ABSTRACT
As an organizing principle for reconceiving the events of the Theban war, crusading proved to be a short-term experiment. After the OF Roman de Thèbes, no subsequent Theban narrative of the Middle Ages placed crusading at the center of the main action. While Chaucer appears to have modeled the Theban setting for his Anelida and Arcite to some extent on the crusading landscape of the Roman de Thèbes, crusading in no way drives the central crisis of the poem. Even the prose translations of the Roman de Thèbes, which began appearing in the early thirteenth century, drop the crusading element from the story entirely.1 By contrast, the OF poet’s blending of Theban matters with Trojan history had a lasting impact on the medieval tradition of Thebes, and, in fact, lies at the heart of the next vernacular Theban narrative, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Teseida, a poem set in the period between the Theban and Trojan wars. While Boccaccio signals the advent of the Trojan War by including such figures as Menelaus, Odysseus, and Nestor, the full extent of the poem’s Trojan content has remained entirely unexplored. In fact, the story of Troy, as transmitted through various classical and medieval sources, forms the basis for much of the poem, conceptually and structurally, including some of its more puzzling aspects, such as its long, digressive first Book and its seemingly shapeless second half, among other portions. Boccaccio’s Teseida is, therefore, as much a prequel to Troy as a sequel to Thebes.
