Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and Its Verse Continuations
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner provides the first book-length examination of all four verse continuations that follow Chrétien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. By focusing on the dialogue between Chrétien 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...
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Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner provides the first book-length examination of all four verse continuations that follow Chrétien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. By focusing on the dialogue between Chrétien 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 Chrétien'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 Chrétien's decentered Conte du Graal.
List of Illustrations xiiiIntroduction 1Overview of the Corpus 4Perceval Continuations and Grail Rewritings 11Verse and Prose/Centripetal and Centrifugal Textuality 15Key Traits of the Conte du Graal 17On Ending and Endlessness 22Reading (Through) Collective Authorship 251 Authorial Relays 32Authors' Names 33Anonymous Chrétien 42Interlacing Wauchier de Denain 44Manessier's Closing Signature 54Collective Authorship and Gerbert 59Back to the Story and Chrétien 722 Telling Tales, Of Maidens in Tents 86Textual Intercourse and Human Development 87Chrétien's Criss-crossing Itineraries 91Perceval and the Tent Maiden: Simulating Rape 95Too Little and Too Much for the Ladies' Man 98Gauvain and the Male Pucele: Thinking About Rape 100The First Continuation's Gauvain: Confessing Rape 105Gerbert's Gauvain: Acting out Rape 109Retelling Love Stories: Writing Forward and Back 1123 Sons and Mothers, Mothers and Lovers 116Protecting Mothers: Connections and Contradictions 119The Sin of the Mother 124Nature and Nurture 127The Marginalization and Restoration of Mothers 132Mothers and Siblings: From the Conte to the First Continuation 135The Sexuality of Mothers 137The Good Mother and the Beloved 1434 Violent Swords and Utopian Plowshares 149Violence at the Heart of Romance 149What is a Lance? 153Collapsing Oppositions 157Isaiah's Utopian Vision in Arthurian Garb 163Re-reading Oppositions 165Unending Questions 168Grail Quests and the Ends of Violence 173Manessier's Resolution 1795 Middles, Beginnings, and Ends 187A Beginning for Middlesand Endings 187Verbatim Repetition: A Biblical Example 192Gerbert's Grail-like Barrels 198Grail Castle Visits Multiplied 204Conclusion 213Appendix 1 229Appendix 2 235Bibliography 237Index 255
