Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France by Venetia Bridges (review)

It was not that long ago that anyone curious about the reception of Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages picked up one of two surveys: George Cary’s The Medieval Alexander (1956) for a broad account of the crafting of the legend from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages, or Paul Meyer’s Alexander le Grand dans la littérature française du moyen âge (1886) for a more specialized study of the romance Alexander in France. These days one can read studies dissecting the medieval Alexander from a host of perspectives: linguistic, geographical, intellectual, historical, codicological, literary. All of this activity in the last twenty-five years or so has steadily established this legend as a near subdiscipline, Alexander Studies, among medievalists.

The impressive framework from which this scholarship draws its inspiration is the vast textual network of Alexander narratives, in classical and vernacular languages, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to western and northern Europe. One distinct branch of texts emanated from the vulgate histories, the surviving classical accounts in Greek (Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica, Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandri, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives) and Latin (Quintus Curtius Rufus’s Historia Alexandri Magni and Justin’s epitome of the Philippic Histories by Pompeius Trogus), and another from the Greek text known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes, which, as it directly and indirectly influenced versions in Hebrew, Latin, and the medieval vernacular romances, accumulated various fabulous episodes (e.g., Alexander’s flight in a chariot led by griffins) and moralizing anecdotes (e.g., his failed attempt to enter an earthly paradise). As scribes and writers transmitted and interpolated these texts from both branches across Europe, knowledge of and attitudes towards the ancient figure crystallized based on geography and availability of sources: those in southern Italy, for example, introduced Jewish episodes of Alexander to the Latin narratives based on the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and their counterparts in England reasserted the authority of the Latin vulgate, particularly the Philippic Histories. This collective transmission created over many centuries Chaucer’s oft-cited designation of the story of Alexander as “commune,” a loaded adjective that the author discusses in the opening pages of her book.

Bridges situates Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great against recent scholarship in the field by arguing that postmedieval “nationalist” approaches to the figure (e.g., the so-called “French” or “English” Alexander) are misguided in examining him in geographical and linguistic isolation and that genre studies are too broad, given that the legend is reliant upon a cacophony of authorial voices, many of which blurred the boundaries of generic conventions. She is right, of course, that we must not assume that the Alexander legend was so neatly packaged across Europe, but no scholar who has examined the prolonged literary activity that accounted for the medieval Alexander has argued as much. She is also right to remind us that Alexander texts are “transnational,” but this is not a novel stance. By the very nature of textual transmission from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the continuous adaptation of the most widely circulated narratives in so many languages, the Alexander legend is inherently transnational and indeed transcontinental. While offering her book as a means of righting the ship of Alexander Studies (although I do not know that the ship is off course), Bridges provides, in fact, a supplementary study. While she argues that studies organized by nation and language perpetuate the oversimplification of the complex corpus of Alexandriana (a point with which I agree), by neglecting the various branches and texts of the literary schema that created the medieval Alexander, she is guilty of the same.

Despite the expanse and complexity of this textual network that ultimately provided us with an intimidating body of “medieval Alexander narratives,” Bridges rejects the use of the words “tradition” and “transmission” in her discussion...