Translating Troy: Imperial Historiography and Middle English Alliterative Romance

Description

This dissertation investigates late fourteenth-century English translations of Latin texts about the fall of Troy and the broad dissemination of British history through the genre of popular romance. Because critiques of war and imperialism emerge with remarkable frequency in Middle English alliterative romance, this project focuses on how the alliterative poets contribute to a distinctly vernacular understanding of English national identity. On the surface, these romances appear to indulge in a fantasy of English sovereignty by claiming that England is the inheritor of the imperial power of ancient Troy and Rome. I argue, however, that these poems embrace ethical approaches to English origins and consider the negative consequences of war and lay aristocratic empowerment. Through vernacular embellishments of their Latin sources and graphic representations of violence, these alliterative poets express great ambivalence about the imperial practices of their infamous Trojan and Roman ancestors. Because of their provenance in the Northwest Midlands, I read these romances as provincial historiographies that demystify cultural and textual transfers of power from East to West embodied in the medieval notion of translatio imperii (“translation of empire’) — when one empire falls, another more western empire takes its place. My investigation of Troy’s status as an eastern origin for western culture informs the way Troy, as a conquered city, operates throughout these poems. The heroes of these romances not only travel from Greece to Troy to Rome to Britain to enact imperial shifts, but also venture back into these threatening, yet tantalizing, eastern locales to engage in - pilgrimages and conquer pagan territories. Through an analysis of these British fantasies of empire in alliterative romance, Troy and Rome emerge as objects of derision, not imitation. This dissertation therefore redefines the relationship between warfare and ethics in the Middle Ages and interrogates the medieval origins of modern British imperialism and nationalism.