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Part of the book: Engaging with Troy

Edited by Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell

Transcript 27

Legenda

RenaissanceEnglishDramaFictionopen

Abstract.  In fifteenth-century Europe, many dynasties sought to invent Trojan origins for themselves. For Burgundy in particular, the claim to antiquity was a key unifying bond in a nascent state formed from many disparate duchies. Jean Miélot (1420–72) was Philip the Good’s ‘secrétaire’, copying, translating, and fabricating books for the Burgundian court. His extensive additions to Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea drew heavily on the Burgundian reception of Guido delle Colonne’s 13th-century Historia Destructionis Troiae. This text was itself a reworking of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (c. 1165), and claimed to contain eye-witness accounts unavailable to Homer: an underpinning of ‘truth’ for the history Burgundy was constructing about itself.

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