Chretien De Troyes Research Articles

“Parzival” by Wolfram von Eschenbach and “Parzival” by L. V. Ginzburg: The Pragmatics of Incomplete Translation

The article analyses the translation strategy of L.V. Ginzburg, who rendered Wolfram von Eschenbach’s chivalric romanceParzival into Russian, and outlines the main directions that make it possible to return this work to its historical and cultural context. From the very beginning, the collection, which included the translation of Parzival, was intended for the mass audience, and therefore many episodes of the original novel were given in abridgment or retelling. Reductions of descriptions, some factual errors, distortions in the interpretation of scenes and characters seem insignificant and do not affect the overall perception of the translation, which is formally and structurally quite close to the original. However, these distortions accumulate, and details important for understanding medieval ideas of an ideal courtly society are lost in the retelling. The translation seems to be the same “adaptation&8j1; of the medieval text as the Middle High German Parzival was in relation to Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval. An updated translation of the chivalric romance, equipped with historical and cultural commentary, would be a significant event in Russian medieval studies.

Representation of the plot of the novel "Iwein, or the Knight with the Lion" in Western European iconographic programs of the XIII-XIV centuries.

The object of this study is the representation of the plot of the knight's novel "Iwein or the Knight with the Lion" in Western European art of the XIII-XIV centuries. The subject of the study is the features of the visual language of secular medieval art, which manifested themselves in various visual representations of this plot. The purpose of this work was to identify similarities and differences in the structure of various iconographic programs created on the basis of this novel in the period under review, to analyze the dependence of the visual interpretation of the text on the functional purpose of the monument (illuminated manuscripts and monumental murals), as well as to compare the existing visual representations of the history of Yvaine with the structure of the literary plot itself. The main research methods in this work are the methods of iconographic and iconological analysis, involving the identification of relationships between the images of the iconographic program of monuments and literary subjects on which these programs are based. The novelty of the work consists in identifying the structural features of the iconographic programs of the monuments under consideration, their similarities and differences from the programs of the religious content of the era under consideration, which is important for understanding the overall picture of the development of the visual language of Western medieval art of the XIII-XIV centuries. As a result of the conducted research, it is concluded that the considered secular programs are significantly inferior in their structural complexity to programs of a religious nature, most of them represent a visual interpretation of the plot intended to demonstrate and glorify the traditional lifestyle of the knightly estate and entertainment, and only one of the considered iconographic programs of this period has a complicated structure closest to the basic one It can be considered, as well as the text of the poems of Chretien de Troyes and Hartmann von Aue, in the context of understanding its religious basis.

СПЕЦИФИКА ИЗОБРАЖЕНИЯ "МИРА ИНОГО" ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ РЫЦАРСКОМ РОМАНЕ XII-XIII ВВ.

On the material of the novels by Chretien de Troyes (“Cliges”, “Perceval”), the anonymous “Floir and Blanchetflore” and “The Beautiful Stranger” by René de Beaujeu the article examines the basic parameters of marking, the specific features and the semantic load of the otherworldliness in the French chivalric romance at the early stages of its development. The undertaken analysis reveals both mythological and fairy tale markers (crossing the water border, defeating the guard of the reservoir, signs of death, barren land, playing chess) and new ones (imaginary death of the hero or heroine). The article shows how the opposition of two different other worlds in one novel serves to depict the formation and selfidentification of the knight in his two roles – a warrior and a lover, as well as to depict the complex relationship between these roles, the limits of duty and freedom of the hero, the problems of combining courtly love and love sensual, as well as love for and pursuit of wanderings and adventures. It is noted that the portrayal of the other world in the novels is subjected to the author’s creative revision.

