Chapter Five—
Courtesy in the French Romance

From Epic to Romance:
The First Generation

The world view of the lyric bears a closer relation to that of the courtly romance than has been commonly recognized in historical expositions.^[1] We have seen how the former reflects our theme: let us now look at the latter. We will find there the perfect knight who joins in his exemplary person the leading qualities of arma, amor, and litterae —the valor of the fighter, the refinement of the true lover, and the sophistication of the educated man of society.

The French epics or chansons de geste have been amply analyzed for incipient elements of chivalry and courtesy. I shall therefore start with an example outside the main French cycles and single out a Provençal epic of circa 1150, the ten-thousand-line Girart de Roussillon, celebrating the struggle between the French King Charles Martel and his vassal Girart. We encounter there the striking portrait of a chivalrous knight readying for battle whom Maurice Keen has found to be of the same mold as the Arnold of Ardres and William the Marshal of somewhat later chronicles.^[2]

Folcon was in the battle lines, with a fine hauberk, seated on an excellently trained horse . . . . He was most graciously armed . . . . And when the king saw him he stopped, and went to join the Count of Auvergne, and said to the French: “Lords, look at the best knight that you have ever seen . . . . He is brave and courtly and skilful, and noble and of a good lineage and eloquent, handsomely experienced in hunting and falconry; he knows how to play chess and backgammon, gaming and dicing. And his wealth was never

denied to any, but each has as much as he wants . . . . And he has never been slow to perform honorable deeds. He dearly loves God and the Trinity. And since the day he was born he has never entered a court of law where any wrong was done or discussed without grieving if he could do nothing about it . . . . And he always loved a good knight; he has honored the poor and lowly; and he judges each according to his worth.”^[3]

The 114 lines dedicated to him present Folcon as an ideal knight thanks to courtly virtues (he is cortes in the sense of “having the manners of the court,” according to Hackett) that, outside the lyric, are perhaps here for the first time attributed to a knight rather than a nobleman. He hates war but enters the field of battle with fierce bravery when loyalty calls. He shows good breeding, liberality, and eloquence as well as skill in the courtly pastimes of hunting and social games. His humanity and sense of justice toward the needy also make him the sort of knight that the Peace of God had been preaching.^[4]

Another significant episode in the early epic deserves our attention. The French Coronement Looïs is part of the cycle of Guillaume d'Orange, the hero of this poem, within the vast geste of Garin de Monglane, which goes back to historic characters of the late eighth century. The high nobility's duty to uphold justice (typically, defend orphans and widows) makes a dramatic entrance in this poem when, at the solemn ceremony prepared in the chapel of Aachen for the crowning of his own son, Charlemagne declares that he will veto the investiture unless the candidate king swears to uphold these high ideals:

If you must, dear son, allow yourself to be corrupted, put on and exalt arrogance (démesure ), indulge in lustfulness and breed sin, take his fief away from an orphan, subtract even four deniers from a widow, in the name of Jesus, son Louis, I deny this crown to you and forbid you to take it.^[5]

As Louis hesitates to come forward and take the oath, Charlemagne, in front of all the high nobility of France, declares him unfit to rule and orders him sent to a convent. The action proceeds with the attempt by Arneïs d'Orléans to take over the throne by offering to save Louis and act as his regent until he shows to be worthy of the succession. Guillaume of Orange, however, intervenes, unmasks Arneïs as an impostor, kills him, and puts the crown on Louis's head. Charlemagne accepts Guillaume's warrant that his son deserves the crown.

This surprising plot illustrates how the epic, though of noble origin within the feudal structures, could transcend a class perspective. Arneïs represents the real interests of the high nobility, namely to limit the

monarch's hereditary power, whereas Guillaume (regardless of his historic position) becomes a sympathetic hero by acting in a manner that contradicted his class interests and was consonant with popular sentiment—briefly, the growing spirit of national solidarity under and around the king and his family. The king stands for the nation precisely insofar as he is inherently opposed to the interests of the great lords. Consequently, even while stressing the close connection of this literature with the noble spheres that bred it, as historians we cannot interpret it as a direct expression of class interests.^[6] The epic became popular precisely because it elicited sympathy over a broad social spectrum. Its generic “horizon of expectations” was collective to the point of encompassing a wide range of “national” consciousness. It is this broad appeal that made the French legends popular even outside France. In Italy they were recited both in noble circles (as in the Venetia under the Ghibelline lords) and in the streets and public squares of free mercantile communes (as in Florence down to the late fifteenth century, the days of Luigi Pulci). At the same time the rich ideological texture of the early epics reflects a tension between the ideal of the monarchic sovereign and the interests of the great lords, who, as typically in the Guillaume of Orange cycle, can overshadow an occasional undeserving king like Louis. Charlemagne himself could be forced by his rebellious lords to recognize his own impotence. In Huon de Bordeaux he ends up having to admit himself unworthy of drinking at the cup of “the pure.”^[7]

The epics put forth the growing conflict between the image of the king as supreme embodiment of the collectivity, the “nation,” and the lords' resistance to the process whereby that higher authority imposed limitations on their own sovereign rights. This kind of internal opposition is also found in the Arthurian romances. With the Plantagenets' either tacit or explicit endorsement, the creators of the Arthurian legend upheld the claims of the feudal lords against the centralizing monarchy embodied in the Plantagenets' enemies, the Capetian kings.^[8] Arthur became a sort of anti-Charlemagne. He was an ideal feudal king because he behaved as a primus inter pares; his peers' identity and dignity derived from their individual adventures away from the court.

Resistance was a matter of survival. Originally, the epic could be used as a functional form of ecclesiastical propaganda to promote the Crusades as well as those cooperative monarchs who led the marches against the infidels. Now other clerics at feudal courts came to the aid of the threatened lords in much the same way, providing them, through the Arthurian mythology, with an ideological means to resist their an-

nihilation.^[9] The romance stepped in to assert in coherent terms the great vassals' resistance against those among the French kings (signally Charles VI, Charles VII, and Philip Augustus) who had become conscious of their antifeudal function. The progress of royalty was to mark the evolutionary parable from feudalism to absolute monarchy, culminating with the triumph of centralized absolutism under Louis XIV, whereas elsewhere, as in Germany and, with the long parenthesis of the Elizabethan period, England, the lords held their ground and kept the kings in check.

