“The City Imagined: Carthage in the Roman d’Eneas—Generic and Historical Transformation”
K. Tallarico

Many critical studies of the twelfth-century roman antique, the Roman d’Eneas, quite naturally, focus on the differences between Virgil’s Latin original and the French author’s “reworking”–often to the detriment of the latter.  Quite ironically for medieval studies, since the source of the French poem is well-known, the fate of the Eneas in modern times has been to relegate it to some oddly hybrid form that “misunderstands,” “misreads,” “anachronizes,” etc. (and these are the polite terms) Virgil’s classic epic.  

This paper proposes to study the description of the city of Carthage as it is presented in the Eneas not as the naïve or ignorant result of the French poet’s bungled anachronization, but to situate this text within a tradition of deliberately rationalizing the material of classical antiquity in order to recreate from the past a pre-history of the twelfth-century present.  The past that the Eneas seeks to recreate is both historical and cultural:  it links the stories of the Greek and Roman past to the stories of the “present” that were becoming increasingly popular at the time, namely the stories (and histories) of King Arthur. 

The city of Carthage, as imagined by the French poet, is not merely an exotic medieval merveille, but rather the description of the city fits the descriptive pattern of a poet who instructs his audience not only about the people, stories, myths, and events of the classical Roman past, but whose task is also (and perhaps more importantly) to take what is essentially a Roman epic and to transform it into a medieval French romance.