Prose Lancelot Research Articles

Emotional Pain and Self-Harm in the Prose Lancelot and the Alliterative Morte Arthure

Abstract Medieval romance often associates anger, sadness and distress with self-harm when these emotions reach a high level of intensity. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur’s knights protest that the king is ‘blundering himself’ (that is, injuring himself) when mourning Gawain and feeling overwhelmed with sorrow. In the Prose Lancelot, Galehaut asks Lancelot, who has spent the night beset by heart-wrenching grief, why he is ‘killing himself’. In both works, the self is foregrounded in episodes that involve intense emotions and self-inflicted injury. The purpose of this essay is to investigate this recurring association of extreme emotions with self-harm in medieval romance.

Activation of the Narrative Memory in the 13th-Century French Romance 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑡

Activation of the Narrative Memory in the 13th-Century French Romance 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑡

L’Iconographie du ‘Lancelot-Graal’. Par Irène Fabry-Tehranchi et Catherine Nicolas

Although the iconographic cycles which illustrated medieval books are of great importance for a holistic understanding of the texts they were designed to illustrate, they are often neglected by scholars. Obstacles to accessing the original manuscripts preserving these cycles, in conjunction with the difficulty of conceptualizing a given cycle of illustrations as a unitary entity (especially in long works in which illustrations may be widely scattered, or in works where the relation of text to image is unclear), have fed the need in medieval studies for examinations such as that presented by the present volume. Here, two eminent Arthurian scholars, Irène Fabry-Tehranchi and Catherine Nicolas, provide a detailed commentary of a complete iconographic cycle illustrating the Lancelot-Graal (or Vulgate) cycle of Old French prose romances. This cycle comprises five units or books, all dating from the thirteenth century: the Estoire del Saint Graal, Merlin and the Suite Vulgate, the prose Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal, and the Mort le Roi Artu. This cycle was extremely popular, being preserved for us today in over 180 manuscripts from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, as well as in numerous early printed editions. In order to produce this study, the authors have examined a wide range of extant manuscripts; the results of their survey are presented in a concise and informative Introduction, which in addition contextualizes the Lancelot-Graal and provides summaries of its constituent parts. The authors focus in particular on six manuscripts created between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, all of which contain the full cycle of texts and are richly illustrated. They note that it is difficult to speak of a definitive, fixed iconographic cycle for the Lancelot-Graal, for exemplars are characterized by a high degree of variety; much higher than image cycles designed to accompany contemporary but more conventional texts, such as books of hours. For this reason, rather than struggling to justify the selection of any one manuscript on the grounds of the superior representative quality of its illustrative cycle, the authors have chosen to reproduce the complete cycle as found in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 344, as representing the most suitable entry point for studying the iconographic tradition associated with this text as a whole. The reproductions in black and white of the 348 illustrations in MS fr. 344 are arranged in order of books and chapters, and are accompanied by detailed commentary, as well as by brief descriptions of the corresponding illustrations in the other manuscripts. Brief descriptions of illustrations from these other manuscripts are similarly included for chapters left unillustrated in MS fr. 344. This excellent research tool is supplemented by a comprehensive bibliography and a synoptic table that allows researchers to compare at a glance the iconographic programmes of all six manuscripts. Following a detailed index, this volume is crowned by an appendix of full-colour reproductions of the iconographic cycle from MS fr. 344, helpfully cross-referenced with the commentary. Arthurian studies will long be indebted to this thorough guide to the iconographic tradition of the Vulgate cycle.

The Matter of Pseudo-History: Textuality, Aurality, and Visuality in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle

