In the prologue to his Roman de Troie, Benoît de Sainte-Maure recounts how Cornelius, nephew of Sallust, came across Dares Phrygias's eyewitness account of the fall of Troy one day while browsing for grammar books in a bookcase. As Benoît tells it, dares felt compelled to leave a written record of the events he was witnessing:

The fiction of narrative genesis that Benoît presents involves a fairly complex interaction of oral and written authority, encapsulated in the apparently straightforward act of ‘metre en memoire’: events are written down by ocular witnesses and handed down the generations via a double translation, first into Latin and then French (thus mirroring the trajectory of learning and empire described by Chrétien de Troyes in the prologue to Cligés). Significantly, the latter translation is also that of an ancient source document into a performed romance narrative.

This vignette illustrates some of the issues that pertain to both the reality and the representation of textual transmission in the Middle Ages, and which I will be discussing in this chapter. In particular, the rhyme pair of memoire/estoire encapsulates the instability of distinctions made between ‘performative oral’ and ‘documentary written’ modes of thought and practice in medieval literature.