Abstract
Mandeville’s version of Alexander’s encounter with the Gymnosophists goes like this: having been greatly impressed with their “gret feyth and hire trouthe,”Alexander “bad hem aske of hym what that thei wold haue of him, ricchess or ony thing elles”; when they ask him to make them immortal, he admits perforce that such a gift is not in his power to give. The Gymnosophists—who clearly relish opportunities like this—immediately ask him
whi he was so proud and so fierce and so besy for to putten alle the world under his subieccioun,“right as thou were a god and hast no terme of thi lif, neither day ne hour; and wylnest to haue alle the world at thi commandement, that schalle leve the withouten fayle or thou leve it. And right as it hath ben to other men before the, right so it schalle ben to othere after the. And from hens schaltow bere nothyng. But as thou were born naked, right so alle naked schalle thi body ben turned into erthe that thou were made of. Wherfore thou scholdest thenke and impresse it in thi mynde that nothing is inmortalle but only God that made alle thing.” (32.213–14)
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Notes
Magoun, Gests, pp. 174–75. Both Alexander and Dindimus and The Wars of Alexander are descended from the Nativitas et Victoria Alexandri Magni Archpresbyter Leo of Naples’ tenth-century Latin translation of the Greek Alexander romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes (ca. 200 BC-AD 200). The Nativitas, which became known as the Historia de Preliis in its incunabular versions, also produced three interpolated (I) recensions: I1, an eleventh-century reworking and expansion; I2, of an uncertain date before the end of the twelfth century (the source of Alexader and Dindimus and Alexander A another fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative poem dealing with the beginning of the legend); and I3, from before 1150 (source of the Wars of Alexander and the fifteenth-century Prose Alexander in the Thornton Manuscript). Recensions I2 and I3 are independently descended from I1, and according to DJ.A. Ross, “No version of the Alexander-romance has had a wider influence nor produced more vernacular progeny than this wretched little book” (Alexander Historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature, Warburg Institute Surveys 1 [London: Warburg Institute, 1963], p. 47). There are also works in Latin, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Magyar that derive from the various versions of the Historia de Preliis, suggesting a history of transmission that rivals that of Mandeville’s Travels. Prior to the composition of the Historia de Preliis, Julius Valerius’ Res Gestae Alexandri Macedonis, a fourth-century translation of Pseudo-Callisthenes, was the chief Latin source of the Alexander legends; its popularity was eclipsed in the later Middle Ages by both the Historia and a ninth-century Epitome of the Res Gestae itself. The Julius Valerius tradition is the source for most French Alexander poems, two fifteenth-century Scottish versions, and the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder (before 1330). The most complete explication of the complex lines of transmission of the Alexander story in the Middle Ages is still George Cary’s The Medieval Alexander. Less daunting versions can be found in Magoun, Gests, pp. 15–62, and Ross, Alexander Historiatus. See also Duggan, “The Source of the Middle English The Wars of Alexander”Speculum 51 (1976): 624–36.
For an account of the Alexander material in these two texts see G.H.V. Bunt, “Alexander and the Universal chronicle: Scholars and Translators,” in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic: Essays in Honour of David J.A. Ross, ed. Peter Noble, Lucie Polak, and Claire Isoz (Millwood, N.J.: Kraus International Publications, 1982), pp. 1–10, and
Bunt, “The Story of Alexander the Great in the Middle English translations of Higden’s Polychronicon” in Vincent of Beauvais and Alexander the Great: Studies on the Speculum Maius and Its Translations into Medieval Vernaculars, ed. W.J. Aerts, E.R. Smits and J.B. Voorbij, Medievalia Groningana fasc. 8 (Groningen: E. Forsten, 1986), pp. 127–40. Bunt argues that Vincent was an important source for Higden’s account of Alexander, though probably not his chief source, adducing as part of his evidence their divergent treatments of the Alexander-Dindimus episode.
For a concise account of this binary and its origins, see Elisa Narin van Court, “Socially Marginal, Culturally Central: Representing Jews in Late Medieval English Literature,” Exemplaria 12 (2000): 293–326, esp. pp. 300–03.
The Monk’s Tale, 2631–33, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).
