Visions of antiquity remembering the classical past in the Castilian Roman Antique

Abstract

The appearance of the Libro de Alexandre and the Libro de Apolonio in the thirteenth-century Castilian literary scene represents the first time in which the key classical narratives about Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, and Apollonius of Tyre are rendered in an Iberian vernacular language. Both works are traditionally studied against the background of the mester de clereca, a body of Castilian clerical didactic poems often composed in the same metrical form as the Libros and encompassing different genres such as hagiography, epic, or romance. In this study, I read the Libros from a European rather than exclusively Castilian perspective as part of the generic tradition of the Roman Antique or Roman D'antiquit, vernacular romances recounting some of the central narratives inherited from classical antiquity. The romances of antiquity initially took shape in twelfth-century francophone courts but were copied, read, and reworked in almost every Western European language throughout the Middle Ages. My reading stems from a reconceptualization of the Roman Antique as a genre primarily concerned with the construction of a collective memory of antiquity, a result of its investment in the larger process of cultural homogenization known as the Europeanization of Europe. I argue that memory is central to the Libros not only in the form of the memorable events recounted in the poems but also as a set of mnemonic strategies necessary to remember them, which the Libros offer to their audience as well. The study explores two fundamental rhetorical techniques of the Roman Antique, ekphrasis and anachronism, as they negotiate the interaction between word and image both within the text and on the manuscript page. In this way, I show how the Libros interrogate the visual and verbal means through which a vernacular cultural memory of antiquity, providing a shared past for the courtly elites throughout the continent, could be successfully created, stored, and transmitted.