The medieval romance (Fr. roman ) is a hard-to-define genre that stems from early French texts already embodying aspects of chivalry and courtliness, namely the “classical romances”—the various romans d'Alexandre, d'Énéas, de Troie, and de Thèbes, the first of them (the first version of the Alexandre composed around 1100, the others around 1150/1160.^[10] These texts continued to enjoy great popularity even outside France: Heinrich von Veldeke, for example, produced a German version of the Énéas in his Eneit of circa 1170–1189. As the romances grew, their courtly elements became clearer. The anonymous Picard version of the Alexandre (ca. 1270), perhaps the best-known version today, starts with the author's polemical allusion to his inept predecessors who “strive to be prized at court,” and with his address to an audience of people who “wish to soften their hearts toward good manners” by reading the story of a great hero who inherited from his mother Olympias “such virtues that he was sweet and humble and full of generosity.”^[11] In the story, Aristotle is made to advise his pupil Alexander on how to win loyal service through largesse —generous giving.^[12] Similarly, in their chansons de geste Garin le Lorrain and Guillaume of Orange, among others, are shown winning the loyal services of knights by promising lavish gifts.^[13] A prolific subgenre commonly labeled roman d'aventure (G. Schicksalroman ) is characterized by a sense of fate, fortuna, or chance—qualities which dominate the interminable strings of adventures the heroes and heroines have to go through before attaining their goal, a happy reunion. The label differentiates these often lively texts from the Arthurian variety, where the adventure follows ethical and aesthetic rules that are part of the chivalric code. A particularly interesting example is the successful Partonopeus de Blois (ca. 1170?, anonymous though sometimes attributed to a Denis Piramus), which mixes with great verve antique elements, Arthurian ones, and contemporary historical events within a geographic setting that goes from France to the Byzantine East.^[14]

The romances of “ancient” matter borrowed some Arthurian lore and also some features from the courtois lyric. The more literate or “clerical” milieus enlarged the ancestral vision of the world of chivalry by including not only ancient Trojan and Roman heroes—duly interpreted as early knights and regularly represented in knightly garb as in medieval iconography, according to a practice that endured through the Renaissance—but also some military biblical figures. The ambitious knightly ideal was thus given an illustrious ancestry that harmonized the Christian with classical and biblical ascendants: Charlemagne, Arthur, and then the Crusading leader Godfrey of Bouillon found themselves flanked by such monumental personages as Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar, plus the hallowed Old Testament figures of Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabaeus. This impressive sequence, or variant thereof, constitutes the canonical series of the Nine Worthies that we see represented from the late-thirteenth-century Vulgate version of the Queste del Graal (Bodmer MS)^[15] on through Renaissance literature as well as in popular castle frescoes, tapestries, and manuscript illuminations from France to Germany and northern Italy. The Nine Worthies were often paired with the Nine Heroines, who, however, did not symmetrically parallel the male series since they tended to be mostly ancient figures. Nevertheless the idea could show its enduring vitality through the addition of modern characters in later times: Christine de Pisan (1364—after 1429), for one, placed Joan of Arc among the canonical knightly Heroines.^[16]

The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus was also inserted into this grand repertory of knightly heroes through the story of Joseph of Arimathea, the guardian of the Grail (conceived as Christ's eucharistic cup), whose lineage led directly to Perceval and Lancelot's son Galahad in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie.^[17] Keen (120) recalls that the introduction to a French translation of the Books of Judges, Kings, and Maccabees done for the Knights Templar between 1151 and 1171 points to the principles of “chivalry” to be learned from those sacred books. That Christine de Pisan did not hesitate to configure Paris and Helen as courtly lovers (Épître d'Othéa )^[18] was only one example of that alluring chivalric disguise of ancient heroes which endured in literature and art well into the Renaissance, and not only in France.^[19]

Paul Zumthor (1987: 299–311) has forcefully underlined the “uniquely literary” nature of the medieval romance as opposed to the basic “orality” of the lyric, the epic, and other narrative forms. The epic,

in particular, was originally oral or, if written down, so done only as a textual basis for a fully oral performance, hence to be recited by a minstrel who was, in the concrete act of delivery and performance, indistinguishable from an author/narrator. The lai, contemporary to the romance, also expressly declares its oral derivation, while the conte was written down only after an oral tradition (ibid. 301). In clear opposition to the other forms, the roman was written as a text with a relatively fixed and independent status, to be read before a live audience, presumably at a court, as the work of an individual, self-conscious author. The possibility was open for works of mixed status, as exemplified by Gautier d'Arras's Éracle.^[20] Gautier (fl. 1170–1185), also a cleric, was probably a compain of Chrétien at the court of Champagne, and may be the butt of Chrétien's critiques in the prologue of the Chevalier de la charrete.

Reviewing the genesis of the Breton romance, Jean Frappier has argued for Celtic origin and for the Welsh and Cornish minstrels as channels of transmission through the Norman court in England, then on to the Continent.^[21] Whatever may have been the role of Celtic traditions in the shaping of the French courtois ideology, no doubt they contributed significantly to notions that coincided with those independently developed earlier at German courts. However, while German courtliness had been decisively centered on loyal service to the emperor, the French romance served the specific function of vindicating the autonomous, antimonarchic claims of the great feudal vassals.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1136) is the major source of the Arthurian cycle and the “matter of Brittany,” and this “Énéide bretonne en prose” (Frappier 1978: 189) already contained clear chivalric and courtois elements, including the all-important coupling of love and valor, amor et militia. This, at least thirty years before Chrétien and about twenty years before the romans de Thèbes, d'Enéas, and de Troie. King Arthur's knights regularly proved their mettle at tourneys in the presence of ladies with whom they were in love. No lady worth her honor would think of granting her love to a knight who had not tested himself successfully three times: this kept the courtly ladies “chaste” and the knights more noble through their love for them:

facetae enim mulieres  . . . nullius amorem habere dignabant nisi tertio in militia probatus esset. Efficiebantur ergo castae quaeque mulieres et milites pro amore illarum nobiliores. (chap. 157, vv. 41–44)^[22]

Arthur's court is represented as the most splendid ever and much given to lavish displays and games and is said to have become the envy of the world also for being the realm of facetia: “copia divitiarum, luxu ornamentorum, facetia incolarum cetera regna excellebat,” “it excelled all other realms in riches, luxury, and the ingeniousness of its inhabitants.”^[23] This rather uncommon meaning for facetia can be rendered with “wit,” but Frappier does not hesitate to translate it as courtois. Interestingly enough Wace translated facetia and facetae mulieres in the passage just quoted from Geoffrey's chapter 157 precisely with curtesie and curteise dame.^[24] This term's semantic field will appear all the clearer if we think of the mid-twelfth-century didactic poem Facetus de moribus et vita by an anonymous cleric (see my chap. 2 above).

Geoffrey's ample narrative, perhaps a way to impress the Normans with the native dignity of the British Celts, victorious fighters against both Anglo-Saxons and Romans, covered the whole of Arthur's fantastic parable, from triumph to final ruin through the disintegration of the realm on account of infighting between the feudal lordships and the potentially anarchic elements of courtesy, including Lancelot's tryst with Guinevere. The twelfth-century poets picked up only the adventures of the happy period, leaving the Götterdämmerung to the thirteenth-century compilers of cyclical prose romances, who felt in tune with this part and carried it on until it reached the capable hands of Sir Thomas Malory. Around 1230 the prose romances would thus seal Arthur's tragic fate, and “l'enchantement finira par devenir désenchantement” (Frappier 1978: 211).

Wace's Roman de Brut (dated at 1155, labeled as romans at the end of the text, and dedicated to Henry II's wife Alienor of Aquitaine) portrays Arthur thus:

Servir se fist cortoisement
Et mult se maintint noblement.
Tant com il vesqui et raina,
Tos autres princes surmonta
De cortoisie et de proesce
Et de valor et de largesce.