Leo continues,“For the prelates, who are eke guides, by reading and meditating how the aforementioned pagans, idolaters though they were, bore themselves above reproach in all they did, may thus sharpen their minds by that example, with the resolve that they be known as leal members of Christ, and greatly outdo those others in chastity, righteousness, and piety.” (“Certamina vel victorias excellentium virorum infidelium ante adventum Christi, quamvis exstitissent pagani, bonum et utile est omnibus Christianis ad audiendum et intelligendum tam praelatis quam subditis, vidilicet saecularibus et spiritual-ibus viris, quia cunctos ad meliorem provocat actionem. Nam prelati, id est rectores, legendo et considerando, quemadmodum praedicti pagani idolis servientes agebant se caste et fideliter atque in omnibus se inreprehensibiliter ostendebant, per eorum exempla bonorum operum ita acuant mentes suas, eo quod fideles et membra Cristi esse videntur, ut multo magis meliores se illis demonstrent in castitate et iusticia atque pietate.”) The translation is Margaret Schlauch?s, from Medieval Narrative: A Book of Translations (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1928), p. 285; for the Latin text, see Die Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni-Synoptische Edition der Rezensionen des Leo Archipresbyter und die interpolierten Fassungen J1, J2, J3 (Buch I & II)
ed. Hermann-Josef Bergmeister, Beitrage zur Klassischen Philologie, Heft 65 (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1975), p. 2a. The sentiments are as old as Augustine’s City of God compare his remarks on Roman virtue in book 5, chaps. 16–18, in City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 205–12.
“Religiosis insuper et in claustris residentibus non erit hec compilacio minus utilis, qui ex processu delectacionem non modicam generit, et fortasse talium personarum tollet accidiam et tedium relevabit. Et cum sit generativa leticie lectio hujus hystorie, occasiones vagandi inutiliter aufert et efficaciter perimet et extinguet.” Quoted from British Museum MS Douce 299, the unique copy of Walsingham’s text, by Paul Meyer, Alexandre le Grand dans la Litterature Francaise du Moyen Age (Paris: F. Viewig, 1886), II: 65. On Walsingham’s authorship of the later compilation and its date, see
V.H. Galbraith, ed., The St. Albans Chronicle 1406–1420 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. xli, xliv–xlv
James G. Clark, “Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered: Books and Learning at Late-Medieval St. Albans,” Speculum 77 (2002): 832–60. For another version of the argument that reading and writing history, pagan and Christian, can relive the tediousness of the monastic life, see the
Eulogium Historiarum sive Temporis, ed. Frank Scott Haydon, 3 vols., Rolls Series 9 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858–63), I.3.
Frank Grady, “The Literary and Political Recuperation of Pagan Virtue in the English Middle Ages,” Ph.D. diss. U.C. Berkeley, 1991, pp. 97–100, surveys the surviving records. In addition to the sources cited there, see also David N. Bell, ed., The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines, and Premonstratensians, CBMLC 3 (London: The British Library, 1992), p. 103 (for the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx, Yorkshire), and
R. Sharpe, J.P. Carley, R.M. Thomson, and A.G. Watson, English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, CBMLC 4 (London: The British Library, 1995), pp. 12 (for Bardney, Lincolnshire) and 255–56 (for Holme St. Benets, Norfolk).
For the life and work of John of London, a mathematician who may have been this donor, see DNB x.885. M.R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. lxxiv–lxxvii, suggests that there were two Johns, both mathematicians, both known to Bacon, and that the younger of the two (d. c. 1331?) was the man in question. He cites John as the donor of the Gesta (#916) on p. 295. This is British Library MS Additional 48,178 (Yelverton MS Appendix I); see The British Library Catalogue of the Additions to the Manuscripts 1951–55 (London: The British Library, 1982), i.141, and The British Library Catalogue of the Additions to the Manuscripts: The Yelverton Manuscripts (London: The British Library, 1994), i.373–75, which dates the MS after 1316. James (pp. 375, 521) identifies the catalogue’s #1544 (Liber de alkemia) with Glasgow, Hunterian MS 253 (U.4.11), though he does not associate the MS with John; however, a note in a fourteenth-or fifteenth-century hand on f.3r of the MS ascribes it to John of London, so it ought to be counted as one of his donations. See
John Young and P. Henderson Aitken, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1908), p. 206.
