Acta Universitatis Danubius. Communicatio, Vol 10, No 2 (2016)

Abstract

Thanks to the Toledo School Europe rediscovered some long-lost classical texts which form the basis of Western culture. In its cultural enterprise, the School went beyond the mere act of translating: its scholars produced new texts based on those translations and medieval chronologies and King Alfonso’s General Estoria (GE) is an example of this. One of the medieval texts that Alfonso used for the composition of his GE was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, a pseudo-historical account of the creation and development of the British Isles. This article analyses three short paragraphs of the original work (the original text had some propagandistic features) and how they were translated and adapted into emerging Castilian and to what extent these Alfonsine adaptations also contain some propaganda features.