The fascination with the Troy story seems inexhaustible, in medieval culture as well as in modern scholarship. Following upon a 2017 colloquium published in Troianalexandrina in 2018 and 2019, a 2020 meeting resulted in this new volume featuring nine articles, focusing on Guido delle Colonne (c. 1215-c. 1290), a jurist and poet at the court of Frederick II in Sicily who wrote in both Italian (Dante praised his vernacular poetry) and Latin. The essays examine his culture, his influence, and the afterlife of the Historia destructionis Troiae, a Latin prose version of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's twelfth-century Roman de Troie.

Undertaken at the behest of Matteo della Porta, archbishop of Salerno, the work was finished in 1289, sixteen years after the bishop's death. The impact and circulation of the Historia were impressive: around 250 manuscripts survive, it was translated into many European languages, and illustrated in manuscript illuminations and other works of art. The volume offers a variety of perspectives (biographical, paleographic, codicological, iconographic), bringing to light new documents and insights but also discussing, and sometimes contesting, previous scholarship on a given problem.

In the first part dealing with the author and his cultural milieu Giuseppina Brunetti wants to settle once and for all the question of whether Guido, the judge in Messina, and Guido the poet, were the same person. By comparing the signatures in Guido's autograph manuscripts with those in newly discovered judicial documents Brunetti can now conclude without a doubt that there was only one Guido.

Jacopo Fois digs deep into previous criticism (beginning in 1887) and the many different manuscripts and families of manuscripts of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Troy romance to conclude that "Guido's model should be identified as a lost, contaminated codex of the second family, which tends to belong to z" (40), in the classification introduced by Sainte-Maure's editor Léopold Constans in 1912.

The remaining two articles of part 1 by Benoît Grévin and Alex Mueller demonstrate that Guido's style could serve as the perfect model for manuals on the ars dictaminis. His Historia was used extensively for its rhetorical excellence, his "langage richement métaphorisé" (51), as Grévin shows in a complex study of the cultural and political milieu of Capua in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Precise examples of how passages from the Historia were integrated and adapted into some papal letters, for instance, open an intriguing window on the politics of this time.

Alex Mueller takes us to England where teachers of rhetoric in Oxford, as well as Chaucer and Lydgate in their translations, turned to Guido for the story of Troy. In the Legend of Good Women in particular, Chaucer combined Guido's Historia with Ovid's Heroides in a style that reflected his "rhetorical prowess" (73), honed by a thorough knowledge of the artes dictaminis.

Part 2 turns to translations and artistic adaptations of the Historia in Italy and Spain. Arianna Punzi's mastery of the extremely complex manuscript production in Tuscany and North Eastern Italy allows her to paint a multi-layered picture of Guido's reception that she rightly calls "polycentrique". (81) Her meticulous study of many manuscripts and their illuminations shows that a new bourgeois interest in the Troy story was satisfied by new translations of the Historia into Italian by urban notaries and that new combinations emerged, for example of an Italian version of the so-called Prose 1, a prose version of the Roman de Troie, with parts of the Historia, also in Italian. Filippo Ceffi, a notary from Pistoia, was so successful at fabricating one of these new texts that in one Venetian manuscript, Ceffi rather than Guido is cited as the ultimate authority!

Equally complex was the Castilian tradition, masterfully illuminated by Clara Pascual-Argente. Guido was incorporated into a "tradition autochtone" (99) that already featured several Trojan texts such as the Historia troyana polimétrica or the Sumas de Historia troyana.

In addition to tracing the complex textual and codicological pathways of these texts in their different combinations, Pascual-Argente places them into the political developments in Castile, thus demonstrating that they often respond to specific and changing power structures.

María Sanz-Julían stays in Castile with her focus on Pedro de Chinchilla who completed his Historia Troyana, commissioned by Alfonso de Pimentel, in 1443. A detailed comparison with three Catalan, Aragonese, and Castilian translations shows that Pedro's work, which survives in a single manuscript, was a direct translation from Guido, albeit from an incomplete version.

The final two articles take different approaches: Maud Pérez-Simon studies the iconography of the splendid ceiling in the Steri Palace in Palermo, constructed for the powerful Manfred III Chiaramonte, while Florence Tanniou returns to Guido or rather the image of Guido that circulated in various European countries. Pérez-Simon's study, illustrated with color images, focuses on eleven painted joists that depict scenes from the story of Troy which she calls "un petit Guido illustré". (133) Several biblical stories also depicted on these joists deal with judgments and so do the scenes chosen from the Trojan material. In a very detailed analysis, the author argues persuasively that as people approached the throne at the end of this enormous hall, they would be confronted by scenes of justice being meted out and the consequences of false testimony and calumny. By moving forward, the viewer is taken back to the very origins of the deadly Trojan War. In fact, the ceiling functions as a Mirror of Princes, as a reflection on "la justice humaine et la justice divine". (143)

The collection closes with Tanniou's exploration of Guido's image up to Renaissance humanism. Translations into German, Swedish, Russian, and Czech began to circulate. But while on the one hand Guido was now grouped among the ancient authors, he was also reprimanded, e.g., for his misogyny by Lydgate and for his "fabulosité" by Jean Lemaire de Belges (176). Thus, his veracity was questioned more and more as humanist scholars turned to the study of truly ancient sources in their quest for authentic texts.

This is an impressive collection with each article, solidly grounded in philological and codicological expertise, placing Guido and his Historia into multiple contexts, highlighting new findings, and hinting at yet more possibilities for exploration of this rich tradition.

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski