Troianalexandrina

This article offers a new evaluation of the textual tradition of the Libro de las generaciones y linajes de los reyes (or Liber regum) and specially the section devoted to Trojan history. Among the versions of this work, only the so-called Libro de las generaciones (c. 1256) was known to have this section. Here, it is presented a complete witness of a previous version, produced in Toledo (c. 1220), which contains also this part. It is argued that in fact the Trojan narrative was already present in the original Libro de las generaciones y linajes de los reyes (c. 1205), so this would be the first vernacular narrative on Troy written in the Iberian peninsula. The second part of the article is devoted to a version of the Libro de las generaciones y linajes de los reyes preserved in an incomplete manuscript, which contains an expanded narrative of the Trojan section. It is based on the De excidio Troiae and it is connected to a particular branch of the textual tradition. Arguments on its date and location are given, as well as an edition of the fragment that has survived.

This article examines a crucial but neglected scene of musical performance in the Castilian vernacular version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, Libro de Apolonio (c.1250). The scene, in which the protagonist plays the fiddle and sings at the court of his future wife and father-in-law, contains musicological detail unique in European literary history. The event of Apolonio’s performance is also highly significant for the narrative and broader significance of the poem. When Apolonio takes up the fiddle he demonstrates that he is of superior rational capacity and can moderate his desire, in consonance, as I argue, with Aristotelian natural philosophy and ethics. Analysing the scene in close textual detail and with reference to other major thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian texts, including the Libro de buen amor (1330/43), Libro del Caballero Zifar (c.1300) and Lucas de Tuy’s De altera vita fideique controversiis (c.1236), I consider the evidence for an Aristotelian context for the Libro de Apolonio. I assert that the poem is an attempt to assimilate Aristotelian thought into a Christian worldview at a very early stage for the European vernacular tradition. The Libro de Apolonio is a pious response to strands of radical Aristotelianism prevalent from the early thirteenth century in Iberia. Such Aristotelianism was most likely disseminated in unofficial schools, via the vernacular, and closely associated with the Jewish intellectual community. The Libro de Apolonio is an important witness of thirteenth-century Iberian Aristotelianism.

In this contribution it is offered for the first time a Spanish adaptation of the book X of the Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon. It is a unique witness preserved in the fifteenth century manuscript 12672 belonging to the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

It only remains a fragment of the Spanish Historia troyana polimétrica (1270). Beautiful derelict, remarked Ramón Menéndez Pidal. It is a remarkable text in three research domains: the Trojan cycle in European medieval literatures; the history of Spanish metrics; Spanish medieval literature in general. In terms of metrics, the text allows itself a surprising freedom in the use of patterns and their combination. Even more: it combines prose with verse, which result is the genre called prosimetrum. The anonymous author must have been a cultivated clergy, provided of a personality of his own and peculiar criteria; when he translated the manuscript of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, he recreated it. This paper of Alberto Paredes, poet and modern philologist, proposes a fresh approach to the text, showing how it is nurtured with originality and literary richness.