(He had himself served with courtoisie and held himself most nobly. As long as he lived and reigned, he surpassed all other princes in courtoisie, bravery, valor, and generosity.)^[25]

At verse 9655 Wace praises Queen Guinevere as very liberal and eloquent, “mult fu large et buene parliere,” besides being the most beautiful lady on the island. After the episode from Geoffrey of Monmouth

where Duke Cador welcomes the Roman procurator Lucius's challenge to Arthur by extolling warfare as the way to keep knights from going soft and lazy, Wace adds this illuminating answer from Gawain to Cador:

Sire cuens, dist Walwein, par fei,
De neient estes en effrei.
Bone est la pais emprés la guerre,
Plus bele et mieldre en est la terre;
Mult sunt bones les gaberies
E bones sunt les drüeries.
Pur amistié e pur amies
Funt chevaliers chevaleries.^[26]  

(Sir Count, said Gawain, truly, you have no cause to fear. Good is peace after a war, the land becomes all the more beautiful and better; there is good in pleasant conversations and in love affairs. It is for love and their beloveds that knights perform their chivalrous deeds. Vv. 10,765–772.)

Uther Pendragon, too, is vividly depicted as being madly in love with Ygerne (vv. 8549–8665).^[27] If his behavior on this occasion cannot be labeled as courtois or chivalrous, other particulars could not be described otherwise. It is tempting to conjecture that such ideas might have traveled from southern to northern France and England with Alienor having a firm hand in the translatio —unless it was a spontaneous generation, with or without Celtic imports.

It is interesting to compare the Brut with the Roman de Horn (early 1170s), that has been judged as “the most typically English” among the Anglo-Norman romances. Whereas Brut presents an idealistic and courtly view of knighthood, with sharp differentiation between chevalers and such gent menue as pouners, sergans, gelduners, esquiers, garcuns, and archers, in Horn the emphasis is on moral probity, religious faith, and traditional military virtues: “courtesy” is replaced by the adverb vassalment, stressing duty toward the lord. Horn, a landless knight who wonders who he is, since he has not yet been tested (“Joe ne sai ke joe sui, ne fui onc espruvez,” v. 1167), successfully tests his valur by feats of arms while still a bacheler deprived of adobement. He thus finds his identity and is recognized as a true knight: “Or estes chevalier” (v. 1780).^[28]

The Age of Chrétien

As already stated, the romance was far from a well-defined genre. Most striking in this large production are the differences among authors and

texts. Despite appearances at this chronological remove, the evolution of themes and forms was quick and intense. The same episodes, plots, and motifs could assume different, contrasting meanings in contemporary or immediately subsequent authors, as is so apparent in the Lancelot and Tristan legends.^[29] Plots and myths were props or literary pretexts for the treatment of vital moral, psychological, social, and even metaphysical and religious issues, since the often fanciful and mysterious-sounding motifs, including ogres, fairies, and magic implements, were essentially metaphors —as was even the relationship between lovers.^[30] Chrétien de Troyes (fl. ca. 1165–1190) tackled not only diverse themes in different poems (love and marriage, love and knighthood, love and loyalty to the liege, knighthood and service to God), but changed his mind on these interrelated values, since he was constantly trying to offer a harmonious solution that kept evading him and his society. Hence the textual features we will observe can seldom be taken as definitions of their works' general import. In his attitude toward his subject matter, Chrétien can even be viewed as a cleric who ultimately rejected both courtly love and chivalry.^[31] This may sound like a radical conclusion about the man who more than anyone contributed to the crystallization of both sides of that ideological phenomenon. But the main point is that Chrétien appears to us as a cleric who strove to understand and resolve the contradictions inherent in his subject matter while remaining bound by the ethical imperatives consistently raised by the anticourt critics. Combining the anthropological and the aesthetic, we could say that in these and other romances the narrative art provides an illusion of order within a perception of reality that is so fraught with uncertainties as to border on chaos.

The writers of romances were aware that their novel compositions did not fit the canonical narrative forms. This is evidenced by the lack of a set generic style of the kinds inherited from antiquity. From Auerbach to Daniel Poirion, literary critics have studied Chrétien's undefined style, always stressing its “median” quality that hovered somehow in a no-man's land between the high style traditional for the epic, including the Chanson de Roland, and the low style of both popular and religious narrative.^[32] Despite strongly “class-determined” restrictions in subject matter, Auerbach saw this as an abstract and “absolute” genre that excluded the representation of a social and political reality, since the authors had adopted an ideal fairy-tale world consisting entirely of deeds of arma et amor, “arms and love,” the latter often as motivation for the former.^[33] Nevertheless, all its abstract principles and outward

ritual notwithstanding, the chivalric ethos was an operative one that created “a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity.”^[34] Auerbach's characterization must be further qualified with the remark that both Chrétien and his German imitators, mainly Hartmann and Gottfried, were aware of this fairy world's limitations, and reacted to them in a productive way. The lingering popularity of these literarily “abstract” tales can only be explained by their disguising a concrete social predicament. Once again, without being a mirror of society, good literature reveals and expresses society's deeper structural truths.

The mysterious quality of characters who do not behave like real people is part of the poetic charm of these literary texts, yet their characters' deviations from the norm clamor for explanation: we cannot assume that they act as they do simply to be “artistically” odd. Arbitrary oddity is not likely to produce the enduring charm of finished poetry, and contemporary readers must have sensed that there was a concrete meaning to such strange stories. Chrétien, for one, alerted them to his hidden san.^[35]

Auerbach (119) found the ideal of graduated perfectibility through courtly love and knightly adventure analogous to the experiences of mystic love among the Victorines and the Cistercians in the same century—allowing for the difference of the theological setting as well as the absence of class restrictions in the religious experiences of those monastic movements. Chrétien praised a socially oriented code of courtly behavior combined with love as a powerful inspiration enhancing, not impeding the heroic virtues of knightly valor.^[36] From the vantage point of its psychological content, the peculiarity of courtly love stands out more clearly when set against the background of ancient erotic literature. The continuous popularity of Ovid even in the lower schools testifies that pagan sexuality remained very much alive in the Middle Ages. Ovid is conspicuously present in many medieval literary texts on love, even when they are marked by a strong courtois and chivalric flavor. Suffice it to mention in passing such thirteenth-century French texts—from a period when courtly love had already reached full bloom—as Maître Élie's rendering of the Ars amatoria, the anonymous Norman Clef d'amour, Guiart's Art d'amors, the anonymous Anglo-Norman De courtoisie, Robert de Blois's Le chastoiement des dames, Drouart de la Vache's Livres d'amours, and Richard de Fournival's Consaus d'amours.^[37] But the need for self-sacrifice, the devotion to a distant ideal, and the satisfaction in chastity and frustration that are such striking features of courtly love were the direct counterpart of the

Ovidian Ars amatoria, with its overtly cynical strategies for winning the lady's sensual favors quickly and without afterthoughts.

