Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France 1843844265, 9781843844266

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Grail Literature in France c. 1180–1530
1 Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
2 Blurbing the Grail
3 Disclosing the Author
4 Re-packaging the Grail
5 Patronage and Promotion
Conclusion
Appendix: Timelines of Composition and Production
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Early Printed Books
Primary Works
Secondary Works
Index

Citation preview

Publishing the Grail

Leah Tether

Leah Tether is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending (D.S. Brewer, 2012).

in Medieval and Renaissance France

The Grail is one of the most enduring literary motifs in publishing history. In spite of an ever-changing world, the reading public has maintained a fascination for this enigmatic object, as well as the various adventures and characters associated with it. But the nature and reception of the Grail have not remained static. Thanks to the fact that the first known author of a Grail story, Chrétien de Troyes, died c.1180-90 before completing his tale and revealing the meaning of the Grail, authors and publishers across history have reimagined, reinterpreted and re-packaged Grail literature so as to appeal to the developing tastes and interests of their target audiences. This book analyses the developing publication practices associated with French Grail literature in medieval and Renaissance France. Arguing for preprint book production as constituting an early incarnation of a publishing trade, it discusses such matters as the disclosure of authorship and patronage, and the writing and formatting of blurbs, as well as tactics of compilation as production techniques that bear evidence of common commercial motivations between pre- and post-print publication. The distinctive investigation of manuscript and early-print evidence brings medieval and early-modern publishers and their concepts of both product and market into focus.

Publishing the Grail

in Medieval and Renaissance France Leah Tether

ARTHURIAN STUDIES LXXXV

PUBLISHING THE GRAIL IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE FRANCE

ARTHURIAN STUDIES ISSN 0261-9814 General Editor: Norris J. Lacy Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

PUBLISHING THE GRAIL IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE FRANCE Leah Tether

D. S. BREWER

© Leah Tether 2017 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Leah Tether to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2017 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 426 6 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

The publishers are grateful to the Vinaver Trust, Anglia Ruskin University and the Stationers’ Foundation for generously providing a subvention towards the production costs of this volume

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

viii xi xiii

Introduction: Grail Literature in France c. 1180–1530

1

1 Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

13

2 Blurbing the Grail

27

3 Disclosing the Author

63

4 Re-packaging the Grail

109

5 Patronage and Promotion

139

Conclusion

171

Appendix: Timelines of Composition and Production

175

Bibliography  Manuscripts  Early Printed Books  Primary Works  Secondary Works Index

177 177 179 179 180 195

Illustrations Plates 1

Guiot’s marketing blurb in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794, f. 105c. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

38

2

Advertisement included on the title page of the 1530 edition of the Conte du Graal and its Continuations; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

40

3

Woodcut accompanying the prologue of the 1530 edition of the Conte du Graal and its Continuations; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74, f. 1r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

44

4

The depiction of the Trinity at the beginning of the Estoire del saint Graal; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 95, f. 1r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

47

5

The Trinity depicted in the same scene as the hermit receiving the book at the beginning of the Estoire del saint Graal; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS fr. 9246, f. 2r. By permission of the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique.

47

6

The colophon of Michael in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12581, f. 229d. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

55

7

The colophon of Pierart dou Tielt in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5218, f. 91c. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

56

8

The colophon of Micheau Gonnot in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 112, f. 233a. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

57

9

The feast of Pentecost depicted at the opening of the Queste del saint Graal in the 1488 printed edition of the Vulgate Cycle; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 46–47, sig. P. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

59

10

The names of Chrétien (col. 1, line 11) and Gerbert (col. 2, line 1) positioned almost on eyeline with each other; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12576, f. 180r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

78

Illustrations

ix

11

In panel 2, the narrator of the Estoire reads the book from Christ; in panel 3, the narrator receives the book from Christ: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 749, f. 1r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

89

12

Historiated initial depicting the narrator of the Estoire receiving the book from Christ: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 747, f. 1a. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

89

13

Historiated initial providing a portrait of the narrator writing down the Estoire: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 749, f. 1a. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

90

14

Walter Map presents his book to King Henry at the opening of the Estoire; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 113, f. 1r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

97

15

Walter Map, with tonsure, writes in Latin at the behest of King Henry; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 342, f. 150r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

98

16

Walter Map, with tonsure, writes at the behest of King Henry, while unidentified monk introduces the Mort Artu; London; British Library, MS Royal 14 E III, f. 140a. From the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (https://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts); licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

100

17

Walter Map at his writing desk with full head of hair; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 122, f. 272b. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

100

18

Walter Map presenting his book to King Henry(?); Cest lhystoire du Sainct Greaal (Paris: Antoine Cousteau for Philippe Le Noir, 1523), f. 122v. Available at (digitised by Google and uploaded by ARLIMA; accessed 30 August 2016). Licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0. Cropped from original.

101

19

Opening miniature of the Perlesvaus, depicting a scribe writing at the behest of a king(?); Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 11145, f. 1a. By permission of the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique.

103

20

Guiot’s depiction of Marie de Champagne at the opening of Le Chevalier de la charrette; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794, f. 27r. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

145

21

Christ (the escripture-patron) delivers the book to the hermit in the Estoire del saint Graal; London, British Library, MS Royal 14 E III, f. 3r. From the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts); licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

149

x

Illustrations

22

King Henry II patronising Walter Map’s work on the Queste del saint Graal; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 229, f. 272v. By permission of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

151

23

Woodcut with spaces for names and arms; Lancelot du Lac: Livre fait des fais et gestes […] du tres vaillant chevallier, Lancelot, du Lac, 2 vols (Rouen: Jean Le Bourgeois; Paris: Jean du Pré, 1488); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 46–47, I, sig. aa. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

168

Tables 1

Summary table of texts, artefacts and sigla.

xiv

2

Compilation of artefacts text by text.

131

3

Chronological compilation of all artefacts.

135

Graphs 1

Trend (Independent, Anthology, Cycle).

126

2

Form (Verse, Prose, Mixed).

128

3

Form relative to Trend.

130

All images from the Bibliothèque nationale de France were sourced from Gallica (http://gallica. bnf.fr), except Plate 15, which is from Mandragore (http://mandragore.bnf.fr). Images from the British Library were sourced from their Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (https://www. bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts), where the images are licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (details available at: https://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Plate 18 is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (details available at: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/). Plate 22 is from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Digital Collection (http://beinecke.library.yale. edu/collections/highlights/arthurian-romances-ms-229) and reproduction was kindly approved by Anne Marie Menta. Images from the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique were taken by their in-house photographic team and kindly approved for publication here by Benoît Labarre. Notes: All URLs were checked and still active on 20 February 2017. Translations and transcriptions are the author’s own unless otherwise stated. Diplomatic transcriptions from artefacts are provided so as to preserve original typography and formatting choices as accurately as possible. The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements This book has been several years in the making, and I am indebted to many friends, family, colleagues and institutions for their help in turning my sometimes (often?) fanciful thoughts into something with scholarly meaning. The initial inspiration for this book came from the many wonderful conversations I had with Dr Samantha Rayner, as we looked for ways to connect our publishing teaching at Anglia Ruskin University with our rather more traditional medieval training. We co-wrote several conference papers on the history of publishing in Arthurian literature, and it was these that formed the basis for my eventual focus on the publication of medieval French Grail literature. Anglia Ruskin University, my home institution until August 2015, was kind enough to support my endeavour through the provision of a one-term sabbatical, as well as funding to help with publication costs. The Stationers’ Foundation, through a Francis Mathew Bursary, similarly provided financial assistance that enabled me to travel for an extended period to the various manuscript libraries and repositories of Paris, as well as to underwrite both reproduction and production costs. The University of Bristol, where I commenced working in September 2015, financed a trip to Paris so that I could verify some final details. The Vinaver Trust graciously provided the remaining funds I needed to see this book through to press. Ghent University (through the sponsorship of Professor Jan Dumolyn) and Somerville College, Oxford (through the sponsorship of Dr Steve Rayner), meanwhile, offered me Visiting Fellowships that allowed me to access various libraries and networks in their respective vicinities that were crucial to my research. In addition to this, the staff of the following libraries and institutions worked tirelessly to ensure that I had all that I needed: the British Library, London; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels; the Institut d’Histoire et de Recherche des Textes, Paris; the John Rylands Library, Manchester. I am especially grateful to a number of individuals for their assiduous reading and critique of my work: they helped me to see the wood for the trees at difficult moments. Professor Keith Busby, Professor Jane Taylor and Dr Helen Swift were the best critical friends (with friends being the operative word) that I could have asked for. I must also thank Keith for allowing me to offer curry-for-life in exchange for various shipments of books (a very fair deal by anyone’s standards). Linda Gowans’ remarkable encyclopedic knowledge of Arthurian references (and all things Robert de Boron) allowed me to find the information I needed with much more speed than I could have anticipated. The members of the International Arthurian Society British Branch offered counsel and ideas willingly as I presented my developing project at our meetings each

xii

Acknowledgements

year (they are probably breathing a sigh of relief in the knowledge that they will never again hear a paper from me with the prefix ‘Publishing the Grail:…’). I must also express my gratitude to Caroline Palmer and the team at Boydell and Brewer, as well as to my encouraging and cheerful anonymous reader: they were instrumental in making this book what it is. Finally, I have to thank the members of my family for their unceasing support, and chief amongst them is my husband, Dr Benjamin Pohl. He, with only the occasional grumpy utterance of ‘not literary stuff again…’ or ‘…but what about monks?’, read, re-read and read once again every single word in this book. His knowledge of book history helped Chapter 4 to sound like the work of more than a mere amateur (which is no mean feat). To him, I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations Ars. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal B Bliocadran BL British Library BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France BR Bibliothèque royale C1 First Continuation C2 Second Continuation CdG Conte du Graal CdGP Prologue of Conte du Graal CG Continuation of Gerbert de Montreuil Charrette Le Chevalier à la charrette (Lancelot) CM Continuation of Manessier E Elucidation Erec Erec et Enide Estoire Estoire del Saint Graal (Vulgate redaction) frag./frags fragment(s) Joseph Joseph d’Arimathie (Robert de Boron) L Lancelot en prose Lion Chevalier au lion (Yvain) M Merlin (Vulgate) MA Mort Artu MR Merlin (Robert de Boron) P-V Queste Queste del Saint Graal (Post-Vulgate redaction) Queste Queste del Saint Graal (Vulgate redaction) SV Suite Vulgate du Merlin TNA The National Archives YUL Yale University Library

1

Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque municipale et interuniversitaire, 248 Private collection, Annonay fragments London, BL, Additional 36614

Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal and its Continuations Early 13th C Early 13th C Mid 13th C Mid 13th C Mid 13th C Mid 13th C

Early 13th C Early 13th C

CdG (frag.) CdGP+B+CdG+C1+C2 CdG CdG+C1+C2 (frag.) CdG +C1 CdG C2 CdG+C1+C2+CM

Early 13th C

Date

CdG

Grail text(s) within

Champagne Champagne/ Flanders E France Champagne NE France E France Picardy E France

N France

Origin

MS Florence 2943 MS fr. 794 MS fr. 1450 MS Bern 354 MS Bern 113 MS Advocates’ 19.1.5

MS Clermont-Ferrand 248 Annonay fragments MS Add. 36614

Sigla

Manuscript dates and details of origin for the Conte du Graal and the Continuations are provided by Terry Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters, 2 vols (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), II, pp. 1–85. Those for Robert de Boron, the Vulgate Cycle and the Post-Vulgate Cycle are provided by Alison Stones' Lancelot-Graal Project, available at . Those for the Perlesvaus are provided by Nitze’s manuscript descriptions in his edition of the text (Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. by William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932–38), I, pp. 3–12). Whilst there inevitably remains some argument as to the accuracy of a number of these dates, the kinds of margins of error are usually, at least for the purposes of this project, not so great as to affect the conclusions drawn significantly. The margins may be slightly larger in respect of the anteriority of MSS Rennes 255 and Modena E 39, but Stones sets out her reasons for the particular dating of the former in ‘The Earliest Illustrated Prose Lancelot Manuscript’, Reading Medieval Studies, 3 (1977), 3–44, making reference to the existing conjecture of scholars such as Alexandre Micha. For MS Modena E 39, she is in line with the DidotPerceval’s editor, William Roach (see p. 130 of his edition). A good number of scholars (though admittedly not all) adopt both of these datings, and I maintain Stones’ version of events here for these reasons, as well as because they rarely effect a large skew in the results of this study. Where an effect is felt in one or two cases, I acknowledge it. With thanks to Linda Gowans for helping me to compare the relative datings, and for spotting various errors in the manuscript tables in this book.

Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 2943 Paris, BnF, fr. 794 Paris, BnF, fr. 1450 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 354 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 113 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ 19. 1. 5

Shelfmark

Text(s)

Artefacts are sorted first by the texts contained within, and then chronologically (for this reason, some artefacts appear twice where they contain more than one Grail text).1

Table 1: Summary table of texts, artefacts and sigla.

Didot-Perceval

Robert de Boron’s Joseph

Text(s)

Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Mid 14th C Mid 14th C 1530 c. 1200–20? c. 1230–50 Mid 13th C Late 13th C 1301 c. 1310 1357 Mid 14th C 15th C (on paper) c. 1200–1220? 1301

C1 (frag.) C1 (frag.) CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM E+B+CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM E+B+ CdG+C1+C2+CM Prose Joseph; Didot-Perceval Prose Joseph Joseph (frag.) Verse Joseph Prose Joseph, Didot-Perceval Prose Joseph Joseph; Estoire Prose Joseph Prose Joseph Prose Joseph; Didot-Perceval Prose Joseph; Didot-Perceval

Paris, BnF, fr. 423 Paris, BnF, fr. 20047 Paris, BnF, n. a. fr. 4166 (cf. entry under Didot-Perceval) London, BL, Additional 38117 (Huth) New Haven, YUL, Beinecke 227 Paris, Ars. 2996 Paris, BnF, fr. 1469 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria E 39 (cf. entry under Robert de Boron) Paris, BnF, n. a. fr. 4166 (cf. entry under Robert de Boron)

Mid 13th C

CdG (frag.)

