Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Fantasies of Troy makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of how the Troy legend was reimagined and adapted "to perform weighty tasks" in medieval and early modern Europe (1). Its fifteen essays cover a wide range of canonical and non-canonical French, Italian, Irish, English, and Scottish material: literary texts, linguistic treatises, and historiographies. Collectively, these essays shed light on the diverse ways in which the Trojan War and the Fall of Troy served different cultural needs. The myth of Troy helped to underwrite national and civic agendas, yet it could also predict impending disaster; it celebrated heroic masculine will, but it could also illuminate the limits of chivalric masculinity.

Individual essays explore the complex remembering of Trojan heroes in the writings of a single author: for example, Lorna Jane Abray's suggestive study of the different Hectors who appear in the writings of Christine de Pizan: "an immature Hector, a reckless adult Hector, even an embalmed Hector" (137). The figure of this Trojan warrior offered a model of martial masculinity to the French aristocracy. Pizan's versions reflect critically on the chivalric ethos that she wanted to see "removed from models of governance" (145). Other contributors address the ways in which Troy was used to found both civic and national identities. In a fascinating essay Sheila Das contrasts the early Venetian and Roman appropriations of Troy: the Venetian reworking of this myth was "anti-monarchical, anti-imperialist and anti-Roman" (102). Meanwhile, Paul Cohen explores humanist attempts to recover the Trojan-Greek origins of French language and culture. Why did these polyglot humanists, he ponders, "spill so much ink to argue claims that fly in the face of grammatical fact?" (66-67). Two further essays at the end of the collection reflect on English political appropriations of Trojan figures at the turn of the seventeenth century: Scott Schofield considers Anthony Munday's Brute as a celebration less of the founding hero of English national identity than of "stories" and of the communities that share and sustain them; Michael Ullyot advocates the study of "exemplarity" by focusing on the many ways in which Trojan heroes were used to elegize the recently deceased Prince Henry of Wales.

Two essays bring into an especially illuminating focus the volume's broader interest in the topic of memory: Andrew Hiscock's stimulating account of the "remembering" of the sack of Troy in Hamlet and Stephen Guy-Bray's comparison of the Aeneid as translated by Gavin Douglas and the Earl of Surrey. Hiscock discovers in the various tales of Troy conjured up by an anxious Hamlet a "sequence of meditations on possible courses of action," as well as an acknowledgment that stories can always be "retold" and "amended" according to the interests of the storyteller (170, 173). Guy-Bray argues for the "modernity" of Douglas's translation over Surrey's because it addresses both the content and form of the original. He also recognizes that Surrey's partial translation of the Aeneid emphasizes the destruction of Troy and Carthage and the perils of memory.

Collections of essays are well suited to the discovery of difference, and this volume is no exception; it conveys well the richness and diversity of the dissemination of the Troy legend across several hundred years. It also represents a range of critical interests and methods, from cultural history to the more hermetic literary criticism that Spenser's Faerie Queene seems to invite (see the essays by James Carscallen, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, and Rebeca Helfer). However, it can also be difficult to manage such diversity, and the rationale and organization of this collection is not entirely clear. The fifteen essays are divided into three sections: the first deals with "Affiliation and Appropriation," the second with "Rhetoric, Translatio Imperii, and Trojan Legacy," and the...