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Benoît de Sainte-Maure (died 1173) was a 12th century French poet, most probably from Sainte-Maure de Touraine near Tours, France. The Plantagenets' administrative center was located in Chinon - west of Tours.[1]
His 40,000 line poem Le Roman de Troie ("The Romance of Troy"), written between 1155 and 1160,[2] was a medieval retelling on the epic theme of the Trojan War which inspired a body of literature in the genre called the roman antique, loosely assembled by the poet Jean Bodel as the Matter of Rome.
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Le Roman de Troie influenced the works of many in the West, including Chaucer and Shakespeare. In the East it was translated into Greek as The War of Troy (Ο Πόλεμος της Τρωάδος), by far the longest mediaeval Greek romance. Only Guido da Colonna's Historia Distructionis Troiae was as often adapted. Benoît's sources for the narrative were the Latin rescensions of Dictys and Dares and some material from the all-but-lost Latin recension that is represented now in part of a single, fragmentary manuscript, the Rawlinson Excidium Troie in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The audience for Benoît's famous poem was an aristocratic one, for whom this retelling, and the romans antiques in general, served a moral purpose, a "mirror for princes" within the larger didactic genre of mirror literature.[3] To fulfil this audience's expectation that heroic characters should be lovers in accordance with the principles of courtly love, Benoît invented the story of the young Trojan prince Troilus's love for the daughter of Calchas, the priestly defector to the Greeks. After she is handed over to her father during a hostage exchange, she is successfully wooed by the Greek warrior Diomedes. This love triangle would be the central subject of a number of later works. In the Roman, the daughter of Calchas is called Briseis, but she is better known under a different name, becoming Criseida in Boccaccio's il Filostrato, Criseyde in Chaucer, Cresseid in Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid and ultimately Cressida in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.[2]
The dedication of the poem, to a "riche dame de riche rei", securely identified as Eleanor of Aquitaine, consort of Henry II,[4] is buried deep within it, interpolated in the narrative. It serves to date the poem to the years before Eleanor's imprisonment by Henry in 1173.
Another major work, by a Benoît, probably identical to Benoît de Sainte-Maure, is a lengthy[5] verse Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Its manuscript at Tours, dating to 1180-1200, is probably the oldest surviving text in Old French transcribed on the Continent.[6] The standard edition is by Carin Fahlin (Uppsala), 3 vols. 1951-195x.