Chr?tien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations

by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Overview

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner provides the first book-length examination of all four verse continuations that follow Chr?tien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. By focusing on the dialogue between Chr?tien and the verse continuators, this study demonstrates how the patterns and puzzles inscribed in the first author's romance continue to guide his successors, whose additions and reinventions throw new light back on the problems medieval readers and writers found in the mother text: questions about society and the individual; love, gender relations, and family ties; chivalry, violence, and religion; issues of collective authorship and doubled heroes, interpretation, rewriting, and canon formation. However far the continuations appear to wander from the master text, the manuscript tradition supports an implicit claim of oneness extending across the multiplicity of discordant voices combined in a dozen different manuscript compilations, the varying ensembles in which most medieval readers encountered Chr?tien's Conte. Indeed, considered as a group the continuators show remarkable fidelity in integrating his romance's key elements, as they respond sympathetically to the dynamic incongruities and paradoxical structure of their model, its desire for and deferral of ending, its non-Aristotelian logic of 'and/both' in which contiguity forces interpretation and further narrative elaboration. Unlike their prose competitors, the verse continuators remain faithful to the dialectical movement inscribed across the interlace of two heroes' intertwined stories, the contradictory yet complementary spirit that propels Chr?tien's decentered Conte du Graal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191565267
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner taught for many years at Princeton University before moving to Boston College, where she is currently Professor of French. She has published numerous articles, chapters in collective volumes, and dictionary entries in the fields of medieval French literature. Her major books include Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200) (1980), Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (1993), and (with her two collaborators, Laurie Shepard and Sarah White) an edition and translation of Songs of the Women Troubadours (1995; rev. 2000). She has also been co-curator for two art exhibits at Boston College, 'Memory and the Middle Ages' and 'Secular Sacred, 11th - 16th Century: Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts'.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction 1

Overview of the Corpus 4

Perceval Continuations and Grail Rewritings 11

Verse and Prose/Centripetal and Centrifugal Textuality 15

Key Traits of the Conte du Graal 17

On Ending and Endlessness 22

Reading (Through) Collective Authorship 25

1 Authorial Relays 32

Authors' Names 33

Anonymous Chrétien 42

Interlacing Wauchier de Denain 44

Manessier's Closing Signature 54

Collective Authorship and Gerbert 59

Back to the Story and Chrétien 72

2 Telling Tales, Of Maidens in Tents 86

Textual Intercourse and Human Development 87

Chrétien's Criss-crossing Itineraries 91

Perceval and the Tent Maiden: Simulating Rape 95

Too Little and Too Much for the Ladies' Man 98

Gauvain and the Male Pucele: Thinking About Rape 100

The First Continuation's Gauvain: Confessing Rape 105

Gerbert's Gauvain: Acting out Rape 109

Retelling Love Stories: Writing Forward and Back 112

3 Sons and Mothers, Mothers and Lovers 116

Protecting Mothers: Connections and Contradictions 119

The Sin of the Mother 124

Nature and Nurture 127

The Marginalization and Restoration of Mothers 132

Mothers and Siblings: From the Conte to the First Continuation 135

The Sexuality of Mothers 137

The Good Mother and the Beloved 143

4 Violent Swords and Utopian Plowshares 149

Violence at the Heart of Romance 149

What is a Lance? 153

Collapsing Oppositions 157

Isaiah's Utopian Vision in Arthurian Garb 163

Re-reading Oppositions 165

Unending Questions 168

Grail Quests and the Ends of Violence 173

Manessier's Resolution 179

5 Middles, Beginnings, and Ends 187

A Beginning for Middlesand Endings 187

Verbatim Repetition: A Biblical Example 192

Gerbert's Grail-like Barrels 198

Grail Castle Visits Multiplied 204

Conclusion 213

Appendix 1 229

Appendix 2 235

Bibliography 237

Index 255