Troianalexandrina

In her ground-breaking article on Alfonso X’s General Estoria, the Argentinian philologist María Rosa Lida de Malkiel alluded to a rubric found in several late manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César concerning a supposed codex offered by ‘the King of Spain’ to Charles V of France. According to her view, this lost work should be identified as a manuscript preserving the Trojan section of the Alfonsine compilation. This article takes her hypothesis as the start-point for a twofold enquiry. On the one hand, it aims at gathering some evidence of the existence of a lost Estoria de Troya, an illustrated manuscript preserving the account of the Trojan War and related mythological episodes that would had been commissioned by the Learned King before the General Estoria. On the other, this survey tries to track down the vanishing marks left by this missing manuscript that - presumably - went almost unnoticed at the Parisian court.

The main focus of the present article is the Caesarist and Eneadic tradition in the Latin poetry, composed at the Anglo-Norman Medieval courts during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We will begin recalling some models from classic literature, such as laus imperatoris in Horace.’s poems and the Aeneas legend in The Aeneid by Virgil, in order to research these different topics in the poems addressed to William the Conqueror and his family, in particular to his daughters and daughters-in-law. On the one hand and to support this argument, we will read a number of compositions by the most important European writers at that moment, such as Godfrey of Reims, Baudri of Bourgueil or Hildebert of Lavardin, that will show us the comparison established between the king and the figure of Roman Caesar. On the other hand, we will study other poems that follow the Eneadic tradition and how they were used in the education of princes. In this regard, we will focus on the epic poem composed at Henry II’s Plantagenet court by his tutor Peter of Saintes that describes the Fall of Troy and the erratic journeys of Aeneas until he reaches the Italian coast. To sum up, we will cover some aspects of both traditions and demonstrate how classic figures like Caesar or Aeneas were pointed out in these compositions as models of governor.

The article presents the main results of a broader research on the reception of the romance about Alexander the Great in old Slavonic orthodox literature. There are two main translations of the Book of Alexander the Great in the orthodox Slavonic tradition - the Chronography Alexandria, composed probably around the tenth or eleventh centuries in the first Bulgarian kingdom and the so-called Serbian Alexandria from about the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. The Chronography Alexandria is incorporated only to the historical compilations, whereas the Serbian Alexandria appears as a new version of the “romance” genre in the orthodox Slavonic literature and is copied in the miscellanea of mixed contents.

Hildebrand's Alexander is a compilation of mostly humanist chronicles and stories about Alexander the Great, whose main sources are Johannes Aventin's Baierische Chronik and Johann Hartlieb's Alexander. The combination of these two elements is extraordinary, given Aventin's philological criticism of Hartlieb. Secondary sources are Plutarch's Vitae parallelae and Johann Carion's Chronica (both probably in German translations); and Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik. Hildebrand's characterization of Alexander particularly ambivalent, his depiction balanced between a tyrant and a peaceful emperor ruling for the ordinary people. This life of Alexander gives an important role to the ancient Germans, and so the narrative provides a story of the German nation as well, confronting humanist approaches to the nation with older concepts of translatio imperii and imperium.

In the second half of the twelfth century three stories inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses were translated and adapted into French: Pyrame et Thisbé, Narcisse, Philomena. The work of the anonymous translators-adapters shows how Latin texts were revised according to the new fashions/conventions of the courtly world to which these translations were intended. This paper shows how the birth of love in each of these stories is an important moment that helps us to identify rewriting strategies that try to turn passionate ancient love in to courtly love.