Becoming object/becoming queen: the marital contact zone in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide

In Erec et Enide, Chretien de Troyes examines the marriage of a recreant knight and a once-silent wife as an identitary entanglement and contact zone. Enide’s eventual speech provokes a quest on which she must accompany Erec as squire to help him recover his good reputation. While many scholars read Erec as a wayward chivalric subject, I suggest that reading his increasing inactivity as a process of becoming object illustrates his dependency on Enide for chivalric wholeness. As object, Erec reveals Enide’s superlative judgment and speech, qualities that predict her ability to correct and protect him as queen. Ultimately, the very speech that infuriates Erec throughout the romance transforms him from object, failing to meet social expectations, into fully actualized chivalric subject, prepared to rule with Enide.

Un ensayo de microhistoria literaria: mutaciones poéticas en Lancelot o el Caballero de la Carreta y sus vínculos con las culturas francesas del siglo XII


 La historia de los amores de Lancelot y Ginebra posee una centralidad indiscutible en la producción romancesca de materia artúrica, desde que, en el siglo XII, Chrétien de Troyes sellara el destino del caballero al servicio de su reina en Lancelot o El caballero de la Carreta. De esta forma, Chrétien inventó una leyenda que rápidamente vino a competir, en términos análogos y a partir de una temática similar, con el popular mito de Tristán e Iseo, el cual, desde los oscuros parajes de la Bretaña insular, había conquistado la imaginación de los hombres medievales.
 En función de esta aseveración, el objetivo del artículo es revisar la relación que el escritor establece entre las dos parejas mediante el análisis particular de El caballero de la Carreta. Presentaré algunas hipótesis relativas al tipo de amor que el caballero siente para con su reina, el cual no parece reproducir los sentimientos de Tristán por Iseo. Finalmente, intentaré esbozar un panorama de la posición que el texto ocupa en toda la obra de Chrétien de Troyes, especular sobre las líneas directrices que guiaron su producción en general y proponer algunas explicaciones de cómo el roman responde a coordenadas intelectuales específicas de su momento de escritura.

Los manuscritos de Chrétien de Troyes: materialidad, escritura y oralidad, siglos XIII-XV

Basado en las premisas de la literacy, la cual considera al lenguaje escrito y oral un sistema dialéctico que transforma y es transformado por la realidad, a partir de su acción en los espacios de lectura y de escritura, el presente artículo muestra un análisis de las diversas copias de los manuscritos de los cinco romans courtois de Chrétien de Troyes, con el objetivo de establecer el posible alcance y su relación con la cultura material de los siglos XIII al XV. En este sentido, se hace énfasis en la posible procedencia de los manuscritos, sus características físicas, su lengua y su contenido, así como su relación con otros textos incluidos en diversos corpus documentales.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road As Apocalyptic Grail Narrative