Private Collection, Brussels fragments (formerly de Lannoy) Brussels, BR, IV 852 nos. 10–11 London, TNA, E122/100/13B Paris, BnF, fr. 12576 Paris, BnF, n. a. fr. 6614 Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H 249 Mons, Bibliothèque de l’Université de Mons-Hainaut, 331/206 (4568) Paris, BnF, fr. 1429 Paris, BnF, fr. 1453 Paris, BnF, fr. 12577 Printed book: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 74 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria E 39 (cf. entry under Didot-Perceval) Paris, BnF, fr. 748

Date

Grail text(s) within

Shelfmark

Laon/St-Quentin Tournai? ? France N France/ Champagne? Normandy

Flanders/ Tournai Champagne Paris Paris Paris N France/ Champagne? Thérouanne/S France N France N France Normandy

NE France NE France NE France NE France Ile-de-France

NE France

Origin

MS n. a. fr. 4166

MS Add. 38117 MS Beinecke 227 MS Ars. 2996 MS fr. 1469 MS Modena E 39

MS fr. 423 MS fr. 20047 MS n. a. fr. 4166

MS fr. 748

MS fr. 1429 MS fr. 1453 MS fr. 12577 1530 edition MS Modena E 39

MS Mons 331/206

Brussels BR fragments MS E122/100/13B MS fr. 12756 MS n. a. fr. 6614 MS Montpellier H249

Brussels fragment

Sigla

c. 1230–50 c. 1230–50 c. 1240–50 c. 1250 c. 1250 1274 (female scribe) c. 1275–85 c. 1280 c. 1280 c. 1280 1284 c. 1285 c. 1290 c. 1290 c. 1290 Late 13th C Late 13th C c. 1300 c. 1310 c. 1310 c. 1310

Estoire Queste Queste Queste Queste Queste Estoire Queste Estoire Estoire with Joseph interpolations Queste Estoire; Joseph (frags) Queste Estoire Queste Queste Queste Estoire; Joseph (frags) Queste Queste Estoire with Joseph interpolations Estoire; Queste

Paris, BnF, fr. 747 Paris, BnF, fr. 751 Paris, BnF, fr. 771 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D.899 Brussels, BR, 9627–28 Paris, BnF, fr. 342

Paris, BnF, fr. 19162

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 223 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 303 Le Mans, Médiathèque Louis Aragon, 354

Paris, BnF, fr. 12581 Paris, BnF, fr. 770 Paris, BnF, fr. 12580 Paris, BnF, fr. 95 (companion to MS Beinecke 229) New Haven, YUL, Beinecke 229 (companion to MS fr. 95) London, BL, Additional 17443 London, BL, Royal 19 C XIII Paris, BnF, fr. 749

Paris, BnF, fr. 12573 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Q. b. 6 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Fr.F.v.XV.5 London, BL, Additional 10292–94

1317

c. 1220

Estoire

Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, 255

Date

Vulgate Cycle (Lancelot-Grail)

Grail text(s) within

Shelfmark

Text(s)

MS Add. 17443 MS Royal 19 C XIII MS fr. 749

MS Beinecke 229

MS fr. 12581 MS fr. 770 MS fr. 12580 MS fr. 95

MS Digby 223 MS Douce 303 MS Le Mans 354

MS fr. 19162

MS fr. 747 MS fr. 751 MS fr. 771 MS Rawl. D.899 MS Brussels 9627–28 MS fr. 342

MS Rennes 255

Sigla

MS fr. 12573 MS Rawl. Q. b. 6 MS St Petersburg Fr.F.v.XV.5 Flanders/ Artois MS. Add. 10292–94

Douai N France Thérouanne/ Ghent Arras Paris Paris

Thérouanne

Champagne? Douai Paris/Acre Thérouanne

Thérouanne/ Cambrai Douai Douai Douai

Paris/ Champagne? N France N France N France Soissons Paris Arras/Douai

Origin

Angers/Poitiers Central France Central France Poitiers Bourges? Paris ? Champagne? France Paris

c. 1440–55 c. 1470 c. 1470 c. 1480–85 1480 1488 15th C 15th C (on paper) 1504 1516 1523

Estoire; Perlesvaus; Queste

Post-Vulgate Cycle

14th C

Paris

c. 1406

P-V Queste

Paris? Tournai Paris Tournai ? Paris

c. 1320–30 1344 c. 1350 1351 14th C c. 1406

Queste Queste Queste Queste Queste Estoire; Perlesvaus (frag.); Queste Estoire; Perlesvaus (frag.); Queste Estoire Estoire; Queste Queste Queste Estoire Queste Estoire with Joseph interpolations Queste (in 105d) Estoire Estoire; Perlesvaus; Queste

?

Paris

Flanders/ Artois Saint-Omer/ Tournai/ Ghent?

c. 1315–25 c. 1315–25

Estoire; Queste Queste

London, BL, Royal 14 E III Manchester, John Rylands Library, French 1 (NB. was originally part of a set with ex-Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica 1 (now in private ownership) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 215) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 199 Paris, BnF, fr. 122 Paris, Ars. 3482 Paris, Ars. 5218 Paris, BnF, fr. 768B Paris, BnF, fr. 117–20 (cf. entry under Perlesvaus and Ars. 3479–80) Paris, Ars. 3479–80 (cf. entry under Perlesvaus and fr. 117–20) Paris, BnF, fr. 96 Paris, BnF, fr. 113–16 Paris, BnF, fr. 112 Paris, BnF, fr. 111 Brussels, BR, 9246 Printed edition: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 46–47 Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château (Musée Condé), 643 Geneva-Cologny, Fondation Bodmer 105a–d Paris, BnF, fr. 1427 Printed edition: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 23–24 (cf. entry under Perlesvaus) Printed edition: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 370–71 (cf. entry under Perlesvaus) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D.874

Origin

Date

Grail text(s) within

Shelfmark

Text(s)

MS Rawl. D.874

1523 edition

MS Bodmer 105d MS fr. 1427 1516 edition

MS fr. 96 MS fr. 113–16 MS fr. 112 MS fr. 111 MS Brussels 9246 1488 edition MS Chantilly 643

MS Ars. 3479–80

MS Douce 199 MS fr. 122 MS Ars. 3482 MS Ars. 5218 MS fr. 768B MS fr. 117–20

MS Royal 14 E III MS Rylands 1 (MS BPH 1; MS Douce 215)

Sigla

Shelfmark

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 82

Paris, BnF, fr. 1428 Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château (Musée Condé), 472 Brussels, BR, 11145 Paris, Ars. 3479–80 (cf. entry under Vulgate Cycle) Paris, BnF, fr. 117–20 (cf. entry under Vulgate Cycle) Printed edition: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 23–24 (cf. entry under Vulgate Cycle) Printed edition: Paris, BnF, Rés. Y2 370–71 (cf. entry under Vulgate Cycle)

Text(s)

Perlesvaus England or France? NE France N France

13 C Mid 13th C Mid 13th C Late 13th C (1275) c. 1406 c. 1406 1516 1523

Perlesvaus Perlesvaus Perlesvaus Perlesvaus As intro to Queste As intro to Queste Estoire; Perlesvaus; Queste Estoire; Perlesvaus; Queste

Paris

Paris

Paris

NE France? Paris

Origin

th

Date

Grail text(s) within

1523 edition

1516 edition

MS fr. 120

MS Brussels 11145 MS Ars. 3479–80

MS fr. 1428 MS Chantilly 472

MS Hatton 82

Sigla

Introduction: Grail Literature in France c. 1180–1530

When testators and correspondents describe their books […] they betray their perceptions of them, perceptions which might then inform our own: contemporary evidence of how books were regarded by their makers, owners and readers can only enhance modern understanding of these medieval artefacts and the culture in which they were produced and consumed.1

In the literary world, there are few bedfellows better acquainted than the publishing trade and Arthurian literature. Ever since Geoffrey of Monmouth first brought the legend of King Arthur to a European audience in his twelfthcentury Historia regum Britanniae, book trade professionals have copied, rewritten and exploited Arthurian material with seemingly unceasing enthusiasm, with countless examples of Arthurian literature having been produced in manuscript, print and digital formats. Whilst Geoffrey, a Welshman, may have brought us the legend of Arthur, though, it was in fact the romance of Arthur, written by a Frenchman in the twelfth century, that gave rise to one of the most recognisable, and yet enigmatic, motifs in all literature. For his fifth and final romance, left incomplete after his death around 1180–90, Chrétien de Troyes composed Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail).2 Its central motif, the Grail, might be easily recognisable to us today, but at the time it had never before been written about, and Chrétien’s death prevented him from ever explaining the true nature of this enigmatic object. It may be just as well that Chrétien did not complete the tale, though, since the lack of explanation regarding the nature and precise meaning of the Grail invited a swathe of successors to continue, reinterpret and rewrite the story, initially in France, but later also across Europe, with ever more diverse recastings of the material. Indeed, the attraction of the Grail was precisely in its inexplicability; it positively dared others to provide the answers. The resulting multiplicity of responses of Continuators and sequelisers in France in the thirteenth century laid the foundations for what, over the course of several centuries, was to become a genuinely international publishing phenomenon, one which continues today 1

2

Margaret Connolly, ‘Compiling the Book’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 129–49 (p. 149). The Continuation of the Conte du Graal by Gerbert de Montreuil, to which and to whom I shall return, is the source for this turn of events: ‘Ce nous dist Crestiens de Troie/ Qui de Percheval comencha,/ Mais la mors qui l’adevancha/ Ne li laissa pas traire affin[…]’ (lines 6984–87) (Chrétien de Troyes began [the story of] Perceval but death, which overtook him, did not allow him to finish). All references to Gerbert’s Continuation are from Gerbert de Montreuil, La Continuation de Perceval, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1922–75), vols 1 and 2 ed. by Mary Williams (1922–25), vol. 3 ed. by Marguerite Oswald (1975).

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on a global scale, not only in print, but also in film, gaming and other new media. I recognise that in using the word ‘publishing’ as an umbrella term that includes all formats from manuscript to digital, I place myself in something of a precarious position, since several scholars suggest that publishing is a trade largely synonymous with the rise of print and the Renaissance.3 However, I believe there is justification for its employment. From the earliest stages of transmission, book trade professionals seized upon the growing interest in Grail literature in their droves; for commercial gain, they created products carefully tailored to their target market(s), be that a manuscript’s sole commissioner (or patron) in the pre-print era, or the fledgling mass-market audience for books that stemmed from the Gutenberg revolution. The motivations of all of these professionals, therefore, find common ground in the sense of sharing an underlying commercial, market-oriented rationale for their projects. Indeed, there is a growing consensus amongst scholars that the varying historical practices surrounding textual dissemination more generally are all equally acts of publication, ranging from Horace’s recitationes (reading parties) in ancient Rome to the manifold editions and redactions of medieval texts available in manuscript form, and culminating in the Renaissance editions commonly seen as physical incarnations of the beginning of publishing.4 Scholars such as Derek Pearsall have even argued that print merely standardised a set of practices that had already been in existence, and therefore the publishing trade we know today in fact developed from these ‘institutions’ of publication much earlier than has traditionally been assumed.5 Such an interpretation finds additional support in the fact that both trades necessarily co-existed for a long period in what Jane Taylor calls a ‘mixed economy’.6 It would, after all, have been logistically and economically impossible for the new technology to replace the old with the kind of immediacy that is all too often suggested as characterising this industrial revolution. Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick make a particularly impassioned plea for scholars ‘to see the intermixture and hybridity of these two media as a keynote of the culture of communication in this period’.7 Thanks to its having successfully negotiated this era of unprecedented technological change, with extant formats demonstrating particularly fine examples of this ‘hybridity’, I therefore contend that medieval French Grail literature provides an extraordinarily coherent and recurring body of fictions for the investigation, on a 3

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See, for example, Lotte Hellinga, ‘The Gutenberg Revolutions’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden and Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, 2009), pp. 207–19, and David J. Shaw, ‘The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, pp. 220–31. One example is, of course, provided by Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 1999), but see also Richard Sharpe, ‘Anselm as Author: Publishing in the Late Eleventh Century’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 19 (2009), 1–87. Derek Pearsall, ‘Introduction’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–10. Jane H. M. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), p. 42. Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick, ‘Introduction: Script, print, and history’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. by Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–26 (p. 12).

Introduction

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comparative and progressive basis, of the development of ‘publishing practices’ associated with secular literature in medieval and Renaissance France.8 In short, this book finds its locus in precisely this movement and enacts an analysis of the developing publication practices associated with French Grail texts published in France within the period c. 1200–1530.

Existing Scholarship Studies associated with book production in France in relation to both Grail texts and other works of secular literature are available in quality and abundance. Important studies include the exhaustive analysis of the manuscripts of the works of Chrétien de Troyes edited by Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori J. Walters,9 which touches upon a vast array of topics, such as ownership, illumination, workshop practices and the relationship of text and image. Covering an even broader spectrum of French vernacular literature is Keith Busby’s magnum opus, Codex and Context, a two-volume exploration of the manuscript contexts of medieval French literature.10 Alison Stones’ studies of the manuscripts of the Vulgate Cycle, meanwhile, represent an authoritative body of work that is particularly focused on the relationship of text and image.11 Roger Middleton’s contributions on Arthurian manuscripts to various companion volumes are also meticulous and extensive in their detailing of the manuscripts, particularly in terms of provenance.12 In respect of print culture, Jane Taylor’s Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France is an extraordinarily insightful foray into the ways in which French print publishers recast and reinvent Arthurian romance for new audiences in the Renaissance.13 Of particular significance for this study is the seminal work of Richard and Mary Rouse, which specifically positions the Parisian bookmaker within a determinedly commercial context.14 8

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There are, of course, a good number of manuscripts of French Grail literature that were made outside of France, notably in England and Italy. Whilst some of these artefacts will be referenced for comparison in this study, the key focus here is on those manuscripts known or assumed to have been made in France. Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters, 2 vols (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993). Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002). Stones gives an overview of the extent of her work (as well as of her future research plans) in ‘The Lancelot-Graal Project’, in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscripts, ed. by Derek Pearsall (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 167–82; she has since published a two-volume study which brings together her work on Grail manuscripts with that on other medieval illuminated codices: Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts: 1260–1320, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 2013). See Middleton’s ‘The Manuscripts’, in The Arthur of the French, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 8–92; ‘Manuscripts of the LancelotGrail Cycle in England and Wales: Some Books and their Owners’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. by Carol Dover (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 219–35; ‘Index of Former Owners’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, II, pp. 87–176 and ‘Additional Notes on the History of Selected Manuscripts’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, II, pp. 177–243. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers.

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The Rouses’ study was the first substantial attempt to provide a detailed exploration of the ways in which the book trade in France developed away from the monastic scriptorium and towards the professional workshop, and it continues to set the agenda in the field today. Where these studies have typically focused on reader reception and production techniques associated with medieval French texts, however, this book attempts an assessment of manuscript and early printed evidence that brings ‘publishers’ specifically into focus. In doing so, it uses evidence from the material artefacts associated with medieval French Grail literature in order to explore publishers’ perceptions of both their products and their markets, and how these developed over time towards the rise of print. Through this analysis, I thus aim to demonstrate the benefit to scholarship (in both publishing studies and medieval studies) of approaching the materiality of medieval texts through concepts of publishing.

Overview of the Primary Texts and Artefacts15 Chrétien de Troyes, as mentioned, is typically understood as the originator of the Grail legend in romance form, having composed his Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) in c. 1180–90. The text is preserved in fifteen French manuscripts, the earliest of which dates to the beginning of the twelfth century.16 What is remarkable, and what makes Grail texts particularly valuable as a case study in ‘publishing’, as I suggest above, is the proliferating network of other Grail texts, and the associated manuscripts and early printed books that appeared in the wake of the Conte across four centuries. Commencing with the initial verse tradition in the first half of the thirteenth century, this period saw the composition of four separate continuations of the Conte (the First Continuation, c. 1200, preserved in eleven French manuscripts and two fragments; the Second Continuation, no later than 1210, preserved in eleven French manuscripts; the Continuations of Gerbert de Montreuil and Manessier, both composed c. 1225–30, preserved in two and seven French manuscripts respectively, with a further fragment for Manessier).17 These texts continue Chrétien’s narrative, one after the other, from the point at which its original author ceased to write, but only Manessier’s provides a definite

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Timelines indicating the approximate dates of composition and timespans of publication for the Grail texts analysed are provided in the Appendix. Throughout this study, references to the Conte will be according to Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du graal, édition critique d’après tous les manuscrits, ed. by Keith Busby (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). For full details regarding dates of composition of the Conte and its Continuations, see the Introduction to my The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), as well as John W. Baldwin, ‘Chrétien in History’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 3–14. For the First, Second and Manessier Continuations, I use William Roach, ed., The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, 5 vols (vol. I: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949; vol. II: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950; vol. III: Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952; vol. IV: Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1971; vol. V: Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983).

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ending.18 The Continuations, with one exception (MS Bern 113, which contains only the Second Continuation in a miscellany), always appear alongside the Conte in the manuscripts. Two prequels to the Conte were also written subsequently, both anonymously. One, the so-called Elucidation, appears in just one French manuscript, while the other, the Bliocadran, appears in two.19 Both, though, are also witnessed by a later print edition, which I will come to shortly. Meanwhile, at around the same time as the First Continuation’s appearance, Robert de Boron composed a ‘prequel’ to the legend, the Estoire dou Graal. This text, which would transform the understanding of the Grail dramatically, is typically referred to as Joseph d’Arimathie, since it charts the connection of Joseph of Arimathea with the Grail, which is here presented as the cup used to collect the blood of Christ at the Crucifixion, as well as that of the Last Supper. Robert also composed a verse Merlin at the same time. This ‘mini-verse cycle’ is witnessed by just one manuscript (MS fr. 20047, dated to c. 1300), but was shortly afterwards rendered into prose, possibly by Robert himself,20 and there are some fifteen extant manuscript witnesses to this prose redaction. Meanwhile, two of the prose manuscripts of Robert’s works also suffix them with a Perceval romance (MSS  n.  a. fr. 4166 and Modena E 39). Some (albeit controversially) claim that this Perceval text was also written by Robert, especially in light of his promise – expressed at the end of the Joseph, and in some redactions of the Merlin (including that preserved in MS fr. 747) – eventually to return to the stories of key protagonists such as Perceval.21 Thanks to the name of the nineteenth-century owner of the manuscript in which this trilogy of prose narratives was first discovered, the Perceval story is frequently referred to as the Didot-Perceval.22 As the swift prosification of Robert’s works suggests, prose romances were generally on the rise during the early thirteenth century, likely thanks to the overwhelming consensus that narratives in prose were perceived as, as Taylor suggests, ‘a vehicle for historical legitimacy’.23 Although dating the text remains 18

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Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation, which was written at the same time as, and probably in ignorance of, Manessier’s Continuation, may once have furnished such an end, but the only two extant manuscripts show the text as interpolated as a ‘middle’ for the narrative, thus excising any original end that may have existed; see my The Continuations, Chapter 5. References to the Elucidation and the Bliocadran are respectively to The Elucidation: A Prologue to the Conte del Graal, ed. by Albert Wilder Thompson (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931) and Bliocadran: A Prologue to the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes: Edition and Critical Study, ed. by Lenora D. Wolfgang (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). A notion advanced by Jean Marx in Nouvelles recherches sur la littérature arthurienne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965), p. 151. This is, however, firmly refuted by Fanni Bogdanow as ‘gratuitous and to be rejected’, ‘Robert de Boron’s Vision of Arthurian History’, Arthurian Literature, 14 (1996), 19–52 (p. 20). See William Roach, The Didot-Perceval according to the manuscripts of Modena and Paris (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), p. 115. Others are less convinced; see, for example, Linda Gowans, ‘What did Robert de Boron actually write?’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, ed. by Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 15–28. The owner was Ambroise Firmin-Didot; see Roach, The Didot-Perceval, p. 1. References to the verse and prose Joseph throughout this study will be to Robert de Boron, Joseph: Joseph d’Arimathie: A Critical Edition of the Verse and Prose Versions, ed. by Richard O’Gorman (Toronto: PIMS, 1995). Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 53–68 (p. 58).

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rather difficult, the anonymous Perlesvaus may have been one of the earliest of these prose romances.24 Many argue for a very early date of composition (a terminus post quem of 1191, when the graves of Arthur and Guinevere were supposedly ‘discovered’ at Glastonbury, an event to which the narrative appears to refer), while some consider the romance to have been composed significantly later, perhaps closer to 1250.25 The most comprehensive study of dating is that by Tony Grand which, however, only really succeeds in marginally narrowing the possible window of composition to 1200–39.26 The Perlesvaus’ text itself is something of an oddity. It seems to suggest itself as a sequel to the Conte, since it commences from the moment of Perceval’s failure at the Grail Castle, but its positioning of Arthur as a key protagonist, as well as its forays into very violent adventures that are preoccupied with concerns related to the Old and New Laws (Judaism and other faiths in opposition with Christianity), would appear to indicate that it might represent a rather discrete movement from other Grail romances of the period.27 Rather more obvious as a direct development of the existing prose Grail tradition is the voluminous Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail. The Lancelot en prose is the core text of this corpus, and this was quickly followed by two sequels, the Queste del saint Graal and the La Mort le roi Artu (hereafter Mort Artu);28 all three were composed c. 1215–30, possibly even by the same author given the evidence of their ‘internal architecture’.29 Two prequels, probably not authored by the same person, would shortly afterwards appear in the form of the Estoire del saint Graal and the Vulgate Merlin (this latter consisting of two sections known as the Merlin proper and the Suite Vulgate du Merlin).30 Each of these two texts seem, as the names would suggest, to be at least partly based on Robert de Boron’s Joseph and Merlin, and they are usually thought to have been composed rather later than the Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu sequence. Alison Stones’ work on the dating of MS Rennes 255 indicates, however, that it is possible that these two narratives were in fact in existence as early as c. 1220.31 These five constituent parts of the Vulgate Cycle appear in many and varied compilatory sequences across their transmission, and regardless of the actual identity of the Cycle’s author(s), most manuscripts contain a claim that it was in fact authored by Walter Map, a cleric who lived in England during the reign of King Henry II.32

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For references to the Perlesvaus, I use Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. by William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932–38). Thomas E. Kelly gives a good summary of the key dating arguments in his Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus: A Structural Study (Geneva: Droz, 1974), pp. 9–15. Tony Grand, ‘A Time of Gifts: Jean de Nesle, William A. Nitze and the Perlesvaus’, Arthurian Literature, 23 (2006), 130–56. See, for example, Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe, with Debra N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, 2nd edn (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 80–81. Not to be confused with the Mort Artu of the Post-Vulgate Cycle (see below). Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 59. Not to be confused with the Suite du Merlin (or Huth-Merlin due to its appearance in the so-called Huth manuscript, London, British Library, Additional 38117) of the Post-Vulgate Cycle (see below). Stones, ‘The Earliest Illustrated Prose Lancelot Manuscript’, pp. 3–44. Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 60.

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This ‘canonical’ cycle (which eventually formed a source for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur)33 was recast yet again c. 1230–40 to form what is known as the Post-Vulgate Cycle. Where the Lancelot was a key constituent part of the original endeavour, here it is dramatically reduced in size in an apparent attempt to harmonise the narrative and shift the emphasis away from the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere.34 The Post-Vulgate is not found in complete form in any French manuscript and has to be reconstructed from fragments, as well as from translations into Portuguese and Spanish.35 Despite the Lancelot laying some of the foundations for the Queste, the most pertinent texts of both Cycles for our survey of Grail literature (since they contain Grail-related adventures) are the Estoire and Queste.36 These two Grail texts survive in various forms and compilations (sometimes even on their own) in a comparatively large number of French manuscripts – around one hundred in total. Later, in the early years of printing, many of these texts would be reincarnated in incunabula and early printed editions, with varying levels of success. The complete Vulgate Cycle was published in 1488 by the joint enterprise of Jean and Gaillard Le Bourgeois with Jean du Pré,37 while the Estoire and the Perlesvaus were published in a compilation that also included a truncated version of the Queste in 1516 (with a new edition in 1523).38 Coming full circle, the final medieval French Grail text to be printed anew in this period was that with which we began, Chrétien’s Conte, alongside its Continuations, as well as the Elucidation and Bliocadran, all of which were translated into prose and published in 1530.39

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The most recent and comprehensive work on Malory’s sources is Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008); see also P. J. C. Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998). Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘Introduction and Comparative Table of Medieval Texts’, in The Grail: A Casebook, ed. by Dhira B. Mahoney (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–101 (pp. 29–30). Fanni Bogdanow, ‘The Post–Vulgate Cycle’, in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. by Norris J. Lacy et al. (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 364–66 (p. 365). For the Estoire and the Queste, I use The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. by H. Oskar Sommer, 6 vols (Washington: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1909–13). The texts are contained in volumes I and VI respectively. Sommer’s edition of the Mort Artu, to which I occasionally refer, is also in volume VI. Lancelot du Lac: Livre fait des fais et gestes […] du tres vaillant chevallier, Lancelot, du Lac, 2 vols (Rouen: Jean Le Bourgeois; Paris: Jean du Pré, 1488). I use Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 46–47. The Le Bourgeois brothers produced the first volume and du Pré the second. It has been argued that the larger enterprise of Antoine Vérard may have underwritten some of the costs of this expensive, time-consuming and risky enterprise; see Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard: Parisian Publisher (1485–1512), Prologues, Poems and Presentations (Geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 299–300. The 1516 edition is Hystoire du Sainct Greaal: Lhystoire du sainct greaal Qui est le premier livre […] (Paris: Jean Petit, Michel Le Noir and Galliot du Pré, 1516); I use Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 23–24. The 1523 version (which is extremely similar) is Hystoire du Sainct Greaal: Cest lhystoire du sainct greaal Qui est le premier livre […] (Paris: Antoine Cousteau for Philippe Le Noir, 1523); I use Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 370–71. Tresplaisante et Recreative Hystoire du Trespreulx et vaillant Chevallier Perceval le galloys […] (Paris: Jean Saint Denis, Jean Longis and Galliot du Pré, 1530); I use Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74.

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Aims and Approaches The approach developed in this study, so as to investigate the socio-literary contexts that governed the publication of Grail literature, involves several of the basic theories and assumptions commonly associated with the twentieth-century schools of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. These approaches suggest, in essence, that social (even everyday) events are equally as important for our understanding of history as are major political or economic phenomena, and that texts are indivisible from the historical contexts in which they are produced (and which they, in turn, help to shape).40 I do not wish to suggest that I am applying these approaches with any sense of rigidity, let alone in an absolute way; rather, I take a more holistic approach, drawing on some of their underlying principles, making modifications where necessary, and demonstrating that investigating the cultural history surrounding literary and historical works is vital to their decoding. With this in mind, I deliberately position the material manifestations of the texts in question here specifically as cultural artefacts, which Stephen Greenblatt defines as items which have the ability ‘to reach out beyond formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which [they have] emerged’.41 In other words, since the publishing trade requires publishers to create products for given markets, observing and understanding their practices in this study offers a promising gateway into the demands and motivations of the readers for whom these books were created. Rather than operating on the basis of a small textual selection, all of the medieval French Grail narratives outlined in the previous section are employed as a comprehensive test-bed for my investigation into the development of the publication of Grail literature in medieval and Renaissance France. Naturally, a large and wide-ranging body of material artefacts is required to make such a study quantitatively and qualitatively meaningful. The corpus of artefacts that I have selected accordingly comprises of just such a broad range of manuscripts and printed editions, all inscribed in France.42 For the majority of our Grail narratives, the corpus of artefacts is in fact comprehensive. In the case of the Vulgate Cycle, however, due to its vast and unwieldy proliferation, I have instead extracted a 40

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The term ‘New History’ seems to have been initially coined by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel (see, for example, their defining collection of essays: La Nouvelle histoire (Paris: Retz, 1978)). An excellent overview of the broad ways in which the concept is interpreted is provided by Peter Burke, ‘Overture. The New History: Its Past and its Future’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–24. Cultural Materialism, meanwhile, is often bound together with New Historicism. It is in essence a product of Raymond Williams’ work, though is based on Marxism, and advocates an understanding of texts as intrinsically linked to the social contexts in which they were produced. A useful overview is provided by John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998). Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 170. I allow a little fluidity for what counts as ‘inscribed in France’ around the geographical borders. Whilst we have a fixed concept of what constitutes France in the modern era, in the Middle Ages, the borders moved back and forth considerably (particularly in relation to Flanders, which is a key area of manuscript production in this study). For more information on changing boundaries in France in the Middle Ages, see Olivier Guyotjeannin, Atlas de l’histoire de France: La France médiévale, IXe-XVe siècle (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2005).

Introduction

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large sample, providing a representative, but still sizeable, spread of examples from across the entire chronology and French geography of its transmission. My particular selections are based on Stones’ exhaustive concordance of the extant witnesses.43 I provide a summary table of the material artefacts used in this study above, where I also append sigla so as to facilitate (cross-)reference. In relation to each Grail narrative, I comb both the textual and material manifestions between the dates of the earliest manuscripts and the latest print editions, that is, c. 1200–1530, in order to identify evidence, or ‘cultural residue’ as Erik Kwakkel terms it,44 of the ways in which these texts were manipulated and modified so as to please differing target markets.45 Crucially, this evidence evinces historical trends in how publishers presented different texts to their audiences at different times, thus suggesting several important hypotheses as to their contemporary reception, or at least publishers’ perceptions thereof. These hypotheses are presented and discussed in turn in Chapters 2–5 (see below). Chapter 1 prefaces these with a methodological exploration of the term ‘publishing’ and its historical development, incorporating analyses of current theoretical discourse related to the fields of Publishing Studies and Book and Social History. Specifically, I discuss the applicability of the term ‘publishing’ within a medieval context, paying particular attention to historical evidence related to the co-existence of manuscript and print workshops in France during the later stages of the period under scrutiny, sometimes as part of the same business. Through this, I establish the justification for the term’s use in a study of medieval Grail literature, as well as a methodological and terminological framework from which to commence the analysis that then follows in Chapters 2–5. In essence, I institute the designation ‘publisher’ as an umbrella term for the varying combination(s) of individuals (scribes, rubricators, illuminators, printers, binders, etc.) involved in the production process of a given volume. Of course, exploring the activities of such publishers across the corpus of French Grail literature inscribed in France requires a focus on key sites (or lieux) associated with the publication of texts in the period concerned, that is, areas where we can clearly see the interventions of publishers contributing to the particular market-framing of the text(s) in question. The scholarly context and rationale for homing in on such sites is perhaps most crucially set out by Gérard Genette’s seminal work on paratexts, whereby he defines extra-textual matter – paratexts – as constituting vital ‘thresholds’ or gateways into understanding the

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Stones’ online The Lancelot-Graal Project. Kwakkel sets out a compelling case as to how the paratextual evidence of material books, that which he calls ‘cultural residue’, can help us to read both the scribe and reader and therefore, to some extent at least, reconstruct motivations, as well as determine usage; ‘Decoding the Material Book: Cultural Residue in Medieval Manuscripts’, in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. by Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 60–76. Of course, there is always a chance that such decisions are made purely on the basis of what was contained in the exemplar, and I do factor this in where there is some evidence relating to this. However, since there are so few examples of Grail artefacts where it is clear that one has derived directly (or even indirectly) from another, I assume throughout my study (unless otherwise stated) that decisions about such aspects as redacting, compilation and illustration are contemporary with the items’ respective processes of creation.

