New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages

Description: Federico combines historicism and psychoanalysis to explore the "fascination with Troy" in late-medieval England as a "symbolic appropriation" and a means of establishing English identity. Examines the gendered representations of Troy in Gower's "Vox Clamantis" and in Richard Maidstone's "Concordia facta inter regem Riccardum II et civitatem Londoniae"; assesses how the protagonists of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and HF reflect the notion of a flawed Aeneas.; In TC, Criseyde's innocence "figures the contemporary cultural nostalgia" for a "new Troy made clean." In Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Lydgate's "Troy Book," the "Lancastrian empire" rethinks its Ricardian past. Throughout, the female characters of Troy are used to create the masculinist illusion that some versions of history are true and others false.