K.W. Humphreys, ed., The Friars’ Libraries, CBMLC 1 (London: The British Library, 1990), pp. 120 (#486) and 114 (#463f). On Erghome’s library see Humphreys, “The Library of John Erghome and personal libraries of the fourteenth century in England,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 18 (1982): 106–23. For Erghome’s commentary, see most recently
A.G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look,” Speculum 63 (1988): 596–613.
For Hereford, see W.A. Hulton, ed. Documents Relating to the Priory of Penwortham, and other Possessions in Lancashire of the Abbey of Evesham (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1853), p. 95; Sharpe et al., English Benedictine Libraries, p. 144. This Hereford should not be confused with the sometime Lollard Nicholas Hereford, who died sometime after 1417. Wivill’s book is Oxford, Worcester College Library MS 285; see
R.W. Hunt, “A Manuscript Belonging to Robert Wivill, Bishop of Salisbury,” Bodleian Library Record 7 (1962–67): 23–27. For Stafford, see DNB xviii.862–63. The erased inscription identifying him as donor is apparently readable under ultraviolet light, according to the on-line catalogue at Glasgow University Library (on 4/24/00): http://Special.lib.gla.ac.uk/manuscripts/detaild.cfm?DID=32625. For the Cotton MS, see
H.L.D. Ward, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1883–1910), i.114.
Madeleine Blaess, “L’Abbaye de Bordesley et les Livres de Guy de Beauchamp,” Romania LXXVIII (1957): 511–18.
Viscount Dillon and W. St. John Hope, “Inventory of the goods and chattels belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester…,” The Archaeological Journal 54 (1897): 275–308.
Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490 (London: H. Miller, 1996), ii.73.
Ward, Catalogue of Romances, i.129; see also George Warner and Julius P. Gilson, Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1921), iii. 177–79. The manuscript survives as BL MS Royal 15.E.vi.
Walworth’s interest is revealed in the note published by J.M. Manly in the Times Literary Supplement no. 1338 (Thursday, September 22, 1927), p. 647: “Students of the Alexander romances may be interested in the following entry from the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London (25m5d). I quote from the manuscript calendar, p. 155:‘Friday [27 Feb] after the feast of St. Mathias, 5 Richard II, came to the court held before the sheriffs of London, viz. on the fourth day, William Waleworth suing John Salman, a burgess of Bruges, in a plea of debt upon demand of 100L, for which his debtor has been attached by a foreign attachment and has made four defaults. The plaintiff demands his attachment on the customary terms and the articles are delivered to him, viz. a book of Romance of King Alexander in verse [rimiatus] and curiously illuminated, value 10L and a dosser of assar work, presenting the coronation of King Alexander, 9 yds. long, 3 yds. wide, value 6L.’ Perhaps it may be possible to ascertain whether this copy of the romance is among those still preserved and known to us.” M.R. James briefly considers the chances that the book referred to is actually MS Bodley 264, but discounts the possibility; see James, The Romance of Alexander: A Collotype Facsimile of MS Bodley 264 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), p. 5. For Robert Thornton see
George R. Keiser’s two essays, “Lincoln Cathedral MS.91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe, Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 158–79, and “More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton,” Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 111–19. The text of the Prose Alexander has been edited three times: without apparatus by J.S. Westlake, EETS o.s. 143 (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1913); by Marjorie Neeson, “The Prose Alexander A Critical Edition” Ph.D. Diss., UCLA, 1971; and by Julie Chappell, “The Prose ‘Alexander’ of Robert Thornton: The Middle English Text with a Modern English Translation,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Washington, 1982. This last has also been published in book form (New York, 1992).
