French Literature

The mysterious and haunting Grail makes its first appearance in literature in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval at the end of the twelfth century. But Chrétien never finished his poem, leaving an unresolved story and an incomplete picture of the Grail. It was, however, far too attractive an idea to leave. Not only did it inspire quite separate works; his own unfinished poem was continued and finally completed by no fewer than four other writers. The Complete Story of the Grail is the first ever translation of the whole of the rich and compelling body of tales contained in Chrétien's poem and its four Continuations, which are finally attracting the scholarly attention they deserve. Besides Chrétien's original text, there are the anonymous First Continuation (translated here in its fullest version), the Second Continuation attributed to Wauchier de Denain, and the intriguing Third and Fourth Continuations—probably written simultaneously, with no knowledge of each other's work—by Manessier and Gerbert de Montreuil. Two other poets were drawn to create preludes explaining the background to Chrétien's story, and translated here also are their works: The Elucidation Prologue and Bliocadran...

Guillaume de Palerme ('William of Palerne') is a French romance poem, later translated into English where it is also known as William and the Werewolf. The French verse romance was composed c. 1200, commissioned by Countess Yolande (who is generally identified as Yolande, daughter of Baldwin IV, Count of Hainaut). The prose version of the French romance, printed by N Bonfons, passed through several editions. The English poem in alliterative verse, commissioned by Humphrey de Bohun, 6th Earl of Hereford, was written c. 1350 by a poet named William.

Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of love affairs in a context that blends the courtly culture of tournaments and hunting and otherworldly elements such as self-steering boats, shape-shifting lovers, and talking animals. Popular with readers across countries and languages since their composition, the Lais have made their author, Marie, one of the most famous women writers of the Middle Ages, renowned for her brilliant use of language and cultural allusion as well as her keen eye for human behavior. This new edition provides a complete facing-page edition with the original text alongside a new modern English translation. A single manuscript, Harley 978, is used as the copy text. Appendices include contemporary literature on love, animals, and courtly life, as well as a list of textual variants in other manuscripts.

The romantic poems of 12th-century French poet Chretien de Troyes were of immense influence across Europe—widely imitated, translated, and adapted. Giving rise to a tradition of story-telling that continues to this day, the poems established the shape of the nascent Arthurian legend.

A knight who presses a ring on his lady and, when she refuses it, throws it to her reflection in a well—a gesture that persuades her to accept him. The Lai de l’Ombre is found in seven manuscripts, to which Joseph Bédier added the following sigla:

Winner of the 2016 Northern California Book Award for Translation of Poetry. Honorable Mention for the 2015 Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize For Translation of a Literary Work. Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and who lived in England during the twelfth century. Prominent among the earliest poets writing in the French vernacular, Marie de France helped shape the style and genres of later medieval poetry. This Norton Critical Edition includes all of Marie's lais (short narrative verse poems); selected fables; and a generous excerpt from Saint Patrick's Purgatory, a long poem based on a well-known medieval legend. Each text is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. For comparative reading, two lais, "Bisclavret" and "Yönec," are accompanied by Marie's facing-page originals. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of Marie's inspirations. Topics include "The Supernatural," "Love and Romance," "Medical Traditions," "Fable Sources and Analogues: Similar Themes," and "Purgatory and the Afterlife." Ovid, Chaucer, Andreas Capellanus, Boccaccio, Aristotle, and Bede are among the authors included. From the wealth of scholarly work published on Marie de France, Dorothy Gilbert has chosen excerpts from nine pieces that address issues of history and authorship as well as major themes in the lais, fables, and Saint Patrick's Purgatory. The contributors are Thomas Warton, Abbé Gervais de la Rue, Joseph Bedier, Leo Spitzer, R. Howard Bloch, E. A. Francis, Jill Mann, and Jacques Le Goff. A selected bibliography is also included.

On 15 August 778, Charlemagne's army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant epic poem in French. The Song of Roland, written by an unknown poet, tells of Charlemagne's warrior nephew, Lord of the Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies in the massacre, defiant to the end. In majestic verses, the battle becomes a symbolic struggle between Christianity and paganism, while Roland's last stand is the ultimate expression of honour and feudal values of twelfth-century France...

Despite its status as a masterpiece of world literature, the Song of Roland has only been available in English in translations based on the Oxford manuscript whose text dates to around 1100. But the medieval corpus of the Roland consists of seven substantial manuscripts, two in assonance and five in rhyme. The only complete text among the rhymed versions is found in two manuscripts housed respectively in Chateauroux and Venice, and thus known as CV7, which has never before been translated into a modern language. CV7 dates to the end of the twelfth century. It introduces five new episodes and expands others substantially, transforming the substance and sense of the narrative. The role of Aude is recomposed, raising her standing to one of the most important characters in the poem.Students of the epic and those taking courses on medieval literature and history will experience the vitality and mutability of the genre in the course of the century in which many of the great French epics and romances were composed. The present volume contains complete translations of Oxford and CV7, plus an introduction, notes, and indices of proper names and place-names that pertain to both texts.

Wace's Brut is an 1155 French verse rendering of Geoffrey of Monmouth's earlier Latin history of Britain, from the time of Brutus, the eponymous founder, to the 7th century. It includes the Arthurian legend, with the first appearance of the Round Table and an unambiguously guilty Guinevere. This is an English translation and is presented in parallel with the French text.

Douglas Kelly provides a comprehensive and historically valid analysis of the art of medieval French romance as the romancers themselves describe it. He focuses on well-known writers, such as Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France, and also draws on a wide range of other sources—prose romances, non-Arthurian romances, thirteenth-century verse romances, and variant versions from the later Middle Ages. Kelly is the first scholar to present the 'art' of medieval romance to a modern audience through the interventions and comments of medieval writers themselves. The book begins by examining the difficulties scholars perceive in medieval literature: problems such as source and intertextuality, structure in its manifold modern meanings, and character psychology and individuality. These issues frame Kelly's identification and discussion of all the known authorial interventions on the art and craft of romance. Kelly's careful reconstruction of the 'art' of romance, based on the records left by the romancers themselves, will be an invaluable resource and guide for all medievalists.

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances. Featuring a chronology and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal companion for students and scholars in other fields wishing to discover the riches of the French medieval tradition.

Modern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages. In medieval French literature, faces feature heavily as markers of identity, mood, class, status, and even humanity. The information that they convey can be strategically concealed and revealed, but they are always understood to be legible. This book explores the face as a medieval literary motif and as a modern phenomenon, charting its limits and interrogating the idea of face as a universal signifier. It examines what happens when faces are not legible, when they are found on non-human surfaces, and when they migrate across the human body. It looks at faciality in a series of texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moving from Arthurian tales, through the Roman de la Rose to the fabliaux, as well as examining fourteenth-century manuscripts in which faces appear as disembodied doodles. Reading these texts in conjunction with twentieth-century theories of face and faciality, and considering the ideas behind twenty-first-century face recognition technology, this book argues that faces in the popular imagination tell us less about identity than they do about how we understand and interact with the world around us.

In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation. An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and--in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory--demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity. Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies