Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes (Modern French:
Life
Little is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes or at least intimately connected with it. Between 1160 and 1172 he served (perhaps as herald-at-arms, as Gaston Paris speculated) at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married Count Henry I of Champagne in 1164. Later, he served the court of Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders.[1][2][3] As proposed by Urban T. Holmes III, Chrétien's name, meaning literally "Christian from Troyes", might be a pen name moniker of a Jewish convert from Judaism to Christianity, being also known as Crestien li Gois.[4][5]
Works
Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete:
There are also several lesser works, not all of which can be securely ascribed to Chrétien.
Sources and influence
The immediate and specific sources for his romances are uncertain, as Chrétien speaks in the vaguest way of the materials he used.
There is a specific Classical influence in Chrétien's romances, the likes of which (the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses) were "translated into the Old French vernacular during the 1150s".[17] Foster Guyer argues that specifically Yvain, the Knight of the Lion contains definite Ovidian influence: "Yvain was filled with grief and showed the Ovidian love symptoms of weeping and sighing so bitterly that he could scarcely speak. He declared that he would never stay away a full year. Using words like those of Leander in the seventeenth of Ovid's Epistles he said: 'If only I had the wings of a dove/to fly back to you at will/Many and many a time I would come'."[18]
Chrétien has been termed "the inventor of the modern novel". Karl Uitti argues: "With [Chrétien's work] a new era opens in the history of European story telling… this poem reinvents the genre we call narrative romance; in some important respects it also initiates the vernacular novel."[17] A "story" could be anything from a single battle scene, to a prologue, to a minimally cohesive tale with little to no chronological layout. Uitti argues that Yvain is Chrétien's "most carefully contrived romance… It has a beginning, a middle, and an end: we are in no doubt that Yvain's story is over."[17] This very method of having three definite parts, including the build in the middle leading to the climax of the story, is in large part why Chrétien is seen to be a writer of novels five centuries before novels, as we know them, existed.
See also
References
- ^ "Four Arthurian Romances". gutenberg.org. Retrieved March 29, 2007.
- ^ "Chrétien de Troyes". agora.qc.ca. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- ^ "Background Information on Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette". princeton.edu. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- ISBN 9780786457946.
- S2CID 164127302.
- ISBN 0820303275.
- ISBN 0-8240-4377-4.
- ISBN 0-460-87389-X
- ISBN 9781843841616. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- ISBN 0198115881.
- ^ ISBN 0460116983.
- ISBN 0460875779.
- ISBN 0701118717.
- ^ Cohen, Esther. The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France. Boston: Brill Publishing, 1992, 27
- ^ "William Wistar Comfort Papers 1867–1941". Haverford College. Archived from the original on 19 March 2016. Retrieved 17 January 2016.
- ^ Loomis 1991.
- ^ a b c Uitti, Chrétien de Troyes Revisited
- ^ Guyer, Foster Erwin (1960). Chrétien de Troyes: Inventor of the Modern Novel. London: Vision Press. p. 101. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
Sources
- Loomis, Roger Sherman (1991). The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. Princeton. ISBN 0-691-02075-2
Bibliography
- M. Altieri, Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes: Leur perspective proverbiale et gnomique (1976, A G Nizet, Paris).
- Jean Frappier, "Chrétien de Troyes" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ISBN 0-19-811588-1
- Jean Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work. Translated by Raymond J. Cormier. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982.
- Idris Llewelyn Foster, "Gereint, Owein and Peredur" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Roger S. Loomis (ed.). Clarendon Press: Oxford University. 1959.
- K. Sarah-Jane Murray, "A Preface to Chretien de Troyes," Syracuse University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8156-3160-X
- Gerald Seaman, "Signs of a New Literary Paradigm: The 'Christian' Figures in Chrétien de Troyes," in: Nominalism and Literary Discourse, ed. Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard Utz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 87–109.
- Albert W. Thompson, "The Additions to Chrétien's Perceval" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Roger S. Loomis (ed.). Clarendon Press: Oxford University. 1959
- Karl D. Uitti, Chrétien de Troyes Revisited, Twayne: New York, 1995. ISBN 0-8057-4307-3
- Haidu, Peter; Tomaryn Bruckner, Matilda (2020). Philomena of Chrétien the Jew: the semiotics of evil. Legenda. OCLC 1255369712.
This article incorporates material from an essay by W. W. Comfort, published in 1914.
External links
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 273.
- Works by Chrétien de Troyes at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Chrétien de Troyes at Internet Archive
- Works by Chrétien de Troyes at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- The Charrette Project 2 at Baylor University
- Dictionnaire Électronique de Chrétien de Troyes complete lexicon and transcriptions of the five romances of this Old French author by ATILF/CNRS-Université de Lorraine and LFA/University of Ottawa
- El Grial, including poetry by Chrétien de Troyes set to music by Capella de Ministrers & Carlos Magraner
- Bibliography of his works on Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge