The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance

Abstract

Thomas Hinton. The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chretien de Troyes's Perceval, the Continuations, and French Romance, Gallica 23. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. 277. Thomas Hinton's monograph, the second of three to have appeared in the space of three years (more recent than Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner's 2009 study and just before Leah Tether's 2012 publication) is probably the most interesting attempt so far to understand the narrative of the Continuations and to reappraise their role in the history of literature. This double focus is reflected by the book's structure, with the first three chapters dedicated to an analysis of the corpus, its narrative aesthetics, and its presentation in the extant manuscripts, and chapter four, together with the introduction and conclusion, considering the corpus's relationships with literature in both verse and prose. Building on David Hub's 1998 Manuscript Transmission, Reception, and Canon Formation: The Case of Chretien de Troyes, Hinton sees the construction of an authorial persona for Chretien by modern scholars as the main reason for the neglect of the Continuations-, instead, he argues convincingly for the role of the Conte du Graal (CdG) and Continuations corpus in establishing Chretien's renown as an author of (8-15). Criticizing former scholars' considerations (summarized in Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arturische Versroman, Tubingen, 1980; English transi, by M. and R. Middleton, Cambridge, 1998) of Chretien de Troyes's as the only point of reference for authors of the following generation (164-65), Hinton posits that Arthurian verse began to appear in substantial numbers and that Chretien de Troyes' became models for later authors because of the success of the Conte du Graal cycle (165). He also states that each romance has the capacity to modify the horizon of expectation of the genre (185), outlining a more complex--and subtle--model for the study of intertextual relationships between verse texts. The instances of later verse borrowing from the CdG corpus quoted by Hinton are many and various. At one end of the spectrum we have whose narratives have been clearly shaped from elements of the CdG corpus (Fergus and Le Chevalier as deus espees); at the other, there are brief mentions of characters in lists of knights, which are typically unspecific and cannot be used to prove any relationship to the CdG corpus (198-99). Between these poles, there is a series of instances that are more open to interpretation: some motifs are clearly derived from the Continuations (178-90, and, probably, 201-12), while elsewhere the influence of the Continuations seems rather indirect or not necessarily prominent: it is the case with the instances discussed on pages 167-78, since the transformation of Gauvain's character in later verse romance is already foreshadowed in Chretien's CdG. Drawing on Schmolke-Hasselmann's analysis, Hinton also develops interesting considerations on the aesthetics of no-consequence deployed in the verse romances (197) and their scattered configuration in the manuscripts as a response to the cyclic pull of the CdG corpus (193-201). More might be made of chapter four's conclusions. All the borrowings from the Continuations analyzed by Hinton can be traced back only to CdG and C1, with only the Fergus making a possible allusion to Perceval's Mont Dolereus adventure in the Second Continuation (C2). In establishing intertextual relationships with other romances, it would be necessary to consider which parts of the corpus would have already been written when the author of a given text set out to compose his own romances. Also, the corpus's influence could have lost momentum precisely when, as with Manessier's (CM) and Gerbert's (CG) Continuations, the Continuations started to draw on prose romances. …