Campo de fuerza para la molécula de piridina

Alexander the Great approaches the beautiful and rich Queen Candace. He is disguised as his own messenger, and travels under the protection of Candace’s son. Long ago she had sent Alexander letters offering both her realm and her love, but only if he would take her as his equal (“si a pier la volt avoir”).¹Since then he has heard a prophecy of his approaching death and has defeated his last great enemy, the emperor Porrus of India, but now he puts aside both militancy and impending mortality. Candace awaits, gorgeously dressed, attended by min-strels,

E se fist vieler e harper un nouvel son Coment danz Eneas ama dame Didon, E coment s’en ala par mer od son dromon, Cum ele s’en pleint sus as estres en son, E cum au de roin se art en sa meson.

Pensive en est Candace del torn de la chançon.

Es vous donc son fiz! Candeules ot non,

E tient par le poing destre son noble compaignon.

And she had them playing on viol and harp a new tune How lord Eneas loved lady Dido,

And how he went off to sea in his swift galley, How she cried her lament up to the rooftop, And how at last she burned herself in her palace.

Candace was pensive at the close of that song, When behold! Here’s her son, Candeules was his name, Holding his noble companion by the right hand.

(Roman de Toute Chevalerie, 7650–57) Candace’s choice of music and her thoughtful reaction seem prescient:

Alexander too will dally with her briefly then return to imperial conquest in frank relief. Yet the implication is not just one of erotic analogy. Some readers at least would recognize here a version of earlier history and lineage, in that Alexander’s Macedonian ancestors were, it was thought, also survivors of Troy.²

This passage in Thomas of Kent’s Roman de Toute Chevalerie conflates dynastic history, courtly eroticism, and a self-conscious reworking of Latin models; in all these ways it exemplifies the group of French and Anglo-Norman texts that have been called the romans d’antiquité. Thomas’s late twelfth-century Alexander romance, and the roughly contemporary Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris, come at the end of the first blossoming of the “romances of Antiquity,” well after the anonymous Roman de Thèbes (1152 or a little before) and Roman d’Eneas (c.1155), and the Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (1160 or soon after). Thomas claims connection to these predecessors by this overt reference as well as by a series of geographical overlaps and historical sum-maries of Alexander’s classical forebears at Thebes and Troy. At the same time, the Roman de Toute Chevalerie often encounters its predecessors in ways that contest, or at least re-examine, their preoccupations. Although she does soon lose her lover as did Dido, for instance, Candace first solicits Alexander as a feudal equal (“a pier”), controls the terms of their affair, sees Alexander off without explicit regret, and appears firmly in power as she leaves the narrative. By such complex echoes and inversions of literary models, the romances of Antiquity group themselves into a recognizable cluster, if not quite an independent genre.³ The clerkly poet is almost explicitly figured in the scene. Alexander and Candace meet not just in the presence of Candeules, but also the performers of the “nouvel son.” This group, performers of one erotic story and audience of another, nicely reflects the anomalous position of educated clerks (most of them in some level of holy orders) at the secular court in the twelfth century. It is a per-sistent habit in the romances of Antiquity to interpolate versions or icons of their own learned makers within their texts: poets, inscriptions and epitaphs, build-ings and fabrics decorated with scientific and cosmological learning.

The learned, clerkly poet brought ancient narrative to his aristocratic audi-ence. The very scene of Queen Candace listening to a new version (“un nouvel son,” 7650) of an already ancient tale provides a mirror within the text for the key role played by the romances of Antiquity in twelfth-century aristocratic culture. They made available to an aristocratic audience with little command of Latin the stories of what it often considered its own genealogical past. This past was at once distant by chronology, yet connected by genealogy, and through it the clerical redactors created a discursive space in which to regard the political conflicts and erotic negotiations of their own time, as well as the unstable family lines resulting from both. This was especially relevant to the Anglo-Norman court with which most of these texts are to some degree connected; that court embraced a mythical, double Trojan genealogy as descendants of the Norseman Rollo and through the Britons (descendants of the Trojan Brutus) whose island they occupied.

History lessons notwithstanding, the scene is also doubly an erotic interlude,

in which Dido’s tragic love and Candace’s incipient affair mirror one another in a way that lifts both, to a degree, out of time. This function of similitude and repetition, especially around moments of heightened eroticism, tends to resist, even subvert, the linear narration of history. Alexander’s military triumph over the emperor of India is bracketed, and to some degree conditioned, by his earlier receipt of Candace’s letters and later the “amur fine” (7755) of their actual encounter. Much of the interplay of history and erotics, here and elsewhere in the romances of Antiquity, occurs around the actions and subjectivity of power-ful women, women sometimes able like Candace to invite their men to accept them as equals, and willing to exploit their riches as much as their beauty for purposes of seduction.

This moment in the Roman de Toute Chevalerie, then, makes a series of deft gestures to three central aspects of the romances of Antiquity. First, the clerk’s vernacular retelling of stories from learned Latin sources serves an aristocratic society’s sense of its heroic past and its current political destiny, even shaping the former to underwrite the latter. These texts involve a translation of empire as well as learning; they both record and extend the widespread historiographical notions of translatio studii and translatio imperii, the inexorable westward movement of learning and power, from ancient Troy to Greece to Rome to Europe. Second, the romances of Antiquity offer a way of looking through the mirror of the past at a range of ways, some of them unstable and unnerving, in which social order was translating itself into a new form: new modes of power, possessions and their transmission across generations, and the articulation of women’s power in this world. Third, these and other romances enact a new and heightened sense of how the most intimate experience of love and eroticism interacts with the experience and shape of the public world. The sections that follow will focus on these three aspects in turn.

A N C I E N T S TO RY A N D “ N O U V E L S O N ” : T R A N S L AT I O S T U D I I

Study of the great classics of the Roman imperial period was virtually uninter-rupted during the Middle Ages. It was considerably advanced and widened, though, during a florescence of monastic and other ecclesiastical schools that has been called the “renaissance of the twelfth century.” The quality of readings in ancient Latin poetry was enriched by the era’s interest in science, cosmology, and history; and its impact was broadened by the increasing role of Latin writing and documents as governance slowly became more centralized, especially in north-western Europe. The stories recounted in the romances of Antiquity derive from this reinvigorated study of poetic epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’

Thebaid, and of quasi-historical sources in Latin prose such as the late antique

“Dares and Dictys” (fictive witnesses of the Trojan war), and the many narra-tives of Alexander the Great.⁴

The Roman poet Ovid also enjoyed a popularity in the schools that was vir-tually unaffected by his preoccupations with pagan mythology and eroticism.

Ovidian love casuistry and its armature of rhetorical strategies were studied in poems like the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Heroides. His stories and witty style were widely imitated in twelfth-century Latin poetry, and contributed to the ver-nacular romances’ long internal dialogues on love, depiction of interior states, and scenes of erotic pedagogy. These elements of Ovidian love psychology (and its darker terrors) account for sometimes massive expansion from the romances’

narrative sources, especially in the Roman d’Eneas and Roman de Troie.

Together, these readings and learned exercises in ancient stories were enough of a fashion to invite the parody of Walter Map, a writer connected to the court of Henry II. “A notable wonder! the dead live, and the living are buried in their stead!” he complains in Courtiers’ Trifles (1183–93); “the excellences of our modern heroes lie neglected and the cast-off fringes of Antiquity are raised to honour.”⁵Walter Map’s strictures reflect the degree to which such clerkly learn-ing made itself felt at court; and this in turn implies the role of learned clerks as mediators between abstruse Latin texts and the vernacular culture of secular aristocrats.

The clerks who turned antique story into French and Anglo-Norman poems were also working within, and helping mold, the contemporary vernacular modes of chanson de geste and romance. The chanson de geste was long thought to be the earlier genre. Usually it was simpler in narrative form and style, loosely structured in irregular “laisses” of ten-syllable lines linked by end-line asso-nance. Certainly its themes of national heroes (like Charlemagne and Roland) and military exploits reflect a heroic ethos, and its convention of public perfor-mance points back to early oral epics. Whatever its still-debated origins, though, chanson de geste was being produced in the same time and place that witnessed early romance, and the romans d’antiquité exploit resources of both forms.

