Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance by Alex Mueller (review)

Alex Mueller’s learned and meticulous study of the long shadow of Troy upon alliterative romance joins a recent surge of scholarship in the politics of alliterative romance and late medieval vernacular romance more generally. Informed by anti-imperialist critical theory from Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben and Benedict Anderson, Mueller proceeds, through a combination of careful source comparison, manuscript analysis, and close reading, to situate late medieval alliterative romances within a historiographical tradition bifurcated between, on the one hand, the fantasies of empire he associates with Geoffrey of Monmouth and, on the other, the more ambivalent and skeptical anti-imperialist historiography that he associates with Guido delle Colonne. Mueller’s argument thus reads the opening gestures that many alliterative romances make toward Troy as a significant claim about their historiographical sympathies, which almost assumes the potency of a party affiliation. The linchpin of Mueller’s argument is to classify alliterative romances according to how they adapt the Troy legend and what those adaptations suggest about their attitudes toward translatio and aristocratic imperial genealogy. His search for a Guidonian counter-voice is intended as a corrective to the undue scholarly dominance of Galfridian historiographies.

Mueller’s organizing metaphor is corporeal: he notes that Guido and various alliterative romances commonly homologize fractured bodies with equally fractured imperial foundations in particularly moralistic ways. Thus, far from acceding to the allure of Troy as illustrious origin, Mueller’s argument traces Trojan historiography as a kind of pathology. Guidonian Troy is a burnt and dismembered body whose disintegrations invade and infect subsequent historiographies. I loved this reading and found it the most powerful and convincing through-line of Mueller’s study.

Mueller builds upon the work of Patricia Clare Ingham, Geraldine Heng, Randy Schiff, and Christine Chism, among others. His book is structured as five chapters, one setting up the historiographical frame of Guido vs. Geoffrey, and then four more, which treat significant alliterative romances: John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy, The Siege of Jerusalem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The introduction argues that northern and provincial alliterative romances draw upon Guido delle Colonne’s influential Historia destructionis Troiae to critique the southern Galfridian English literary and historiographical traditions that instrumentalize Trojan historiography in the service of imperialism. Mueller posits that alliterative romances highlight the moral atrocity of empire-building by pinioning imperialism’s favorite instruments of self-validation: genealogy, war, violence, heraldry, and territory. Chapter 1, “Genealogy,” posits Mueller’s Guidonian intervention into Galfridian historiography as a skeptical counter-discourse of infective, rather than productive, genealogy. Chapter 2, “War: Reviving Troy,” compares John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy to Guido’s Historia destructionis Troiae, and another Middle English analogue, Lydgate’s Troy Book. From this source study, Mueller concludes that John Clerk, while faithfully translating Guido’s Latin prose text, justifies his own historio-graphical use of vernacular poetry, insisting that “vernacular poetry can appropriately and accurately express Guido’s ‘eyewitness truth’ about historical events” (61). Moreover, where Guido attributes Troy’s fall to a combination of fate and human choice, Clerk, by contrast, underscores the human error and malice that doom Troy, making the Destruction “a raw expression of human freewill” (66). Mueller ends with a vivid reading of Hector’s embalmed body as a misguided attempt to immortalize Troy’s highest chivalric ideals, which instead results in their zombification. Hector’s corpse is displayed over his own monument, looking as he did in life while simultaneously putrefying, blighting visitors to his tomb and readers of the passage alike. Thus, in Clerk’s adaptation of Guido, Troy’s glory is lost in translation but its misjudgments transfer all too readily.

Chapter 3, “Violence,” discusses The Siege of Jerusalem as an exposé of Roman imperial atrocity. Mueller links the seemingly non-Trojan poem to Trojan historiography both through imperial genealogies of translatio that link Troy with Rome...