We can assume that, whereas the French chansons de geste must have been close to anticourt clerical milieus, the matière de Bretagne, instead, issued from curial clerics, prone to invest knighthood with the ways of curialitas. The two mentalities still coexisted in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (1186-ca. 1218). With striking contradiction this author extolled the savagery of Starcatherus, who slew the effeminate husband of King Ingellus's sister, yet he also praised King Canute's (Knud, d. 1035) decision to have his wise counselor Opo of Seeland impose the courtly code on the unruly knights who made political order impossible at court.^[38] Just as royal chaplains and imperial bishops had been constrained by standards of conduct imposed as conditions for obtaining their offices, so did King Canute need to polish the warriors at court if they were to be turned into a wieldy instrument of government. There was a conspicuous difference between the lesser nobility at court (Canute's court nobles), who needed restraint of the “courtly” type, and the free higher lords (like Starcatherus), who did not, since they survived by remaining aggressively self-sufficient and independent of the king (the French fronde could go on even under the heavy hand of Mazarin). The novelty of twelfth-century France was the cultural (not yet the social) adoption of chivalry by the higher nobility—that is to say, in idea and feeling, not in actual behavior. The new standards originally imposed by real life conditions became ideals and mental models.

Among the key narrative themes of the romances that narratology and semiotics have tried to single out, there is the ever-present aventure, definable in sociological terms as “an invention of the poor or lower nobleman”^[39] who, like the members of a maisne, imagines himself striking out for success (a good marriage, eventually, or a stroke of good fortune) in order to (re-)enter Arthur's court with full rights.^[40] Since the Arthurian world of chivalry was inadequate to satisfy the lofty needs of the perfect knight, he might have to seek his perfection in an individual experience—possibly, as with Perceval, of a mystical nature. Typically, Chrétien represented Arthur's court as a counterpart of the Capetian attempt to build a truly sovereign centralized monarchy by stifling out the “anarchic” independence of the feudal nobility and its acolytes, even if this meant raising up the ministerial bourgeoisie. Arthur's “weakness” makes him the ideal feudal king, with his court acting like a chivalric switchyard or, as Köhler wittily put it, “a welfare institute for

knights.”^[41] Arthur's Round Table (made to seat 1500 knights!), first introduced by Wace in the Roman de Brut, picturesquely symbolized this aristocratic egalitarianism as a palatable alternative to monarchic sovereignty.^[42] Working at the court of Alienor's daughter Marie de Champagne, and her husband Philip of Flanders, another count of exemplary feudal background, Chrétien carried on and raised to the sublime level of art the heritage of Provençal courtesy and knighthood that Alienor had probably brought from Aquitaine to Paris and then to England, and which could be identified with the public image of the anti-French Angevin lords.^[43]

This propaganda element, as it were, could then work back on reality, as it did when it fostered the fusion of nobility and knighthood and then again when it inculcated the hopeful ideology in the rural nobility resisting central control down through the Fronde (see my chap. 11 on the case of d'Urfé's Astrée ). But resisting the victorious march of monarchism—in both France and, with healthy compromises, England—was partly utopian, hence subject to fears and occasional despair. It was not without a degree of desolation that Chrétien's epigones down to Sir Thomas Malory perceived the Götterdämmerung of Arthur's court.

If somewhat extreme, Chrétien is exemplary in displaying the attitudes of the chivalric class. His world was reserved for the knights, and the despised vilain, also identified with the rising bourgeoisie so prominent in the regions of Champagne and Flanders, was its antithesis. Listen to Guiganbresil's sister insulting the burghers of the city: “Vilenaille, / chien anragé, pute servaille” (boors, rabid dogs, despicable slaves—Perceval: 5955 f.). In his encounter with a free town's burghers, Gauvain refuses to use his shield as too noble a piece of armor for such rabble (ibid. 5894 f.). He considers it the greatest insult to be taken for a merchant (5091 ff.).^[44] In five of the dialogues of book 1 of his De amore or De arte honeste amandi (1180s), Chrétien's contemporary, Andreas Capellanus, shows awareness of the alliance between the monarchy and the bourgeoisie by introducing burghers as possible rivals of knights in a lady's love, and by stressing that true nobility is a spiritual matter rather than one of rank, since we all have a common origin from Adam.^[45] The chanson de geste Guillaume d'Angleterre strongly underlines these class contrasts, presenting with a sense of horror the attempt of some merchants to teach the trade of tannery to the king's sons they have adopted (vv. 1342 ff., 3205 ff.).^[46] What alarms the poet is the

unthinkable association of a nobleman with a manual art—it does not occur to him that those merchants acted more responsibly than the king toward his sons.

All this is typical of northern France;^[47] in the south the relationship between the nobility and the merchant class was much less strident. Especially in Toulouse and southwest France, the towns, much like the Italian communes, teemed with urban knights who constituted the bulk of the city's defense even against the local lords (in the late 1170s, for instance, knights commissioned by the city consuls barred Count Raimon V of Toulouse from the city). More important still, these knights were actively engaged in the town's main business as outright traders and speculators in land rents and mortgages. As they did in Italy, they lived in fortified houses and built towers within the city walls—an irritating and surprising sight to the northern invaders at the time of the Albigensian Crusade.^[48] Accordingly, in the Midi the merchant was not, as he was in the north, the nobleman's natural political enemy, actively allied with the monarchy in trying to curtail feudal privileges.

Chrétien's way of embedding into his works the exclusivism of the high nobility can be profitably compared with the mentality of contemporary chroniclers on the one hand and troubadours on the other.^[49] The reader will remember the encounter between Geoffrey the Handsome and the peasant in Jean de Marmoutier's chronicle (my chap. 3). In Chrétien's Yvain, when Calogrenant meets a savage, subhuman-looking, monstrously ugly shepherd and asks him whether he is “boene chose ou non,” the answer he gets is that “il ert uns hom.” He probes further: “Quiex hom ies tu?” And the new answer is: “Tex con tu voiz; si ne sui autres nule foiz  . . . sui de mes bestes sire.” (Such as you see, I am lord of my beasts, never anything else.) When, in his turn, the shep-herd asks Calogrenant “quiex hom tu ies, et que tu quiers,” the knight defines himself as “un chevaliers qui quier ce que trover ne puis; assez ai quis, et rien ne truis.” (I am a knight who seeks what I cannot find: much have I searched and nothing do I find.)^[50] The vilain is nothing but a man, and being is doing: a man is what he does—his work—so he is precisely a vilain, more specifically, a tamer of wild beasts. Calogrenant, instead, is a man searching for something, but since his search is so far unsuccessful (and will remain so—only Yvain will succeed in the test of the magic fountain), he is, in a way, nothing, as a poor nobleman who has not found his place in the world.^[51] A successful knight, however, will be something special, noble, worth fighting and enduring for, higher than the simple, base humanity of the rustic who is identified

with his work and no more. Calogrenant's “adventure” has thus explicitly turned into what the knight errant's adventure is supposed to produce: a finding of one's identity by becoming worthy of the court after proving one's capacity to overcome the lower and inferior world of wild nature and quasi-bestial humanity. The search for individual identity is part of a search for the meaning of the world, which, in turn, is the very nature of the adventure as the core of the roman, as expressly stated in another similar episode in the prose Tristan. There Dinadan answers Agravain so: “I am a knight errant who every day goes in search of adventures and of the sense of the world; but I cannot find any, nor can I retain any of it for my useful service.”^[52]

In Marcabru's landmark pastorela “L'autrier jost'una sebissa,” the bold knight confronted a sharp-tongued shepherdess who managed to put him in his place by turning his knightly logic against him. The knight feels it is natural for him to use a lower human being for his pleasure, but the shepherdess retorts that it is natural for her to find her pleasure with her peers. Inferior though they might be, the rustics had their own place and even rights and dignity, which Marcabru, for one, was ready to acknowledge, perhaps with tongue in cheek.^[53] Chrétien's social distinctions were sharper and less compromising.

