Subproject 02
John Lydgate, Troy Book (British Library)
Troynovant Revisited. Strategic hybridisation in the competing traditions of classical antiquity in English Literature c. 1380 – 1620
Prof. Dr. Andrew James Johnston (Institute of English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin),
Prof. Dr. Wolfram Keller (Institute of English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin)
In the second funding period, the subproject continues to investigate competing medieval and Renaissance concepts of antiquity in vernacular English Troy texts written between c. 1375 and c. 1620 as a problem of a systematic hybridization of literary traditions. In this context, the constructions and functionalizations of various ‘old’-‘new’ dichotomies are understood as strategic decisions made within a field of conflicting conceptions of Antiquity which are in turn subject to a constant process of aesthetic and political re-definition in view of specific notions of historicity, authorship and generic traditions as well as attendant ideological and political concerns. In the Anglophone literature of the Middle Ages, the literary engagement with the ‘Matter of Rome’ coincides roughly with the adoption of early forms of Italian humanism and its different conceptualization of Antiquity. Thus, the relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’, a question already addressed in the tradition of the romans dʼantiquité, appears in a different light: a textual tradition that is based mostly on Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, which is characterized by a specifically medieval notion of Antiquity, is joined by an early humanist Trojan tradition that puts the problem of classical sources, literary models, genre conventions and topoi on the intellectual agenda. Yet, the departure from medieval patterns is far less complete than 19th-century clichés of the Renaissance would have us believe. In the first funding period, the sub-project focused on three medieval and early modern threads of the medieval and early modern transmission of Troy: individual Trojan episodes (e.g. Chaucer’s Troilus), vernacular ‘translations’ of Guido’s Historia (e.g. Lydgate’s Troy Book), and texts in which Troy functions as a poetological cipher (e.g. St. Erkenwald). All of these texts frequently reference (partially conflicting) conceptions of Antiquity and generate as well as figure literary innovation in terms of the strategic purification and hybridization of different ‘antiquities’, of multiple temporalities. The various constructions of divergent temporalities appear to ensue in front of a generic/genre-poetological background that will be studied in detail in the second funding period. Processes of purification and hybridization in figurations of ‘novelty’ within the mentioned Troy traditions are frequently signaled by generic references. The poetological relevance of such generic references within their respective purifications and hybridizations of multiple temporalities and antiquities remains under-appreciated in literary scholarship especially as concerns attendant conceptualizations of literary authorship and innovation, which will be the main area of inquiry in the second funding period.
Head of Subproject
Prof. Dr. Andrew James Johnston
Prof. Dr. Wolfram R. Keller