The Matter of Pseudo-HistoryTextuality, Aurality, and Visuality in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle Joyce Coleman Considerable attention has been paid in medieval literary studies to the later stages of the relation of immaterial to material text—to the transition, as Sylvia Huot famously labeled it, from song to book.1 Romance has strong early associations with oral performance from memory—whether the minstrels’ and jongleurs’ recitations derived from their own composition or from memorization (and mental revision) of preexisting oral or written texts. Written romances perpetuate this history with phrases evoking a listening audience, for instance, “as you have heard,” referring to previous narration.2 There is a problem, though, if we imagine the transition from oral composition and delivery to written text as a unilinear, evolutionary progression—book replacing song, silent reading replacing oral performance—since medieval audiences most often experienced the material text through the voice of someone reading the book aloud.3 This point needs emphasizing because for some scholars the “as you have heard” phrases evoke Walter Ong’s category of “oral residue,” or fossilized vestiges of orality lingering into the world of private reading.4 But the abundant evidence of public reading among medieval elites through the fifteenth century and beyond suggests that these phrases persisted into more literate times because the texts were still, in fact, being heard—even after the supposed watershed moment when romances began to be written in prose, which is often equated with the advent of private reading. As late as circa 1455, for example, the Prose Guillaume d’Orange announced: “Who of arms, love, nobility, and chivalry would hear fair and pleasant words . . . be quiet, or read, who would rather read.”5 Here the audience’s literacy is assumed, so that the choice to hear the text or read it privately depends only on personal preference (and on [End Page 71] the possible presence of other people wanting to share the reading experience). Though written down, the text still speaks, through the immaterial voice of the prelector.6 But if the materiality of the medieval book was enfolded within the immateriality of the voice, the book still carried authority. Whether romances involved actual historical characters or not, their authors frequently cited alleged written sources: for example, Chrétien de Troyes claims he learned about Cligès from a tome held at the library of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Beauvais, “which proves that the story is true.”7 At the same time, the voice could also produce authority, in the form of eyewitness verbal accounts allegedly recorded and preserved, then transmitted to the romance’s readers and hearers.8 Eyewitness narration and clerical transcription, authoritative written sources and the prelector’s public reading, the voice and the book, weave in and out of each other in many medieval romances. The eyewitness accounts are as fictional as the recording clerks and as the ancient sources allegedly uncovered in cathedral archives. Yet, as Miranda Griffin has suggested, such “paradoxically positioned truth guarantees in medieval historiography and literature do not represent the exploitation of a naïve audience, but an invitation to participate in the play between truth and fiction.”9 This play of realities, I would add, can sometimes function as what anthropologist Clifford Geertz labeled “deep play.”10 That is, it creates stories so resonant with cultural and individual aspirations that their value and impact transcend issues of actual historicity. In one particular set of romances, this play takes on a visual component as well, through illuminations that envisage the creation of the texts themselves. The early thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances comprises the Estoire del saint Graal, the Merlin and Suite du Merlin, the Lancelot en prose, the Queste del saint Graal, and the Mort Artu—in English, the History of the Holy Grail, the Merlin and Continuation of Merlin, the Prose Lancelot, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The individual texts probably had different authors, but there is evidence of coordination in cross-references and overall themes. An early version of the Lancelot was probably completed ca. 1215–20. Then, “subsequent parts were gradually added to it, starting with the...

The Hero and Severed Heads: Moral Display in the Prose Lancelot

The Hero and Severed Heads: Moral Display in the Prose Lancelot

The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions. Karen Sullivan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 299.

<i>The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions</i>. Karen Sullivan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 299.

Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Elizabeth M. Willingham joshua byron smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 254. isbn: 978–0–8122–4932–3. $69.95. Smith has written a linguistically adept, frequently well–argued consideration of the textual nature and significance of Map’s De Nugis Curialium, directing positive attention to Map’s authorial competence and his use of the matière de Bretagne. De Nugis, the only work attributed definitively to Map, is composed of five distinctiones and exists uniquely in Bodley 851, a compilation dated around the last quarter of the fourteenth century. With others, Smith affirms the De Nugis text as ‘quite corrupt’ (p. 81), but he seeks to demonstrate Map’s methods of composition and revision with readings of certain paired narratives, in which he theorizes Map’s use of Welsh source material from Latin texts. In Map’s availing himself of literary sources to incorporate Celtic elements into purposeful narrative revisions in De Nugis, Smith finds plausibility for Map’s nomination as the supposed author of books of the Prose Lancelot. Smith’s opening chapters present what is known of Map’s Welsh credentials, his clerical and courtly connections, and his interest in romance, the latter based on De Nugis narratives. Smith studies several of De Nugis’s paired narratives to show Map’s aims and methods in revising his tales and to affirm Map’s competence as a writer. In spite of messy interpolations in the De Nugis text, Smith argues for its possessing unity and coherence (pp. 74–81). Smith’s fourth chapter, his most demanding in terms of the reader’s background, probes Map’s rewriting and use of Celtic materials in the tale of King Herla. Next, Smith theorizes Map’s Celtic sources based on narrative details that Smith asserts compellingly point to textual—not oral—sources: namely, Latin texts on Welsh topics. Map’s access to repositories, particularly to the Abbey library of St. Peter’s of Gloucester, which Smith theorizes may have held as many as eighteen texts treating Welsh (and Irish) topics (pp. 114–15), seems highly plausible. [End Page 161] Smith’s sixth chapter considers the Prose Lancelot’s attributions to Map, suggesting that Map’s supposed use of textual sources, his intimacy with Welsh culture and language, and his reputation for Celticized/Britonized narratives made Map a sound contemporary resort for Vulgate authorship. Beyond Map’s theorized access to Latin Celtic sources, Smith contributes no compelling new arguments. Smith’s references to the structure and naming of the Prose Lancelot, with its books and divisions, are confused; textual references to it are generally nonspecific; details of the ‘earliest’ text(s) remain unclear (pp. 149, 150, 153); a descriptor of Yale MS 229 repeats a small but unattributed characterization; the assessment of a large, double–register miniature—Yale 229’s 272v—could have benefitted from the work of earlier commentators; what the illustrator(s) of Yale 229 ‘was [were] unlikely to have known’ (p. 149) can hardly be a point of useful speculation; and because Map’s name is given as Map, Mappe, Mape, and Maples in Yale 229, the claim that his name ‘never unambiguously appears’ as ‘Mappe’ (p. 15) errs. Logic problems need mending: ‘direct verbal similarities’ in narrative versions do not ‘prove that Walter had an earlier version in front of him as he reworked his prose’ (p. 60); asserting that De Nugis, ‘like many favorite medieval texts, did not achieve a wide audience’ is a puzzle (p. 63); and who is ‘the most-well known reviser’ [sic] in medieval England is debatable: along with Langland, Chaucer is a contender, and so may be Marie de France; and a kinship of ‘revision’ fleetingly implied between two disparate Bodley 151 texts, each noted for corruption, is pointless (p. 62). Asserting James Hinton’s failure to ‘continu[e] looking for orthographic clues,’ then identifying the ‘few’ Hinton supposedly overlooked as four personal–name variants and claiming that these can be used independently to differentiate scribes (pp. 64–65) is disconnected with scribal practice. Asserting a parallel between Map as...

A impregnação bíblica no romance arturiano em prosa: uma parábola no "Lancelot en Prose"

In what concerns the prose Arthurian romance, little space has been devoted to the study of biblical matter. This fact seems even more striking with regard to Prose Lancelot, a bookthat seems to bethe narrative axis of the “Lancelot-Graal” cycle, written in France, around 1220.After a thorough study aboutthe parables of the Gospels, detected in the two versions of the conclusion of the cycle mentioned above, the Portuguese Demanda do Santo Graaland the Queste del Saint Graal, that we present in a very succinct wayin this article, we reserved a brief analysis of a parable unexpectedly found in Prose Lancelot. Thus, we propose a reading of the “Parable of the talents” and a reflection on the modeling action of the Holy Scriptures, seeking to understand to what extent they fit into the cyclical conception.

Wounds and Healing: A Moral Guide to the Prose Lancelot

Wounds and Healing: A Moral Guide to the Prose Lancelot

The Wounded Knight's Stench in the Prose Lancelot: The Grail Quest Prefigured

The Wounded Knight's Stench in the Prose Lancelot: The Grail Quest Prefigured

Lanzelet und sein Schatten

Abstract Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven ›Lanzelet‹ seems to be the only medieval version of the Lancelot myth without the adulterous love between the hero and the king’s wife or any other rivalry between King Arthur and the best knight of the Round Table. There are two possible explanations for that issue: Either the version of Ulrich’s romance is prior to the version represented by Chrétien’s de Troyes ›Chevalier de la Charrette‹ and the ›Prose Lancelot‹, or Ulrich’s romance avoids the adultery story on purpose. The present article argues for the second explanation, analysing the ›Lanzelet‹ as an intertextual play with the Lancelot myth, a play which does not simply cut the conflict out, but keeps alluding to it and re-narrates it on different levels (as a kind of ›Schattengeschichte‹). In doing so, the romance reveals the essentials of each Lancelot story as well as the narrative conditions under which the adultery story appears evitable or inevitable.