Nevertheless, a closer look shows that a crack in the exclusiveness of Chrétien's socioethical perspective allowed a disturbing but fertile infiltration. For in the Champagne region the bourgeois point of view could be scorned but not ignored. Thanks to its fairs and through Henry the Liberal's enlightened policy, Champagne had become prosperous as a key international center of commerce and finance, a clearinghouse where Henry's gardes des foires guaranteed that the merchants could move about and do their business safely, with officially recognized and enforced contracts. Auerbach (120 f.) already speculated that Chretien must have felt a nagging awareness of the abstractness of chivalry because of concrete conditions at the courts of Champagne and Flanders where he was writing: he must have sensed that the real forces embodied in the fairs of Champagne and the burghers' guilds of the Flemish communes limited, indeed threatened the dominance of feudal structures.

Yet an open recognition of the mercatores could only come gradually: if they could not be assimilated to the agricolae as one of the three divinely established social orders, another term for the laboring class, laboratores, could well include them, even if some moralists balked at crediting them with productive work and chose to look down on them

as exploiters of opportunity, mere “usurers.” But the influential educator Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096–1141), for one, had written a sort of epic hymn to the industriousness of this daring new class: “Commerce penetrates the secret places of the world, approaches shores unseen, explores fearful wildernesses, and in tongues unknown and with barbaric peoples carries on the trade of mankind. The pursuit of commerce reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes the private good of individuals into the common benefit of all.”^[54] It was enough to fill a merchant's heart with pride at being as honorable as the best knight errant, and probably more useful.

In direct contrast with the warrior's view of marriage as a form of conquest or acquisition by force, the mercantile ethic of contractual bond through mutual consent of the participating parties may have contributed to a change in the ecclesiastical definition of the marriage contract. Perhaps these profound changes affected Chrétien's representation of the moral issues involved in the relationship between courtly lovers. If we read the romances in this light, their socioethical dimensions will appear as a counterpart of the ethical world of the epic, where, at least tendentially, the warrior mentality reigned supreme.^[55]

In Erec et Enide (Chrétien's first Arthurian romance, dated by Anthime Fourrier as not earlier than 1170),^[56] despite the mistaken assumption that Erec is dead, Enide does not consent to the Count of Oringle's attempt to assert his rights as a bellator by conquering her by force (vv. 4770–4782). Chrétien insinuates that Enide was entitled to posit mutual consent as the only acceptable and fair ground for marriage. In Yvain recent critics have seized on the episode of the “Château de Pesme Aventure” for its striking socioeconomic overtones. Yvain frees three hundred maidens who were enslaved as hard-laboring textile workers by two brothers born of the devil and a woman (vv. 5107–5810).^[57] The episode may sound like a critique of textile sweatshops in Chrétien's Champagne. But it would be incorrect to read into this famous episode an expression of real sympathy for workers as against their bourgeois oppressors. Rather, Chrétien's social horizon is once again exclusively limited by his allegiance to the feudal nobility. What moves him in the invention of this episode may be a horror of the alliance, imposed by the realities of the growing monetary economy, between high nobility (and monarchy itself) and bourgeois capitalists exploiting cheap labor. Chrétien's fantasy sounds a stern, resentful warning. He neither understands nor appreciates what he sees around him: cities, enfranchised by kings and princes, serve the long-range financial goals of the monarchs,

even against the interests of the landed nobility. The ideal of Arthur as a king of largesce who associated with none but brave knights contrasted with a world of acquisitive guile where both Capetians and Plantagenets surrounded themselves with low-class clerics, especially school teachers, magistri, and burgher-merchants, who replaced the knights as court administrators and public officials. The clerics at court naturally espoused the doctrine of guile and calculation against the knights' ethic of frankness, bravery, and generosity: the courtliness they taught was the nonknightly kind. In the face of these threatening changes, the romances acted as a literature “qui n'est pas une littérature d'évasion, mais de combat,” where chivalry could oppose courtliness.^[58]

More important for Yvain' s central plot is the hero's conversion from the victorious warrior aiming to conquer Laudine, whose husband he has slain, to the loving husband who must earn his wife's affection by proving his love for her. When he fails by forgetting their anniversary, the “liberated” Laudine demands his atonement and compensation, refusing to recognize him as her husband until she is satisfied. Acknowledging his unforgivable “breach of contract,” Yvain loses his mind and turns to a wild life in the forest, hunting and eating raw game. A hermit engages him in an intriguing game of progressive barter exchanges, leading him back to a quasi-civilized state. At first the hermit feeds him moldy bread in exchange for the wild game Yvain hunts; next he cooks the game for Yvain; finally he purchases even better food for Yvain in town with the proceeds from Yvain's hunt. A useful mercantile relationship is established between the holy man and the fallen knight.^[59] But in this adventure Yvain tests the dangers of abandoning the court for the world of nature and the open forest. Being reduced to eating raw meat is symbolic of his having fallen back into a naturally savage state. His madness consists of being reduced to the life of a brute. Thus the “adventure,” which is the test of conquering the anticourtly forces symbolized by monsters and evil magic together with the wild nature of forests and vilains, the subhuman peasants and shepherds, is at the same time the quest for identity and self-recognition, as perceived earlier in Calogrenant's dialogue with the shepherd.

The plot of Yvain may also confirm Chrétien's overarching concern for the knights' chivalrous duties toward society as a higher moral commitment than love itself, somehow pitching chivalry against courtly love. In this tale helping the helpless gives more significance to chivalric adventure than love does: whereas Laudine remains a rather marginal figure, there is a powerful moral bond between Yvain and Lunete and

also between Yvain and the lion. Lunete, out of gratitude for his kindness toward her when others had spurned her at court, saves Yvain and is then saved by him when she is in dire need, just as in an equally symbolic context the lion saves Yvain in gratitude for having been saved by him. Yet the destiny of the knight is an unending quest. When Yvain conquers Laudine's love a second time, he returns to where he had started. He is no longer a great active knight: conquest ends both love and chivalric value.^[60]

