mention them. This phenomenon of rewriting antiquity matters is not lacking in interest, since its study puts forward some questions beyond the mere accuracy with respect to the source used. This article is focused, to these purposes, in the configuration of urban space in Eneas and in Roman de Troie, whose construction, or reconstruction, in the case of Troy, involves not only an aesthetic reflection, but also an ideological and political one.

El romance medieval inglés Sir Orfeo nos ha llegado en tres versiones. La más temprana y fiable se ha conservado en el importante manuscrito Auchinleck, de comienzos del siglo XIV.

La historia clásica de Orfeo y Eurídice se entremezcla aquí con diversos elementos de origen celta y, como suele ser habitual en el subgénero derivado de los lais bretones, tiene un final feliz. Si bien el poema ha sido ampliamente estudiado y analizado, proponemos aquí una relectura del mismo en clave homérica, basada en la parte final de la Odisea.

In 1481, the first Catalan version of Historiae Alexandri Magni by the Latin author Quintus Curtius Rufus appeared translated by the nobel Valencian Lluís de Fenollet i Malferit. What makes this translation so original are its first nine chapters, added to the original Tuscan version from the humanist Pier Candido Decembrio. These nine chapters refer to Alexander’s youth and are directly translated from some of the numerous Latin versions of Plutarchus’s Parallel Lives that were readily read in the fifteenth century. In our article we have edited these chapters because of their difficulty and because they represent a distructured syntax (clearly seen when Fenollet translates from Latin, a language that he does not master, or Tuscan, a much easier Romanic language to understand). Henceforth, the following edition has been created from the incunable 10-vi-28 from Catalunya’s Library which we have described in situ, and from the digitalized version that can be found in the Virtual Library of Miguel de Cervantes.