Sir Launfal’s Creative Abuses

Abstract

Scholars have long accused thomas Chestre’s Middle English lay, Sir Launfal, of deviating from the high aesthetic and formal standards of the earlier French lay tradition, and in particular from its ultimate source, Marie de France’s Lanval.1 And scholars have demonstrated that the first audiences of Chestre’s lay would have recognized its divergences from generic traditions. the range of audiences of Middle English lays probably included more popular, less sophisticated groups than the audiences of the earlier, aristocratic French lays,2 but those earlier works remained in circulation in fourteenth-century England, so at least some audiences of the Middle English works would have been familiar with the French predecessors as well.3 Since the genre’s conventions were available to fourteenth-century audiences, those earliest readers could well have agreed with more recent critics’ assessment that Chestre’s work is a “fascinating disaster.”4 Sir Launfal is not alone in receiving such negative attention. Past scholarship has condemned the majority of Middle English lays as poor attempts to imitate the aristocratic French genre, attempts that merely succeed in “besmirching and mutilating the tradition.”5 In the last couple