Chrétien's Perceval is the culmination of the synthesis of chevalerie and clergie that the poet had first announced in his early Cligès. The famous lines 30–35 of the prologue of Cligès (“puis vint chevalerie a Rome / Et de la clergie la some, / Qui or est en France venue”) proclaimed the transmission of truth and wisdom (translatio studii ) together with knighthood or chivalry from ancient Greece to Rome and now to France.^[61] The role and function of chivalry had been ennobled, historically authorized, and universalized by identifying it with the virtues of the ancient heroes. But the anticourt objections of the moral rigorists like John of Salisbury and Bernard of Clairvaux had to be answered and neutralized by a clear, programmatic wedding of warrior ethic with Christian mission. The potentially sinful and even heretical quality of courtesy had to be overcome in a way that took it to higher metaphysical and theological levels. The Quest for the Grail attempted to perform this very act of supreme harmonization with the clerics' highest wishes. It was the alliance of fortitudo and sapientia, Christian chivalry and classical wisdom, nourished by both moral heroism and intellectual refinement. The good and the true were now one and the same.^[62] In medieval Germany the imperial heritage of antiquity could be perceived as translatio imperii, but the French Arthurian romancers saw the centralizing authority of emperor or monarch as the enemy, and the individual knights, perilously replacing the impersonal state and taking over its functions, as the true heirs of ancient wisdom and heroism. The only superior institution those knights were prepared to acknowledge was the universal Church, and even the Church held a tenuous edge. Gornemanz's dubbing of Perceval makes him a member of the highest divine order, but such secular orders were suspicious to the Church, since they could feel superior to the established Church. Indeed, Perceval's quest could be seen as entailing heretical overtones. The dubbing episode emphasizes the superior moral and social quality of knighthood in a way that seems to imply the superiority of the milites over the other two ordines:

Et li prodom l'espee a prise,
se li ceint et si le beisa,
Et dit que donee li a
la plus haute ordre avoec l'espee
que Dex a fete et comandee,
c'est l'ordre de chevalerie,
qui doit estre sanz vilenie.

(And the wise man took the sword, girded him with it and then kissed him. And said that with that sword he had given him the highest order created and commanded by God. This is the order of knighthood, which must be without baseness. Vv. 1630–1636.)

The Vulgate Lancelot carried this message further in the elaborate speech by the Lady of the Lake who explains to Lancelot that the hallowed institution of chivalry is society's only hope against wickedness and violence. The knight is the sole protector of the church, widows, orphans, and all the unjustly oppressed.^[63] The exalted view of chivalry that entered Chrétien's oeuvre in its last phase around 1180 responded to a situation of acute tension that saw the great lords, including Chrétien's new patron, Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, pitched against both the monarchy and the high clergy.^[64] Like the feudal lords, the knights attempted to claim for themselves a superior type of clergie which was different from that of the clerics but equal to it in dignity: a clergie which valued a Ciceronian view of rhetoric for the training of the public man and which taught the virtues and good manners of courtliness. It was to be the result of a sacramental initiation and courtly training, an education akin to that of the priests but no longer imparted directly by them.^[65]

All in all, courtoisie could perform a metaphysical function analogous to the theological one of divine grace. For Thomas Aquinas the social estates were part of a fixed natural law which mirrors divine law, yet the estates could be transcended through grace. Similarly, the opposition courtoisie/vilenie (originally meaning the aristocracy versus both bourgeois and peasant estates) acquired a transsocial value implying secular transcendence of social limitations: thus the poor or landless knights, even when nonnoble by feudal standards, could be redeemed and ennobled by courtesy alone, the domna replacing God. This is the meaning of “true nobility” in the debates already contained in certain Provençal partimens.^[66] The search for perfection had entered a metaphysical, mystical, neo-Platonic sphere that, for all its connection with religious experiences, was thoroughly immanent and secular. The ideal

knight could be at the same time—to use the German terms—gottes ritter, “God's knight,” and a vrouwen ritter, “a lady's knight.”

Students of Chrétien are familiar with the conjectural theses on his moral goals ever since the lively polemic between Gaston Paris and Wendelin Foerster, centered on the role of marriage in Erec and Cligès and on Chrétien's position vis-à-vis the Tristan legend as stated in Cligès. This “marriage question” is not unlike the marriage question in the Canterbury Tales, but the impossibility of settling it convincingly on the sole basis of philological or psychological analysis proves the limitations of any hermeneutical approach that does not bring in the objective social background. Like Chaucer, Chrétien was not simply a psychologist or moralist trying out a formula to reconcile courtly love with the sacrament of marriage. He was a member of a court society that saw literature as a functional part of its cultural self-image. In Cligès, Fenice, married to Alis, refuses to be like Iseut by sharing herself with both lover and husband. She wants to belong loyally and truly to one man only, body and soul (or ceur et cors, as she puts it: vostre est mes cuers, vostre est mes cors, she tells Cligès: vv. 3145–3164, 5250–5263, 5310–5329).^[67] But she achieves her end by serving her husband a magic philter that gives him, every night, the mere illusion of possessing her, and agrees to marry Cligès only after Alis's convenient death. The charge of hypocrisy, for the casuistic solution and for adducing scruples that had less to do with morality than with reputation, is really out of place in this context, since in Chrétien's court society there was no separation between morality and social duties: ethical questions could not be independent of courtly mores.^[68]Cligès is, indeed, an Anti-Tristan in the sense that it refuses to recognize the rights of the individual against society on the basis of the inescapable bonds of high passion. Courtly love demands control of irrational forces and animal instincts, rationally channeled toward social ends. Appearances and reputation are not external matters but the essence of social living. The Tristan story as interpreted by Thomas was uncourtly and subversive insofar as it was eminently antisocial.

A passage from Le chevalier de la charrete contains an exemplary stroke of the psychological finesse that could enter the representation of courtesy as a civilizing force—even to the point of subtle personal diplomacy in everyday behavior. Lancelot has swooned at the sight of a comb he recognized as belonging to the kidnapped Guenièvre. A maiden tries to help him but, when he comes to, she tells him a “white lie” in order to avoid embarrassing him. The author interjects:

Do not suppose that the girl would reveal the true reason [for her approaching Lancelot to help him]. He would be ashamed and troubled, and it would cause him pain and anguish were she to reveal the truth [to wit, that she thought he needed help for his fainting spell]. Therefore she hid the truth and said with the utmost tact, “Sir, I come to get this comb. That's why I dismounted. I wanted it so much I couldn't wait any longer.” (vv. 1446–1456)^[69]

All the courtly and knightly virtues were necessary in love, too, and in a harmonious combination. Contrary to appearances based mostly on an excessive exemplarity attributed to the first two books of Andreas Capellanus's De amore, the lack of self-restraint made happiness impossible and tragedy inevitable, as was the case with Lancelot and Tristan. It showed lack of self-restraint to pursue the total gratification of sensual attraction, since the courtly lady was perceived as eminently virtuous. The lyric, specifically, portrayed the lady as infinitely attractive but necessarily unreachable, as Petrarca understood and promulgated well after the heroic age of “courtly love.” Capellanus's emphasis on adultery is, at best, symbolic of the difference between the freedom of choice in pure love and the practical, contractual nature of marital relations. But Chrétien's Erec, Yvain, and Perceval, like their German imitations Erek, Iwein, and Parzival, all found happiness and true love in marriage. Even Boccaccio's heroes and heroines, it bears noting, would aim at marriage, often with success. In both the romance and the lyric, courtly love demanded this hard degree of self-denial and self-control, even “frustration.” The French fin' amor and Gottfried's hohe Minne were, after the first French romances, a necessary companion of the knight's prowess, its motivating force and purposeful center of inspiration.

