The Trojan Mirror: Middle English Narratives of Troy as Books of Princely Advice by Władysław Witalisz (review)

The publication of C. David Benson’s The History of Troy in Middle English Literature(1980) was followed by a noticeable lack of (monographic) treatments of the Troy story—the most widely circulated secular narrative in the Middle Ages—in Britain. Over the last decade or so, British Trojan texts have attracted critical interest again, in prominent essays by Francis Ingledew on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, John Finlayson and James Simpson on what the latter calls the “other” book of Troy—the vernacular English translations of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae—and in important monographs, such as Sylvia Federico’s New Troy(2003) and Kordula Wolf’s Troja(2008). Władysław Witalisz’s The Trojan Mirroramply references these (and other) studies of the Middle English Troy story, aiming to supplement and extend existing scholarship by reading the late medieval English Troy stories as “educational texts offering advice on moral and political conduct related in their aims to the genre of the medieval speculum.” Situating his readings within a new historicist framework, Witalisz aims to examine how the Troy story “becomes appropriated to a class discourse, which expresses, defines and propagates values assumed as significant” by medieval aristocrats (p. 13), which emerges when reading council scenes and descriptions of Trojan and Greek manners against texts that dispense advice to princes and rulers. In other words, the Troy story is seen as contributing to a debate about the “aristocratic code” as being a “specific sub-genre of didactic historiography, a kind of speculum historiae, which in effect becomes a speculum principis” (pp. 16, 35). The corpus for Witalisz’s investigation comprises The “Gest Hystoriale” of the Destruction of Troy, the Laud Troy Book, the Seege of Troye, and John Lydgate’s Troy Book.

The Trojan Mirroris subdivided into five chapters. The introductory chapter presents an overview of medieval historiographical traditions in general and English Trojan historiography in particular, emphasizing the contemporary utility of history and the potential for the literary historians of Troy (as opposed to the chronicle-oriented monastic historians) to add “didactic digressions and the capacity for building a collective memory that shapes their [aristocratic] readers’ group identity” (p. 25). A second, prefatory chapter briefly surveys the classical and medieval Trojan traditions, the four mentioned English Troy stories, and allusions to Troy in other late medieval English literary texts. A comparative plot summary of the four texts also points forward to the author’s interpretations: Lydgate’s extended commentary on the Myrmidons at the outset of Troy Bookis offered as a heuristic for readers to recognize that it is human agency, “rooted in moral and political virtues,” especially prudence, that shapes history; moreover, Peleus is seen as a representation of Henry, Thessaly as England (p. 54). The chapter closes with brief remarks on genre, identifying the English Troy stories as “‘history’ with the coloraly [sic] of its medieval didactic meanings, and ‘epic,’ with its appeal for identification with (and emulation of) exemplary heroes.” Following statements to the fact that Troy Bookis a mirror for princes (e.g., in Robert Edwards’s edition of Troy Book[1998]), the author extends the hybrid generic shorthand of “epic mirror” to the discussed Troy narratives (pp. 71, 74).

The mentioned proleptic comments aside, for readers familiar with the Troy story, the argument proper begins in the third chapter, in which the four texts are read with a view to their respective representations of the historical process itself, the nexus of history, Fortune, and human agency/prudence. Troy Bookemerges as involving the reader in a “moral debate” about the importance and attendant responsibility of human choice, advocating “a vision of history in which the human agent is the decisive factor” (pp. 80, 82). Such a Machiavellian perspective on history is likewise, albeit less...