Mary Maschio
University of Toronto / École Pratique des Hautes Études
The earliest known works of literature in French look beyond the francophone world, and the
earliest romances settle their gaze on Ancient Greece and Troy. The Roman de Thèbes (c.1150)
and the Roman d’Énéas (c.1160) are adaptations of the Thebaid and the Aeneid that brought the
ancient world to a public not versed in Latin. The writers sought to put into the vernacular not
only the classical poems themselves, but a wealth of supplementary information drawn from
encyclopaedias and commentaries. Like all good medieval authors, they sought to delight as well
as to instruct and so enchanted their audiences with lengthy descriptions of luxurious buildings,
tents, and outfits, often made from materials from distant lands. The importance of exotic fabrics
for the construction of courtly identity has been well studied, but little attention has been paid
to the Greek origin of many of the words that designate textiles. Some of these, such as samit,
derived ultimately from ἑξάμιτος, arrived through robust Latin traditions and appear in texts that
may well have been known to the writers of the French poems. Others, however, have a less
certain provenance. This paper will focus primarily on two specific words: catefite (Thèbes,
l.8012) and catablati (Énéas, l.7369). Both of these are previously unattested in French and, while
the connections made with the Latin terms catasfittulum and catablattion cited by Du Cange
seem likely, his only source for these words was a charter from southern Italy dated 1197. The
forms of both words strongly suggest that they were borrowed from Greek: catablati finds a
relatively close counterpart in καταβλάττιον, whilst catefite may more tentatively be linked to
κατασφίγγω. I will argue that these terms likely found their way into the romances through
commercial networks, or in the case of the Énéas as the result of continuing familial links between
Normans in southern Italy and those who remained in Normandy, where the poem was probably
composed. These words therefore reveal a trace of contemporary Byzantium in romances that
rework stories rooted in Ancient Greece as filtered through Latin epic. They demonstrate the
authors’ efforts to seek out new sources of information for their works and reveal in microcosm
the complexity of the reception of ancient and medieval Greek culture in Latin Europe. Through
an etymological study of these words, we will be better able to understand not only the
composition processes of these authors, but also the connections between French courtly life
and contemporary Greek speaking regions.