Chansons de geste, epic and chilvary romance: the meanings and uses of elevated poetic genres in Historia troyana of Pedro I of Castile

Abstract

Historia troyana is a 14th century chivalry romance commissioned by Pedro I of Castile and it was mostly preserved in an illustrated and bilingual manuscript - in Castilian and Galician-Portuguese - from the Menéndez Pelayo Library (B, ms. 558). The addition of such work to the list of trojan legends revisited in the Middle Ages accounts for investigations into how the elements of epic form tradition are maintained and reformulated in this roman, in order to point out - both through written content and through iconographic material - to the confluences between chivalry romance, chanson de geste and epic in medieval Iberian. This study will be based on theoretical references related to Conceptual History, as postulated by Koselleck (2012; 2014) and Hansen (2019). Furthermore, it will be developed a historiographical and critical literary approach, based on works such as those by Braga (2005), Copeland and Sluiter (2012), Curtius (1979), Gotérrez (2010; 2017) Huizinga (2010); Mattoso (1993) and Stanesco and Zink (1992). Finally, in order to assess the place occupied by medieval epic and knightly narratives in the Middle Ages, this work will be founded on poetic treatises from antiquity and medieval times, such as those by Aristotle (Poet.), Horace (Ars.) and Geoffrey de Vinsauf (Poetria nova).