The "Roman de toute chevalerie": Reading Alexander Romance in Late Medieval England.

Author/Editor
Stone, Charles Russell.

Title
The "Roman de toute chevalerie": Reading Alexander Romance in Late Medieval England.

Published
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Review
Beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the early fifteenth, Stone sets out to trace "two distinct corpora of Alexander narratives," one derived from "vulgate histories" and the other, full of "fantastic anecdotes about Alexander's childhood and campaigns," from the third-century text known as Pseudo-Callisthenes (1). As his title suggests, his focus is England, although with detours into the tradition as it developed in France. Thomas of Kent--about whom nothing is known--wrote the Anglo-Norman "Roman de toute chevalerie" in the 1170s. While there are strong suggestions that the poem had a wide audience both insular and continental, only three manuscripts survive, are later (mid-thirteenth and two fourteenth), and all present significant textual challenges. "Gower . . . considered the [poem] still to be an authoritative source-text on Alexander, one that might be read as a narrative reflective of the dangers that threaten to undermine any king's reign, and an attractive Anglo-Norman Alexander romance in the face of three centuries of French competition" (172). From Thomas Gower borrowed into the CA the narratives of Nectanabus (VI.1789-2366), Diogenes (III. 1201-1330), the pirate (III. 2363-437), and Dindimus (V. 1453-96). Stone argues that Gower found Alexander to be "a criminal who is justly killed for his misdeeds"--allowing his desire for conquest and glory to drive him into endless wars (180). In this view Gower seems to concur with the scribe/commentator of Durham, Cathedral Library, MS C.IV.27B, copied ca. 1350. Stone does not claim, however, that this manuscript was Gower's source. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis