The Road to Babylon: Monsters, Marvels and Moralising History in Medieval Legends of Alexander the Great

Abstract

The topography of the medieval Alexander legends is full of wondrous and monstrous elements as the pagan hero travels and conquers many lands. This thesis offers a new approach to the nonhuman and supernatural marvels which appear in the corpus of the Alexander retellings by focusing on their typological and eschatological connotations in the medieval Christianised versions. Many of the monsters, marvels and prophecies which Alexander encounters on his conquests are moralised by the Christian authors with some even including eschatological resonances such as the monstrous Gog and Magog, the earthly paradise and the Tower of Babel in certain versions of Le Roman de toute chevalerie and Le Roman d’Alexandre. My doctoral project aims to expand our knowledge of the medieval Alexander legends by examining the marvels and monsters which often blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman in Alexander’s quest to conquer all territories. These marvels and prophecies are inherited from the earlier Alexander texts, but as we move into the twelfth century, the Christianisation of the Alexander story shifts into eschatological and moralising hermeneutics in trying to reconcile (or not) Alexander’s heroic portrait with his exclusion from Christian salvation as a pagan king.