Benoît de Sainte-Maure
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Benoît de Sainte-Maure (1154 – 1173) was a 12th century French poet, from Saint-Maure, Indre-et-Loire. His 40,000 line poem Le Roman de Troie ("The Romance of Troy") was a central medieval retelling on the epic theme of the Trojan War, which inspired a body of literature in the genre called the roman antique, loosely assembled as the Matter of Rome. Le Roman de Troie influenced the works of many, including Chaucer and, later, William Shakespeare. Only Guido da Colonna's Historia Distructionis Troiae was as often adapted. Benoît's sources for the narrative were the Latin rescensions of Dictys and Dares and some material from the all-but-lost Latin rescension that is represented now in part opf a single, fragmentary manuscript, the Rawlinson Excidium Troie in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The audience for Benoît's famous poem was an aristocratic one, for whom this retelling, and the romans antiques in general, served a moral purpose, a "mirror for princes" in the didactic genre of Mirror literature.[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1992.