This text has been edited twice: see Thomas Hahn, “The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: Introduction, Text, Sources, and Commentary,” Medieval Studies XLI (1979): 106–45, and Vincent Dimarco and Leslie Perelman, eds., “The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle,” Costerus 13 (1978). On the copyist of this manuscript, who according to A.I. Doyle was active during the reign of Edward IV, see
Doyle’s “An Unrecognized Piece of Piers the Ploughman’s Creed and Other Work by Its Scribe,” Speculum 34 (1959): 428–36, and
Linne R. Mooney, “A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths,” in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna III (London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 113–23. If we include scribes we could also add to this list Richard Frampton, the early fifteenth-century London scribe who copied the Historia de Preliis at least twice, in Cambridge University Library MS Mm.V.14 and Hunterian 84. For Frampton see
A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, ed. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), pp. 163–210, esp. pp. 192–95 and n.65.
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 219 and Gonville and Caius College MS 154 (the latter from Bury; see Andrew Watson, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain…: A Supplement to the Second Edition [London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1987], p. 60). The most complete account of the Compilation, which has never been published in full, can be found in Meyer, Alexander le Grand II: 52–68; see also Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 68–69; and Magoun, Gests, pp. 244–54, where he prints a small portion of the text. The manuscripts are described in James’s catalogue for Corpus Christi and his A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–08).
DJ.A. Ross, “Parva Recapitulatio:An English Collection of Texts Relating to Alexander the Great,” Classica et Medievalia 33 (1981–82): 191–203.
Cambridge University Library MS Ll.I.15, ff. 136v–137. This addition is not, as the catalogue claims, “a continuation of the letter in the third person” (A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge [1854; repr. Munich: Kraus Reprint, 1980], iv.11), nor, as a marginal note in the manuscript suggests, a passage borrowed from Alexander Neckham’s De Naturis Rerum (f. 136v), but a bit of reconstructive surgery in the same vein as the inclusion of Alexander and Dindimus in Bodley 264. To this list of “corrected” Alexander MSS we can also add BL MS Arundel 123, which contains a fourteenth-century copy of the I1 recension of the Historia de preliis. At the point where Alexander encloses Gog and Magog—a story that only appears in certain I1 MSS—the scribe also cites the version of the story told in Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, in order to stress Alexander’s dependence on God’s intervention. See G.H.V. Bunt, “The Art of a Medieval Translator: The Thornton Prose Life of Alexander,” Neophilologus 76 (1992): 154.
Meyer, Alexandre le Grand, II.63–68, discusses the Douce MS; the final exchange with Dindimus begins on f.91v, near the marginal note “Ranulphus.”Another manuscript now at Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116, demonstrates that interest in Alexander continued through the fifteenth century at St. Albans; in addition to a number of theological tracts and sermons from the monastery, the manuscript preserves more than a dozen letter formulae, an English version of the Carta humane redempcionis (Christ’s last will and testament, addressed to humankind), a tract entitled Composicio Cartarum et aliarum euidentiarum, and a Littera increpatoria darii ad Alexandrum, together with Alexander’s response. The letter, in which Darius rebukes Alexander, calling him “famulus,” slave, and sending him children’s toys, is a well-known part of the correspondence between these two, the first step toward Darius’s defeat by Alexander’s forces; Alexander’s reply interprets the toys (a ball, a string for a spinning top, and two small purses) figurally as signs of his impending conquest. The letter’s preservation in a collection that includes several inuectiones of John Whethamstede (abbot from 1420 to 1440 and again from 1452 to 1465) argues for a strong sense of the relevance of the Alexander letters to the other missives of the same heated tone and general purpose, and thus a continuing interest in classical writing at St. Albans. On Walsingham’s classicism see Clark, “Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered.” The “littera increpatoria” begins on f. 169; I have not yet been able to discover the specific source, although versions of the letter appear in the Historia de Preliis and in Julius Valerius. For a description of the manuscript and its contents, see M.R. James, A Catalogue of…Gonville and Caius College, I.268–76. For a brief account of Whethamstede’s career see David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England II:The End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), II.193–97, and for a survey of his literary output
R. Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), pp. 30–38.
Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of ‘Piers Plowman,’ ” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 104, 109. She continues,“These narratives comprise a kind of mythography of rule, a legendary for ‘possessioners?, lay and ecclesiastical. Whether at the level of catechitical dialogue (between ruler and philosopher, prophet and unjust judge, Saracen or pagan king and apostle) or war between the traditional culture-bearing power of the west and the opposing culture it will in the long process of time supplant (Greece and Troy, Rome and Jerusalem), these works present in a compendious historical mirror man’s confrontation with spiritual dangers, and the rationale of large communal enterprises. They do so for the benefit, and from the viewpoint, of those who are situated to reflect on these enterprises and their consequences: the nobles, knights, burgesses and clerics who advised, judges, and acted in them by virtue of ‘possessioun’—their responsibilities and powers devolve from what they hold and of whom” (109–10).
For the suggestion that Alexander’s generosity as recreated by the Jewish chroniclers is based on an actual “exemption fiscale” of Caesar’s, see M. Simon, “Alexandre le Grand, juif et chretien,” Revue d’Histoire et Philosophie Religieuses XXI (1941): 179. Simon makes an even stronger case than I do for the “Hebraicization” or “Christianization” of Alexander in this episode, claiming that “En se mettant sous son patronage, Israel annexe du m? coup a sa foi: protecteur des Juifs, il est aussi l’instrument, elu et conscient, de Dieu” (180).
Of the twenty surviving manuscripts, which date from the mid-fourteenth through the end of the fifteenth century, six are fragmentary or incomplete, two represent a textual tradition that does not contain the two exempla (the Expanded Northern Homily Cycle in a Northern dialect), twelve contain the tale of Trajan’s salvation, and ten of those pair Trajan with Alexander: Bodley 6923, CUL Dd.I.1, CUL Gg.V.31, Minnesota Z 822 N 81, Huntington HM 129, Lambeth 260, the Bute MS, BL MS Additional 38010, the Vernon MS, and the Simeon MS. For an account of the MSS, see Saara Nevanlinna, ed., The Northern Homily Cycle: The Expanded Version in MSS Harley 4196 and Cotton Tiberius E. VII, Memoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 38 (1972). For the genesis and circulation of the cycle, see The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 125–26, and
Thomas J. Heffernan, “Orthodoxies Redux: The Northern Homily Cycle in the Vernon Manuscript and Its Textual Affiliations,” in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 75–87. The one other Middle English text I know of in which these Alexander and Trajan stories appear together is James Yonge’s The Gouernance of Prynces, a 1422 translation of the Secretum secretorum; I discuss this text in the conclusion.
I quote from the version of the sermon in the Vernon MS, and have transcribed passages directly from the manuscript facsimile prepared by Doyle, marking expanded abbreviations and supplying minimum punctua-tion;passages are identified by folio and column. This version of the sermon has not been printed in full, although the exempla are printed by Carl Horstmann, “Die Evangelien-Geschichten der Homiliensammlung des MS. Vernon,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 57 (1877): 241–316.
This story is based on a confusion of two other legends, both of Jewish origin; a condensed account of their origin and transmission can be found in Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 130–32, 295–97, and a fuller treatment in Andrew Runni Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Inclosed Nations (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1932).A necessary supplement to the latter is Scott D. Westrem’s “Against Gog and Magog,” in Text and Territory, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 54–75. Horstmann, “Evangelien-Geschichten,” pp. 306–07, prints the NHC version. Josephus describes how Alexander imprisoned the Scythians behind iron gates, identifying the prisoners with the biblical giants—or peoples—Gog and Magog. Picked up in the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius, this version of the story passed into the I2 and I3 versions of the Historia de Preliis and thence into the Wars of Alexander see
Alfons Hilka, Der altfranzösiche prosa-Alexanderroman nach der Berliner bilderhandschrift…(Halle a S.: M. Niemeyer, 1920), p. xxxi, and
Karl Steffens, ed., Die Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni: Rezension J3, Beitr? zur klassischen Philologie, Heft 73 (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1975), p. 174. A second story, often confused or fused with the first, involves Alexander’s enclosure of the Ten Tribes and their apocalyptic fate; this is the version contained in the Vernon sermon. Delivered to the Middle Ages via the Vitae Prophetarum of Pseudo-Epiphanius, it appears in the Historia Scholastica, whence it passed to later chroniclers: Matthew Paris, Vincent of Beauvais (who treats the story with some scepticism), Higden and others. See Cary, Medieval Alexander, p. 296.