There and Back Again: A Malorian Wild Man’s Tale

In Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Lancelot and Tristram form, in many ways, two sides of the same Arthurian coin. They are consistently referred to as the two best knights, and are considered to be nearly equal in terms of prowess and chivalry. Their similarities even extend to the structural parallels between their many adventures, although their actions demonstrate that they prioritize their chivalric values differently. Placed side by side, Lancelot and Tristram often present different answers to the same scenario: when faced with conflict between their knightly duties and faithfulness to courtly love, for example, Lancelot consistently chooses courtly love (and, more specifically, Guinevere) over his knightly duties, while Tristram consistently chooses his chivalric efforts over his relationship with Isode. The tension that stems from the two knights being forced to choose between two chivalric ideals results in their participation in parallel episodes in which they separate from civilization and become wild men. These wild-men episodes function as a Bakhtinian carnival and allow Tristram and Lancelot to escape the rigid confines of chivalric society and experience a temporary change in their place in the social order. Their experiences follow the traditional medieval wild-man episode type and culminate in the knights' reintegration into courtly society. This reintegration, however, does not signal a resolution of the conflict, and both Tristram and Lancelot must face the tragic consequences of their earlier choices. The carnivalesque wild-man episodes in Malory, while they affirm the world order, ultimately demonstrate that the world order itself is broken.Lancelot is well-known as the best knight of Arthur's Round Table, both by Malory scholars and by Malory's text itself;1 many scholars have also noted Tristram's resemblance to Lancelot and the narrative parallels between their many adventures.2 These similarities are not original to Malory as he borrowed his material from French sources. As Renee L. Curtis has observed, the Prose Tristan relies heavily on the Prose Lancelot, and similarities between the two should be expected.3 Since Malory borrows from both of these texts, it is not surprising that these similarities also appear in his work. While Donald Schueler agrees that Lancelot and Tristram 'should be considered correlative,'4 he also asserts that 'the whole point of Malory's comparison is that all the qualities which the two men have in common are less important than the one matter in which they differ-that is, their importance to Arthur's comitatus.5 Schueler argues that Tristram is a free agent since he does not belong to the Round Table for the majority of the tale. He is, in fact, reluctant to join and is pressured into membership by Arthur.6 Schueler claims that this free agency allows him to avoid the conflict between chivalric duty and courtly love which Lancelot repeatedly faces.7 Maureen Fries, although she rejects Schueler's conclusion, concurs that 'Malory depicts Tristram's career as contradictory to the Arthurian oath.'8 She paints a picture of Tristram as a 'counter-hero' who serves as 'a symbol of the decay of the Arthurian world from its own ideals.'9 While D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. agrees that The Book of Sir Tristram marks the beginning of the decline of Arthur's kingdom, his assessment of Sir Tristram contrasts starkly with that of Fries as he suggests that Tristram, far from being a symbol of chivalric decay, is 'Malory's chosen agent of gentility.'10 Kevin Grimm also presents Tristram as the gentlest of knights and argues that Tristram's 'jantylness' is infectious. Sir Lamerok so admires him that he begins emulating Tristram's gentility, and it subsequently spreads to other knights as well.11 In addition, Nancy H. Owen and Lewis J. Owen claim 'that Tristram himself is meant to epitomize the glory of Arthurian chivalric life in full flower seems obvious.'12Incorporating ideas from all of these sources, this study explores the idea that Tristram and Lancelot represent both the best and worst of Arthurian society. …