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing. --Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men The Holy is a standard symbol the English language for an object of search far-off, mysterious, out of reach. --Dhira B. Mahoney, The Grail: A Casebook Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with its ashen, post-apocalyptic landscape, seems a striking departure from the realism of earlier novels. Inspired part by grim images of wanderers biohazard suits or wearing masks and goggles like ruined aviators (The Road 51, 24), many critics identify the unnamed catastrophe that precipitates the novel as a nuclear holocaust (see e.g., Christman). McCarthy himself imagines the disaster to be a meteor strike, although he claims that his money is on humans destroying each other before an environmental catastrophe sets in (Kushner). Yet few critics have explored just how unusual the fantastic and futuristic landscape of The Road is. In an interview regarding the Coen brothers' film of 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, McCarthy claims that he prefers literary realism over more magical genres. [I]t's hard enough to get people to believe what you're trying to tell them without making it impossible, he says. You have to make it vaguely plausible (Grossman 63). While The Road does bear McCarthy's typical attention to accuracy all the minutiae of descriptions, the excesses of carnage and apocalyptic horror its pages may stretch the limits of credulity. In fact, one critic finds the world of the novel so sublimely damaged that it must have a cause, and he therefore concludes that The Road is a retelling of the Book of Revelation (Grindley 12). The fantastic elements the novel, however, are not supernatural allegory, but mythological motif. The novel's title an early draft was The Grail, (1) a title illustrative of the narrative arc which a dying father embarks on a quest to preserve son, whom he imagines as a chalice (McCarthy, The Road 64), the symbolic vessel of divine healing a realm blighted by some catastrophic disease. The motifs of the Waste Land, the dying Fisher King, and the potentially unattainable healing balm the cup of Christ provide particularly apt metaphors through which The Road examines pervasive apocalyptic fears order to explore if and how the human project may be preserved. It may be useful first to establish common grail motifs before investigating their application The Road. The principal early Grail texts fall into two general categories: chivalric romances about King Arthur's knights encountering the grail and histories of the grail from the time of Christ to its removal to Britain. The first category has been the most influential terms of those stories' impact upon subsequent literature. This category includes Chretien de Troyes' Conte del Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and the Queste del Saint Graal (Loomis 1). (See Loomis 2-4 and Weston 12-15.) The first two of these texts particular have as the quest hero the Arthurian knight Perceval, as well as the most common and consistent narrative tropes (Weston 15). In this storyline, Perceval is a young boy raised the wilderness by mother after knight-father's death battle. The wild, untrained boy one day sees some of Arthur's knights riding the woods. Captivated by the sight, he follows them to Arthur's court, leaving mother grief-stricken; she later dies of her grief. During journey, Perceval finds two men fishing a boat. One of the men is the Fisher King, who offers the boy hospitality for the night. At the Fisher King's castle, Perceval sees an older king dying of a grievous wound. Perceval fails to ask the right (a question relating either to what ails the older man, who is usually the Fisher King's father, or whom the grail serves). …

The lover’s eye: image and love in medieval-renaissance Europe and late imperial China

The case study concerns the construction of the image of the beloved and the justification of the process of falling in love in European and Chinese texts. Analogies seem to confirm the universals in the human affective field: the sight is catalyst for love, in the sequence starting from the apparition of an image to the falling in love both in European and Chinese literatures. But behind this similar phenomenon different are explanations, ideological justifications and mythical references. Late Medieval and Renaissance European poetry developed a representation of love process which became a kind of conventional motif in the rhetoric of love. This rich tradition linking love to sight as a channel for falling in love, and to the glance as a vehicle for seduction could be traced back to Plato (Phaedrus) and Aristotle’s optical theory. From Chretien de Troyes to Dolce stil novo poets and later eyes may have a double catalyst function, according to intromissional and extramissional theories. These two elements of the image and its re-construction by memory and rumination can be found in the Chinese legend of the man of letters who falls in love by contemplating a female image painted on a screen, from the story “Zhu Ao” 朱敖 to Feng Menglong’s Zhenzhen 真真 and Pu Songling’s “Wall Fresco” (Huabi 畫壁), but the image can play various roles, like in the case of Phoenix Sprite 鳳仙. Thus, in front of various analogies, the elaboration of the philosophical, cosmic and physiological explanations follow different ways: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe the phantasma plays an important role, in a dialectical tension between body and soul. In late Ming-early Qing tales, the fantasmatic process, which involves imagination and memory is rather associated with the concept of the illusory nature of passions and desires and the cultivation process within the Neo-Confucian and Buddhist doctrines.

Wędka króla Rusinów (Gall Anonim, ks. 1, rozdz. 7)