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reception of a text at the varying moments of its publication.46 The paratextual indicators that I explore in my study number four in total: blurbs, authorial disclosure, compilation and relations with patrons. Each of these receives a separate chapter in which both their textual and their material manifestations are analysed using representative examples drawn from across the Grail corpus, and illustrated where appropriate. In relation to each aspect, I seek answers to questions such as the following: how is the aspect represented within the accepted narrative of the text and how is that reflected in the material artefacts? Are there specific items in these texts, such as prefaces, dedications and illuminations, which offer particularly rich soil from which we can glean this information? Can any trends be discerned in the ways in which French scribes and ‘publishers’ of Grail literature manipulated these aspects between 1200 and 1530? To what extent can this inform us about market considerations in France in relation to Grail texts at the time of their publication? In what ways are this information and this methodology transferrable to the wider context of publishing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? The specific justification for the selection of the four aspects will become clearer as the analysis develops, but it is useful to summarise some of the underlying reasoning here. Chapter 2 commences the analysis proper with a consideration of the notion of blurbs. It opens with a discussion of these snippets of promotional copy in the modern context, referring to contemporary publishing theory, before considering what kinds of medieval/early-modern textual apparatus could legitimately be seen, not so much as blurbs in the modern sense, but as fulfilling the function of blurbs. For instance, Monique Goullet’s work on the notion of ‘re-writing’ (réécriture) in medieval hagiography shows that author-composed paratexts such as prologues and epilogues are quite often completely at odds with the frame in which a text later finds itself, thus telling us something of the ways in which works are reinterpreted by different audiences.47 Equally, of course, the rewriting of prologues and epilogues at the hands of publishers promise to tell us a great deal, too. Following this line of thought, the key material sites of ‘blurbing’ investigated in this chapter are precisely prefaces, incipits, colophons, epilogues, dedications and explicits. I examine how different publishers strategically manipulate these ‘blurbs’, both textually and within the mise en page, so as to connect with a given market. This leads to a discussion of what we might therefore understand to have been perceived as the key ‘marketing factors’ for these texts, as well as a consideration of whether discernible trends developed over time. The core texts analysed in this light are Le Conte du Graal, its Continuations and prequels, the Perlesvaus and the Vulgate Estoire and Queste. 46 47

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–2. Monique Goullet, Écriture et réécriture hagiographiques: Essai sur les réécritures de vies de saints dans l’Occident latin médiéval (VIIIe-XIIIe s.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), p. 148. See also Franz Josef Worstbrock, ‘Wiedererzählen und Übersetzen’, in Mittelalter und frühe Neuzeit: Übergänge, Umbrüche und Neuansätze, ed. by Walter Haug (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), pp. 128–42 and Jörn Rüsen, ‘Die vier Typen des historischen Erzählens’, in Formen der Geschichtsschreibung: Tradition der Geschichtsschreibung und ihrer Reflektion, ed. by Reinhart Koselleck, Heinrich Lutz and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1982), pp. 514–606.

Introduction

11

Chapter 3 arises from Genette’s emphasis on the importance of the changing treatment of authorship in modern publishing; the author, Genette suggests, is a key brand for the text.48 Turning his attention briefly to the Middle Ages, and importantly for this study, Genette also highlights the complications associated with multiple, pseudonymous and anonymous authorship in medieval texts, as well as the non-standardised practices surrounding the moment of an author’s disclosure in medieval books.49 Beginnings, middles and ends are thus all foregrounded as sites of authorial disclosure in the medieval texts under scrutiny here. I specifically orient my analysis towards the task of answering an essential question: did notices of authorship matter to either publishers or audiences, and if so, in which ways? To answer this question, I conduct an examination of both the textual and material reflections of authorship discernible in the material artefacts from across the full corpus of French Grail texts. I underpin my discussion with Genette’s theoretical discourse relating to anonymity, onymity (the practice of using one’s true name) and pseudonymity as a means of gleaning information as to the possible motivations for, and trends in, the strategic manipulation of authorial disclosure by publishers. Chapter 4 offers a survey of the developing ways in which medieval and early-modern publishers packaged Grail texts within the covers of the books in which they appear, considering whether they are bound as independent texts, or as texts forming part of a larger compilation. In doing so, it draws upon some of the concepts outlined in a recent article by Justin Lake, which contends that decisions about which texts are combined or compiled within manuscripts actually constitute a method of ‘historical communication’.50 Compilation, in other words, is conceptualised as a facet through which we can gain insights into the particular preoccupations of audiences with certain texts. Here I ask to what extent the medieval and early-modern compilatory contexts of French Grail texts, that is the nature of the corpus of texts alongside which they are bound, offer insights into the ways in which these texts were interpreted by audiences. A consideration of whether publishers seem to wish to exact a pseudo-historical scaffold for a given text, or rather attempt to place Grail texts within romance or literary contexts, is at the heart of the analysis. From this, I develop conclusions that foreground the notion of generic similarity, drawing comparisons with the ways in which modern publishers compile their lists. I argue that identifiable trends in the ways in which Grail texts were interpolated, compiled and bound into volumes over time strongly indicate a growing awareness of an inherent, and possibly even generic, link between French Grail texts. Texts covered here are Le Conte du Graal and the Continuations, Robert de Boron’s Joseph, the DidotPerceval and the Vulgate Estoire and Queste. In Chapter 5, I consider the role of patronage in publication, exploring the topic in terms of both the text and the artefact. This is, of course, not an area included in Genette’s work on modern publishing since it concerns a particularly medieval and early-modern concept. However, the patron’s role was pivotal, not 48 49 50

Genette, Paratexts, Chapter 3. Ibid., pp. 37–38. Justin Lake, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, History Compass, 13 (2015), 89–109 (p. 95).

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only in terms of finance, but also in relation to defining a text’s initial moment of publication and encouraging its wider dissemination. It therefore underpins practically all publishing-related activity in the period concerned, and thus an exploration of the communication of patronage in our artefacts is vital in forming the final section of my study. Specifically, I examine the ways in which various publishers represent patrons in their editions, considering whether or not they are excised, highlighted, replaced or ignored. I distinguish carefully between the patrons of literary creation and the patrons of manuscript production, developing new technical terminology by which we can refer to different kinds of patrons, and explore whether there is any evidence that patrons are subject to different treatment in print and manuscript. This furnishes the discussion with insights into the development of attitudes towards, and relationships with, the patrons of French Grail texts and editions. Of key concern in this chapter are Le Conte du Graal, Manessier’s Continuation, Robert de Boron’s Joseph, the Vulgate Queste and the Perlesvaus. Of course, there are many other sites within these texts and artefacts that could equally serve to inform us about the activities of publishers between 1200 and 1530, but it cannot be within the remit of this study to discuss them all. Aspects such as illumination and mise en page as indicators of book production techniques, in any case, have been explored extensively elsewhere.51 These are therefore not situated as central pillars of this study in their own right, since to do so would be to duplicate existing scholarship. Instead, they are considered, alongside other paratextual features, as among a variety of key sites of publishing practice that serve to illustrate the four aspects designated above. Based on these four aspects, I hope through the analyses presented in this book to generate a useful and broad-ranging framework through which to gain not only new insights into publishers’ practices, but also an enrichment of our current understanding of consumers of Grail literature in the period concerned.

51

See, for example, Alison Stones’ extensive research on illumination in the Vulgate Cycle manuscripts, such as in her ‘Mise en page in the French Lancelot-Grail: The First 150 Years of the Illustrative Tradition’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Graal Cycle, pp. 125–44 and her online comparative study, The Lancelot-Graal Project, op. cit., as well as the various contributions to the aforementioned Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes.

1

Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance In the Introduction, I alluded to the debate regarding the appropriateness of applying the term ‘publishing’ to manuscript culture, since both popular and scholarly conjecture often suggest that the publishing trade only began with the arrival of print.1 This contention is frequently linked to the notion that printed books so quickly overtook manuscripts as the predominant format for textual dissemination that it supposedly marked a very immediate, and irreversible, change in book production, one which in effect underpinned the formation of a brand new industry. For example, in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s well-known book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the author emphasises the ‘instability and infidelity’ of manuscript transmission and thus how it succumbed very early following the introduction of the new technology.2 However, various scholars from a broad range of disciplines have put forward cases over the years, including my own brief prolegomena on the matter in relation to the Conte’s Continuations,3 that contrastingly and persuasively support the idea that the process of change was far more complicated and protracted than this would suggest. For example, in their Introduction to The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, Walsham and Crick state of recent scholarship on the matter that: the ingrained contrast between ‘script’ and ‘print’ has begun to blur and fade, giving way to an emphasis on their lingering co-existence, interaction and symbiosis both before and after 1500. To change the metaphor, the division between the terra cognita of printing and the obscure, unmapped world of scribal culture now seems to have almost run its rhetorical course.4

In spite of this change of emphasis, medievalists are evidently still wary of the term. For example, in his study of Christine de Pizan’s deep involvement in the production of her own works, James Laidlaw ensures to caveat his designation of Christine as a publisher as ‘a deliberate anachronism’.5 This said, even if the term ‘publication’ and its derivants are still cautiously applied, scholarly work that discusses manuscript culture and secular literature of the Middle Ages 1 2

3

4 5

See, for example, Hellinga, ‘The Gutenberg Revolutions’ and Shaw, ‘The Book Trade Comes of Age’. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), I, pp. 10–14 and II, p. 703. Leah Tether, ‘Revisiting the Manuscripts of Perceval and the Continuations: Publishing Practices and Authorial Transition’, Journal of the International Arthurian Society, 2 (2014), 20–45 (esp. pp. 23–26). Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. James C. Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan: A Publisher’s Progress’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 35–75 (p. 35).

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(including examples regarded as seminal) has readily made use of publishingrelated terms. The most notable example of this is probably Elspeth Kennedy’s field-shaping piece, ‘The Scribe as Editor’, in which Kennedy authoritatively sets out the editorial and creative agency of scribes during the copying process.6 In this chapter, I survey the existing scholarship relating to publishing in the Middle Ages. This, first and foremost, will offer a clearer delineation of the nature of pre-print and early print publication in France between 1200 and 1530, thus contextualising the conditions in which Grail literature was produced. Second, and importantly, it will provide a robust rationale for the employment of the term ‘publishing’ not only in this study, but also more broadly. The fact that I reference a sizeable variety of scholarship relating to the notion of pre-print publication might create the false impression that this concept is in common usage. However, these references come from a wide and divergent range of sources, as well as from across a lengthy timespan. On the one hand, those pieces referring explicitly to notions of publication (which are relatively few) typically represent isolated examples that have not yet impacted significantly upon the ways in which scholars discuss and define publishing history. On the other hand, the more seminal works cited, such as that by Rouse and Rouse, have covered considerable ground in elucidating the activities of commercial manuscript producers – details that are invaluable to this study. These works have not, however, concerned themselves with generating an understanding as to how those activities might be specifically representative of a publishing trade in development. My aim here, therefore, is to bring together this scattered conjecture and to synthesise, as well as add to, the associated arguments in such a way as to demonstrate more fully the case for the existence of a pre-print publishing trade. My specific interest, of course, is in the manuscript context of secular literature in particular, but I also draw examples from a wide range of formats and genres in order to present as broad a picture as possible of the backdrop against which the trade operated.

The Co-existence of Manuscript and Print I briefly touched upon the co-existence of manuscript and print in the Introduction, citing Taylor’s notion of a ‘mixed economy’ as providing a strong rationale for understanding ‘publication’ as a term attached to more than just printed formats.7 Many scholars are certainly in accord with the view that print developed alongside manuscript for decades and that many of the specific practices related to each format were not, therefore, as discrete as is so often portrayed. David McKitterick, for example, argues at length for a series of ‘dependent skills’ linking the two forms of the book trade, with many of the individuals involved having developed skills that qualified them in both fields,

6 7

Elspeth Kennedy, ‘The Scribe as Editor’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Jean Frappier, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1970), II, pp. 523–31. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 42.

Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

15

often out of necessity in order to stay in business.8 This fits comfortably alongside Pearsall’s view that the print trade only systematised the practices of a trade which was already in existence,9 a point echoed by Wendy Scase who states that: ‘Print culture […] appropriated in many ways the systems and conventions of manuscript culture.’10 What can be gleaned from Pearsall and Scase’s observations is the idea that, while there were new skills and crafts to learn owing to the introduction of new technology, namely the printing press, many of the processes associated with publication remained unchanged. For example, the codex format was still in use, editing and revision work still had to take place, rubricators and illuminators continued to provide hand-drawn decoration in many books and, ultimately, there was still a customer to please.11 I suggest, therefore, that there must have existed a similarly commercial focus in the book trade, and one that was consistently in operation both before and after the advent of print. Particularly indicative of the idea that print did not immediately introduce the redundancy of the manuscript is the fact that people evidently continued to read manuscripts, not least because the printing press did not even make it to certain centres of book production (such as Bordeaux and Poitiers) until later in the sixteenth century.12 Indeed, most early printed books seem to have been designed specifically to ape the look of a manuscript, acting as a kind of ‘surrogate’, to use a term employed both by Taylor and by Walsham and Crick.13 In a similar vein, in discussing the survival of manuscript production well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, McKitterick states: The wonder at the invention of printing was a wonder at its technological achievement. In so many respects, it was presented as an alternative to manuscript – more efficient for some purposes, but not necessarily either better or worse.14

So print was conceived of as having both advantages and disadvantages, suggesting that while one format was seen as suitable for certain purposes, the other was conceived of as equally valuable, but for different ends. To some extent, it seems, they may have actually been thought of as complementary for some considerable time. In fact, the apparent usage of the two formats by medieval readers only serves to support this. Manuscript and print were, for example, not only listed side by side in library catalogues, but physically shelved alongside each other, too, with no obvious distinctions made.15 Similarly, there is good evidence that book owners were content (and indeed keen) to own both formats, and that manuscripts became just as likely to be copied from printed books as

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 22–52. Pearsall, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4. Wendy Scase, ‘Afterword: The Book in Culture’, in The Production of Books in England, pp. 292–98 (p. 294). For a discussion of the continuing contributions of illuminators and rubricators in particular, see Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 320. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 41. Ibid.; Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 51–52.

