Violence and Transgression in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion

Abstract

The critical scholarship surrounding Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion carries an implicit separation of ‘violence’ from ‘non-violence’ where chivalry is pitted against love in a pattern which accords with the medievalist tendency to conceive of violence in minimalist terms. Instead, by defining violence in terms of violation and reading the text through the Augustinian–Bernardian frame of the ‘inner disposition’ (intention, emotion), new parallels and recursions emerge within Yvain which undermine the supposed phenomenological separation of violence and non-violence in the medieval period.