A fi shing rod of the king of the Ruthenians (Gallus Anonymus, Book I, chapt. 7) The purpose of the article is an attempt to solve the following question: why did Gallus Anonymus present the king of the Ruthenians fishing with a fishing rod at the very moment of Boleslaw Chrobry’s attack, which inflicted a catastrophic defeat upon Rus’? In the Chronicle the king of the Ruthenians is presented as an unwarlike and cowardly man, but this in itself does not explain, why the chronicler placed him in a boat, fishing. The matter is not made clear by the medieval adaptations of this anecdote by Wincenty Kadlubek and Jan Dlugosz. None of them understood the sense Gallus gave to the motif of fishing rod and both changed its meaning. Also the cases of fishing described in the Bible have a different character altogether. But a useful context is given by motif of fishing rod and fishing people in stories certainly unknown to Gallus Anonymus. The article presents a choice of texts where fishing refers to military matters and brings disgrace to the king or hero: Le roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal by Chretien de Troyes (the Fisher King), Plutarch’s Life of Antony , Waltharius , the story about Arnulf conquering Rome in the Antapodosis by Liudprand of Cremona. The comparison makes it possible to say that in the medieval literature the fishing rode quite often plays the role of anti-attribute that given to a king or warlike hero becomes a clear sign of the lacked or lost ability to command the army and fight war, or of the betrayal of the honour of a brave soldier. On the other hand, the association with fishing or with using a fishing rod is not disgraceful for people who do not aspire to military functions or actions, as illustrated by the examples of Wanda-Weda in the Chronica Poloniae maioris ( Chronicle of Greater Poland ), and of Saint Zeno of Verona in De Zenonis vita sermo Coronati Notarii .

Le Moyen Âge français dans les “Petits traités”

The reflection on Medieval language and literature is the source of recurrent remarks in many works by Pascal Quignard, and particularly in his Petits traites. The author’s perspective on the Middle Ages takes different forms and his attention often focuses on the crucial moments of transition from Latin to French and, later, from verse to prose, as well as from the manuscript to the printed book. Several topics are frequently mentioned, such as one of the most famous passages from Chretien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal: the image of the three drops of blood within the trace left by a goose that has flown away on the ground covered in snow becomes an emblem of the songearts villants’ complete absence from the outside world. This form of absorption leads to a comparison with Proust’s Recherche, a comparison this paper further develops through references to Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole.

Caritas Begins at Home: Virtue and Domesticity in Chrétien’s Yvain

This article argues that Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain serves as an exemplum of Christian virtue through which the author explores caritas —love directed toward a higher purpose than oneself—as the theological virtue under which all others are ordered and which the hero Yvain must work to perfect.

Irony and Cognitive Empathy in Chrétien de Troyes's Gettier Problem

Irony often separates a work's author (or reader) from its characters. But irony can also engage our universal, adaptive capacity for perspective taking. In his twelfth-century romance Cliges , Chretien de Troyes creates such an irony. Though medieval, it takes the form of a Gettier problem, a thought experiment from twentieth-century epistemology. Read closely, this irony can pump our intuition that we share the characters' ignorance. This intuition allows us to empathize with them, not emotionally but cognitively, taking on their worldview and realizing that we know things, or not, just as they do.

La contaminación en la tradición del Chevalier de la Charrette: el caso del manuscrito A

A partir de la edición del Chevalier de la Charrette de Chrétien de Troyes, en el haber Wendelin Foerster, y del examen del corpus manuscrito de esta obra por parte de Alexandre Micha, el presente artículo, escrito desde los presupuestos de la crítica neolachmanniana, saca a la luz varios casos de contaminación, incidiendo sobre todo en las relaciones del llamado manuscrito A con el resto de la tradición.

"C’est costume d’amur de joie aveir aprés dolur." La fenomenologia amorosa in alcuni passi del 'Tristan' e del 'Cligés'

The love described by Thomas d'Angleterre in Tristan and by Chretien de Troyes in Cliges is conceived in different terms than the conventional model of fin'amor put forward by the troubadours; both authors treat the phase of their protagonists' falling in love as a true and proper disease whose symptoms can easily be mistaken for those of any medical condition such as sea-sickness. The two romances differ, however, in their rendering of the affective states and the somatic reactions that correspond to each of those states of the individual. A comparison of the relevant passages shows how the pathology of love brings about individual emotive characteristics and physical manifestations. This understanding of love as a disease is rooted in the literary tradition going back to Ovid, but the two authors reinterpret it in distinctive ways and leave it to their protagonists' own choice to seek healing.

Imagining Ovid and Chrétien in Fourteenth-Century French Libraries

Popular in French royal and ducal libraries, the Ovide moralise is the first full-length French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ; it introduces pseudo-historical explanations and Christian moralizations. Fusing references to and tales from diverse medieval and classical sources, the Ovide moralise is a microcosm of the late medieval library, offering a digest of myth and doctrine, and manifesting a reading practice aware of its reliance on, and reassessment of, previous instances of authority. With reference to Foucault’s evocation of the bibliotheque fantastique , this article focuses on two auctores cited by the Ovide moralise : Ovid and an author referred to as ‘Crestien’. Evidence from Ovide moralise manuscripts belonging to the libraries of King Philippe VI, his wife, Jeanne de Bourgogne, and their three bibliophile grandsons — King Charles V; Jean, duc de Berry; and Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne — suggests that the name Crestien, today evocative of Chretien de Troyes, would likely connote the author of a twelfth-century translation and adaptation of the Metamorphoses ’ Philomela episode, which is interpolated into the Ovide moralise . Focusing on encounters between these authors reveals the medieval library as a space of fantasy in which texts gloss, summon, adapt, and re-imagine one another.

Le Morte de Perlesvaux: el Perceval le Gallois d'Éric Rohmer i l'Excalibur de John Boorman

Film makers who turn to a book as a source do not always use it in the same way. This article focuses on two examples taken from Arthurian re-tellings. In Perceval le Gallois (1978), Eric Rohmer respected the verse form and the medieval world vision of Chretien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal. Conversely, in Excalibur (1981) John Boorman uses Le Morte Darthur as a catalogue of Arthurian episodes in order to render its key moments within a modern three-act cinematographic story structure.

Masculine Identity and the Rustics of Romance in Chrétien's Erec and Yvain

In his interwoven representations of a dwarf, a peasant, and a giant in the romances of Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion and Erec et Enide, Chretien de Troyes indicates the existence of a knightly anxiety over the social station of knighthood with respect to its common-born inferiors. The coherence of this class of knighthood was predicated on a distinction between nobility and servility, a distinction threatened by the upward mobility of an emerging common-born mercantile class in the twelfth century. With knights unable to respond directly on account of their vows to protect their social inferiors, this unresolved threat of existential dissolution produced in Chretien’s works a sense of anxiety surrounding literary representations of characters of imputed common birth. The defeat of these common-born antagonists by knightly protagonists offered noble audiences a cathartic release through the affirmation of the social distinctiveness of knighthood.

Milk or Blood?: Generation and Speech in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, ou le Conte du graal