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printed books were to be copied from manuscripts.16 The modern divide between rare books and manuscripts, which is perhaps most typically embodied by the practice of having separate rooms for their consultation in libraries, thus bears very little resemblance to how these books were actually treated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Such modern logistical and pragmatic distinctions, therefore, might well be at the root of the modern scholarly perception that an intrinsic divide exists between the two, a situation that inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, affects how modern scholars discuss and analyse the original conditions in which manuscript and printed books were created.17 All of this is not in any way an attempt to suggest, however, that print did not alter the book trade. Naturally, it did, and immeasurably so. Rather, I contend that the notion of the press bringing an instant end to manuscript is clearly anachronistic. In their consideration of the effect of the rise of print on the location of book-trade workshops in Paris, for example, Rouse and Rouse have noted that ‘the press did not abruptly move the librairie from old families to new, nor for a long time did the book trade desert the rue Neuve Notre-Dame’.18 Since print evidently did not put an immediate end to manuscript, therefore, it becomes even less likely that a notion of a publishing trade should have commenced only with print. Indeed, if the two formats co-existed for some time, then the publishing trade must surely be seen as having developed in response to both formats, initially in canon, but later in combination (and sometimes even healthy competition) with each other. Michael Clanchy makes a particularly helpful observation in this respect, contending that we should perhaps see print as a ‘culmination’, rather than as a new age, of the book trade, since to do otherwise would be to ignore the trade’s lengthy history.19 The Rouses similarly suggest that the biggest change in the book trade is not so much one of formats or technology, rather one which simply saw it become less of a ‘cottage industry’.20 Rather than the book trade undergoing a change in essentials, therefore, I argue that what it actually experienced was an upsurge in the specifically commercial scope of its operation, and I will return to this shortly. What this evidence allows me to contend at this point, nevertheless, is that it surely is legitimate to speak of a publishing trade prior to print. A specific definition as to what publication actually meant, though, has not yet emerged. When and how did publication occur? If we say that books were published in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, what exactly – in practical terms – did this entail? 16 17

18

19 20

Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 3–4. On the ‘physical setting’ of medieval and early-modern libraries, see Richard Gameson, ‘The Physical Setting: The Medieval Library (to c. 1450)’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume 1: To 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa M. Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–50 and Clare Sargent, ‘The Physical Setting: The Early Modern Library (to c. 1640)’, in ibid., pp. 51–66. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 327. Wolfgang Augustyn argues a similar case for the German book trade in his ‘Zur Gleichzeitigkeit von Handschrift und Buchdruck in Deutschland – Versuch einer Skizze aus kunsthistorischer Sicht’, in Die Gleichzeitigkeit von Handschrift und Buchdruck, ed. by Gerd Dicke and Klaus Grubmüller (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), pp. 5–47. Michael Clanchy, ‘Looking Back from the Invention of Printing’, in Literacy in Historical Perspective, ed. by Daniel P. Resnick (Washington: Library of Congress, 1983), pp. 7–22. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, pp. 329–30.

Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

17

Publishing: Access, Permissions and the Public I have argued elsewhere that ‘to publish, in its most basic sense, means to make public, thus texts had arguably been published for centuries prior to the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press’.21 In essence, I was suggesting that the act of distribution amongst a public, rather than a private, audience could and should be seen as an act of publication. This is in line with Richard Sharpe’s argument that publication ‘requires some deliberate action and intention to make public’.22 Felicity Riddy similarly calls for us to pay ‘attention to the “public” in “publication”’,23 since by this token it is possible to understand publication in the Middle Ages as not confined to one particular format, or even just to written formats, but rather as having a much wider-ranging set of applications. Indeed, Riddy’s chief interest lies in considering speech as a form of publication, with her putting forward the idea that ‘“Publication” is short for public conversation’,24 but she also acknowledges the term’s potential currency in a manuscript culture.25 By virtue of a similar rationale, Walsham and Crick argue for publication as accommodating ‘not only the duplication of books by scribal copying but also the posting of placards on church doors and in marketplaces, the oral proclamation of news, the singing and scattering of vernacular libels and scurrilous rhymes’.26 Publication, we can therefore assume, applies not only to written texts, but rather to any number of ‘texts’, regardless of their medium of delivery, that are communicated with the explicit intention of public consumption. I have elsewhere cited examples that showed authors to be aware of the need, dependent on the intended medium, to prepare their works in particularly nuanced ways prior to publication. Key amongst the examples are the speeches of Cicero (106–43BC).27 A long debate, for instance, has raged regarding the differences in the publication of these texts between their spoken and written formats, with many arguing that Cicero’s emendations to his oratory works reveal that he quite deliberately prepared his writings specifically for multiformat publication.28 Similarly, Horace (65–68BC), to whom I referred in my 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Tether, ‘Revisiting the Manuscripts’, p. 24. Sharpe, ‘Anselm as Author’, p. 5. Felicity Riddy, ‘“Publication” before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, pp. 29–49 (p. 37). Ibid., p. 42; see also the various essays in Marco Mostert, ed., New Approaches to Medieval Communication (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). Ibid., p. 29. Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. Tether, ‘Revisiting the Manuscripts’, p. 24. See, for example, the opposing views of Jules Humbert, Les plaidoyers écrits et les plaidoiries réelles de Cicéron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925) and Wilfried Stroh, Taxis und Taktik: Die advokatische Dispositionskunst in Ciceros Gerichtsreden (Stuttgart: Teeuner, 1975). The former sees the emendations in the written texts as acts of concealment, hiding errors in the spoken version, whilst the latter rebuts this view, arguing instead that the emendations simply show an author aware of the need to recast the works for the two different mediums. Jerzy Axer agrees with Stroh’s interpretation and compares Cicero’s written and spoken publications under the light of communication theory in his ‘Cicero’s Court Speeches: The Spoken Text Versus the Published Text: Some Remarks from the Point of View of the Communication Theory of the Text’, in Rhetoric as Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy, ed. by Winifred Bryan Homer and Michael Leff (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), pp. 57–63.

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Introduction, is known to have held ‘reading parties’ (called recitationes), for which he would prepare his completed work explicitly for the purpose of reading it aloud in the presence of various notables, including Augustus, the then emperor of Rome.29 Indeed, modern Classicists often refer, unabashedly, to Horace’s readings as acts of publication.30 But with such a multifarious selection of formats all being accounted for by the term of publication, determining what to identify as the precise moment of publication becomes especially difficult, and it is to this that I now turn. Sharpe has argued that medieval authors seem to have been aware of a moment of publication, citing the example of St Anselm of Canterbury. Born in Italy, Anselm became a Benedictine monk who, in his forties, came to preside over the Abbey of Le Bec in Normandy (which during the eleventh century enjoyed a reputation as a key centre of learning and literary production in its own right), and later was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (1090–1109). Both at Le Bec and at Canterbury, Anselm produced a considerable number of written treatises. Sharpe interprets Anselm’s use of the Latin term edere (to bring forth) as a method of showing that his book had specifically been published; for example: Librum quem ego edidi, cuius titulus est Cur Deus homo… (‘The book that I published, of which the title is Cur Deus homo…’).31 He also demonstrates that other contemporary writers referred to Anselm’s work with this term, such as the English historian, Eadmer of Canterbury (c. 1060–c. 1126), who says of Anselm’s Cur Deus homo: insigne uolumen edidit (‘he published a remarkable book’).32 This still does not give a clear impression, however, as to when that moment occurred. Harold Love suggests, rather vaguely, that the moment of publication involves ‘a movement from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption’,33 which Walsham and Crick are quick to point out as particularly useful since it explicitly avoids ‘equating the process with a transition from script to print’.34 This may be true, but what exactly counts as the ‘public realm’? Ian Doyle gives a slightly more explicit indication in his discussion of the publication of ecclesiastic works in medieval England: Publication […] must comprise, at least, communication […] of a piece to another person or persons, with leave (perhaps tacit) or motivation to pass it on to others which may be preceded or followed by the growth of knowledge of its existence and interest, rousing a desire for further copies, consequent reproduction and gradual dissemination to a greater or lesser extent.35

29

30

31 32 33 34 35

James Tate, ed., Horatius Restitutus or The books of Horace arranged in chronological order according to the scheme of Dr. Bentley, 2nd edn (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1837), p. 137. With thanks to P. J. C. Field for directing me to this reference. See, for example, the entry on Horace in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eldinow, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 704–07. Anselm, Cur Deus homo, printed in Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1968), II, p. 42. Eadmer, Vita et conuersatio Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi, 2, 30, ed. by R. W. Southern (Edinburgh: Nelson and Sons, 1962), p. 107; cf. Sharpe, ‘Anselm as Author’, pp. 1–2. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 179–80. Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. A. I. Doyle, ‘Publication by Members of the Religious Orders’, in Book Production and Publishing, pp. 109–23 (p. 110).

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In other words, publication is not just a matter of public access; there additionally needs to exist an intention for that text to be further disseminated afterwards. Riddy similarly notes that we might see such access as ‘an availability that is not so much spatial as modal: a text is communicated to other people in a way that opens it to further copying and transmission’.36 This very specific notion of publication as distinct from dissemination, that is, that publication involves not just making a text available, but also intending the further broadcast of that text, is important here. Robert Root explains one of the circumstances in which a text might be disseminated, but not published, whilst also raising a vital point: Before its formal publication a work might become known […] in the narrow circle of the author’s personal friends. The author might read his work aloud […] or he might send an advance copy to a friend for criticism and advice, with the understanding, express or implied, that he should not permit it to be copied and circulated.37

Root’s important observation is that there had to be not only the intention of wider dissemination, but also, and crucially, the permission for that to happen. Root evidences this contention by showcasing the correspondence of frustrated authors, in which they complain that their readers have allowed wider audiences to see or copy a text before the author has said that the work in question is ready. Amongst his examples are several letters from Boccaccio.38 Boccaccio writes to the select few chosen to be among the first to read a given work, and he talks repeatedly of eventually sending his work out in public (in publicum). This, though, he is only willing to permit following the work’s first reading, whereupon the first reader should decide whether or not it is fit to be sent out (emissus).39 Upon that decision, the patron will receive the text and be free to distribute it as s/he sees fit amongst friends (inter amicos communicare), as well as to permit the making of copies. Importantly for our discussion, this suggests not only that

36 37 38

39

Riddy, ‘“Publication” before Print’, p. 39. Robert K. Root, ‘Publication before Printing’, PMLA, 28 (1913), 417–31 (p. 421). One other example provided by Root is that of Petrarch complaining that he allowed his friend, Barbato di Solmona, to see a copy of his work, Africa, on the condition that he would not broadcast it further since, once it is public, it cannot be made unpublic (semel in publicum egressae). Unfortunately, Barbato broke his promise and Petrarch writes of his suffering in constantly finding his poor work in libraries, which had been further corrupted by the unfaithful copying of scribes; ‘Publication before Printing’, p. 420. In a similar vein, in Chaucer’s short work, Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyne (the text is available on Digital Chaucer, ), Chaucer famously lambasts his scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, for his ‘negligence and rape’ in copying his works, which means Chaucer has to spend much time making corrections before they can be seen by others; cf. Linne R. Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 97–138. Ibid., pp. 418–19. Boccaccio’s letters are available in Le Lettere Edite e Inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Francesco Corazzini (Florence: Sansoni, 1877), pp. 231–34. Here we might also see echoes of the behaviour of Gautier de Coinci, who sent his manuscripts of Les Miracles de Notre Dame to his friend Robert de Dive (prior of Saint-Blaise at Noyon) for copying and illumination. There is some evidence to suggest editorial input on the part of Robert prior to circulation (in the form of marginal glosses); see Tony Hunt, Miraculous Rhymes: The Writing of Gautier de Coinci (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), p. 6, as well as Veikko Väänänen, Gloses marginales des Miracles de Gautier de Coinci (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1945), p. 8.

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delivery to the patron constituted the moment of publication, but also that the patron was actually under some obligation to further a text’s circulation.40 The fact that the moment of delivery was of particular importance is demonstrated by the evidence that I present in Chapters 3 and 5 in relation to the French Grail corpus. In these chapters, I discuss the recurrent visual depiction of the moment of delivery in both manuscript and print editions of Grail texts. If we are to embrace this evidence of the patron’s apparent importance to the moment of publication, such illuminations should be understood as depicting more than just the patron’s receipt of the text: they also, surely, document the original moment of publication. Indeed, by extension, since it is this moment that permits the creation of all subsequent editions, the explicit illustration of it in a manuscript might even be seen as a kind of primitive statement of copyright, not dissimilar from the declaration in many early printed texts that were being published avec privilège.41 In her study of the English anchoress and theologian, Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416), Felicity Riddy also finds a key locus in the moment of delivery to the patron. This she identifies as among one of three main ‘modes of publication’ that she sees as having operated in different contexts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Riddy refers to the author’s presentation of the text to its patron for the first time, or the first public reading of a new work, as the ‘authorial’ mode. The second, which is, however, less useful for our study of secular literature, she calls ‘official’, in which specifically religious works are licensed by an ecclesiastical authority. The third mode is ‘commercial’, and is indicative of an environment where professional book producers are involved in the dissemination of texts.42 Of course, no autograph manuscripts of our texts survive, which means that Riddy’s ‘authorial mode’ cannot be applied in this study. This said, we can still use the texts themselves to help us understand something of their original publication, since they contain indicators of original authorial publication in the prefaces and colophons written by authors which have been copied into later editions. Perhaps most crucial to this study, though, owing to its focus on secondand later-generation material artefacts, is Riddy’s third mode, that which she calls ‘commercial’, in which book producers – publishers – produce new editions aimed at the broader public that is now accessible and engaged thanks to the patron’s having received the original copy and disseminated its contents more widely. I therefore turn now to the workings of the commercial publishing trade in medieval and Renaissance France.

40

41

42

Root, ‘Publication before Printing’, p. 419; see also Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 19 and Peter J. Lucas, From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997), p. 272. I will return intermittently to privilèges in early printed texts. Here, it suffices to say that publishers of printed texts sometimes sought to acquire the exclusive rights (via royalty or government) to print a given text for a set period of years, typically between three and six. This required both time and money to set up, and is usually declared in the opening pages of a volume. For more detail see, for example, Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 49. Riddy, ‘“Publication” before Print’, p. 30.

Publishing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

21

The Commercial Publishing Trade Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin pertinently remind us that one crucial governing principle underpins the entirety of the book trade, whether manuscript or print, in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: ‘the printer and the bookseller worked above all, and from the beginning, for profit.’43 This is, of course, highly relevant to this discussion. Grail literature was produced in a mainly commercial environment,44 one which became properly ‘organised’ from about 1200 onwards in France, as well as elsewhere.45 As Rouse and Rouse, who have been largely responsible for putting the operations of the French commercial book trade on the map, tell us: it would be hard to overestimate the effect of commercial book production on the dissemination of medieval French literature, and equally hard to overestimate the importance of French literature in providing the booktrade with its daily bread.46

Secular literature was thus at the heart of the enterprise’s success: for all the good intentions one may cite about the societal role of the book trade in disseminating knowledge, in the end the aim was to make money and expand the business, and this is discernible in various ways. One simple but important pre-print example is offered by the range of format options increasingly available to readers. In recognition of the fact that book buyers had a range of financial means, from limited to unlimited, it was possible to select book formats that best suited a customer’s budget (rather than such selections being based on purely aesthetic considerations). This had the effect of permitting as wide an audience as possible to be able to purchase books (though no books would have been cheap, of course), which inevitably and ultimately meant more income for a publisher’s business. Erik Kwakkel puts it succinctly: ‘market principles influenced the object’s physical appearance and cost’.47 This offers an impression of a trade that was both professional and commercial in outlook. It is worth drawing a distinction at this point between what is meant by, on the one hand, commercial and, on the other, professional. Book production had been a profession for some considerable time – monks in monastic scriptoria were professional producers of books, for example, but this did not make their enterprise commercial, since the profit-driven and market-oriented aspects that were so vital in the wider book trade were less meaningful within the cloister walls. Linne Mooney draws the dividing line in this respect between those

43 44

45 46 47

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450– 1800, trans. by David Gerard (London: Verso, 2010), p. 249. There is little evidence that Grail literature was produced in other kinds of settings, such as monastic scriptoria. In the case of MS Ars. 5218, there is a possibility that this codex might have been prepared for an abbey library, probably in or around St-Martin de Tournai. There is a chance, in this case, that it was prepared in a monastic setting, but it is impossible to be certain. I return to this in Chapters 2 and 4. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Erik Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation’, in The Production of Books in England, pp. 173–91 (p. 175; see also p. 191).