Allusive Fonteinnes: Love as Trouble in La Mort le Roi Artu

Allusive Fonteinnes:Love as Trouble in La Mort le Roi Artu David S. King Scholars have long noted how the first half of the thirteenth-century French prose romance, La Mort le Roi Artu, parallels the narrative of Béroul’s twelfth-century verse Roman de Tristran.1 David F. Hult, in the preface to his recent edition and translation of the Mort Artu, indicates the resemblance as evidence that the prose romancer sought to glorify the adulterous love between Lancelot and Guenevere. Hult, like many other scholars, sees the final installment in the Lancelot-Grail cycle as turning away from the ascetic concerns of its immediate predecessor, La Queste del Saint Graal (63).2 But one must not mistake the secular focus of the characters in the Mort Artu for that of the author. The same portion of the romance that resembles Béroul’s poem makes a number of smaller scale allusions to other texts that suggest kinship with the spirit of the Queste. These allusions center on the image of the fonteinne (fountain or spring), first evoked in a description of Guenevere recalling the lovers’ initial meeting in the Prose Lancelot. Following that point, two springs appear in the narrative. Lancelot stops to rest by one when chased from court by Guenevere’s jealousy, and again by another when drawn back by peril she faces. Elements of these scenes allude to the Narcissus myth, as told in the twelfth-century Lai de Narcisse, and to Biblical verses that associate fountains with marital fidelity/infidelity and the water from such sources with knowledge of the divine. The scenes also recall Lancelot’s oneiric encounter with the sole fountain in the Queste, a vision underscoring the knight’s unworthiness. With these references in mind, we may understand Lancelot’s behavior at the springs in the Mort Artu as suggesting his obsession with worldly matters and his neglect of the spiritual. The allusions encourage the reader to think of adultery as a source of turmoil [End Page 453] rather than as an inspiration, a message in harmony with the Queste’s attitude toward carnal passion. The description of the queen given in the opening folios of the Mort Artu recalls and recasts the one given on Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s initial meeting. In the Prose Lancelot, he steals furtive glances at her, losing interest in the beauty of all other women. The narrator endorses the young knight’s infatuation: “il n’avoit mie tort, se il ne prisoit envers la roine nule autre dame, car che fu la dame des dames et la fontaine de biauté. Mais s’il seust la grant valor qui en li estoit, encore l’esgardast il plus volentiers, car nule n’estoit, ne povre ne riche, de sa valor” (7: 274).3 The Mort Artu’s narrator, by contrast, tells us that: “la reïne estoit si bele que touz li monz s’en merveilloit, car a celui tens meïsmes qu’ele iert bien en l’aage de cinquante anz estoit ele si bele dame que en tout le monde ne trouvast l’en mie sa pareille, dont aucun chevalier distrent, por ce que sa biauté ne li failloit nule foiz, qu’ele estoit fonteinne de toutes biautez” (3-4).4 This narrator is less effusive in his praise. He attributes the fountain simile to others rather than vouch for its truth himself. The queen’s inner virtues merit no mention, and her beauty is a feature of this world, thereby hinting at the beauties of another world that escape the attention of those at court. What precedes the description motivates this inference. The narrator reminds us that “Lancelos se fust tenuz chastement par le conseill del preudome a qui il se fist confés quant il fu en la queste del Seint Graal et eüst del tout renoiee la reïne Guenievre” (3). We then learn of the hero’s surrender to temptation following the quest – “il rencheï el pechié de la reïne autresi comme il avoit fet autrefoiz” (3). Soon thereafter, Agravain denounces the lovers to the king. In this context, the allusion to the Prose Lancelot reads...

From Guinevere to Isabel: Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Transformations of Oriana in Amadís de Gaula

From Guinevere to Isabel:Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Transformations of Oriana in Amadís de Gaula Stacey Triplette The 1508 romance of chivalry Amadís de Gaula provides some of the best evidence for the transmission of Arthurian legend to the Iberian Peninsula. Though Guiraut de Cabrera references the matter of Britain as essential repertoire for jongleurs in 1170, many scholars consider the Iberian Peninsula “an Arthurian backwater”, to borrow Michael Harney’s term (Lida de Malkiel, “Arthurian Literature” 405; Harney, “Spanish Lancelot” 188). Two partial translations of the prose Lancelot survive in Iberian languages: the sixteenth century Castilian Lanzarote del Lago, a manuscript copy of a 1414 codex, and a shorter, unrelated manuscript fragment in Catalán (Contreras Martín and Sharrer xii). The story of Lancelot is also preserved in references in other texts.1 For example, the popular Lancelot ballad “Nunca fuera caballero de [End Page 29] damas tan bien servido”, which Don Quijote mentions in his discussion of Lancelot and Guinevere, dates to the fourteenth century and survives in four sixteenth-century variants (Contreras Martín and Sharrer xi; Sharrer 180–81). Carlos Alvar notes that two Lancelot ballads were sung at the court of the Reyes Católicos (“Materia de Bretaña” 43). Amadís, a belated Arthurian text, imitates the plotline of the French Lancelot en prose but rewrites its love triangle, substituting juvenile disobedience for adultery. This change has prompted scholars to classify the Amadís’s values as bourgeois or “middle class” (Entwistle 216). Michael Harney, citing Fogelquist, explains that “[t]he shift in the locus of control over the female converts the triangle of the jealous husband (Arthur), his wife (Guinevere), and her lover (Lancelot), into that of the domineering father (Lisuarte), his daughter (Oriana), and her suitor (Amadís)” (“Spanish Lancelot” 192; Fogelquist 103). Edwin Williamson argues that the purpose of the revision is moral, as the Amadís participates in a “Christianizing process” typical of both the French Post-Vulgate and the Iberian tradition (39). While these readings are all valid, they do not tell the whole story. In this article, I contend that the transformation of the mal mariée into the rebellious daughter also has political implications. Peggy McCracken, referencing medieval French romance, notes that stories of adulterous queens “respond, sometimes indirectly, to issues raised by the evolving shape of queenship during the period of their production: the role of the queen in government, the importance of childbirth and succession in the royal family, and the importance of the queen’s chastity in the rituals and symbolic structures of the royal court” (Romance of Adultery 15). Oriana’s sexual transgressions, though they fall short of adultery, leave her vulnerable to criticism as her political power increases, as is often the case in the romances McCracken studies (Romance of Adultery 26; “Queen’s Secret” 289–90). Montalvo, in his 1508 revision of Amadís, redeems the sinful princess through marriage to Amadís in order to legitimate the political power that the two share as the co-rulers of Britain and Gaul. Oriana evokes at certain moments the image [End Page 30] of Isabel, and the chivalric dual monarchy provides a fictional echo for the kingdom of the Reyes Católicos. Imitation of Isabel Though she differs from Isabel in her sentimental life, Montalvo’s Oriana comes to resemble the monarch of Castilla in her role as heiress to the throne of Britain. Montalvo’s topical references reveal that he revised Amadís during the last decades of the fifteenth century and likely concluded it around the time of the conquest of Granada (Avalle-Arce 133). Barbara Weissberger asserts that the depiction of female characters during Isabel’s reign is “deeply affected by the presence on the throne of an absolutist monarch who is also a woman” (xiv). Isabel ruled Castilla from 1474 to her death in 1504, and her frequent travels made her a familiar public figure. Montalvo was a regidor of Medina del Campo and thus on the periphery of Isabeline bureaucracy. According to Frank Pierce, “Medina del Campo was a place especially favored by Isabella and her husband (the queen died there in 1504...

