Anne Rochebouet
The way Homer was forgotten or even disregarded in the medieval West until the mid-fourteenth century is well known. In addition to the loss of his works, medieval literature specialists insist on the role of Homer as a negative reference, especially in relation to the Trojan War, before its gradual re-evaluation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This dismissal of the Homeric corpus, however, is far from being unambiguous. This essay proposes to study the figure of Homer and its variations in medieval learned culture outside Trojan narratives. It first examines the different way Homer's works, and through them, the figure of the poet itself, are present in the Middle Ages, before exploring the image(s) simultaneously elaborated by some historical and encyclopaedic texts, in Latin and in French.