Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

History

Advisor/Mentor

Joshua Smith

Committee Member

Lynda Coon

Second Committee Member

Charles Muntz

Third Committee Member

Edward Holland

Abstract

Dares Phrygius’s De excidio Troiae (“On the Destruction of Troy”) is a fifth or sixth century historical account of the Trojan War that gained significant attention during the medieval period in western Europe. Surviving in over 200 manuscripts, De excidio Troiae had been widely disseminated, developing different traditions in Latin as well as inspiring translations and adaptions in vernacular languages, such as Irish, Middle High German, and Old Icelandic. Dares was considered one of the most reliable sources on the Trojan War, partly because of the decline of Greek in Western Europe, but also partly because of its claim to a contemporary witness. The trend of attaching De excidio Troiae as a prefatory text to medieval genealogical histories became a popular practice, including in Britain. Out of the 200 manuscripts containing De excidio Troiae, about a fifth have been identified as being in Britain at one point or another, either sent for circulation or created there. Dares first arrived on the island somewhere from the end of the eleventh to the beginning of the twelfth century, and were found all over England and Wales.

Louis Faivre D’Arcier has identified eight manuscripts that contain a unique version of De excidio Troiae made in Britain between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, which he labels as "group ι." The Anglo-Welsh redactor of this recension created his own versions by utilizing two different texts of De excidio Troiae. This recension, however, is late and is not deemed important for the creation of a critical edition of Dares, and so no further collation work has been done on these manuscripts. For this preliminary study, my aim is to investigate the nature of the Anglo-Welsh redaction. I seek to answer the question of whether this recension differs substantially from the other versions of Dares, and if so, identify what those differences are. I selected MS Exeter, Cathedral Library 3514 from this group as the representative for my preliminary study, and compared it to its two sources. Ultimately, I conclude that this variant Anglo-Welsh recension was not a drastic re-working of the content as the beginning and ending sections of the text might imply. Rather, the Anglo-Welsh redactor exhibits a careful exercise in medieval editing in an attempt to make a better text with more readable Latin.

Keywords

medieval studies; Latin; manuscript studies; Trojan War; Britain; Dares Phrygius

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