Troianalexandrina

In this article, starting from a thorough study of the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the General Estoria undertaken in our Ph.D., we establish the guidelines that characterise this reception, and more specifically the compilers’ work and their position with respect to the historic use of a literary work. We prove that King Alphonse X’s desires about his historiographical project are not always compatible with the constraints his collaborators meet. The Alphonsines receive clear instructions from the king himself: they do their best to rationalise them in order to build a historic narrative out of diverse and contradictory sources such as Biblical, historic and mythological texts. Thus, the compilation criteria applied to the pagan matter logically vary depending on the difficulty to include supernatural elements - e.g., physical transformations of a deity into an animal - the explanations of which can be found only in the margins of the Latin manuscript. How to authorise a scattered, scholarly and anonymous matter like the glosses to include it in the canonical sources of history? Thanks to the analyses of its literary and pagan sources, we observe, to conclude, that the General Estoria is eclectic and sometimes paradoxical. This feature reflects the difficulty to establish an exhaustive narration of the history of the world that takes into account all religious confessions and keeps a unity at the same time.

This article examines the nine full-page miniatures in a manuscript of the Roman d’Alexandre (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264). Almost entirely overlooked by scholars, these miniatures constitute one of the most exceptional iconographic ensembles of the fourteenth century. As pictorial punctuation, these miniatures announce the main divisions of the narrative, illustrate the opening scenes in each section, and signal encyclopedic content. In this way they function similarly to multi-compartment images in other sacred and secular manuscripts, but magnified and elaborated in accordance with Bodley 264’s luxury and textual completeness. As mnemonic devices, Bodley 264’s full-page miniatures facilitate navigation of the text and signify that Alexander’s story is morally exemplary and memory-worthy. They recall the ekphrastic descriptions that were used for composition and memorization in medieval rhetorical and meditational practice. These full-page images also refer to monumental art such as wall paintings and tapestries, thereby assimilating Bodley 264’s functions to those of larger, more public pictorial forms. Crucial to the display and narrative effects of Bodley 264, these full-page miniatures transform the book into a “super Alexander romance”: an exceptional textual and visual compilation in dialogue with numerous other texts, objects, and cultural practices.

The Marquis of Santillana’s Proverbios is one of his most important poetic works and his most well-known text from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The central part of the poem presents a group of biblical and Roman examples, some of them glossed by Santillana himself. The Suma de virtuoso deseo (BNE, ms. 1518), a miscellaneous historical text, provides variants in some of these glosses in prose, together with illustrations. The interpretation of these images, which seek a didactic and mnemonic effect, and the interpretation of the symbolic set represented by both texts and images, help us understand some issues related to the metamorphosis of the vision of Antiquity and the written transmission of history in this particular period of the Spanish Middle Ages.

The analysis of the glosses accompanying the fourteenth-century Italian translation of the Heroides preserved in the MS Gaddiano reliqui 71 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence sheds new light on the literary amalgamation between matière de Troie and Ovidian works, a phenomenon that goes back to some of the prose versions of the Roman de Troie, direct source for the Italian text. Given their distinctive nature and probable chronological décalage, the commentaries found in the MS Gaddiano reveal the existence of what appear to be diverse layers of glosses, since it is possible to recognize here moralizing notes characteristic of clerical commentaries next to lyrical quotations such as those frequently found in transalpine romances a farcitura, in addition to some mythological glosses whose unusual narrative development betrays remarkable affinities with several sections of the Ovide moralisé and the French vernacular versions of the Ars Amatoria. By means of merging materials derived from their transalpine precedents with classical apologues, some of these glosses function as brief narrative units of their own that depart from these French models in their degree of stylistic re-elaboration, paving the way for the first examples of the Italian novella that will end by converging and culminating in the compilation known as the Novellino.

The present article focuses on the analysis of two manuscripts that seem to be symptomatic of the subtle and variegated reception of the Ovidian Metamorphoses in fourteenth-century Italy: on the one hand, the luxurious copy of the of Ovidius Moralizatus (Gotha, Forschungsbibliothek, MS Membr. I 98) made ca. 1350-1360 for the Milanese aristocrat Bruzio Visconti and intended to be illustrated by 284 miniatures; on the other hand, the humble manuscript preserving the translation in volgare of the Ovidian work by the Florentine notary Arrigo Simintendi (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Panciatichi 63), whose marginal drawings (added ca. 1360-1370) can be attributed to a group of “interactive readers” who tried to intensify their reading experience by giving visible form to their particular interpretations of the text. Despite their differences, both works betray an unprecedented attention to the representation of nature and witness to the existence of an ongoing debate ‒pervading both the courtly and urban realms‒ over the value of antique myths and the effects of the human passions so memorably described by the classical poet. This particular reception of the Ovidian work may have paved the way to another, new experience of subjectivity and, therefore, to an intensive intellectual engagement with emotions that would have marked a significant step in the history of the “Nachleben der Antike”.