A New Arthurian Text: the Tuscan translation of the Lancelot en prose

Abstract: This article is a commentary of an important recent find, namely fiftysix folios from a manuscript of the second half of the fourteenth century, containing a long passage from a hitherto unknown Tuscan version of the Prose Lancelot.

Le rire galant: usages du comique dans les fictions narratives de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle by Nathalie Grande, Le rire des libertins dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle by Bruno Roche

medievalists for years to come. Gingras divides his study into three major sections. The first, “Une langue qui se donne un genre,” focuses on linguistics and genre, with chapters on the development of the term ‘roman,’ multilingual Normandy and England, translation, and the medieval concept of genre. Next, “Un genre à faire des histoires” examines thematic elements: history (and story), the protagonist, love, and adventure. The final four chapters consider “[l]es attraits d’un mauvais genre,” the appeal of a‘bad-boy’genre: (excessive) length,prose and verse,parody,and the reception of romance.Although his subject is essentially literary history, Gingras is more literary analyst than historian, and this leads to one of the volume’s great strengths. Moments of textual analysis punctuate the book,contributing to the larger argument and offering excellent micro-readings of individual texts. The result is a study that far exceeds the bounds of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the thematic analysis leads, more than once, to chronological confusion. Thus, in a section on the term ‘fable,’ the examples discussed move from the Brut, to Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, to the Chanson de Guillaume, then Gautier de Coinci, followed by the Roman de Thèbes et al. Gingras’s argument here is not purely historical (or developmental), but a more rigorous sense of chronology would have made it stronger. One other minor problem is similarly linked to the study’s vast scope: in a number of places, Gingras formulates interesting arguments based on specific manuscripts, yet in others, he refers to modern editions, with no mention of manuscripts. Thus, in a passage on“errance”(278–86), the discussion opens with an examination of manuscript rubrics in the prose Lancelot, but then considers the relationship between ‘aventure’ and ‘merveille’ via a series of analyses often hinging on a single word or line of text, yet with no mention of the possibility of variants. Here, the juxtaposition draws attention to the lack of manuscript information in the latter section, but similar passages exist throughout. Including manuscript information for every passage is clearly impossible, however it is unfortunate some solution other than complete silence could not have been found.Despite a few infelicities arising from the sheer mass of material (and from a lack of good copy-editing),Gingras’s well-written study is a major contribution to the field of Old French romance studies. University of Missouri, Kansas City Kathy M. Krause Grande, Nathalie. Le rire galant: usages du comique dans les fictions narratives de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2116-9. Pp. 332. 66 a. Roche, Bruno. Le rire des libertins dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2092-6. Pp. 622. 122 a. As these two books demonstrate,the scholarly study of humor is no laughing matter. The public execution of Lucilio Vanini in 1619 and the imprisonment of Théophile de Viau in 1623 created a dangerous social and political landscape for libertine satirists of 264 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 265 the early seventeenth century.As Roche explains, the libertine’s laughter of superiority and lucidity, what he terms the katagelos, gives way as the century unfolds to more subtle and less easily detected practices of irony. The argument culminates in the exegesis of a third, existential mode of laughter that unifies epicurean bodily pleasures with a corresponding philosophy. Covering the period between the first publication of Théophile’s Œuvres in 1621 and the death of Gassendi in 1655, Le rire des libertins extensively and carefully analyzes the work of freethinkers and comic writers including Cyrano, Sorel, La Mothe LeVayer, Naudé, Dassoucy, and Tristan L’Hermite. In addition to Christian doctrine, the libertines’ main targets were pedantry, scholasticism, and Aristotelian philosophy.Alternatives toAristotle were found in Epicureanism,skepticism, and cynicism.The sacrilegious creator of an inverted world,Cyrano emerges as perhaps the most interesting figure in this study; Cyrano’s ridicule of anthropocentrism robustly anticipated what is now increasingly termed posthumanism. Like Cyrano, Naudé attacked dogma and prejudice, specifically targeting the obscurantism and false claims of the Rosicrucians. Laughter became a critical...

