ABSTRACT
With Boccaccio’s Teseida, two trends in the medieval Theban legend reached their zenith: first, the matter of Thebes became inextricably intertwined with the matter of Troy. This process had already been underway in the OF Roman de Thèbes, where the poet weaves certain Trojan personnel and battle tactics into his account of the Theban war, but in the Teseida, this blending of Thebes and Troy became the core of the project. Second, Theban identity, with its hallmark propensity towards deviant and destructive behavior, had begun to ameliorate in the face of new and redeeming influences, namely Christianity. In the OF Thèbes, the poet rehabilitates one of the sons of Oedipus, Pollinicés, by placing him among respectable men with crusading ambitions, though he never goes so far as to make him the hero of the poem (very likely due to his Theban lineage). Ethïoclés, meanwhile, remains king of their native city, Thebes, now crawling with Infidels. In his Teseida, Boccaccio takes this process of rehabilitation begun by the OF poet to its full fruition; he removes his fictional Theban kinsmen from their ancestral seat of destruction, Thebes, exposes them to love and, indirectly, Christianity, makes Arcita the undisputed hero, and has that hero “convert” the other Theban kinsman, Palemone, away from the modes of behavior and thought that had set their race apart from its inception. In short, the distinctiveness of Theban history and racial identity now faced extinction. This was the state of the Theban legend when Chaucer turned his own pen to it some forty years later, and it is precisely these two trends, so fully realized in Boccaccio’s Teseida, that Chaucer set about undoing. Chaucer became the first medieval poet to untangle the Theban legend from the various other historical threads, chiefly Troy, introduced by his predecessors in order to isolate and restore Theban criminality as a distinct historical phenomenon.
