HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 401Moreover, in the romans d’antiquité (according to Baumgartner), poetryis most clearly visible in the guise of rhetorical embellishment—confirmation of the scholarly competence of the clerks responsiblefor it:The same is true of the ‘images of the world’ presented via the descriptionof the tent of the King of Adraste and of Amphiaraüs’s chariotin the Thèbes, of the ‘descriptio mundi’ or digressions provided byBenoît on the customs of the Amazons; then there is the inventory ofmedical knowledge carved upon Amphiaraüs’s chariot in the Thèbes;the same goes for the importance of political speeches and thought inthe Enéas and Troie. Even the lovers’ soliloquies, which could be thoughtof as signaling the advent of the novel, reveal in the excess and minutiaeof their meditations the intention to produce fragments, indeed atotality of possible discourse about love, rather than to pursue theconflagrations and uncertainties of an individual passion. 50In light of the interest they evince in embassies, councils, and combats,these works still have something of the chanson de geste aboutthem. But their authors shared the common goal of translating theirrespective sources as faithfully as possible, and their work can thusbe seen as an important aspect of twelfth-century humanism. Thedeclared ambition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troiewas to translate—in other words, to render into roman—a part ofthe only classical heritage to which he had access, namely, two workscomposed in Latin in the sixth century (but which he believed tobe much older): the Historia de excidio Trojae of Dares the Phrygian;and the Emphemeris belli Trojani of Dictys the Cretan. Convinced thatthese narratives incorporated eyewitness accounts of the Trojan wars,Benoît wanted to give to his own contemporaries a reliable andunbroken chronological account of an important episode in humanhistory. 51In his Roman de Brut, finished in 1155, Master Wace had alreadyrecounted the arrival in Britain of Brut (Brutus), the Trojan descendantof Aeneas who would soon become the eponymous king of the50Baumgartner (1994), 2–3; my translation.51Cf. Boutet (1999), 32: “Est-ce un hasard si les premières œuvres de quelqueimportance en langue vulgaire, chansons de geste et romans d’Antiquité, entretiennentun rapport avec l’Histoire, voire avec l’historiographie en langue latine? Laréférence historique, sous les différentes formes qu’elle revêt dans les textes, devraitalors être rattachée à ce désir d’authenticité, de justification du discours littérairepar une autorité extérieure à la fiction romanesque”.