W.W Skeat, ed., Alexander and Dindimus, EETS o.s.31 (1878; repr. London: H. Milford for Oxford University Press, 1930), p. xviii.
Wells (A Manual of Writings in Middle English, 1050–1400 [New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1916], I.104) claims that “The letters are really a presentation of all the author can say on the old theme of the contrast and relative worth of the Active Life and the Contemplative Life,” concluding that “The whole is cleverly manipulated so as to exhibit the excellent qualities of each of the opposing elements, without seeking to persuade to conclusion in favor of either.” R.M. Lumiansky, in the revised manual, sees in the device of the letters “a balancing of aspects rather than an outright debate” (A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500 J. Burke Severs, gen. ed., Vol. I fasc. 1.5 [New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967], 108). For Bennett, who goes on to observe that the poem “scarcely merits such ornament” as it receives in MS Bodley 264, see Middle English Literature, ed. and compl. Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 92–93. Turville-Petre’s judgment that “It is a sad irony that, of all the magnificent poems of the Revival, it was the incompetent and tedious Alexander and Dindimus alone on which scribe and illuminator lavished their professional attention” can be found in his The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1977), p. 43.
In other versions of this correspondence, they do meet, and the confrontation is typically humiliating for Alexander; see George Cary, “A Note on the Mediaeval History of the Collatio Alexandri cum Dindimo,” Classica et Mediaevalia XV (1954): 124–29, and n.67 below.
The Collatio Alexandri cum Dindimo per Litteras Facta is probably a product of the fourth century, although it was revised in the tenth for inclusion in the Historia de Preliis. The origin of the Collatio and its relation to later works about Alexander are discussed by Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 14, and Magoun, Gests, pp. 46–47; the Collatio’s own sources in Greek writing are traced by J.D.M. Derrett, “The History of Palladius on the Races of India and the Brahmans,” Classica et Mediaevalia 21 (1960): 64–99.
Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11.
In fact, the original version of the correspondence with Dindimus was probably intended to be a defense of Alexander against Cynic or Stoic attacks on his character. See Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 13–14 and “Note,” p. 125; Hahn, “Indian Tradition,” pp. 219–20; and E. Lienard, “La Collatio Alexandri et Dindimi,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d?Histoire 15 (1936): 819–38.
See Higden, Polychronicon, ed. Lumby, iii.472–79, and Eulogium Historiarum i. 432–34. Neither of these moralizing historians goes quite as far as Johann Hartlieb, physician and diplomat for Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria. In his mid-fifteenth-century version of the story Alexander, despite being convinced of the truth of everything Dindimus says, nevertheless explains that he cannot emulate the virtuous Indian; he spends the rest of his life sadly regretting this decision, lamenting “O we, ach und we, dass ich der guten lere Dindimi nit gevolget hab!” See H. Becker, “Zur Alexandersage,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 23 (1891): 424–25.
Winner and Waster, ll.375, 378, from Stephanie Trigg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure, EETS o.s. 297 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
On the monastic roots of this division, see T.P. Dunning, “Action and Contemplation in Piers Plowman,” in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. Hussey, pp. 213–25. There is, contemporary with Alexander and Dindimus a wave of Latin treatises on the origins and preeminence of the life of regulars throughout England, advancing from Bury to Durham, St. Albans, Glastonbury and elsewhere. These texts, probably first written in response to the challenge of the friars (and later the Lollards), typically rely on scriptural precedent to buttress their claims on behalf of the monastic life. But Alexander and Dindimus cites Scripture only allusively and incidentally; it may be related to this literature of monastic self-scrutiny if, like other alliterative translations, it was originally a monastic production, but the relationship is a distant one. See Knowles, Religious Orders in England II, pp. 270–72; W.A. Pantin, “Some Medieval English Treatises on the Origins of Monasticism,” in Medieval Studies Presented to Rose Graham, ed. Veronica Raffer and A.J. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 189–215
Pantin, “Two Treatises of Uthred de Boldon on the Monastic Life,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin, and R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), pp. 363–85
Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 88–94; and for Thomas Walsingham’s contribution to this topic, Clark,“Thomas Walsingham Reconsdered,”p. 851.
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Grady, F. (2005). The Middle English Alexander. In: Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12367-1_4
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