La création littéraire d’un mythe d’Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes (XIIe siècle-début XVIe siècle) – CREAMYTHALEX

Our team aims to study the way in which the reception of the myth of Alexander the Great and its extraordinary dissemination from the twelfth century until the first half of the sixteenth century in Western and Eastern Europe inspired an extremely large number of new literary works which kept reinventing the myth. The latter do show a specifically mediaeval heroic and royal character in the making, which is both unique and diverse, since it keeps changing in the different varieties of European literatures. We will seek to explain what inchoated this unprecedented highly creative atmosphere around the memory of Alexander the Great and to point to the circumstances and to the functions of this European creation process. Even though we have chosen to work on this particular historical period and within these spatial boundaries and although we will be putting the emphasis on literature rather than on any other form of creation ' we may still be looking at manuscript illustrations ' ours is an extremely rich research field for it spans four and a half centuries and covers the whole spectrum of European literatures. The wide-ranging object of our study, its unity and its diversity, as well as the role it has played in spurring the development of the European literary sphere make it truly original. Its originality also lies both in the determinedly comparative point of view and in the work method we have opted for. Our interdisciplinary team is made up of twelve literature and history researchers, specialists of Byzantine, Armenian, Slavish (Serbian and Russian in particular), mid-Latin, French, Spanish, German, English, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures. Each member of the team has already worked, within his or her own field of research, on some of the mediaeval works which center on Alexander the Great and on the reception of Antiquity in the Middle Ages. We are now looking at switching to a new methodology implying a simultaneous study of texts which, despite the fact that they were written in different languages and that they targeted a large variety of audiences, were closely related at the time they were created and within the period we will be studying, since their authors wrote them after they had read and reinterpreted their predecessors' texts. They overcame linguistic and cultural barriers to adjust them so that they fit their aesthetical ideals, their imaginary references and their systems of thought as well as the expectations of their audiences and their patrons. Alexander-related literature was densely-circulated throughout Europe and its reception and its immediate recreation in each cultural area, provide us with one of the richest and most complex textual corpuses in terms of studying the rebirth and the evolutions of a historical and literary myth from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. We will therefore be carrying out a precise and comparative analysis of the various forms of rewriting/translation/adjustment/transposition and metamorphosis which paved the way for reinvention at the European level, with the unprecedented language expansion that naturally followed in the wake of the growth of vernacular literatures and its crucial bearings on the creative act. Mirroring works that were written in connection with one another will spur innovative views on the literary creation of a European myth of power, of knowledge and of the exotic dream. Our research will be dealing with what Alexander embodies in mediaeval European imaginations, with the invariants that underlie European literary creation, with how European literary creation contributes to spreading common values and ideals and to promoting a common ancestor, with the dynamics which fuel its constant renewal, with the variations it reflects according to various conceptions of literary works and of their functions. This will result in the publication of a reference work, which will be written through a series of team meetings and thanks to the team's collective work over this four-year period. We will also be organizing an international closing conference and we will then turn to the issue of the relationship between texts and their illustrations in illuminated manuscripts, i.e. the artistic input into the creation of the mediaeval myth of Alexander.