Matter of Troy

The Matter of Troy is one of the three groups of stories which form the most widely used sources for writers in the Middle Ages and beyond. The other two are the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France.)

The subject-matter of romances was first classified by the French poet Jean Bodel of Arras (c. 1165-c. 1210). He categorized the group containing the oldest sources as the 'Matter of Rome', including all material relating to classical Greece and Rome. (Later writers sometimes clarified this as the 'Matter of Greece and Rome'.) The group was later sub-divided by other writers into such sub-groups as the 'Matter of Alexander', dealing with the life of Alexander the Great

Two differences between what is now recognized by modern classical scholarship as the classical canon of mythology and story and the medieval Matter of Britain may be summarized as

• • the belief in the British Isles that the root of Britain, British etc is the name of Brut (or Brutus), a son of Sylvius, grandson of Ascanius, and great‐grandson of Aeneas, who was supposed to have arrived here and founded the civilization of these islands.