Le bâtard conquérant: essor et expansion du genre romanesque au Moyen Âge by Francis Gingras

Reviews 263 and also certain philosophical arguments of Lacan related to death, particularly his readings of Antigone,and the Lacanian concept of entre-deux-morts.Chapter 1,“Roland and the second death,”is largely informed by Lacan’s ideas on the death drive, and also proposes different approaches to Roland’s death based on the major textual variants of the work. Chapter 2,“The knight as the Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot,” explores Lacan’s interpretation of courtly love, argues that the termination of the Arthurian order represents a kind of “collective death drive”(61), and considers some interesting ambiguities associated with Galehot, trapped in the state of entredeux -morts. The following portion of the study,“The ubi sunt topos in Middle French,” focuses on a ballade by Eustache Deschamps and the three ballades from Villon’s Testament related to the ubi sunt topos, including the famous Ballade des dames, highlighting complex patterns and tensions revolving around mortality and sexuality, and“Villon’s intense engagement with existence, extinction, and the literary”(150). In “Ceci n’est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl,” the author probes the rich symbolic connotations of the marguerite, which she finds“linked to a debate relating the complex of life, death, and life beyond death to that of desire, love, and poetry” (169). The final chapter treats two works by Chaucer, the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of the Good Women (particularly the prologue). Gilbert (with a nod to Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe) cleverly titles the chapter, “Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant,” and focuses on women who, in various senses, find themselves between two deaths. To characterize this as a difficult book would be an understatement. The work is intensely theoretical and abstract, weaving ideas from Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Butler, and others into an analysis of some important, and sometimes problematic French and English medieval texts. Readers who do not share Gilbert’s familiarity with these theorists may easily lose the thread of some of her most important arguments. Nevertheless, her attempt to apply certain aspects of Lacanian theory to these important texts yields original and revealing readings that are worth the intellectual effort. University of North Carolina, Greensboro David A. Fein Gingras, Francis. Le bâtard conquérant: essor et expansion du genre romanesque au Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2304-0. Pp. 529. 107 a. Gingras has written an ambitious book; as his title and subtitle summarize, his subject is nothing less than the history of the medieval ‘roman’ from the earliest uses of the term through the fourteenth century. Largely focused on origins, the book also includes significant discussion of the genre’s coming of age and concomitant multiplication of forms in the thirteenth century. Given the enormity of the task, the fact that the study is“un peu tortueuse”(45) is almost to be expected. Nevertheless, the volume contains much excellent analysis, and will provide points of reference for medievalists for years to come. Gingras divides his study into three major sections. The first, “Une langue qui se donne un genre,” focuses on linguistics and genre, with chapters on the development of the term ‘roman,’ multilingual Normandy and England, translation, and the medieval concept of genre. Next, “Un genre à faire des histoires” examines thematic elements: history (and story), the protagonist, love, and adventure. The final four chapters consider “[l]es attraits d’un mauvais genre,” the appeal of a‘bad-boy’genre: (excessive) length,prose and verse,parody,and the reception of romance.Although his subject is essentially literary history, Gingras is more literary analyst than historian, and this leads to one of the volume’s great strengths. Moments of textual analysis punctuate the book,contributing to the larger argument and offering excellent micro-readings of individual texts. The result is a study that far exceeds the bounds of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the thematic analysis leads, more than once, to chronological confusion. Thus, in a section on the term ‘fable,’ the examples discussed move from the Brut, to Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, to the Chanson...

