Touch and Temporality in Selected Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and the Roman d’Eneas

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the intimate connections between proximity, temporality and metanarrative in selected thirteenth- and fourteenth-century multi-text manuscripts of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1165) and the Roman d’Eneas (c. 1155), arguing that all display a desire for narratives of the past to construct collective meaning in the later medieval present. It uses the phrase romance historicity/ies to explore the compilatory metanarratives that these books construct, arguing that romance as a genre displays a multifaceted concept of history that combines linear chronology, thematic repetition and narratives of heroic individuals, which is demonstrated in varying degrees in these manuscripts. It highlights that although genre is indeed an important organising principle in such narratives, the relationship between romance and history is fluid even within this generic horizon of expectation.