Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great

It was not that long ago that anyone curious about the reception of Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages picked up one of two surveys: George Cary's The Medieval Alexander (1956) for a broad account of the crafting of the legend from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages, or Paul Meyer's Alexander le Grand dans la littérature française du moyen âge (1886) for a more specialized study of the romance Alexander in France. These days one can read studies dissecting the medieval Alexander from a host of perspectives: linguistic, geographical, intellectual, historical, codicological, literary. All of this activity in the last twenty-five years or so has steadily established this legend as a near subdiscipline, Alexander Studies, among medievalists.The impressive framework from which this scholarship draws its inspiration is the vast textual network of Alexander narratives, in classical and vernacular languages, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to western and northern Europe. One distinct branch of texts emanated from the vulgate histories, the surviving classical accounts in Greek (Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica, Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri, and Plutarch's Parallel Lives) and Latin (Quintus Curtius Rufus's Historia Alexandri Magni and Justin's epitome of the Philippic Histories by Pompeius Trogus), and another from the Greek text known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes, which, as it directly and indirectly influenced versions in Hebrew, Latin, and the medieval vernacular romances, accumulated various fabulous episodes (e.g., Alexander's flight in a chariot led by griffins) and moralizing anecdotes (e.g., his failed attempt to enter an earthly paradise). As scribes and writers transmitted and interpolated these texts from both branches across Europe, knowledge of and attitudes towards the ancient figure crystallized based on geography and availability of sources: those in southern Italy, for example, introduced Jewish episodes of Alexander to the Latin narratives based on the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and their counterparts in England reasserted the authority of the Latin vulgate, particularly the Philippic Histories. This collective transmission created over many centuries Chaucer's oft-cited designation of the story of Alexander as “commune,” a loaded adjective that the author discusses in the opening pages of her book.Bridges situates Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great against recent scholarship in the field by arguing that postmedieval “nationalist” approaches to the figure (e.g., the so-called “French” or “English” Alexander) are misguided in examining him in geographical and linguistic isolation and that genre studies are too broad, given that the legend is reliant upon a cacophony of authorial voices, many of which blurred the boundaries of generic conventions. She is right, of course, that we must not assume that the Alexander legend was so neatly packaged across Europe, but no scholar who has examined the prolonged literary activity that accounted for the medieval Alexander has argued as much. She is also right to remind us that Alexander texts are “transnational,” but this is not a novel stance. By the very nature of textual transmission from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the continuous adaptation of the most widely circulated narratives in so many languages, the Alexander legend is inherently transnational and indeed transcontinental. While offering her book as a means of righting the ship of Alexander Studies (although I do not know that the ship is off course), Bridges provides, in fact, a supplementary study. While she argues that studies organized by nation and language perpetuate the oversimplification of the complex corpus of Alexandriana (a point with which I agree), by neglecting the various branches and texts of the literary schema that created the medieval Alexander, she is guilty of the same.Despite the expanse and complexity of this textual network that ultimately provided us with an intimidating body of “medieval Alexander narratives,” Bridges rejects the use of the words “tradition” and “transmission” in her discussion of a handful of texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and concerns herself not with the sources behind them but with reading these texts in dialogue with contemporary narratives of—and, intriguingly, not of—the protagonist. She argues that such reading across languages and genres, rather than within them, reflects an “accurate historicist approach” and offers “perhaps the closest modern scholars can come to experiencing key aspects of medieval literary culture” (p. 241). If we acknowledge, however, that an individual author's material for crafting an Alexander narrative depended upon the sources that had made their way to his corner of Europe and that readers encountered any given narrative in various versions (such as the Historia de preliis, the series of Latin adaptations of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes) and in various manuscripts (perhaps none so frustrating as the collective French work known as the Roman d'Alexandre), then we must be cautious in taking her word for it.The result is more an insightful discussion of translatio studii, the unifying theme of the book, than of Alexander's medieval reception, and although Bridges's reading of texts in dialogue both within and beyond the Alexander corpus is a welcome addition to the field, her generalization of this vast textual corpus behind the legend is disconcerting. This is apparent in two of the book's early chapters: “Alexander in Antiquity,” a survey of the classical translatio studii of Alexander in Greek and Latin; and “Anxious Romance,” a comparative reading of Walter of Châtillon's twelfth-century Latin epic Alexandreis with the composite, cumulative text known as the Roman d'Alexandre. Surveying the classical Alexander, Bridges writes, “this complex network [is] too diverse and intertwined a body of texts to be defined using terms like ‘tradition’ or ‘transmission’” seemingly as justification for using Richard Stoneman's Penguin edition of the Greek Alexander Romance (the Pseudo-Callisthenes) as the basis of her discussion of the “complex web of Latin material” (p. 35). In similar fashion, relying on Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (volume 2 of the Princeton series, the Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre) is a questionable decision in a study that criticizes generalizations in how we write of the medieval Alexander.What Bridges offers is a reasonable case that “the critical debate over the historicity (or otherwise) of the antique accounts . . . has dominated scholarship, potentially to the detriment of analyzing the texts for their literary characteristics, including translatio” (p. 239). I agree with her on this point—to the extent that Bridges's concluding remarks on the Alexandreis as a poem that “is deeply indebted in contemporary debates about literary and political cultures, debates that transcend boundaries of genre, geography, and polity” (p. 109) reflect a standard assumption about any text featuring the politically valent protagonist. No doubt more work is to be done in reading the Alexander legend alongside other narratives within the classical tradition. Her discussions of individual texts removed from the aforementioned network are compelling. Bridges offers insightful readings of the Alexandreis, Joseph of Exeter's Ylias, the Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, and Cligès, all of which she examines via geographical contexts that may have informed their intellectual influences and hermeneutic and poetic responses to Alexander and the classical tradition. Valuable, too, is Bridges's discussion of the Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie, a poem that has long sat neglected in the long shadow of the Contintental Roman d'Alexandre, and in her interpretation of the author's remarks on his source-texts as an excursus on “how to read and interpret material” (p. 159), a concern that she detects in both the author's remarks on his sources and in the characters whom he portrays, she offers a sound argument on what we stand to benefit from not ignoring the poetics of the surviving medieval treatments of Alexander.The strength of her book is this attention to the “literary characteristics” that Bridges (rightly) accuses some of her fellow Alexander scholars of too often ignoring. However, readers may be distracted from this merit by her frequent suggestions of all that must be corrected within Alexander Studies and the “red herring” that we chase in discussing “historical,” as it were, from “fictional” versions of Alexander in medieval literature (p. 239). Comments throughout the book suggest a broad wave of the hand at the wider corpus of Alexander texts and the scholarship dedicated to it: her search for evidence that the Alexandreis and the Roman d'Alexandre “are . . . indirectly connected via Latin material” (p. 112) (true of countless Alexander texts that drew either from the Valerius Epitome or the Historia de preliis); her casual suggestion, without any sustained discussion, that Alexander is a generic hero from the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes onward (p. 167); her review in her first chapter of Greek sources that had no bearing on Alexander texts in her period and place; her insistence that we must now consider as transnational texts that accumulated various episodes as they were transmitted from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin to Europe's vernaculars and from one end of the continent to the other (pp. 3–12). This is not to say that one cannot be critical of the vibrant, and still evolving, field of Alexander Studies, but one should not do so while remaining disengaged from the textual creation of the Alexander legend via a pan-European network of translations, adaptations, and interpolations—the very reason why we have seen of late such prolific scholarship on the classical figure

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