Introduction

Summary

Cleomadés is a long, narrative poem written in Old French about 1285 by a wellestablished poet from Brabant and Flanders, Adenet le Roi. This volume is an English prose translation of the work as edited by Albert Henry, who remains the pre-eminent Adenet scholar. As Adenet himself says at the beginning and end of the poem, he wrote Cleomadés at the request and commission of the Queen of France, Marie de Brabant, and her sister-in-law, Blanche-Anne, perhaps from a story Blanche-Anne brought back from the court of Spain.

Life of the Author and His Work with Marie de Brabant

Marie de Brabant had been long acquainted with Adenet, who was brought up at the court of her father, Duke Henri III of Brabant. In his works, Adenet expresses his gratitude and deep affection for Duke Henri, who was himself a poet and who had taught Adenet to be one. After Duke Henri's death at the age of thirty, the duke's friend and brother-in-law, the Duke of Flanders, Guy de Dampierre, became Adenet's patron. In the course of his decades of employment with Guy, Adenet wrote three book-length poems in addition to Cleomadés: Berte aus grans piés, Buevon de Conmarchis, and Ogier le Danois, the latter of which he presented to Marie.

The four works that we have of Adenet's were edited masterfully between 1951 and 1971 by the Belgian scholar Albert Henry, who gives us information about Adenet's life but also about the works and the milieu of their composition. Until recent decades Henry's commentaries were the principal readily available source about the environment in which Adenet composed. But for the past thirty years, numerous scholars have written about the cultural life and activities of aristocratic and royal courts in Northern Europe, especially as they pertain to the cultural patronage of noble and royal women. And in 2019, Tracy Chapman Hamilton published an extensive and lavishly illustrated study of the artistic patronage of Marie de Brabant, a work that gives much space and importance to Adenet's Cleomadés and that greatly expands our impressions of the rich cultural life of the courts which Adenet's patrons held and with which they interacted.