Cyclical Prose Romances and Later Developments

Since courtly love was conceived chiefly for courtly circles, its appeal was at the same time powerful and narrow. This narrowness is brought into focus not only by the moralistic objections of responsible ecclesiastical circles but also by the satirical insouciance of such an apparently marginal genre as the fabliau. Recent research has emphasized the importance of this genre as the expression of a naturalistic ethos or “materialistic hedonism.” In sharp contrast with the asceticism preached by the Church as well as the rarefied and spiritualized tenets of courtoisie,

it included a dose of ridicule heaped on the dainty manners and strained style that courtoisie imposed. It is remarkable that, lasting from approximately 1190 to 1330, the fabliau coincided with the most creative period of chivalric literature. One can isolate within it a first generation that vigorously, uninhibitedly expressed that hedonistic naturalism, a second generation characterized by bitter and hateful cynicism, and a third that gave in to moral indifference and disillusionment.^[70] Other critics have interpreted many of the fabliaux as “courtly productions designed to mock the bourgeoisie, neutralizing its economic strength by emphasizing the vilanie of its moeurs. ”^[71]

The form of Arthurian literature that enjoyed the widest circulation was that of the cyclical prose romance, especially the group of texts traditionally referred to as the Vulgate Cycle or Prose Lancelot/Graal, probably composed between 1215 and 1230 and constituted chiefly by the Lancelot del Lac, the Queste del Saint Graal, and the Mort Artu.^[72] In the first of these three main texts the Dame du Lac crowns the education of her foster son Lancelot by imparting to him solemn lessons on the meaning of chivalry, the origins of knighthood, the symbolic significance of arms and the horse, and especially the moral obligations to defend the needy and the Church. After Lancelot's first adventures the author starts using the narrative technique of interlacing (entrelacement, so named by its first analyst, Ferdinand Lot) more intensively than had been practiced before, and that set an example destined to be carried on with much success by Sir Thomas Malory and especially by Boiardo and Ariosto.^[73] He does so with a skill that the modern critics have been slow to recognize, just as the classicistic-minded critics of the Cinquecento would be hard put to accept it from their Italian contemporaries. It is most likely that by referring to “Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime,” “the fascinating meanderings of King Arthur's tales,” Dante had specifically in mind the interlacing narrative technique of the Prose Lancelot.^{[ 74]}

In the Queste critics have detected the intervention of a pious monastic spirit of Cistercian hue, which they have tried to relate to the mysticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux or, alternatively, to the more rationalistic views of William of Saint-Thierry, St. Bernard's friend though not his disciple. “When a hermit expounds the hierarchy of the virtues, he places highest virginity and below it in descending order humility, patience, justice, and last, strangely enough, charity.”^[75] Among the knights who achieve the conquest of the Grail the only perfect one is Galaad, who was foreshadowed, as we shall see, in Wolfram von Es-

chenbach's Lohengrin (Loherangrîn). Galaad, Lancelot's son, is a foreordained saint untroubled by human frailties and exempt from temptation, a savior whose name derives from the Gilead of the Vulgate Bible, one of Christ's mystic appellations. The knight has become the true man of God, and chivalry a supreme ideal of moral nobility.

Tempting as it might be, we must forego an analysis of the foremost “best-seller” of medieval literature, the Roman de la rose (1225–1240 for Guillaume de Lorris's portion, 1275–1280 for Jean de Meung's), since in that rich masterpiece the assessment of the role of the courtly and chivalric elements remains subject to the still very controversial interpretation of the authors' central theses.^[76] Arthurian matter continued to show great vitality long after Chrétien in France and elsewhere. For the sake of its author, it deserves at least a passing mention that the chronicler and poet Jean Froissart also composed, around 1388, the Meliador, which has the distinction of being not only the last French romance of strictly Arthurian matter, but also the longest one in verse (30,771 octosyllables). Since we are not engaged in a diachronic survey of our subject matter in all genres and forms, it should suffice to add here, because of their peculiar experimentalism on social, literary, and rhetorical levels, the fifteenth-century “grands rhétoriqueurs” of the Burgundian domains. These court poets served the duke or other great lords by celebrating their patrons' supposedly incomparable achievements, from their invariably just wars to every private or public event in their lives: births, marriages, deaths, and all splendid appearances at banquets and pageants. The critical reader is challenged to look behind and beyond the practical and stylistic constraints of this highly “programmed” literary activity, seeking in the text an hors-texte that contains the poet's original and personal inner message.^[77]

Caxton's Preface to the most splendid swan song of chivalry, Malory's Le Morte Darthur (Westminster, 1485), said plainly that chivalry teaches both the good, to be imitated, and the evil, to be eschewed. The literature of chivalry taught quite a little evil to a host of knights errant who meandered in and out of the princely courts of Europe, breaking spears, challenging, and maiming one another in earnest imitation of the Lancelots and Gawains. Martín de Riquer (1970) has published and studied a number of the many documents, literary and historical, that testify to this lingering popularity of the romantic knight, perhaps more so in Spain and Burgundy than elsewhere. The fifteenth century is full of characters who left thousands of letters of challenge and executions of private wars or personal duels, with minute contestation of fine legal

points of honor—what Spaniards called letras de batalla. The historian of literature and the historian of social customs share a common interest in literary works that are based on real events and “adventures” as well as in daily behavior that is inspired by direct imitation of literary patterns. The Spanish Amadís de Gaula was a fictional derivation from the French romances, but, despite the apparent similarities, Antoine de la Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintré and the anonymous Roman de Jehan de Paris, like the Catalan Tirant lo Blanch (whose principal author was the Valencian novelist Johanot Martorell, 1413 or 1414–1468) and the anonymous Curial e Güelfa (note the names, and that the plot was curiously set in Italy), were based in good part on real events, recorded and narrated without exaggeration or distortion and with considerable artistic verve. In this sense, it is hard to tell the difference between these “novels” and the factual chronicles of the lives of historical military figures in knightly garb, like the Livre des faits du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, or the Spanish El Victorial by Pero Niño. All these books told fantastic stories, yet the story of Jean de Saintré is invented whereas those of Lalaing and Boucicaut are rigorous historical records of living knights who acted in imitation of heroes from the books of chivalry.^[78] Cervantes's Don Quijote was far from unique, except for being laughable.

These more or less “literary” biographies of chivalrous characters constitute a real subgenre in the fifteenth century. All in all, they presented to an eager public exemplary portraits of knightly universals: when the models derived from real historical figures, they had been idealized and generalized. The mixture of fact and fiction that distinguishes the genre also brought together discrete class modes or codes. In Curial e Güelfa, for example, the knight errant Curial starts on his adventure trail by leaving his court, or “curia,” for Marseille well provided with money and letters of exchange, like a regular Catalan merchant. In the fifteenth century, Burgundian biographies of ruling princes also carried on the twelfth-century mode of assimilation of the nobleman to the knight: they portrayed their subjects by patterning them after fictional paladins mixed with historic knights who had become abstract romantic models. Thus Gawain and Lancelot were coupled with Du Guesclin and Boucicaut in the chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Mathieu d'Escouchy, Pierre Chastellain, Olivier de La Marche, and Jean Molinet. Furthermore, such biographies were packed with highly decorative visual elements through theatrical spectacles of tournaments, pageants, feasts, and mock or real battles—in Chastellain's terms, the emphasis

was on voyables, to enable the audience to assoir l'oeil sur les choses.^[79] In the romances as well as in the reality of court life, the exquisite though dangerously serious games of frequent tourneys and hunting parties were part of the chivalric contest.^[80]

