Getting in Touch with Troy in Fifteenth-Century France: The First Prose Version of the Roman de Troie in the Manuscript F°26 of the Abbey of Maredsous

Abstract This paper considers how the codex as a medium, specifically via its illustration and layout, translates into material forms the literary and textual choices of the texts it transmits in order to make its version of the Troy story tangible, and thus intelligible for its medieval readers. It takes as an example the first prose version of the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, probably composed in the last quarter of the thirteenth century in Frankish Greece, and focuses more specifically on a late manuscript of Prose 1 , recently rediscovered, the manuscript F°26 from the Abbey of Maredsous (Belgium), made almost two centuries later, c. 1450, in the Burgundian Netherlands. This paper argues that this codex, in its specific context of production and within its textual and visual traditions, allow its audience to come into contact with the long-lost city of Troy, and the narrative that evokes it.