While their central narratives concern heroic battle and territorial conquest, the romances of Antiquity also explore themes of romance: private quest, the role of women, eroticism, marvels and prodigies. Their heroes must often choose or negotiate between the claims of public heroism and private experience. These ancient tales use the romance form of eight-syllable lines in rhymed couplets;

and like later romances they are self-consciously bookish works, intended for a more meditative and private reading even if, as in the scene with which this chapter opened, they were performed out loud.⁶

The clerkly redactors of Latin texts into the vernacular were highly active and imaginative agents in this moment of cultural appropriation. They engage in a self-conscious revision of Latin models, and have an often playful and willfully

anachronistic habit of comparing, contrasting, or directly inserting contempo-rary places, times, and institutions within that past. They thereby generate a comparatively safe imaginative space within ancient story to register aspects of their own time. This has a triple impact. First, it normalizes or domesticates Classical story; second, it validates contemporary modes of power by writing them into a mythic past and distant place; and yet, third, it provides a securely ancient mirror in which to investigate the anxieties of the present.

The scene of Candace and Alexander for instance, a wealthy queen inviting the erotic attentions (yet respect) of a great conqueror, might suggest analogies to the courtship of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II; and the episode of Candace trying to manipulate and pacify her fractious and rebellious sons, soon after that scene, could seem particularly piquant in view of the rebellion of Henry’s son in 1173–74 and his ongoing squabbling with his brothers. Or in the Roman de Thèbes, Edyppus encounters his father Laÿus at religious games that suggest tournament – a defining form of aristocratic militancy in the mid-twelfth century, but still officially discouraged. This turns into “une mellee” (Thèbes 231) as tournaments often did, and Laÿus’ head is cut off by his own son, radi-cally emblematizing just the challenge to central power that tournament (a fre-quent disguise for vendetta conflict or the training of private armies) could engender. It is this provocatively modern “mellee,” as much as the antique myth of destiny, that becomes the source for incest, that ultimate disruption of orderly genealogy, and for civil war in the Roman de Thèbes.

As governance and justice were slowly but persistently centralized, especially in the Anglo-Angevin realms of Henry II, the clerk himself – capable of produc-ing charters, edicts, and judicial records – had a growproduc-ing if always marginal power in the secular world of the court.⁷The defining crisis of Henry’s reign was with a clerk, Thomas Becket, who had risen to the highest ecclesiastic office through the court bureaucracy. Learning thus was both a component and a reflection of civil power, and elements of arcane knowledge feature repeatedly in the romances of Antiquity, repeating not just the substance of the clerk’s learn-ing but equally his sense of his presence in the venues of power.

As the Greek king Adrastus prepares for a major battle in the Roman de Thèbes, the narrative pauses for a long description of his tent. The panel over the entry to the tent holds a world map (“mappamonde”) that depicts all five zones of the planet, and includes both the inhabited northwest and the east as far as the four rivers of Paradise (4223–68). Other panels in the tent depict the months and seasons, the laws of the ancient Greeks, and the stories of their kings (4269–84). Such decoration pulls clerkly learning and cosmology into the literal narrative of romance, reconfiguring the way that classroom methods, especially allegory, folded much of the same material into commentary on Latin texts like the Thebaid or Aeneid.

This sense of the clerk’s place is explicit in the prologues of several romans d’antiquité, especially that of Benoît to the Roman de Troie. Those who have

“sciënce” (19, 23), he says, must share it or mankind will be left like beasts, and learning die with them. So Benoît will put the Latin story into “romanz” for those who don’t read Latin letters (“n’entendent la letre,” 37–38). This is not just a mundane activity, though; Benoît draws upon men he calls “wondrous clerks”

(“clers merveillos,” 45, 80, 99), and implicitly includes himself among those whose learning partakes of marvel. Indeed the tent of Adrastus, like many other vehicles of learning within the romances, is itself presented as a marvel, gor-geously worked in gold and surrounded by a gleaming border of precious stones.

It is explicitly called “merveilleux” and is painted with “meinte merveille” (4217, 4222).