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature by Jane Gilbert

pieces stand out. Merete Stistrup Jensen’s “Le travestissement narratif dans les écrits d’Isabelle Eberhardt”explores the multiple voices in the recently restored manuscripts salvaged at the time of this young and enigmatic author’s death. Although Eberhardt does at times adopt a feminine narrative voice,it is only when writing—and dressing— as a man that she can overcome the social and physical limits of her sex and,consequently, experience broader intellectual and creative freedom. Jensen carefully demonstrates how the recurring motif in Eberhardt’s works of liberty resulting from the abandonment or killing of a woman mirrors the author’s own struggles, whereby writing is possible only after the female point of view has been neutralized.While Jane Dieulafoy shares her contemporary’s preference for male disguises,they have little else in common. As Natascha Ueckmann points out, far from the expectation that nineteenth-century European women travelers deal with colonialism differently because they themselves are both colonizer and colonized, Dieulafoy projects the same ethnocentrism as her male counterparts. Paradoxically, it is her emancipation from the constraints her own culture places on women that provides Dieulafoy with the opportunity to be an overt accomplice in Western efforts to subjugate other cultures.Although the second section, “Genre et altérité,”contains only one article on French travel writing, it is perhaps the most provocative of all. By examining George Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque and Flora Tristan’s Les pérégrinations d’une paria, Christine Planté shows how these two contemporaneous authors, both famous and considered similar in their time, are in fact polar opposites when read from the perspective of otherness. Despite her inexperience as both a traveler and a writer, Tristan is more conscious and accepting of all forms of alterity, whereas Sand, who generally highlights humanist values in her works, shows pronounced intolerance in her travel narrative. Hiding her gender, her own otherness, Planté argues, causes Sand to disregard or devalue the cultural, linguistic, and environmental differences encountered in her travels. The third and final section,“Formes du voyage et possibles narratifs,”is the weakest in terms of thematic cohesion and analytic quality. One article painstakingly attempts to define different categories of female travel writers only to conclude that it cannot be done. Another suggests that women publishing in geographic or scientific journals reinforce colonialism, a well-worn and somewhat superficial position. Minor shortcomings aside, Voyageuses européennes introduces us to several courageous women whose actions and words place them well ahead of their time. Ohio University Herta Rodina Gilbert, Jane. Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1107-00383-5. Pp. 283. $90. In her introduction, Gilbert sketches the basic theoretical foundation of her study, defining some of the medieval attitudes toward death that she intends to explore, 262 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 263 and also certain philosophical arguments of Lacan related to death, particularly his readings of Antigone,and the Lacanian concept of entre-deux-morts.Chapter 1,“Roland and the second death,”is largely informed by Lacan’s ideas on the death drive, and also proposes different approaches to Roland’s death based on the major textual variants of the work. Chapter 2,“The knight as the Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot,” explores Lacan’s interpretation of courtly love, argues that the termination of the Arthurian order represents a kind of “collective death drive”(61), and considers some interesting ambiguities associated with Galehot, trapped in the state of entredeux -morts. The following portion of the study,“The ubi sunt topos in Middle French,” focuses on a ballade by Eustache Deschamps and the three ballades from Villon’s Testament related to the ubi sunt topos, including the famous Ballade des dames, highlighting complex patterns and tensions revolving around mortality and sexuality, and“Villon’s intense engagement with existence, extinction, and the literary”(150). In “Ceci n’est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl,” the author probes the rich symbolic connotations of the marguerite, which she finds“linked to a debate relating the complex of life, death, and life beyond death to that of desire, love, and poetry” (169). The final...

Sword in the Middle: The Iconography of Courtly Love in the Arthurian Romance

The iconography of two lovers embracing each other in an unnatural yet symbolic fashion recurs in the medieval French Arthurian romances.especially, those in which the idea of courtly love is preserved in its purest form. There is a striking resemblance between the arrangement of Tristan and Iseut’s sleeping bodies in Beroul’s Roman de Tristan and the picture of a knight and a lady painted on the split shield sent by the Lady of the Lake in the Prose Lancelot, which are reproduced, again with an uncanny resemblance, by the famous illustration of Lancelot and Guinevere kissing each other in an early-fourteenth-century manuscript of the Prose Lancelot. This iconography marvelously sums up the modus operandi of medieval courtly love at its best, which at once mobilizes and forecloses the sexuality of both man and woman for the sake of feudal ideology.

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and Its Verse ContinuationsChrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and Its Verse Continuations. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+263.

<i>Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner</i>, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the <i>Conte du Graal</i> and Its Verse Continuations<i>Chrétien Continued: A Study of the <i>Conte du Graal</i> and Its Verse Continuations</i>. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+263.