Fragments of Erec et Enide and Their Relation to the Manuscript Tradition

Abstract

Arecent study of the manuscripts of the works of Chrétien de Troyes contains an appendix which purports to survey the published fragments of the various romances. In point of fact, so far as Erec is concerned, it omits all reference to the. three fragments we now possess. Those to which the author refers are not properly speaking manuscript fragments, but rather early publications of excerpts from complete manuscripts which have now been collated by Foerster in his large edition and by myself in a forthcoming edition of the same romance. Therefore, despite the fact that Foerster's collation was careless and incomplete, these early fragmentary publications are of slight interest. However, in an extensive work dealing with the ensemble of the manuscript tradition of Chrétien, some mention should have been made of the three real fragments which we possess, even though, as the editors of the two published ones have remarked, they are not extensive enough to be of great importance in the classification of the manuscripts.