Some English Texts

Courtly love and courtly conduct became bound together through the psychological, literary, and social process of amalgamation of behavioral ideas. The bond proved durable. A shining example is Sir Orfeo, the charming Middle English poetic text preserved in the Auchinleck manuscript of Edinburgh from 1330–1340, probably composed not many years earlier by an anonymous poet without much culture but with great imagination.^[81] The Orpheus of ancient mythology has become an English king who recovers (for good) his lost Euridice (Queen Heurodis in the text) by playing his inimitable harp before the King of the Fairies, who had taken her from the world of the living. This arresting idea of stealing one's dead beloved away from a fairyland afterworld may not be the invention of Sir Orfeo' s poet, since it appears in Walter Map's story of the Breton knight (ca. 1182). The charming fairy tale atmosphere does not prevent the characters from behaving according to the most idealized rules of the world of courtesy and chivalry. When he decides he cannot go on living without his beloved wife, the king leaves the throne in care of his steward, but when he returns, made unrecognizable by ten years in the wilderness, the steward professes his loyal devotion to the king he hopes to see again. When Orfeo reveals his true identity, the steward is so overjoyed that he knocks the table over, and all the lords shout their joy, too. The King of the Fairies is also a chivalrous lord who knows how to keep his word against all logic: having promised to grant the minstrel any reward he desires for his inspiring music, he hands Orfeo back his (dead) wife. All behave like members of the best of all possible loving and loyal worlds, according to rules and patterns unthinkable before the age of chivalry and courtesy.

By contrast, a “realistic” representation of court life stands out clearly in such contemporaneous “epic” texts as, for example, Havelok the Dane, where the temporary trustees of the kingdoms of England and Denmark betray their oaths and become unscrupulous usurpers.^[82] In the end the rightful heirs triumph and the traitors pay dearly for their perfidy. The courtly code prevails and the reader is conscious of the criminality of its violation.

Sir Orfeo and, in its way, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1360/1370, commonly characterized as a most “courtly” English poem) may be further exceptions to Jauss's “test of commutation,”^[83] proving my contention that social constants (that is, motifs with a heavy, if obscure, social content) can be stronger than literary ones and, at times, can unexpectedly overcome the latter. Those two gems of Middle English poetry are textured with elements from incommutable genres: Arthurian knights become fairy figures in the former case, or epic ones in the latter. The pagan motif of the head-cutting challenge in Sir Gawain may derive from a ninth-century Irish narrative, Bricriu's Feast, where myth and fairy tale mixed: it then became a heroic-chivalric contest. In Sir Orfeo the king's total devotion to his wife, to the point of being unable to govern or even remain in society without her, is emphatically courtly.

One extraordinary merit of Sir Gawain is to have concentrated in such a short space the most essential and complex issues of chivalric morality. Morgan le Fay schemes to humiliate Arthur's court by subjecting its most valiant and proud knight to a supreme test of chastity, loyalty to an absurd promise, and humility. She does so by sending the enchanted Green Knight to deliver an awesome challenge: he will allow a rival to strike his head off with an ax while he is unarmed, on condition that a year hence he will have his chance to return the blow. Indeed, his head is cut off by Gawain, but he picks it up and leaves, waiting for Gawain to come after him the next Christmas and receive his own stroke, equally without resistance. Gawain dutifully shows up and is welcomed with the utmost courtesy in three days of magnificent courtly festivities where his chastity is severely tempted by the Green Knight's wife. He is asked to promise that he will yield to his host all he gains in hunting or otherwise during his visit: his host promises to do likewise. But while Gawain receives all the prey from the Green Knight's three days of successful hunt, he returns to him only the kisses he has received from his wife, not the silk sash or girdle she gave him with the assurance it would make him invulnerable. Bertilak de Hautdesert (the Green Knight is only now so named) feigns to strike him three times, then ends by disclosing the purpose of the test, which Gawain has won only partly, since he has not kept his promise to the point of yielding up the girdle. The conclusive lesson is one of humility: no one is perfect, and chivalric pride can be misplaced.

Yet, we must interject, pride was of the essence, since without it there would be no chivalry. In the end, Sir Gawain appears as a sort of meta-

text, a test of chivalry as an impossibility, a proud velleitas asking to be proved absurd. The knight cannot be true to his calling without destroying himself by turning over to his enemy the girdle that would make him invincible. On the other hand the Green Knight is not being fair, that is, chivalrous: he is really cheating since he is asking Gawain to risk everything while he himself risks nothing, thanks to Morgan le Fay's backing him with her magic art. In Chrétien's Chevalier de la charrete both Gauvain and, more importantly, Lancelot were in a similar predicament, since their open and fair ways could not win out against the ruthlessly treacherous schemes of Meleaganz without the chance help of intervening admirers, like the maid who freed Lancelot from the prison tower.

Sir Gawain clearly marks a high point in the history of the civilizing process we have been following: the curial virtue of humility, a Christian element inspired by the clerical psyche at court, intervenes to check the knight's inherent pride. The ideal knight's basic virtues and their opposite vices are neatly defined where Gawain confesses to his opponent:

I cringed at your cuts, and my cowardice induced me
To make an accord with avarice, abandoning my nature,
Which always leaned toward loyalty and knightly largess.
Now I am false and flawed.
                                                     (Part Three, vv. 2379–2382)

Yet the hard lesson, with the humbling outcome, has revealed his humanity, and his challenger generously recognizes it in the triumphantly conclusive lines:

But you have a small flaw, my friend: you lack some faithfulness.
It didn't arise for an artful object or amorous fling—
No! you just loved your life, and I blame you the less for it.
                                                              (Part Three, vv. 2366–2368)^[84]  

Then again, while confessing that he has learned his lesson, Gawain will define the vices of “avarice, excess, the frailty of the flesh, and, above all, pride” as the destruction of chivalry (stanza 19 of Part Four, vv. 2439–2455). Gawain, nevertheless, is the paragon of knightly virtues: the pentangle emblazoned on his shield and coat involves, in “an endless knot,” five sets of virtues, the last of which was made up of: “Free-giving, Good Fellowship, Chastity, Courtesy, and Pity” (Part Two, stanza 9, vv. 651–654). He is welcomed at the castle of the Green Knight as one who brings with him “virtue and valor and the very finest

manners,” and everybody rejoices at the prospect of watching an incomparable display of

 . . . the most subtle behavior,
The most sophisticated standards of civilized speech,
 . . .the lore of effortless language,
 . . .the paragon of perfect manners.
An education in etiquette
This knight shall surely bring;
And those who listen well
May gain love's mastering.
(Part Two, stanza 17, vv. 912–927)

The Lady of Belcirak weaves her tempting tryst with her guest by engaging in polite flirting with that art of gallant conversation that will become the pride of French Classical literature. In affairs of chivalry, she says, the chief thing is the game of love (v. 1512). And so it was, including this supremely sophisticated gem of late medieval poetry, where not only love but chivalry itself becomes an elegant game to be played in earnest for honor, self-esteem, and survival. The ludic element in the acting out of noble ideals had never found a subtler statement, nor had it ever been taken to more dizzying heights.