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

In Translating Troy, Alex Mueller provides convincing alternative theories for how the ideologically-fraught idea of Troy and translatio imperii were reworked by late medieval alliterative poets whose works share compelling affinities. The scholarship in this area has acknowledged Troy’s centrality to the concept of translatio, but has focused on an optimistic view of Troy’s place within this supersession of empires: that is, they have largely dissected how appeals to Trojan precedent bolster claims to English legitimacy and sovereignty. In contrast, Mueller suggests that these alliterative texts take a more pessimistic view of Troy and its role in British historiography—a view rooted in the overlooked tradition of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae. This alternative reading of Troy allows the authors of these alliterative romances to critique translatio imperii and Troy’s role within it, and instead represent nascent English sovereignty as “fundamentally fragmented, destructive, and unjustifiable” (39).

Chapter 1, “Genealogy,” helpfully grounds Mueller’s argument by providing a convincing set of claims that seek to displace Geoffrey of Monmouth and his Historia regum Brittaniae as the font of late medieval conceptions of England’s Trojan origin by focusing on the alternative Guido-tradition. Mueller first thoroughly traces the primacy of the Galfridian tradition in British Trojan historiography, and how the Historia’s liminal status as a text that reads as both fantasy and history allow it to function as a powerful tool for indulging late medieval Britain’s “imperial imagination” (26). Whereas Geoffrey’s work provides a set of more hopeful prophetic pronouncements about the progress of Britain from Trojan origins, as well as comforting imperial fantasies rooted in an “unhistoricized belief in the redemptive power of the translatio imperii” (34), Mueller illuminates how Guido’s text seethes with a language of doubt typified by how Troy represents for Guido a “plague of great destruction.” For Mueller, the Guido-tradition, from which he argues these four alliterative romances descend, reveals the darker implications of Trojan historiography as used in late medieval Britain.

In chapter 2, “War,” Mueller focuses on the Destruction of Troy by John Clerk of Whalley. This text is concerned not only with translatio imperii, but also with two other types of translation: 1) from Latin to vernacular English; and 2) from prose to verse. In adapting his source material, Mueller notes, Clerk uses “poetic didacticism” to emphasize the violence inherent in war, and also how reviving both dead cities and dead bodies (both of which are implicit in translatio imperii) result in tragedy. Mueller first examines a lacuna in the manuscript, which leaves out the key moment in Guido’s text where he articulates how the original Troy’s “plague of great destruction” is rooted in an act of inhospitality that Laomedon perpetrated against the Greeks. While he acknowledges that the reasons for this exclusion will remain a mystery, Mueller provides thought-provoking possibilities in his reading of the missing material. He then goes on to examine Clerk’s multi-faceted role as historian, poet, and translator. Central to this section is the poet’s concept of “the linking of letters” that appears in Clerk’s prologue to the Destruction. Mueller reads this as both the act of translating and, through this, the linking together of Trojan and British history. Clerk’s focus on “linking” as not only translation, but also as “locking” or “securing” emphasizes how, in Mueller’s estimation, “truth” about Troy can be translated to a more inclusive audience—a vernacular audience instead of one the Latin-educated elite. Mueller then turns to a comparative reading of Clerk’s Destruction, Guido’s text, and the Aeneid to demonstrate how Clerk downplays the role of fate, fortune, and the Gods in his version to focus instead on the role of human error in the subsequent destruction, which ultimately condemns Troy as representing a dangerous past and not a source for future sovereign glory. The chapter’s last section wraps these ideas up compellingly, by...