| The course explores the politics of medieval adaptations of the literature of Classical antiquity, taking as an example medieval treatments of the Troy legend, often employed to bolster claims of a translatio imperii in the environments of various Continental and Insular rulers. Texts include Benoît de St Maure’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Troie, composed at the court of Henry II, Duke of Normandy and King of England, and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Guido delle Colonne’s internationally influential pseudo-historiographical Historia destructionis Troiae, written in multicultural Sicily, a European centre of translation and scholarship; Giovanni Boccaccio’s Italian urbanized Il Filostrato connected with the Angevin court at Naples; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, responding to the political crisis of the mid-1380s in London; and Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth-century proto-postcolonial Testament of Cresseid, composed on the eve of Renaissance humanism in a Scotland freeing itself from English cultural and political hegemony. The implications of genre will also be explored as the medieval Troy legend is re-written as epic, courtly romance, scholarly historiography, complaint d’amour, and philosophical (Boethian) anti-romance, as well as in numerous shorter genres. The course ends with a glance at later adaptations of the Troy imagery, from Spenser and Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. (Note: Chaucer’s and Henryson’s texts will be read in the original Middle English and Middle Scots; other texts will be read in modern English translation. Familiarity with Virgil’s Aeneid would be an advantage.) |