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working specifically on the production of books and those copying other kinds of documents, such as charters. She states: All commercial scribes are professional scribes – trained writers of some sort. But not all professional scribes are commercial scribes. […] All book work had a commercial aspect.48

Of course, some scribes worked on both kinds of material (particularly in monastic scriptoria), so this very explicit distinction seems rather too definitive – and, of course, books produced by monks most often simply furnished the shelves of monastic libraries, rather than market stalls in the town. This said, it was certainly more so in the book trade than in the more general trade of scrivening (and particularly the book trade as it functioned outside of monastery walls) that specifically commercial activity came increasingly to be located. A growing demand for particular kinds of books, I suggest, meant that a commercial operation became not only a desire, but also a necessity. Gottfried Croenen sets out some possible reasons for this: monastic scriptoria would have found it difficult to respond to a demand for books essentially quite different from those they traditionally produced. The new readers were interested in vernacular texts, in secular literature, in translations of scholarly Latin works, and in highly illuminated books. For books of that kind even the monks themselves turned to the skilled craftsmen of the commercial Parisian book trade…49

Monastic scriptoria, in other words, had neither the means nor the personnel to produce the books now in demand. Thus what was needed was ‘a flourishing, flexible and market-oriented commercial book trade that was able to respond to a variety of market demands’.50 For example, the kinds of patrons who purchased and commissioned works became ever more varied, encompassing anyone from university students to royalty.51 As a result, and particularly in France, nearly all works in the vernacular were produced as part of a specifically commercial operation by the end of the thirteenth century.52 Along with new and ever increasing ‘market demands’ in place, therefore, and well before the so-called age of print, came a sense of urgency in the production of books: there was a requirement to produce more books, more quickly. It is in essence in response to these pressing market demands that the ‘organised’ book trade, as described by Rouse and Rouse, developed into the very commercial operation that underpinned the production of the artefacts under scrutiny here. The most obvious reflection of this urgency is provided by the increasing multiplication of individuals implicated in a book’s production, 48 49

50 51 52

Linne R. Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and their Scribes’, in The Production of Books in England, pp. 192–211 (p. 193). Godfried Croenen, ‘Patrons, Authors and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400’, in Patrons, Authors and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris around 1400, ed. by Godfried Croenen and Peter Ainsworth (Louvain, Paris and Dudley: Peeters, 2006), pp. 1–19 (p. 6). Ibid., p. 1. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 14; Croenen, ‘Patrons, Authors and Workshops’, p. 1. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 99.

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as is suggested by the ever more widespread practice of parcelling out quires amongst multiple illuminators/scribes in order to speed up production time.53 Put simply, commercial book production now required a team of people working in parallel if the trade was to keep pace with demand. This militates firmly against Henry Bennett’s view of manuscript production that ‘[p]roduction by a team of scriveners […] was probably the exception’.54 This is, of course, not to say that books were always produced by teams of workers, since we know of medieval authors who took on the lion’s share of the labour in producing the manuscripts of their own works. John Capgrave provides one such example: Lucas refers to him precisely as a ‘publisher’ due to his multi-faceted work on the manuscripts of his own writings.55 Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430), meanwhile, provides perhaps one of the most remarkable examples in French literature. Christine is known to have copied her own texts prior to publication, as well as to have emended them for the purposes of new editions. She also often planned their mise en page.56 In a particularly revealing passage in one of her most famed manuscripts, Christine explains to her royal patron: Si l’ay fait, ma dame, ordener Depuis que je sceus que assener Le devoye a vous, si que ay sceu Tout au mieulx, et le parfiner D’escripre et bien enluminer, Dès que vo command en receu.57 (I had this book compiled, my lady, immediately when I knew that it would be dedicated to you. I knew even better that I personally should finish it, write it and illuminate it beautifully the moment that your request was received.)

Similarly, there is significant evidence to suggest that Guillaume de Machaut was closely involved in the production of manuscripts containing his works, often acting as a kind of supervisor (or head-scribe) of the process.58 Notwithstanding this evidence that manuscripts were sometimes produced by individual authors or scribes, however, it is still far more typical that a range of book production professionals would have worked closely in conjunction with each other on products, and that these kinds of interactions only increased as the trade developed towards print. In both the Paris and London book trades, there is much to suggest that scribes regularly cooperated with other local craftsman, such as parchmeners, limners and bookbinders, in order to produce books on demand. These craftsmen were, 53 54 55 56 57

58

Ibid., p. 253. H. S. Bennett, ‘The Production and Dissemination of Vernacular Manuscripts in the Fifteenth Century’, The Library, Fifth Series, I (1946), 167–78 (p. 175). Lucas, From Author to Audience, Chapter 3. Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan’, pp. 35–75. London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 3v. The transcription is given according to the digital edition provided by Christine de Pizan: The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript, available at . Lawrence Earp gives a comprehensive overview of both this matter and existing scholarship in his ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of his Works’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 461–503.

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of course, paid for their work, and there is evidence that they also traded in second-hand books.59 Book artisans thus increasingly created syndicates of activity for the purposes of producing and selling entire book products, rather than having each craftsman merely offer just one constituent of a book to the consumer, who would then have to negotiate with a series of individuals in order to bring together all of the aspects needed to complete the book (such as copying, illumination and binding). Additionally remarkable for our purposes are the close localities in which these craftsmen operated, with their workshops often situated in the same neighbourhood, which in turn facilitated reciprocal skills acquisition and project collaboration.60 These hubs of publishing activity, with craftsmen operating in close confines, are possible to regard, I contend, as a kind of primitive publishing house, where all of the departments come together to work on a given project. What lends this notion particular credibility is the rise of a specific individual, whom Booton describes as ‘the important link between producers and buyers of both manuscripts and books’61 – the marchand-libraire (merchant bookseller). A figure that is far better known to print culture than to manuscript, the marchand-libraire’s role was as an organiser or manager of the commercial production of books (she or he was not involved in monastic book production). She or he would oversee all aspects of the process, from the procuring of parchment to copying and editorial, and from the mise en page to binding.62 The marchandlibraire, I suggest, functioned as a kind of editorial director, who would bring together the resources and personnel required in order to complete a project, sometimes even breaking a work down and parcelling it out quire-by-quire, or undertaking some of the tasks herself or himself, so as to get the work done more quickly and/or economically.63 As I pointed out, though, this key protagonist of commercial publishing prior to print is rather invisible in manuscripts. Rouse and Rouse have demonstrated, however, that it is still possible to identify traces of her or his work where particular combinations of craftsmanship can be discerned as having worked together across several different manuscripts, thus suggesting the presence of an overarching marchand-libraire, managing a team of ‘preferred’ craftsmen, and who led on the production of various works.64 Print foregrounded the marchand-libraire with considerably more vigour, with his or her name or initials often included on the title page in a colophon or similar. This said, his or her actual role in the operation, in both print and manuscript, is often similarly difficult to discern, since there were shifting requirements from project to project. The marchand-libraire of one book might be commissioned to serve only as the copyist of another, while the roles of printer 59 60

61 62 63 64

Riddy, ‘“Publication” before Print’, p. 36. This can be witnessed by street names still in existence to this day, such as the rue de la Parcheminerie (originally rue des Escrivains) in Paris; see also Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization’, p. 181. Diane E. Booton, Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 215. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, p. 14; Booton, Manuscripts, Market, pp. 120–25. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, pp. 14 and 249. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

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and publisher might well be swapped between individuals for different works.65 Where a distinction might most usefully be made is in terms of finance since the marchand-libraire would typically underwrite the costs of production.66 Whatever his or her role, the varied nature of tasks meant that the marchand-libraire needed a broad skillset, as Taylor outlines: To be successful, the marchand-libraire had to be resourceful and dynamic in a shifting, developing marketplace; this was a field, largely new, of speculative publication where understanding such things as the raising of capital and credit management was paramount, and where steady turnover was key.67

Taylor alludes usefully here to the opportunity, and commercial risk, of speculative publishing, which led to a trend that publishers still follow today: a tendency to publish works aimed at known markets – good bets –, so that sales can be assured. This gives us some indication as to the reasons why Arthurian and Grail romances might have been chosen as subject matter for some editions, since the manuscript market for such material had at least been solid.68 However, the genre’s actual commercial success in print did not quite reach the heady levels probably envisaged, as we shall see in the coming chapters. Even if certain enterprises did not experience enormous success,69 the overlap between manuscript and print was nonetheless a period of enormous expansion for the publishing trade, and vernacular literature played a key role. Scase notes that ‘[t]he nature of the “market” for vernacular manuscripts seems to have provided a stimulus for technological innovation rather than simple continuation of existing practices.’70 This is important, since it supports the idea of print marking a culmination, to return to Clanchy’s terminology, rather than a new era: had vernacular literature not experienced such considerable success in manuscript, there would have been no impetus for print to develop. Print was invented, in other words, as a direct response to the success of literature published in manuscript format. In reaching the end of this survey of scholarship on the issue of publication in Middle Ages and the Renaissance, what I hope to have achieved is a synthesis of the rather scattered conjecture related to the development of the commercial book trade between 1200 and 1530, thus giving a clearer picture of the circumstances of production surrounding our corpus of texts, and thus a context for the chapters which follow. By bringing together these arguments, I have also attempted to provide a more rounded and concrete definition of what it meant, in practical and logistical terms, to publish prior to the introduction of the printing press. 65 66 67 68 69

70

Leonarda Vytautas Gerulaitis, Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: American Library Association; London: Mansell, 1976), p. 2. On financing printed editions, see Curt F. Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 52–57. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 45. Ibid., p. 46. Taylor also points out here, though, that Arthurian romance, by comparison with other genres, was only minimally represented in this period. Booton notes the failures of private presses in Brittany, Manuscripts, Market, p. 215, while Taylor shows that many publishers, trying to operate in a shifting business, probably ‘miscalculated their market, or failed to manage their stocks, their cash-flow, and their printruns’, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 45. Scase, ‘Afterword’, p. 295.

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The juncture between manuscript and print proved, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be less of a gaping chasm than is often suggested. All of the evidence points to the fact that print did not change the fundamental nature of the book trade, except technologically. The book trade was already firmly commercial, for example, and it already drew together a wide group of book production professionals working on collaborative projects for financial gain. Particularly important, however, was the emergence of an apparent awareness of the ‘moment of publication’ from as early as antiquity, which we were able to concretise as being directly related to the first public – and, crucially, authorised – distribution of a work. Print therefore only served to facilitate mechanically an already galvanised shift towards the mass-market model that was under development in the manuscript production activities of the marchand-libraire and his teams of artisans. These teams, I believe, we can now legitimately refer to as publishers, in much the same way as we do to their modern counterparts: groups of individuals working collaboratively, for financial and commercial gain, in the creation of book products that aim to be acutely sensitive to their intended target markets.

2

Blurbing the Grail This chapter offers a consideration of the notion of blurbs, commencing with a discussion of blurbs in the modern context, before exploring what kinds of medieval/early-modern textual apparatus in our Grail texts can legitimately be seen as fulfilling similar functions. I investigate publishers’ strategic manipulation of these blurbs, both textually and within the mise en page, and develop conclusions as to what we might understand as having been the key marketing factors for French Grail texts, and whether such trends developed over time. Blurbs, in the modern sense of the term, are one of the most pivotal marketing tools in convincing a customer either to engage further with the product or to purchase it. In 2010, for example, The Bookseller reported on a study by Book Marketing Limited, which had shown that ‘the blurb makes 62% of consumers buy a particular product’.1 The value added by the blurb, therefore, cannot be overestimated. The narrative structure, presentation and positioning of blurbs as we know them today are, of course, rather modern devices, developed to complement shifts in book production and marketing, particularly since the turn of the twentieth century. The term itself appears only to have come into use in 1907, when Gelett Burgess, an American humorist, published a book called Are You a Bromide? and was promoting it at a trade show. Burgess persuaded his publisher to produce a special dust jacket depicting a young woman calling out alongside the usual cover copy. This copy was written to sound as if the young lady was speaking out in praise of the book and it carried the title ‘YES, this is a “BLURB”!’ Additionally, the image was captioned: ‘Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing’. The term gained swiftly in popularity and soon came to be used to describe the marketing copy displayed on book covers, a device which had been in use for some time.2 There is, though, a certain vagueness about what kinds of cover copy might be counted as a blurb according to Burgess’ definition. Is it material written by the author, or rather publisher-authored copy? Are endorsements from other authors included? Does it matter where it is positioned (back cover or flap)? Burgess, evidently sensing the need for clarification, would later include a definition in his 1914 Burgess Unabridged: Blurb, n. 1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher [...] On the ‘jacket’ of the ‘latest’ fiction, we find

1 2

Victoria Gallagher, ‘Publishers are “Missing a Trick” with Blurbs’, The Bookseller, 11 June 2010 . Charlotte Laughlin and Bill Crider, ‘Paperback Blurbs’, Paperback Quarterly, 4 (1981), 3–12 (p. 3).

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the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the ‘sensation of the year’.3

This certainly centralises the role of the blurb as a marketing tool, and gives the indication that it should appear somewhere on the jacket, but does not give explicit answers to the other questions noted above. It is probably also true that a similar haziness can be associated with the term today. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is no more specific than is Burgess, simply describing the blurb as ‘a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes’.4 Whilst perfectly accurate in essence, this definition still tells us little about placement or authorship. The philosopher Alan Levinovitz bemoans this lack of exactitude in his 2012 essay on the subject; evidently frustrated, he labels the situation ‘a mess’ and instead adopts what he calls ‘an arbitrary hybrid definition – blurb: a short endorsement, author unspecified, that appears on a creative work’.5 At first glance, this appears to be exactly the kind of woolly definition that Levinovitz rails against, but this, it transpires, is the point. Levinovitz demonstrates that precision is futile, since notions of who writes a blurb and where it appears on the book actually make little difference in terms of deciding whether a piece of copy can be defined as a blurb. What is more important, he suggests, is the specific function of that copy, which is, he says, ‘to market books, influence their interpretation, and assure prospective readers they kept good company’.6 This construal of the blurb as any piece of copy that fulfils this function argues strongly against Genette’s interpretation of a blurb solely as a paratext – that is, as something positioned only outside of the main text (e.g. on a jacket or in preliminary material). Genette’s sense of the blurb as a ‘promotional statement, an equivalent of the French bla-bla or baratin [patter]’7 does, however, chime well with Levinovitz’s definition of function. Rachel Malik is in agreement, explicitly taking issue with Genette’s view of the positioning of a blurb, and stating that the ‘[b]lurb is above all a type of discourse and a mode of representation of the text – it may and does appear anywhere’. We are wrong, she continues, to class the blurb only as a ‘semi-anonymous, professionalised utterance of the marketing department, not as scribed by authors’.8 Malik’s argument, like Levinovitz’s, turns on the notion of function or, more accurately, representation – that is, the manner in which the book is presented to its audience. For Malik, the composition of a blurb is primarily ‘governed by a readership, imaginary and real’,9 by which she means that blurbs are deliberately designed to reflect the interests and motivations of 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

Gelett Burgess, Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed (New York: Stokes, 1914), p. 7. ‘Blurb’, Oxford English Dictionary, available at: . Alan Levinovitz, ‘I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs’, The Millions, 1 February 2012, available at . Ibid. Genette, Paratexts, p. 25. Rachel Malik, ‘Blurb’, in Selected Essays about a Bibliography, ed. by Tan Lin (n.pl.: Edit, 2011), p. 10. Ibid.