The first scenes of Chretien de Troyes' twelfth-century Old French romance Perceval ou le Conte du graal (Perceval or the Story of the Grail) unfold in the Gaste Forest, the 'Waste Forest,' and yet this wasteland is depicted as fertile, and it is springtime: 'Ce fu au tans qu'arbre florissent / Foillent bochaische, pre verdisent' (ll. 67-68).1 The young hero sets off from his mother's manor on this spring morning to watch the ploughmen harrow the greening fields, lands belonging to and strongly identified with his mother: 'Et pansa que veoir iroit / Hercheors que sa mere avoit / Qui ses avaines li erchoient' (ll. 79-81). The trope of the waste forest, wasteland, and waste castle has long invited reflection on its role in Arthurian romance, particularly with respect to how the wasteland relates to gender and genealogy. Yet the contrast between the connotations of the designation 'Gaste Forest' and the actual descriptions of this space in Chretien's romance invites a reconsideration of the notion of 'wasteland,' and thus of Perceval's genealogy. I propose to explore how, in the first part of the romance, Perceval's quest develops through the mutually necessary forces of maternity and paternity, which are drawn in images of blood, milk, and semen, particularly as these fluids symbolize and are symbolized by functions of language. In medieval medical theory, both milk and semen are created of blood,2 but blood is also the matter of lineage, the stuff of paternity, the guarantor of the patronym, and thereby linked with language and the power of speech. Blood and its derivatives are intimately related not only to language, but also to Chretien's representation of the generation of the romance itself.The shifting, wounded site of the father or fathers in Chretien's romance is a central feature of the text and has been extensively studied. According to a psychoanalytic-and particularly a Lacanian-perspective, Perceval exhibits a stunted, delayed accession to language and the social order because of the absence of the literal and metaphorical father. Readings of the father are not exclusively psychoanalytic: Irit Kleiman has suggested that the father be understood as spatially and rhetorically ailleurs, 'elsewhere,' a term marking both the fissure separating the father from the Arthurian world and the uncertainty that Perceval will be able to restore the active, powerful father.3 Peggy McCracken understands blood as an essential element of the Grail story, contrasting the corruptive blood of the woman and mother with the sacrificial, potent blood of the romance's wounded men and fathers.4 Nearly all arguments regarding parental influence understand the text to privilege the place of the male and paternal, even when showing that this place is conditioned by the female and maternal. In order to establish the importance of the mother and maternal lineage in the text, my argument takes as its starting point medieval medical theory and Lacanian interpretations of paternity and language, thence moving beyond Lacan towards a dual-parent model of language.I. MILK AND BLOOD, FERTILITY AND VIOLENCE, LISTENING AND SPEAKINGThe representation of the Gaste Forest in Chretien's Perceval must be distinguished from other potential wastelands and waste castles in the romance, such as Beaurepaire, as well as from interpretations of the wasteland in subsequent versions of the Grail story.5 Unlike in certain later romances, the Gaste Forest of the Conte du graal does not suggest infertility, but rather wild fecundity; this is coupled and contrasted with controlled fertility, represented by the fields being plowed. The fecundity of the forest is accompanied by the potential for corruption, which, as scholars have argued, stems from the lack of a lord of the manor who would render society dominant over nature.6 The land's lack of a lord mirrors the hero's lack of a father; thus his quest is a dual one, comprising a search for paternal lineage and restoration of the father that parallels his quest for the grail and restoration of the wasteland and the Arthurian kingdom. …

Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century by Michael A. Faletra (review)

MICHAEL A. FALETRA, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Pp. xv, 243. isbn: 978-1-137-39102-5. $90Michael A. Faletra's Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination is welcome as a more thoughtful addition to a group of studies over the last decade or so that have taken a postcolonial approach in arguing for a medieval view of Wales as 'England's original repressed Other, the unruly subaltern that England sees in its mirror, the barbarian standing at the threshold' (1). This book's greatest strengths lie in its attention to Norman military ambitions in shaping post-Conquest views of Wales and in its awareness of the importance of a small body of early authors (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chapter One; John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Marie de France, Chapter Two; Chretien de Troyes, Chapter Three; and Gerald of Wales, Chapter Four) in actively creating the 'Matters of Britain'-that is, 'all manner of texts about the British insular past' (10), not just Arthurian material-as a literary tradition. These authors are not passive 'heirs to a native British tradition' but rather 'shapers and often even exploiters of their Brittonic sources, oral or written' (13). While there are problems with a postcolonial framework that finds 'Anglo-Norman/English modes of colonial discourse' (11) in the twelfth century and not all of Faletra's individual readings are ultimately convincing, this study turns important attention to the Matters of Britain as the product of Anglo-Norman authors who 'iterate the past of the isle of Britain-and, implicitly or explicitly, the future of the Welsh-in ways that often facilitate and occasionally contest the establishment of Anglo-Norman power over the insular present and future' (10), and it should be read by anyone working on post-Galfridian Arthurian literature.This study logically begins with the Historia Regum Britanniae, the cornerstone text of the Matters of Britain. Faletra's argument that Geoffrey 'ultimately justifies the Normans and denigrates the Welsh' (16) is a difficult one. He is a skilled close-reader of the Historia-his attention to the geography of its Arthurian portion is particularly successful-but, despite a well-grounded discussion of medieval historiographic tradition, does not do enough to demonstrate that Geoffrey's depiction of 'the transferal of insular power to the Saxons and the transformation of the ancient Britons into the barbaric Welsh' is a 'distinctly colonialist historiography' (16) in ways that other narratives of the same historical moments are not. …

