The Migration of Miniatures in Italian Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie
Presented by Marilynn Desmond
(English, General Literature and Rhetoric: SUNY Binghampton)
Monday, February 24th @ 5:00PM | HUMN 250
Troy was of immense importance in the dynastic politics of the Middle Ages, with all the major polities claiming their origins in a Trojan founder. The Roman de Troie (c. 1165) was a French verse romance on the matter of Troy which circulated widely in medieval French-speaking regions and survives in over sixty manuscripts and fragments (more than any other twelfth-century French text). It was translated into Latin, Demotic Greek, Italian and German, and five distinct prose “intralingual” versions were produced. In addition to these textual traditions, the Roman de Troie also generated extensive visual traditions that then migrated into other textual traditions on the matter of Troy. Prof. Desmond’s talk will focus upon five manuscripts of the Roman de Troie produced in fourteenth-century Italy which contain elaborate programs of illustration that exhibit a shared iconography entirely distinct from the visual programs in Roman de Troie manuscripts produced in the Kingdom of France. This paper will use the illustrations to explore the networks and materiality of the artistic tool-world that enabled this specialised iconography to migrate throughout the Italian peninsula, offering a distinctive interpretation of the political significance of Troy. The event should be of interest to classicists, historians and art historians, medievalists, and those working in the Romance languages, as well as humanists in general."