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]