encyclopedic learning by defining long lists of words and thus describing everyday
objects (saddles, clothing, beds), technology (goldsmithing, manuscript copying,
agricultural tools), the liberal arts, buildings and their furnishings, and the like. He also
versified Aesop’s Fables (Novus Aesopus) and was the author of a poem, De laudibus
divinae sapientiae, and biblical commentaries. An Augustinian theologian who used
Aristotle in his science, he complained, while abbot, that religion and study were
becoming incompatible—creeping professionalism even in the 12th century.
Lesley J.Smith
Neckam, Alexander. Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo: With the Poem of the Same
Author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, ed. Thomas Wright. London: Longman, Green,
Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863.
——. Speculum speculationum, ed. Rodney M.Thomson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr. Daily Living in the Twelfth Century: Based on the Observations of
Alexander Neckam in London and Paris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952.
Hunt, Richard W. The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam
(1157–1217), ed. Margaret Gibson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
ALEXANDER ROMANCES
. Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), king of Macedonia (336–23 B.C.) and in the
Middle Ages considered one of the Nine Worthies, became the subject of a fantastical
biography by the PseudoCallisthenes in the 2nd century A.D. Julius Valerius’s 4th-
century Latin translation of this Greek biography, as summarized in a 9th-century
Epitome, was the principal source of the medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, a long
poem resulting from a compositional process spread over most of the 12th century.
The earliest extant Old French poem was composed by Albéric de Pisançon in his
native Franco-Provençal dialect (Dauphinois), in the first third of the 12th century; only
one manuscript fragment, 105 octosyllables arranged in fifteen monorhymed laisses,
survives. Albéric’s name is known only thanks to the German priest Lamprecht, who
translated most (or even all; the life is unfinished) of Albéric ca. 1155. A generation or so
later, ca. 1160, an anonymous decasyllabic poem in the dialect of Poitou drew on Albéric
to give an account of the conqueror’s youth (enfances). To this were added two poems:
the first, by Lambert le Tort de Châteaudun, narrates Alexander’s adventures in the East
(Orient) up to his arrival in Babylon; a separate, anonymous, branch treats the hero’s
death (mort). These three poems (enfances, Orient, mort) were combined, resulting in
two manuscripts totaling 6,015 and 9,947 lines, respectively.
After another short interval, Alexandre de Paris, from Bernay in Normandy, rewrote
the earlier compilation in twelve-syllable laisses (hence the term “Alexandrine”), adding
a previously separate account of a raid on Gaza, the Fuerre de Gadres, by a certain
Eustache (ca. 1155). Alexandre’s work is found in seventeen manuscripts; in the critical
edition, the poem is arranged thus:
The Encyclopedia 47