Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring The Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 24)

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among new institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's Aeneid, and the many kinds of appeal it held for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own claim to poetic and even political authority. What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and re-used in a different, much later period? Taking as his model Virgil>'s ancient epic poem The Aeneid, Christopher Baswell shows how manuscripts which were re-used and re-annotated reveal widely differing approaches to the epic on the part of their users, and how medieval vernacular versions such as the Roman d>'Eneas and Chaucer>'s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women make use of Virgil>'s prestige as a way of laying their own claim to poetic and even political authority. Taking as its model Virgil's Aeneid, this study examines the impact on medieval culture of an ancient text, through both its manuscript annotations and its reincarnation in vernacular versions such as the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame. Examines the impact of an ancient and prestigious text on medieval culture.