This wondrous tent, that bears almost a textual, learned narrative within the broader story of battle, emblematizes the way the clerkly redactors encode their roles in the romances of Antiquity. They do so as well, though, in other marvels of artifice and action that explore more unnerving, even darker implications in their new power of the word and the book. Tombs become stages for marvelous artifice and astounding feats of technology, increasingly as the romances develop and respond to one another. They are supplied with elaborate machinery like the eternal flame in the tomb of Eneas’ companion Pallas, and the bodies they hold, like Pallas’, are often elaborately preserved against corruption (Eneas, 6408–518). Often supplied with epitaphs, they suggest both the permanence and the eerie stasis of the book within a culture of texts performed.

The critical place of writing in at once recording and transmitting heroic achievement is most explicit in the tomb of Alexander in the Roman d’Alexandre, probably the last of these romances to be completed. It is built from solid gold and silver, its hundred windows are made from the skin of a wondrous serpent, and it is surmounted by a golden statue of Alexander himself, holding an apple. The statue has “grant senefiance,” “great meaning,” which the author now offers to tell “en romans,” just as he found it in the history (iv, 1539–42).

That history, though, is not in a book, but explicitly engraved on the tomb’s stone. Here, the wonder tomb and the wonder of the clerkly translator into romance enter a complete circularity.

A N C I E N T S TO RY A N D N E W S O C I E T Y: T R A N S L AT I O I M P E R I I

Two emergent forces, both unstable and highly contested, were especially impor-tant in the political and social development of northern Europe in the twelfth century. First, the conceptual organization of the aristocratic clan had begun hesitantly to shift toward a narrower, “agnatic” notion of the family unit based

on the male line, that often included (though it did not consistently practice) patrilineage; this began also to aid the family’s control of stable units of power, land, and feudal rights across generations.⁸

At the same time, in the intellectual realm, there arose a related apparatus of largely secular narratives – histories and genealogies – that underwrote the origins and continuity of such lineage. A series of secular dynastic histories resulted, tending to pull away from the religious model (derived from Augustine and Orosius) that had viewed human history largely within the scheme of salva-tion.⁹By far the most influential of these secularized histories was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138), which reinforced the myth of the Britons’ Trojan ancestry, connected their later kings to the Roman imperial line, and recounted an alliance between King Arthur and some early Normans, among other points of convergence between Britons and Normans.

Like Geoffrey’s History, the earlier romances of Antiquity – Thèbes, Troie, and Eneas – help provide a mythic prehistory and genealogical source for impe-rial formation in northwest Europe, especially by recounting episodes in the westward movement of power, or translatio imperii, from Troy to Rome and thence to France and England. Together they narrate a patrilineal genealogy especially relevant to the Anglo-Normans, in which primogeniture and the rule of the father, as well as armed militancy, ultimately support the accumulation of land and power in a single family line. The romances of Antiquity seem, I will claim, at once to mirror the emergent concept of agnatic lineage in the society for which they were produced, and yet provide imaginative spaces in which to view the dangers, even terrors, the dark inverses of their intellectually and socially dynamic culture.

Translatio imperii and the rule of fathers are most overtly coded into the Roman d’Eneas, in the persons of those good first sons Eneas and Ascanius, and in Latinus’ engagement of his heiress Lavine to Eneas, despite protests (and accu-sations of sexual deviance) by her mother.¹⁰Along with this genealogical source and model, the romances of Antiquity also fold into themselves many elements that their audience would recognize as supports or results of this system of trans-mission: law, written codes, baronial councils, the rise of a more centralized royal government, and the shift from vendetta conflict and private war to

Translatio imperii and the rule of fathers are most overtly coded into the Roman d’Eneas, in the persons of those good first sons Eneas and Ascanius, and in Latinus’ engagement of his heiress Lavine to Eneas, despite protests (and accu-sations of sexual deviance) by her mother.¹⁰Along with this genealogical source and model, the romances of Antiquity also fold into themselves many elements that their audience would recognize as supports or results of this system of trans-mission: law, written codes, baronial councils, the rise of a more centralized royal government, and the shift from vendetta conflict and private war to