Two Troy Books: The Political Classicism of Walsingham’s Ditis ditatus and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Thomas walsingham, the benedictine monk best known for his chronicle accounts of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English political culture, composed a number of texts on classical poetry and prose that have gone almost entirely unnoticed by scholars. Between 1380 and 1394,¹ while precentor and head of the scriptorium at St Albans, Walsingham wrote the Prohemia poetarum, which is an accessus ad auctores, or “introduction to the authors,” comprising some twenty-nine excerpts, with commentary, from classical and medieval writers: the Historia Alexandri magni principis, a life of Alexander the Great modeled in part on the popular Historia de praeliis romance; the Archana deorum, a complete summary of and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is often indebted to Alberic of London’s mythography; De bello civili, a short summary of Lucan’s Pharsalia; and Ditis ditatus, which is a prose narration, with much digressive commentary and chatty cross-referencing, of the Ephemeris belli Troiani attributed to Dictys Cretensis.²

The Ditis ditatus tells the story of the Trojan War from the point of view of a supposed eyewitness on the Greek side, augmented by many references to Homer (via the Ilias latina), Virgil (Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics), and especially Ovid (Metamorphoses, Ibis, Fasti, Heroides, Tristia, Ars amatoria, and Epistulae ex Ponto), with less frequent references to Lucan, Statius, Seneca, and Cicero. Solinus, Orosius, Servius, and Lactantius occasionally drop in as cross-references, as does Bernardus Silvestris, but most often Walsingham cites classical authors in describing the various figures and events associated with the war—or relies on his own Archana deorum, particularly when elaborating on the mythographic material. Frequent “T” sigla in the margins of the unique surviving manuscript of the Ditis ditatus³ indicate places where Walsingham either speaks in propria persona or veers away from the Dictys narrative with one of his many interventions through another author; passages that follow the original source are marked with “O.”⁴ This is a scholar’s text: citation is piled on citation in notes that clearly delight in specificity and in their own accumulation.

Ditis ditatus, however, is to be distinguished from the tradition of clerical classicism in several important ways. Unlike many medieval treatments of Antiquity, Walsingham’s refuses to allegorize: the pagans and their rites are just that. And neither does he engage in pedagogical commentary along the lines of the classicizing friars identified by Beryl Smalley.⁵ This Troy book is a very writerly text: consistently exceeding the formula of citation and gloss, Walsingham does not simply hang quotations in their appropriate places and proceed to explication, but rather interjects, digresses, and muses at length not only on the significance of particular passages but on relevant examples from other literary sources seemingly as they happen to come to mind. His knowledge of classical literature is both profound and nimble, the text shot through with sophisticated playfulness.

The colophon that establishes Walsingham’s authorship acknowledges his amplifying tendencies:

Finitur historia Troiana a Dite Greco aliter Gnosio et Cretensi edita, sed a Fratre Thoma Walsyngham Monaco Verolamensi scilicet exempti monasterii Sancti Albani declarata et historiis ac poematibus ampliata diversis ac ditata. Unde placuit ditanti hunc tractatum vocare Ditem Ditatum.⁶

[Here ends the Trojan history published by Dite Greco also known as Gnosio and as Cretensis. It was elucidated by Brother Thomas Walsingham, Monk of Verolamensis, of the exempt⁷ monastery of St Albans, who expanded and enriched it by various histories and poems. It is pleasing, therefore, for the one who enriches it to name this tract the Dictys Enriched.]

Punning with the verb dito (“to enrich”), the adjective dis (“wealthy”), and the use of the form Dites for Dictys’s name, the title of the text is now, following Walsingham’s extensive additions, “The enriched wealthy thing.” The wordplay of this passage is typical of Walsingham, down to the use of the term Verolamensi[s]: as the city of St Albans was known in Roman times as Verulamium, the author here imagines himself writing from Antiquity.

Walsingham...