Traces of Romance Textual Poetics in the Non-Romance Works Ascribed to the ‘Gawain’-Poet

Abstract

It is increasingly widely recognised nowadays that the study of medieval poetics should be firmly rooted in the context of the trivium — not only of rhetoric, but also of grammar and logic. Taken together, the disciplines of the trivium constitute a repository of a specifically medieval textual poetics. In the ‘Introduction’ to his recent book on medieval poetics — From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages1 — Eugene Vance gives a valuable survey of a variety of approaches to medieval textuality. He regards textuality as a pivotal factor that influenced medieval poetics from the twelfth century onwards and had an epistemic impact upon the whole of medieval culture. Under that impact, he claims, new and specifically textual models for understanding and expressing the reality developed. Romance is a genre the created world of which is modelled by such new, textual determinants, and Vance analyses Chretien de Troyes’s romances from the viewpoint of their relations to medieval logic.2