As much as Arthur, as much as Charlemagne, the figure of Alexander the Great haunted the medieval imagination. His story indeed ‘was translated more often in medieval Europe than any work except the Gospels’. And this version by Jehan Wauquelin is arguably the single most important French Alexander text.

That may seem a surprising claim – as it may seem presumptuous to give the present book the generic title The Medieval Romance of Alexander – when Wauquelin's work is a late (indeed, almost the last) component of the vast corpus of medieval French literature on the great conqueror. But both the claim and the title are to an extent justified. Half a century ago, in his broad survey of ‘the medieval Alexander’, George Cary dismissively wrote that ‘Wauquelin has little to add of his own [to the corpus] except prologues and occasional interjections… [and] the Paris fifteenth- and sixteenth-century press would invest no money in such a rebotch of the old tradition’; but it is precisely Wauquelin's respectful treatment of his sources – and the fact that he had the entire ‘old tradition’ available to him as he assembled his work in the middle of the fifteenth century – that makes his highly intelligent, finely paced and very readable version so valuable. It's true, as Cary says, that there was never a printed edition of Wauquelin's work, but the five surviving manuscripts, three of them of de luxe quality, attest to its (at least fleeting) success with a particular audience; and above all, it would be hard to imagine a more accessible, revealing and well-judged digest of the whole of the medieval French Alexandrian tradition.