The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte- Maure: A Translation. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess, Douglas Kelly. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2017. Gallica, 41. 486 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 394-396
Author(s):  
Raymond J. Cormier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
British History ◽  
Geoffrey Of Monmouth ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Roman De Troie ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extensive Introduction ◽  
Roman De Brut ◽  
Roman De Thebes

In his Roman de Brut (1155), the Norman Robert Wace of Caen recounts the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy to the end of legendary British history, while adapting freely the History of the Kings of Britain (1136) by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace’s Brut inaugurated a new genre, at least in part, commonly known as the “romances of antiquity” (romans d'antiquité). The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d’Énéas, one of the three such romances dealing with themes from antiquity. These creations initiated the subjects, plots and structures of the genre, which subsequently flowered under authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît’s version of necessity deals with war and its causes, how it was fought and what its ultimate consequences were for the combatants. How to explain its success? The author chose the standard and successful poetic form of the era—octosyllabic rhyming couplets; he was fond of extended descriptions; he could easily recount the intensity of personal struggles; and, above all he was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of love, a passion that affects several prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilus and his affection for Briseida). All these elements combined to contour this romance in which events from the High Middle Ages were presented as a likeness of the poet’s own feudal and courtly spheres. This long-awaited new translation, the first into English, is accompanied by an extensive introduction and six-page outline of the work; two appendices (on common words, and a list of known Troie manuscripts); nearly twenty pages of bibliography; plus exhaustive indices of personal and geographical names and notes. As the two senior scholars assert (p. 3), By translating Benoît’s entire poem we seek to contribute to a greater appreciation of its composition and subject-matter, and thus to make available to a modern audience what medieval readers and audiences knew and appreciated.

Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-344
Author(s):  
Jonathan Brent
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Geoffrey Of Monmouth ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.

The First Pagan Historian

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Clark
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Latin Version

The First Pagan Historian traces the reception history of a text that is now largely neglected but once occupied a central role in the ancient canon—the De excidio Troiae historia or History of the Destruction of Troy of one Dares Phrygius, who claimed to have been an eyewitness observer of the Trojan War. From late antiquity (when most scholars today now agree that the extant Latin version of the text was written) to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this study charts the many surprising twists and turns in the afterlife of an author long considered the first of the pagans to write history. It examines the subversive challenge that Dares posed to other ancient canonical traditions (especially the poetry of Homer and Virgil), and the manner in which Dares’s bold rewriting of the Troy story enabled centuries of postclassical readers to forge their own—sometimes radical—visions of the distant past. In doing so, The First Pagan Historian moves back and forth between the ancient world itself and various moments in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The book uses the fortunes of a forged text to interrogate approaches to history, fiction, myth, philology, criticism, authorship, and numerous other topics of profound importance to the interplay between antiquity and modernity.

scholarly journals THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEXAMETER IN GERMAN POETRY

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Tatiana N. Andreiushkina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classic Form

The article traces the history of the development of the hexameter on German soil: from the use of the Leonin hexameter in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the mixed Latin-German hexameter in the period of humanism (in the form of carmina eroica) and the German hexameter in the 18th–19th centuries (mainly in the form of elegy, epigram and idyll) to derivatives and ironic forms of the XX century (memorandum, instructive poem, etc.). Klopstock played a significant role in the spread of the hexameter in German poetry, bringing a fresh stream to German poetry by rejecting the prevailing in the 17th century predominantly alternating Alexandrian verse. Voss also inspired his contemporaries to create distiches with his translations of Homer’s poems. The flowering of the hexameter falls on the period of classicism: Goethe and Schiller created the best and purest examples of this poetic meter. Goethe and Schiller during the Enlightenment, Hölderlin, Novalis and Kleist in romanticism, Rückert, Platen and Mörike in post-romanticism introduced variety and movement into the hexameter by means of different types of caesura in verse. Austrian poets (Saar, Weinheber, Bachmann) appeal to hexameter as a classic form of German verse, Hauptmann uses it to create a large poetic form. The poets of the pre-war and war period (Colmar, Schröder, Holthusen) seek in him an aesthetic support in an era of timelessness. Poets of the former GDR (Brecht, Bobrowski, Müller), poets of the Federal Republic of Germany (Grünbein, Herbst) use it sporadically and in a transformed form, but at the same time take into account the thematic and genre traditions associated with this antique meter. Most foreign researchers, when determining the hexameter, speak of its dactylic component and only from the middle of the 20th century some of them (Kayser, Mönnighof) note, in addition to the spondees, the possibility of using chorees in the initial syllables of a verse.

THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEXAMETER IN GERMAN POETRY

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Tatiana N. Andreiushkina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classic Form

The article traces the history of the development of the hexameter on German soil: from the use of the Leonin hexameter in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the mixed Latin-German hexameter in the period of humanism (in the form of carmina eroica) and the German hexameter in the 18th–19th centuries (mainly in the form of elegy, epigram and idyll) to derivatives and ironic forms of the XX century (memorandum, instructive poem, etc.). Klopstock played a significant role in the spread of the hexameter in German poetry, bringing a fresh stream to German poetry by rejecting the prevailing in the 17th century predominantly alternating Alexandrian verse. Voss also inspired his contemporaries to create distiches with his translations of Homer’s poems. The flowering of the hexameter falls on the period of classicism: Goethe and Schiller created the best and purest examples of this poetic meter. Goethe and Schiller during the Enlightenment, Hölderlin, Novalis and Kleist in romanticism, Rückert, Platen and Mörike in post-romanticism introduced variety and movement into the hexameter by means of different types of caesura in verse. Austrian poets (Saar, Weinheber, Bachmann) appeal to hexameter as a classic form of German verse, Hauptmann uses it to create a large poetic form. The poets of the pre-war and war period (Colmar, Schröder, Holthusen) seek in him an aesthetic support in an era of timelessness. Poets of the former GDR (Brecht, Bobrowski, Müller), poets of the Federal Republic of Germany (Grünbein, Herbst) use it sporadically and in a transformed form, but at the same time take into account the thematic and genre traditions associated with this antique meter. Most foreign researchers, when determining the hexameter, speak of its dactylic component and only from the middle of the 20th century some of them (Kayser, Mönnighof) note, in addition to the spondees, the possibility of using chorees in the initial syllables of a verse.

The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II

1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
History Of

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

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