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Troubling Arthurian Histories

Court Culture, Performance and Scandal in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide

by James Simpson (Author)
©2007 Monographs 536 Pages

Summary

Drawing on a range of approaches in cultural, gender and literary studies, this book presents Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide as a daring and playful exploration of scandal, terror and anxiety in court cultures. Through an interdisciplinary reading, it locates Erec et Enide, the first surviving Arthurian romance in French, in various contexts, from broad cultural and historical questionings such as medieval vernacular ‘modernity’s’ engagement with the weight of its classical inheritance, to the culturally fecund and politically turbulent histories of the families of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II Plantagenet. Where previous accounts of the tale have not uncommonly presented Chrétien’s poem as a decorous ‘resolution’ of tensions between dynastic marriage and fin’amors, between personal desire and social duty, this reading sees these forces as in permanent and irresolvable tension, the poem’s key scenes haunted – whether mischievously or traumatically – by questions and skeletons from various closets.

Details

Pages
536
Publication Year
2007
ISBN (Softcover)
9783039113859
Language
English
Keywords
Chrétien (de Troyes) Erec et Enide Höfische Kultur (Motiv) Skandal (Motiv) Angst (Motiv) Medieval Literature Court Society Marriage Tournaments Burlesque
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2007. 536 pp.

Biographical notes

James Simpson (Author)

The Author: James R. Simpson is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative.

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Title: Troubling Arthurian Histories