The first modern English translation of Hugh of Rhuddlan’s Ipomedon.
The Anglo-Norman
Ipomedon, composed in the late twelfth century by Hugh of Rhuddlan, is a witty, notoriously scabrous romance, set in the Mediterranean. In a version of the Fair Unknown motif, the work’s eponymous hero, the son of the king of Apulia, falls in love with the queen of Calabria, conceals his identity and serves in her retinue. He undertakes a number of adventures, including participating in a three-day tournament, each day under different colours, before revealing his true identity and marrying her. Alert to the conventions of Arthurian romance from which it pointedly takes ironic distance,
Ipomedon invokes the Continental
romans d’antiquité in its protagonists’ names and in its surprising claim to be the source material for the chronologically earlier
Roman de Thèbes. It was popular amongst its contemporary readers, being translated later into three different Middle English versions.
This book offers the first modern English translation; it also provides explanatory notes, and a full introduction, discussing the author, its audience, dating, sources and analogues, themes, humour and narrative style. It will make this important text, of great interest to medieval romance studies, available to a wider audience.
Tabella dei contenuti
Series Editors’ Foreword
Translators’ Preface
Manuscript Sigla
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Romances of
‘Hue de Rotelande’
Author, Audience, Date
Plot and Structure
Sources and Analogues
Theme, Humour and Narrative Style
Text and Translation
Ipomedon
Bibliography
Index of Personal and Place Names
Circa l’autore
JUDITH WEISS is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, UK.
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