Wounds in the Middle Ages ed. by Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham (review)

Reviewed by: Wounds in the Middle Ages ed. by Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham Peter Murray Jones Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham, eds. Wounds in the Middle Ages. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. xiv + 254 pp. Ill. $124.95 (978-1-4094-6569-0). As the editors point out in the introduction, wounds were potent signifiers reaching across all aspects of life as it was experienced in Europe in the Middle Ages. This collection is at its most innovatory and persuasive when the authors are exploring these significations, less so when they are talking about wound treatment as surgical intervention. Cordelia Warr’s chapter on “Changing Stigmata” explores interpretations of the wounds visited on the body of St. Francis in the form of stigmata. She concentrates on texts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, which stress the miraculousness of the continuously flowing blood of the wounds, in order to head off the suggestion that Francis’s stigmata could be the “natural” result of bloodletting or scarring. Louise Wilson’s chapter, “Miracle and Medicine: Conceptions of Medical Knowledge and Practice in Thirteenth-Century Miracle Accounts,” makes a good companion to Warr’s, as it explores the impact of the scholastic medicine of the thirteenth century on the authentication of miracles of healing, including that of wounds, by purported saints. Her case study focuses on the miracles of St. Edmund of Abingdon, and she shows that his miracle stories relied on humoral theory as an explanation for illness, and on the diagnostic and prognostic judgment of physicians. As much as anything this reflected the participation of physicians themselves in the canonization process, where they were called on as experts to draw the line between natural and miraculous healing. Surgeons were not likely to be consulted, and their expertise was not so highly valued as that of the physicians. M. K. K. Yearl’s chapter on “Medicine for the Wounded Soul” also makes fruitful use of the interaction of medicine and religion, but at an earlier period, the twelfth century, before scholastic medicine was fully developed. She shows how the De medicina animae (On the medicine of the soul) of Hugh of Fouilloy and the De natura corporis et animae (On the nature of body and soul) of William of Saint-Thierry both applied the methods and [End Page 803] language of medicine to the care of the wounded soul. Both works are allegorical and moralizing, yet they apply medical theory, methods, and language in a way that is surprisingly systematic. Romance and law are two other areas of discourse where wounds and wounding had great resonance. Hannah Priest’s chapter on “Christ’s Wounds and the Birth of Romance” claims that the extraordinary emphasis on the wounded body in the early romance Erec et Enide by Chretien de Troyes set the stage for subsequent chivalric romances. The knight Erec is wounded again and again, a sign not of powerless victimization but of parallels between the wounding of Christ himself and that of the knight errant, thus establishing a new paradigm of suffering and redeeming masculinity. In language strikingly less high flown than romance, legal codes and court records in Scandinavia and England devoted attention to the appropriate penalties and compensation for wounding of all kinds. Jenny Benham’s “Wounding in the High Middle Ages: Law and Practice” compares the legal context of wounds in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries for both regions, with plenty of fascinating particular examples. She points out that much work still has to be done in the legal archives to bring historical attention to wounding up to the level of that afforded to murder and rape. Lila Yawn’s “The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination” offers a spirited rebuttal of modern assumptions that the Middle Ages were uniquely obsessed with cruel dismemberment. The episode of King Arthur’s duel with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is emblematic of the too-easy equation of medieval and mutilation. Other chapters in the book deal with the management of military wounds, the dissolution of continuity as a framework for learned medicine’s understanding of wounds, fourteenth...