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Reviewed by:
  • L’historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre le Grand
  • Charles Russell Stone
L’historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre le Grand, ed. C. Gaullier-Bougassas (Turnhout: Brepols 2011) 375 pp.

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a golden age of scholarship on Alexander the Great. In recent years, several key moments in Alexander’s classical and medieval reception have received due attention: Richard Stoneman’s Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), Diana Spencer’s The Roman Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), and A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. by Z. David Zuwiyya (Leiden: Brill, 2011) have, to cite three important works, done much to increase our understanding of the most enduring figure of the classical tradition. The latest entry in the field is L’historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre le Grand, the inaugural publication in the Alexander Redivivus series from Brepols. Many books on Alexander in the past decade have been presented as surveys of his extraordinary legacy, and this collection, which offers essays on texts from across Europe and the Near East, follows the same plan. However, while these previous surveys have attempted to address the totality of Alexander’s chronological reception (e.g., the definitively “Roman” or “medieval” Alexander), the present offering focuses on the still understudied field of the conqueror’s presence in the imagination of historiographers.

It has been over half a century now since George Cary categorized Alexander texts into those of moralists, theologians, interpolators of exempla, and “secular writers” in his seminal The Medieval Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), but conspicuously absent in this division—all the more so in light of the wealth of contemporary Alexander scholarship—is Alexander’s reputation among historians and chroniclers, writers who engaged with both their own times and the classical past. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, a preeminent scholar of Alexander’s reception in medieval French literature, is thus quite justified in prefacing this collection with the call to arms: “l’historiographie médiévale européenne d’Alexandre reste encore largement un champ de recherches à explorer.”

This historiography of Alexander represents a massive corpus of texts, largely unavailable to modern readers and spanning chronicles, universal histories, compendia of classical literature, and collections of moral anecdotes interpolated from Roman philosphers. Unlike Alexander romances, which have long been brought to light by such series as the Early English Text Society and even Livre de poche, these historically minded texts remain in relative obscurity. The present collection of essays thus does a great service to scholars of the Continental Alexander tradition by focusing on unedited works, particularly vernacular texts. Still, assessing an Alexander historiography, much less distinguishing it from legendary tales, can be a frustrating task to begin. When it comes to Alexander, one must acknowledge (and accept) the continuously blurred lines [End Page 207] between history and romance, and although some readers may find it odd to devote the first three essays of a book on Alexander historiography to ‘mythistoria,’ these pieces will surely prove the most beneficial to the greatest number of scholars.

Anyone wishing to analyze the medieval Alexander must appreciate two fundamental groups of texts: the historians and biographers of classical Rome (Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Arrian, Plutarch, and Justin’s epitome of the Philippic Histories by Pompeius Trogus—all of whom Gaullier-Bougassas helpfully contextualizes in her introduction) and the lineage of Latin romances from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (the Valerius Epitome and the recensions of the Historia de preliis). Both groups remain curiously under-appreciated in modern Alexander scholarship, and while a handful of specialists may be drawn to the essays on French, Spanish, English, German, and Armenian appropriations of Alexander, they are encouraged to read the opening essays here as well for a much needed background to the conqueror’s evolution into a mythical figure. Moreover, it must be admitted that no collection will please every reader. As with the companion to the medieval Alexander published last year by Brill, there is only one essay (in French) on Alexander’s reception in Britain, although it...

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