The "Alexandreis" of Walter of Chatilon: A Twelfth-Century Epic (The Middle Ages Series)

Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 Select Bibliography 28 The Alexandreis 32 Prologue 34 Book One 36 Book Two 54 Book Three 72 Book Four 90 Book Five 110 Book Six 128 Book Seven 146 Book Eight 162 Book Nine 180 Book Ten 200 Notes 216 Index of Proper Names 240 A 240 B 241 C 241 D 241 E 242 F 242 G 242 H 242 I 242 J 242 L 243 M 243 N 243 O 243 P 243 R 244 S 244 T 244 U 245 V 245 W 245 X 245 Y 245 Z 245 David Townsend's translation - the first ever into English verse - affords modern readers a vivid sense of the aesthetic appeal and sophisticated artistry of Walter's poem. A concise introduction sets out the poem's background and significance in literary history, while also suggesting how Walter's text resonates with the literary sensibilities of our own times. Townsend's explanatory notes, adapted in large part from glosses in the surviving manuscripts, allow modern audiences a remarkable glimpse into the ways in which medieval readers of the Alexandreis must have understood the poem.

Written sometime in the 1170s, Walter of Chatillon's Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great loomed as large on literary horizons as the works on Jean de Meun, Dante, or Boccaccio. Within a few decades of its composition, the poem had become a standard text of the literary curriculum. Virtually all authors of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries knew the poem. And an extraordinary two hundred surviving manuscripts, elaborately annotated, attest both to the popularity of the Alexandreis and to the care with which it was read by its medieval audience.

Book One invests the king with arms and sceptre when Aristotle's holy draught has filled him.