Introduction

Summary

Epic, which was invented after memory and before history, occupies a third space in the human desire to connect the present to the past: it is the attempt to extend the qualities of memory over the reach of time embraced by history. Epic's purpose is to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now.

Appropriating Adam Nicholson's quotation describing Homeric epic and applying it to twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature, material that is frequently defined by its distance from classical epic, may seem a deliberately provocative way to begin a study of Alexander narratives of the High Middle Ages. For Alexander the Great is the hero of no classical epic poem: no Homer or Virgil chose to immortalize him in prestigious verse, despite his extraordinary personal qualities and his imperial domination of the known world. Indeed, Alexander's self-proclaimed medieval Virgil, Walter of Châtillon, gleefully points out this glaring deficiency on the part of his classical rivals in his own twelfth-century treatment of the Macedonian. So Alexander would appear to be an unlikely participant, interpolated more by the academic need for a starting point rather than for his strict relevance, in Nicolson's memorable discussion of classical epic poetry.

Yet the elevated purpose that Nicolson here ascribes to epic surely transcends not only this particular poetic form but also the classical age that produced it. The idea of poetry making ‘the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives … the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now’ describes, in far more inspiring terms than those habitual in academic analysis, the explicitly stated function of much medieval poetry focusing on the stories of the past, stories retold in and for different times but connected to that past via the act of translatio studii. Romance narratives of Troy, for example, frequently begin with the idea that hearing stories of the past will benefit the audience from a moral perspective, an attitude simultaneously found to justify the reading of pre-Christian classical poetry like the works of Ovid in medieval centres of learning.