The chansons de geste French literature
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
More than 80 chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting
Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence
of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost
some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and
their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (“Deeds of the
King”), the king being Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear
guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin’s great-grandson,
Guillaume d’Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne’s
cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne’s son Louis) is the subject of
a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (“Song of William”). The epics in the
Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a
gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux
(Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare’s Oberon), has been
placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary
embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is
not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were
retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated
with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to
the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest
romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy
were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as
Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-
Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s
imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial
intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the
cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology,
especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland
and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet
Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was
reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from
Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s
treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent
by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of
Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155;
Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons
and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material
to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide),
is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship,
uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le
chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s
rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the
Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and
ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou,
le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first
introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse
romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s
contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age,
and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were
short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably
composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly
comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly
fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as
amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents
were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men.
On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all,
only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service
to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic,
unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been
sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely
sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the
favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to
satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine
(see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly
sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel,
who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de
Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours
exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of
Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de
Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles
such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de
Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a
group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from
Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at
clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic
literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as
particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the
fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—
most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from
situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple
wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all
classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals,
inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of
everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces,
bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni
Boccaccio.
