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Part of the book: Engaging with Troy

Edited by Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell

Transcript 27

Legenda

RenaissanceEnglishDramaFictionopen

Abstract.  Down the ages, reconnecting with Troy has been an ongoing process of ‘rediscovery backwards’ of what is known, quoted, imitated and deconstructed, and this is especially true of the two periods this volume invites readers to explore, early modern Europe and present-day Europe. The popularity of the myth of the Trojan War was already fundamental to the fashioning of historiographical discourses in the Middle Ages — medieval chroniclers viewed the ‘gest de Troy’ and the Bible as jointly structuring the ladder of the world’s history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as in the twentieth and early twenty-first, poets, dramatists, philosophers and scholars have anatomized contemporary crises by looking back on the physical and cultural erasure of Troy. What both periods share is a view that the matter of Troy, with its tensions and contradictions, is relevant to national and/or world issues.

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