Benoît de Sainte-Maure
Benoît de Sainte-Maure (around 1165) was a French-speaking author. Nothing further is known about his person except his origin from Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine in the county of Touraine , one of the fiefdoms of the English royal family of the Plantagenets on French soil.
Roman de Troie
Benoît is best known as the author of the Roman de Troie or Trojaromans . This work of over 30,300 verses, preserved in more than 50 manuscripts, is the most successful and most significant of the genre of so-called antiquing novels ( romans d'antiquité ), which flourished around 1170 . It was written for the English court of Henry II Plantagenet and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine , who was a considerable (mostly French-speaking!) Intellectual center.
The material model for the work was not the epic Homer , the Iliad , which was then only known from hearsay in Western Europe , but two Latin depictions of the Trojan War supposedly written by eyewitnesses, but actually apocryphal late antique, namely the Ephemeris belli Trojani by Dictys Cretensis , the wants to have experienced things on the Greek side, and on the other hand De excidio Troiae historia by Dares Phrygius , who pretends to have been there in Troy and reproaches Homer for his fairytale-like representation right from the start. From Dictys (4th century) and especially from Dares (5th century), however, Benoît only adopts the rough framework, which he imaginatively and skillfully furnishes with love stories, chivalrous battle scenes and learned excursions.
The Roman de Troie became apparent after 1200 rewritten for a more urban-middle-class audience in a highly rapacious, largely reduced to the mere act prose version, which was in turn added to 1215 in a centuries read and depreciated and this repeatedly revised Compendium of Ancient History , the so-called Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César .
The Troy material à la Benoît found dissemination throughout Europe in a Middle Latin prose adaptation, the Historia destructionis Troiae . This was started at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Salerno, Matteo della Porta , by an otherwise unknown Guido de Columnis or Guido delle Colonne in 1272 and completed in 1287. This arrangement was translated into numerous vernacular languages and was one of the great book successes of the European Middle Ages. At about the same time and independently of Guido, the Middle High German arrangements by Herbort von Fritzlar and Konrad von Würzburg (around 1280) were made using the French model . A Greek romance novel of the 14th century in verse with the title The Troian War ( Ο Πόλεμος της Τροάδος ) is based on the Roman de Troie .
In France from the 13th to the 16th centuries, the history of Troy was also significant for ideological reasons, because the French kings at that time derived their descent from a legendary Francus who, together with Aeneas, the founder of Rome, during the conquest of Troy by the Greeks rescued on a ship and in turn founded the first Frankish Empire (Francia). This idea was developed around 1570 by Pierre de Ronsard in his epic La Franciade, which has remained a fragment .
History of the Norman Dukes
After the success of the Troy novel , Benoît was commissioned by King Henry in 1174 to write a (also rhymed) story of the Norman dukes and their rule in England. However, for unknown reasons (death of the author?) Interrupts the work in verse 44,544 and King Henry I from.
literature
- C. Durand: Illustrations médiévales de la legend de Troie. Catalog commenté des manuscrits français illustrés du Roman de Troie et de ses dérivés , Brepols Publishers, 2010, ISBN 978-2-503-52626-3
- Elizabeth Jeffreys , Manolis Papathomopoulos (ed.): The War of Troy - Ο Πόλεμος της Τροάδος . RENT, Athens, 1996 - editio princeps
- Cristian Bratu: “Je, auteur de ce livre”: L'affirmation de soi chez les historiens, de l'Antiquité à la fin du Moyen Age. Later Medieval Europe Series (vol. 20). Leiden: Brill, 2019, ISBN 978-90-04-39807-8 .
- Cristian Bratu: Translatio, autorité et affirmation de soi chez Gaimar, Wace et Benoît de Sainte-Maure. In: The Medieval Chronicle 8 (2013), pp. 135-164.
Web links
- Gert Pinkernell: Article in “Names, titles and dates of the French. Literature " (source of the article)
- Publications about Benoît in the Opac der Regesta Imperii
- Literature by and about Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Benoît de Sainte-Maure |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French-speaking author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | before 1170 |
| DATE OF DEATH | after 1174 |