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Article ID: CBB001201553

Geography in Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis and its Medieval Reception (2013)

Hiatt, Alfred (Author)

Journal of Medieval Latin
Volume: 23
Pages: 255--294
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

DOI: 10.1484/J.JML.1.103777

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Science and literature Poetry and poetics Geography Ethnography Ethnography and the practice of history Medieval Chatton, Walter

Recent scholarship has begun to draw attention to the rich and complex history of the medieval reception of Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis. One aspect of that history resides in the attempts of commentators on the poem to explicate the significant amount of topographic reference found in the Alexandreis. Many of the numerous (and still largely unedited) marginal and interlinear glosses on Walter's epic respond to its geography. In addition, a number of manuscripts of the Alexandreis contain a world map, usually a visual gloss to Walter's description of Asia at 1.396-426, but on occasion a larger image located before or after the text. After an overview of Walter's own use of geography in the poem, this article aligns the evidence of glosses with maps to draw conclusions about the ways in which the poem's spatial reference was understood in the later Middle Ages. An instant classic, the Alexandreis was read alongside and with reference to Lucan's Bellum civile and Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum, its representation of space at the intersection of history, rhetoric, and ethnography.

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