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a text’s reader, or at least the reader as perceived by the publisher. Levinovitz, meanwhile, agrees with the prioritisation of the intended (or imagined) reader as the calculated target of a blurb, but also notes additional motivations. Blurbs, he says, are ‘born of marketing, authorial camaraderie, and a genuine obligation to the reader, three staples of the publishing industry since its earliest days’.10 Levinovitz’s understanding of the industry’s earliest days, therefore, is closely in line with that of this study, where formats other than, and anterior to, print can equally constitute acts of publication. Citing the case of the Roman poet Martial, who opens some of his works with a note to the reader (termed a ‘proto-blurb’), Levinovitz argues that, in a time before blurbs on covers, ‘a good way to assess the potential merits of Martial’s book would have been to read the first page or two, an ideal place for authors to insert some prefatory puff. […] [T]hese devices likely served the same purpose that blurbs do today.’11 This is particularly useful for us, since it allows us to develop a notion of the blurb as something that existed, if not in form, then in function, before the inauguration of the term in the early twentieth century and even before the advent of print. Further evidence that this is so is provided by Franz Rosenthal’s study of the taqrîẓ in fourteenth-century Egyptian texts. These sometimes lengthy pieces of copy (often taking the form of letters of recommendation, or even reviews by other authors, and thus perhaps pertaining to Levinovitz’s category of ‘authorial camaraderie’) were occasionally included at the beginning of books in praise and promotion of a work, often after an author had died. Rosenthal admits that the lack of proximity of composition to a work’s initial publication means they are not perfectly in line with our sense of blurbs, but again he emphasises the similarity of their function in their provision of ‘publicity for the original product’.12 By this token, blurbs – whether modern, ancient or medieval – are commercially valuable, since they engage an audience with a text, and tempt that audience not only to read further but also to buy or commission. They therefore promise to tell us a great deal about motivating factors in book consumption within our corpus of Grail texts. But it is also important to recognize the cultural value of blurbs: if they are indicative of trends in textual consumption, then they also hold promise as sources from which to gain insights into audiences, revealing details about readers’ changing relationships with, and interests in, texts over time. Here, I will explore our corpus of Grail texts for key examples of copy that seem to fulfil the function of a blurb as we now understand it: as reader-oriented, promotional copy that is attached to, or interwoven into, a product, and which can be authored by the author, publisher or other party. The question that remains, however, is where to look for blurbs. According to Levinovitz’s interpretation of Martial’s ‘proto-blurbs’, prefaces, prologues, colophons and epilogues suggest themselves as the key sites for exploration. In many cases, of course, these are integral parts of the original text, presumably composed by the author. Since Malik demonstrated, though, that we should not limit our understanding of blurbs to aspects produced specifically as paratexts, 10 11 12

Levinovitz, ‘A Brief History of Blurbs’. Ibid. Franz Rosenthal, ‘“Blurbs” (taqrîẓ) from Fourteenth-Century Egypt’, Oriens, 27/28 (1981), 177–96 (pp. 177–79).

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typically by publishers, such sites provide equally valuable testimony. I will therefore consider both those blurbs apparently provided by authors and those introduced by publishers. In all cases, I will investigate the material and textual manifestations of those blurbs in the artefacts. Where are they positioned? Are they highlighted or offset, or do they form an inseparable part of the text? How are author-composed blurbs manipulated by publishers? What aspects of the edition are prioritised as brands (characters, themes, authors)? What does this tell us about the changing readership for these texts within our period of consideration?

Blurbing Chrétien’s Conte: Manuscript vs Print I start, as I will in other chapters, with Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal, since it is the earliest known Grail text, having been originally composed in the late twelfth century and transmitted in varying forms from the early twelfth century through to its recasting in the 1530 printed prosification of the text. Since the Conte’s transmission both covers and bookends the timespan and corpus under consideration, any examples of blurbing within both its text and its material artefacts will be crucial in providing a framework for analysing the wider development of the Grail-related blurb. By commencing with a comparison of the blurb in the manuscript editions with that in the 1530 printed edition, I provide a preliminary sense of the shifting taste(s) of Grail literature audiences between 1200 and 1530. I then trace the development of this shift through examples provided by those texts composed and published in the aftermath of Chrétien’s original Conte. Levinovitz directed us to explore, first and foremost, what we might call ‘prelims’ (preliminary matter) and end-matter, to employ publishing terminology. In textual terms, the Conte is, of course, unfinished owing to Chrétien’s supposed death prior to completion. This means that Chrétien was never actually able to supply any end-matter to be exploited in material artefacts by the text’s publishers, though the varying proliferations of Continuations appearing in manuscripts at the end of the Conte supply some remedy to this, as we shall see later. In respect of prelims, though, Chrétien’s prologue provides very useful insights for this study. It is notable, in the first instance, that the first sixty lines of Chrétien’s prologue are devoted almost entirely to the extravagant praise of the work’s patron, Philip of Flanders, fashioning him in the mould of someone as great as, if not greater than, Alexander. By way of a mere selection of examples from his lengthy and laudatory introduction, Chrétien says: Qu’il le fait por le plus preudome Qui soit en l’empire de Rome. C’est li quens Phelipes de Flandres, Qui valt mix ne fist Alixandres, Cil que l’en dist qui tant fu buens[…] Dont li quens est mondes et saus. Li quens est teus que il n’escoute Vilain gap ne parole estoute,

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Et s’il ot mesdire d’autrui, Quels que il soit, ce poise lui[…] Dont sachiez bien de verité Que li don sont de carité Que li bons quens Phelipes done; Onques nului n’i araisonne Fors son bon cuer le debonaire Qui li loe le bien a faire.

Ne valt cil mix que ne valut Alixandres, cui ne chalut De carité ne de nul bien?

(lines 11–59)

(For he [Chrétien] is doing it for the worthiest man in Christendom: Count Philip of Flanders, who is of even greater worth than the mightily esteemed Alexander[…] the count will not tolerate base jokes or spiteful words, and hates to hear ill spoken of any man, whoever he may be. The count loves justice, and loyalty and holy church[…] So know this, in all truthfulness: those gifts that good Count Philip gives are gifts of charity, for he is prompted only by his fair and generous heart, which bids him do good. Is this man not of greater worth than Alexander who did not care about charity or other good deeds?)

It is perfectly commonplace to include such raptures towards a patron, and I shall explore this at greater length in Chapter 5, but it is worth noting here that the length and scope of this torrent of praise together provide a key to understanding the reader to which Chrétien apparently felt most obligated. Chrétien’s living was presumably dependent upon his patron, and thus his encouragement of Philip’s buy-in (to use another business term) to the text can surely be seen as an important commercial move: if Philip liked this story, perhaps he would commission another. Chrétien also ensures, though, to hint in his prologue that he understands his equal sense of obligation to a wider audience. This we can see in the final eight lines of the prologue, which segue into the opening of the Conte proper: Dont avra bien salve sa paine Crestïens, qui entent et paine Par le commandement le conte A rimoier le meillor conte Qui soit contez a cort roial: Ce est li Contes del Graal, Dont li quens li bailla le livre. Oëz comment il s’en delivre.

(lines 61–68)

(So Chrétien’s toils will not be in vain striving, by the count’s command, to put into rhyme the finest tale ever told in a royal court: it is the story of the Grail, of which the count gave him the book. Hear how he acquits himself.)

Three key observations can be made here. First, Chrétien addresses himself to his wider audience, alerting them to the fact that the story is a verse reworking of an existing tale given to him in book format by Count Philip. This claim of

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an anterior version is a very familiar trope in medieval literature, and it is one exercised throughout our corpus of texts, as we shall see in later chapters of this study. It is typically employed to append gravitas and legitimacy – and it is by no means Chrétien’s first use of such a claim, since he previously suggested a similar scenario in both Cligés and the Charrette.13 Whether the ‘livre’ mentioned was real or a mere device, its deployment gives a clear sense of its function as a kind of marketing tool, employed to add to the tale the authenticity apparently desired by its audience – Duggan refers to this prolific trope as ‘a known attraction’ in the literature of the time.14 Second, Chrétien gives his tale a title, and in so doing, a key theme and focus – it is, he says, ‘li Contes del graal’ (the story of the dish). Many have mused on the question as to whether the word graal meant something more to a medieval audience than just in its standard sense as a dish, or whether it just provoked bewildered curiosity.15 One might well wonder how the greatest story ever told in a royal court (qui soit contez a cort roial) could possibly be based on such mundane subject matter. Whether due to his expecting pre-knowledge or pure curiosity on the part of the audience, Chrétien’s centralisation of the Grail as the key theme of his tale, one which is explicitly and conspicuously evoked in its title, might well suggest certain ideas about the audience for this text – or at least, about Chrétien’s perception of that audience. If we are to assume that the audience understood no special meaning for graal – its particular presentation as a cryptic, unexplained object in the text alongside its lack of appearance in any known previous literature would suggest that this is so – then clearly, Chrétien felt his audience would be open to intrigue, and possibly even playfulness. That such an arcane item should form the central pillar of this supposedly very important story surely garnered at least a few stifled laughs from the audience on its first outing. What could this mean? What would the story really be about? Third, Chrétien’s act of self-naming is a branding exercise (I discuss this at length in Chapter 3). Given that this is his fifth known romance, by the time of the Conte’s composition, Chrétien is presumably widely recognisable as an established author. He thus confidently, and without irony, invites people to

13

14 15

While, in the Charrette, the text simply states: ‘Matiere et sens l’en done livre/ La Contesse’ (The material and the manner of its rewriting are given to him [Chrétien] by the Countess) (lines 26–27), in Cligés, the text leaves us in no doubt that a pre-existing, and specifically old, book adds authenticity: ‘Cest estoire trovons escrite,/ Que conter vos vuel et retreire,/ An un des livres de l’aumeire/ Mon seignor saint Pere a Biauvez./ De la fu li contes estrez,/ Don cest romanz fist Crestieens./ Li livres est mout anciiens,/ Qui tesmoingne l’estoire a voire;/ Por ce fet ele maiuz a croire.’ (The story that I wish to tell you is to be found written in one of the books in the library of my lord Saint Peter at Beauvais. Chrétien extracted material for the making of this romance from there. The book containing the story is very old, and this makes it much more authoritative) (lines 18–26). For Cligés and the Charrette, I use Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. by Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993) and Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette ou Le roman de Lancelot, ed. by Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de poche, 1992) respectively. See Joseph J. Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 274–75. See Jean Frappier’s discussion of the original meaning of the word ‘graal’ (as a dish or platter) and how the medieval audience might have interpreted it: Chrétien de Troyes et le mythe du Graal: Étude sur Perceval ou le Conte du Graal (Paris: SEDES, 1972), pp. 5–8, as well as William A. Nitze’s ‘Concerning the Word Graal, Greal’, Modern Philology, 13 (1916), 681–84.

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observe how brilliantly he acquits himself of the task before him. These three aspects can together be understood as commercial drivers that are specifically aimed at engaging the readership. To summarise: the tale is based on an old story, spun anew; the Grail itself (whether object of curiosity or well-known motif) is key point of intrigue; this narrative is the work of Chrétien, an already wellknown author. Chrétien’s prologue therefore fulfils extremely well the function of a blurb, as earlier defined, in the author’s positive promotion of the product, as well as his focus on the reader through the highlighting of what Chrétien believes to be the key attractions, or brands, of the text. Of equal importance to this enquiry, though, is how the publishers of the Conte manipulate this prologue – or what I suggest we term this blurb – for their intended audience(s). The manuscripts, interestingly enough, rarely show publishers intervening in the textual editing of Chrétien’s prologue. It is either removed completely,16 or used with minimal modification, such as occasional line inversion or non-sensealtering variants.17 In several cases, the text of the prologue is visually offset from the main text by rubrication, a decorated initial, an illumination or a combination thereof.18 This suggests that medieval publishers typically processed this section as a separate element from the main body text,19 and as one requiring particular treatment. Whilst they might not have seen fit to make extensive editorial amends, which Busby attributes to ‘the name, authority and presence of Chrétien de Troyes [who was] established as the master-romancer, variously imitated, emulated, admired and even feared by poets and scribes alike’,20 their consistent visual distinction of the prologue certainly seems to suggest that they understood the commercial capital contained within this section of the text. Here, after all, were presented the reasons for an audience to read or listen further. MS Add. 36614 depicts this importance in a particularly nuanced fashion. Shortly after the completion of their edition of the text, the publishers of this manuscript seem to have decided to interpolate the Bliocadran between Chrétien’s prologue and his main text.21 In order to do this, they removed the first folio of the first quaternion and erased the final forty-four lines on that first folio (which are in fact the first forty-four lines of the main, post-prologue text), thus leaving the prologue to stand alone. They then attached seven clean folia to that first folio and wrote the Bliocadran into the space, starting from the end of the prologue. At 16 17

18

19 20 21

Such as in MSS fr. 1450 and Mons 331/206. Examples exhibiting this latter form of intervention are MSS fr. 794, Clermont-Ferrand 248, Add. 36614, Florence 2943, Bern 354, fr. 12576, Montpellier H249 and fr. 12577. MSS fr. 1453, Advocates’ 19.1.5, n. a. fr. 6614, and fr. 1429 are missing their opening folia, but their similarities to other manuscripts suggest it is likely that these also once contained Chrétien’s prologue with little amendment; see my The Continuations, Chapter One and Busby’s list of variants, Perceval, pp. 3–5. MSS fr. 794, fr. 12576, Montpellier H249, fr. 12577, Clermont-Ferrand 248, Bern 354, Add. 36614 and Advocates’ 19.1.5. MS Florence 2943 probably also marked this juncture, but several folia are missing from the first gathering. Or, possibly (and/or additionally), that the publishers of these copies’ exemplars did so. Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 350. This manuscript appears to be a single production, but with an interesting possibility that the manuscript was finished in a different location from where it was commenced. I discuss this at greater length in Chapters 4 and 5; see also Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Some Champenois Vernacular Manuscripts and the Manerius Style of Illumination’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, I, pp. 196–226.

