Content area
Full Text
* Paolo Gatti and Antonella Degl'Innocenti, eds. Dudone di San Quintino. Labirinti I6. Trento: Universita degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Science Filologiche e Storiche, 1995. Pp.218.
Dudo of St-Quentin's De moribus et actis primorum Normanniac ducum libri tres, sometimes referred to, more succinctly, as Gesta Normannorum, was written around the year 1000 at the behest of the Norman dukes Richard I and his son Richard II. It did not, by and large, have a good press in the last century, when scholars edited the work and commented on it: its history was ciriticized as unreliable, its geography as confused, and its style, a mixture of metrical panegyrics and apostrophes and narrative prose characterized by a far-fetched vocabulary and reams of epithets, was condemned by Latinists of the Classical mould.
The revaluation of Medieval Latin literature signalled by E. R. Curtius's Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter of I948 has borne fruit also on Dudo in recent times, notably in articles by Fr. Amory ("The Viking Hasting in Franco-Scandinavian Legend," I979), E. Searle ("Fact and Pattern in Heroic History" I984) and L. Shopkow ("The Carolingian World of Dudo of St-Quentin") and, within larger contexts, in P. Stotz's Sonderformen sapphischer Dichtung (I982) and B. Pabst's Prosimetrum (I994). Italian scholars have done much work at the seam of Classical tradition and Early Germanic civilization, and one such initiative was a symposium on Dudo at Trento in I994. This volume, edited with utmost care (except for two misprints in the Table of Contents) and a pleasure to handle and read, is the result of that conference.
It is of importance to Scandinavianists because, while it properly treats the Gesta as what they are, a Latin work whose language and form derives from Latin and Continental medieval models, most contributions are more concerned with the shorter books I and II, dealing with the Viking Alstingus or Hastingus and Rollo, the conqueror of Normandy and its first duke (Gongu-Hrolfr in Old Norse tradition), than with the more extensive books III and rv devoted to dukes Wilhelmus and Richardus....