Imagining Troy: Fictions of Translation in Medieval French Literature.

Author/Editor
Stoll, Jessica.

Title
Imagining Troy: Fictions of Translation in Medieval French Literature.

Published
Ph.D. Dissertation. King's College London, 2014. 312 pp. Fully accessible via https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/imagining-troy/ (accessed February 23, 2026).

Review
Neatly situated among discussions of "translatio studii et imperii" and recent developments in translation studies, Stoll's dissertation "examines the importance of the trope of translation as a means for writers to conceive of their creative process throughout the Middle Ages . . . [exploring how translational] metaphors for textual production have a shaping influence on their narratives" (65). Her focus is medieval French literature that engages the story of Troy and recurrently posits a lost (presumably fictive) Trojan book as a source. Unusually, she includes Gower in this context, setting aspects of his three major works against two by Christine de Pizan ("Epistre Othea" and "Cité des Dames"; see Stoll's chapter three) for the ways they respond to the "tradition of conceiving textual production . . . as a form of translation" (62). Acknowledging that neither Pizan nor Gower wrote a detailed narrative of the Trojan War, nor that either "claims to have translated their texts," Stoll nevertheless includes them because they present a "distinctive concept of fiction" that is "structured" in a way similar to translation "through the concept of the example." Further, both writers "envisage their textual production in relation to Trojan material" and "introduce the figure of Carmentis," mythic inventor of the Latin alphabet, as a provocative figure of transmission (64-65). Gower's multilingualism is central for Stoll insofar as he "frequently puts passages from one of his own texts in one language into another, as well as quoting and translating from other texts" and "blurs the boundaries between translation and multilingual production" (64). Linking Gower's multilingualism, exemplarity, concerns with translation, and allusions and references to Troy (some deeply embedded) with French literary tradition, Stoll explores the poet's ideas about poetic creativity and cultural transmission in "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." [MA]

Date
2014

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Mirour de l'Omme
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis