Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Troy in the Older Scots Historical Tradition
- 2 Troy in the Older Scots Romance and Nine Worthies Tradition
- 3 The Scottish Troy Book
- 4 Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson's Testament of cresseid
- 5 Gavin Douglas' Eneados
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Scottish Troy Book
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Troy in the Older Scots Historical Tradition
- 2 Troy in the Older Scots Romance and Nine Worthies Tradition
- 3 The Scottish Troy Book
- 4 Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson's Testament of cresseid
- 5 Gavin Douglas' Eneados
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Scottish Troy Book (hereafter STB) (NIMEV 298.5) has been described as ‘the most shadowy work in [the] corpus of medieval Scottish romances, doomed forever to be “the bits in the Lydgate manuscripts” that are neither by Lydgate nor […] by Barbour’. Only two fragments of this c. 1400 Scottish octosyllabic couplet translation of Guido delle Colonne's Latin prose Historia destructionis Troiae (1287) now survive, in two late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Scottish manuscripts: Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.5.30 (hereafter MS K) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 148 (hereafter MS Do). In both manuscripts the defective STB is combined in a patchwork fashion with Lydgate's Troy Book (hereafter LTB), itself a translation into decasyllabic couplets of Guido's Historia written between 1412 and 1420 (NIMEV 2516).
On the few occasions that the STB has been mentioned at all, it has been commonly classified as a medieval romance, but its generic affiliations are, like those of Barbour's Bruce, in fact slightly more complicated than this. For, the STB is first and foremost a notably close translation of Guido's Historia, which itself purports to be based upon ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Trojan War, and which was subsequently accepted by its medieval audiences as history. Unlike the Middle English Laud Troy Book, which does align itself with the medieval romance tradition, the narrative trajectory of the STB is furthermore, like Guido's Historia and Lydgate's Troy Book, predominantly tragic, charting first the destructions of Old and New Troy, and then the return to their homeland of the Greek force, increasingly marred by internal divisions and inter-generational conflict.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature , pp. 89 - 120Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014