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the end of the Bliocadran, the publishers realised they had left rather too much space in the quaternion for the first forty-four lines of the Conte that they had erased, and so spread them – by incorporating large gaps to stretch out the text – across the remaining space. This ‘new’ quaternion is then bound into the front of the volume.22 The publishers of MS Add. 36614 thus make a considerable effort to maintain Chrétien’s prologue as the opening to their edition, even placing it prior to the prequel they included at a later moment, thus suggesting that they, too, were aware of the importance of this blurb for the text’s reception by its intended audience.

Removing Chrétien’s Prologue: Prequels and New Contexts Two manuscripts excise Chrétien’s prologue: MSS Mons 331/206 and fr. 1450. These two manuscripts will prove crucial as witnesses to publication practices associated with Grail texts throughout this study, and here they present no exception. MS Mons 331/206 introduces both the Elucidation and the Bliocadran prior to the Conte.23 Here the publishers apparently see these two prequels (or at least part of them) as performing the function of blurbs in their own right, and thus only commence Chrétien’s text from the first line after the prologue (on f. 15b). While the Bliocadran launches straight into the action, the Elucidation (which precedes it) provides a surrogate blurb in the form of its own prologue. There is a marked difference, however, in the way in which this prologue blurbs the text when compared to that of Chrétien. The opening lines read: Pour le noble comencement, Comence .i. romans hautement Del plus plaisant conte qui soit: C’est del Graal dont nus ne doit Le secret dire ne chonter; Car tel chose poroit monter Li contes ains qu’il fust tos dis Que teus hom en seroit maris Qui ne l’aroit mie fourfait Por ce, fait ke sages ki[l] lait Et s’en passe outre simplement; Car se maistre Blihis ne ment, Nus ne doit dire le secré.

(lines 1–13)

(For a noble beginning, a romance should open commendably with the most pleasurable tale there is – this is the [Story of the] Grail, of which the secret should never be revealed or recounted by anyone, since the story could reveal enough that someone, who had not divulged the secret, might end up suffering for it. For this reason, it is wisest to let it pass by because, unless Master Blihis is lying, no one should tell the secret.) 22 23

See my The Continuations, p. 25. The Elucidation appears on ff. 1r–6r of MS Mons 331/206, whilst the Bliocadran runs from ff. 6r–15r.

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Chrétien, we will remember, intrigued his audience with subtle, implicit hints at the mysterious in his blurb – the mention of the Grail itself being central to that intrigue. Here, though, the insistence on secrecy is quite explicit: that there is a secret is, somewhat paradoxically, revealed immediately. What is difficult to be sure of is whether this author is actually trying to be suspenseful, attempting to ape Chrétien’s style but failing, or whether, perhaps more likely, he is deliberately trying to appeal to an audience he believes already knows the story they are about to hear. That is, the emphatic mentions of secrecy are actually a deliberate intratextual reference that the author expects the audience to grasp. Certainly, he is referring forward to later events in the narrative that it would not be unreasonable to assume most audiences were aware of by this stage of transmission. In so doing, he makes little secret of the fact that what he is writing is an addition – even adding a new author’s name to the section (one Master Blihis), before returning the baton to Chrétien at the end of the text: Or contera crestijens a Lessample q[ue] au es oi dont ara b[ie]n sanue sa paine Crestijens q[ui] entent a paine a rimorer le mellor conte par le comandement le conte Q[ui] soit contes en court roial Cou est li contes del greal dont li quens li balla le liure Sores coment il se deliure

(f. 6a–b)

(Chrétien will now relate here the example you have heard about. Chrétien will therefore not have toiled in vain, for he will have strived, by the count’s command, to put into rhyme the finest tale ever told in royal court. It is the story of the Grail, of which the count gave him the book. Listen to how he acquits himself.)

I discuss this passage again in Chapter 3 specifically in relation to authorial disclosure, but here it is particularly pertinent in terms of blurbing the text. In MS Mons 331/206, we will recall, Chrétien’s blurb has been removed, but here we see a clear reflection of the phraseology of Chrétien’s blurb, such that a reader might well be lured into feeling that the Elucidation functions legitimately as a prologue to the Conte. If, as I suggest above, we are to presume that the audience does indeed already know the Conte, and that the publisher’s prefixing it with two new texts is meant as a transparent attempt at reframing the text, then these lexical echoes surely serve to add a familiar quality to the text, allowing the audience to accept this new section as additional, but complementary. I have argued elsewhere that a similar tactic is also employed by Manessier, the final Continuator of Chrétien’s text, who writes a colophon (present in all unfragmentary manuscripts) which resonates both lexically and syntactically with Chrétien’s prologue.24 I discuss this passage in detail in respect of Manessier’s self-presentation in Chapter 3, as 24

See my The Continuations, pp. 170–71.

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well as in terms of patronage in Chapter 5, but here it suffices to say that there is also a blurbing characteristic to Manessier’s colophon. Like the Elucidation’s closing passage, for instance, it suggests a level of authenticity through its use of mimicked phraseology and its reference to an associated patron (Jeanne of Flanders, a descendent of Philip). In respect of both Manessier’s blurb (his colophon) and that of the Elucidation (contained within its closing lines), therefore, their deliberate linguistic interplay with Chrétien’s blurb serves to provide an illusion of a cohesive corpus, when what is contained within is actually widely divergent in terms of narrative trajectory. The Elucidation’s blurb in MS Mons 331/206 also seems to suggest that this prequel will now lead neatly into Chrétien’s text, and this is supported by a rubric inserted between the two texts reading ‘Ci endroit comence li Contes del Saint Greail’ (Here begins the Conte du Graal) (f. 6r). In actual fact, however, MS Mons 331/206 then interpolates the Bliocadran. As a result, we see the publishers making effective dual use of the Elucidation’s blurb: it not only allows for the addition of the Elucidation as a new, but somehow legitimised, contextualisation of Chrétien’s text, but it also serves as a delaying tactic by facilitating the exploration of a further tangent in the shape of the Bliocadran. Indeed, thanks to both the Elucidation’s blurb and the rubric, the Bliocadran actually appears to be presented as the work of Chrétien. It is only after the end of the Bliocadran that the audience finally reaches the text they have been repeatedly promised they will hear. The blurb provided by the Elucidation in MS Mons 331/206, therefore, is one which works hard to market the text by echoing the tones of Chrétien’s original blurb, but also by prioritising the needs of a different reader. Here, the publishers target a reader already familiar with the Conte, but one desirous of knowing more in respect of the genealogical and historical information associated with the main protagonist of Chrétien’s text, which is the subject matter that forms the lion’s share of both the Elucidation’s and the Bliocadran’s respective contents. The other manuscript to expunge Chrétien’s blurb, MS fr. 1450, does so for somewhat different purposes. The publishers of this manuscript interweave all of Chrétien’s romances into the middle of Wace’s Brut. Alongside the Conte’s prologue, that of Erec et Enide is additionally removed. Busby argues that this is a result of the two prologues’ new-found redundancy, which is caused by the new, pseudo-historical context into which they have been introduced.25 Walters argues that this could be why the prologue to Cligés is actually left in place in this manuscript, since it is ‘où Chrétien développe le topique de la translatio studii et imperii’ (where Chrétien develops the subject of translatio studii et imperii). 26 In other words, unlike the prologue of Cligés, the expunged prologues became unnecessary, in Busby’s words ‘even obtrusive’, since they present the texts not as history, but as literary fictions, which is not in line with what appear to be the objectives of this edition.27 The presentation of Chrétien’s tales in MS fr. 1450 is thus clearly aimed at providing a rather different frame, one requiring a different kind of blurb, precisely because the manuscript itself is aimed at a 25 26 27

Busby, Codex and Context, II, p. 409. Lori J. Walters, ‘Le rôle du scribe dans l’organisation des manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes’, Romania, 106 (1985), 303–25 (p. 305). Busby, Codex and Context, II, p. 409.

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different kind of reader. The publisher seems to assume that the target reader in this case, one who is presumably interested in Wace’s chronicle rather than in Chrétien’s romances, will be more concerned with ‘facts’ associated with the deeds of Arthur.28 As a result, the encroachment of details from the original blurbs suggesting, for example, that the author has employed bele conjointure to spin an old story anew, or that they were written by a known romancer (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of the treatment of Chrétien’s name in MS fr. 1450), might well have served to alienate such a reader. Thus the prologues, or blurbs, are removed, and the publisher of MS fr. 1450 in effect uses context, rather than text, as a surrogate, thereby allowing these works of romance to function against their new backdrop. By contrast with the other examples we have explored, here there is no specific textual replacement of the blurb in order to reframe Chrétien’s work. This seems to be because the attempt is to market Chrétien’s texts as generically indistinct from the Brut into which they are sandwiched (see Chapter 4). To include a new blurb for them could risk suggesting the diametric opposite. Instead, Chrétien’s texts are interpolated into the manuscript with little announcement, thus making an important point. Opting to discard a pre-existing blurb (or even not introducing one at all) is, in some ways, as important a choice as including one, especially where that choice serves to market the text more appropriately to the target reader.

Using Blurbs to Promote the Place of Purchase One publisher who understood the marketing power of blurbing his text was Guiot, the scribe of MS fr. 794. Rather like MS fr. 1450, Guiot’s manuscript ‘was probably commissioned by a patron who had an interest in ancient history’,29 an observation supported by the nature of the other, non-Chrétien contents in the manuscript. However, the most significant instance of blurbing in this codex is related neither to the manuscript’s compilatory context (to which I will return in Chapter 4), nor to the Conte. It is found in a scribal note added by Guiot himself (reproduced in Plate 1): Cil qui l’escrist Guioz a non Devant Nostre Dame del Val est ses osteus tot a estal.30 (He who wrote this is named Guiot. In front of Notre Dame del Val is his permanent workshop.)

28 29

30

I discuss in Chapter 4 the subject of whether audiences drew lines between such genres of writing, or whether their boundaries were much less clear-cut than we are used to today. Duggan, The Romances, p. 37. Mireille Schmidt-Chazan suggests that the matter of Britain is in fact at the root of the patron’s interest in ‘Un lorrain de cœur: Le champenois Calendre’, Cahiers lorrains, 3 (1979), 65–75 (p. 75). MS fr. 794, f. 105c.

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Plate 1: Guiot’s marketing blurb in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794, f. 105c.

Critics have agreed that this is an advertisement or marketing note, notifying readers as to where they may purchase copies either of this text, or of others, produced by Guiot – and not just any scribe named Guiot, rather the Guiot whose shop is to be found in front of Notre Dame del Val.31 This transparent piece of copy is important for our purposes in marking out Guiot as more than a mere scribe. Even at this relatively early stage in the transmission of Chrétien’s text, here we find evidence of a scribe with a business strong enough to allow him to set up a permanent place of work in a town of cultural importance, known for commercial fairs and an abundance of rich patrons.32 That Guiot’s profession was indeed multi-functional is demonstrated by critics’ many and varied descriptions of the guises in which Guiot operated: to Busby he is a ‘scribe and bookseller’,33 while Poirion suggests that he has ‘the ink-stand of a merchant’;34 Walters refers to Guiot as ‘copiste, continuateur, compilateur et auteur à différents moments de sa carrière’ (copyist, Continuator, compiler and author at various times in his career).35 Frank Brandsma makes useful sense of how we should interpret the activities of individuals with such portfolio-style skillsets, pertinently questioning ‘whether it is correct to draw lines between the different functions we see the same scribe perform’.36 In other words, drawing distinctions between these roles is not constructive, since these activities – in varying combinations from one book trade professional to the next – apparently sat comfortably alongside each other. They were diverse responsibilities, certainly, but all were associated with the overarching and multi-faceted role of the publisher, as discussed in Chapter 1. Guiot, in this respect, certainly seems to operate in the shape of a publisher, both actively editing and marketing his texts, even if sometimes he has been accused of

31

32

33 34 35 36

Mario Roques, for example, describes it as ‘une annonce commerciale’ in his ‘Le manuscrit fr. 794 de la Bibliothèque nationale et le scribe Guiot’, Romania, 73 (1952), 177–99 (p. 187); see also Duggan, The Romances, p. 37 and Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 41. Roques, basing his identification on the name of the church mentioned by Guiot, names the town as Provins, which was a site of several of the Champagne fairs; ‘Le manuscript 794’, pp. 189–90. See also Daniel Poirion, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. LV. Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 41. Poirion, Œuvres complètes, p. LV. Walters, ‘Le rôle du scribe’, p. 316. Frank Brandsma, ‘Opening up the Narrative: The Insertion of New Episodes in Arthurian Cycles’, Queeste, 2 (1996), 31–39 (p. 32).

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being rather too interventionist in his editorial pursuits.37 Regardless of personal opinion on the relative success of Guiot’s editorial activities, though, his marketing blurb is innovative in its invitation to potential patrons to visit his workshop and, hopefully, to commission further books. In this, at least in relation to Grail literature – and specifically the Conte –, Guiot is actually somewhat ahead of his time, for no parallel notices appear in editions of the Conte until the rise of print.

Blurbing Chrétien in Print In Galliot du Pré’s 1530 edition of a prosified version of the Conte, a very similar notice to that included by Guiot in MS fr. 794 is incorporated into the text on the title page (see Plate 2). This notice is also echoed in a very close reiteration of these lines that appears on the last page of the edition.38 It reads: Tresplaisante et Re/creative Hystoire/ du Trespreulx et vaillant Chevallier/ Perceval le galloys Jadis chevalier/ de la Table ronde. Lequel acheva/ les adve[n] tures du Sainct Gra/al. Avec aulchuns faictz/ belliqueulx du noble/ chevallier Gauvain/ Et aultres che/valliers estans/ au temps/ du noble/ Roy/ Arthus/ Non au paravant Imprime,/ Avec privilege/ On les vend au Pallais a Paris/ En la boutique de Jehan lo[n]gis, Jehan sainct denis/ et Galiot du pre/ Marchans libraires demourant audict lieu. (The very pleasing and entertaining tale of the very brave and valiant knight Perceval le Galois, once knight of the Round Table who achieved the adventures of the Holy Grail, as well as several of the warlike deeds of the noble knight Gauvain and other knights of the time of the noble King Arthur. Never previously printed; avec privilège,39 copies are sold at the Pallais in Paris in the shop of Jean Longis, Jean Saint Denis and Galliot du Pré, merchant booksellers residing there.) 37

38

39

See Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 95 and Duggan, The Romances, p. 37; Roach classifies him as ‘independent[; he] did not hesitate to recast passages freely’, in The Continuations, III, p. vii. Full studies of Guiot’s editorial interventions are provided by T. B. W. Reid, ‘Chrétien de Troyes and the Scribe Guiot’, Medium Aevum, 45 (1976), 1–19 and Tony Hunt, ‘Chrestien de Troyes: The Textual Problem’, French Studies, 33 (1979), 257–71. I use Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74. The reiteration at the end of the text reads: ‘Fin du Romant et Hystoire du preulx/ et vaillant Chevallier Perceual le Gal/loys. Jadis Cheuallier de la Table ro[n]de./ Lequel acheva les aduentures du Sainct/ Graal. Auec auchuns faitz belliqueulx/ du noble cheuallier Gauuain. Et austres/ Chevalliers estans au te[m]ps du noble Roy/ Arthus. Le tout nouuellement Imprimé/ a Paris, pour ho[n]nestres personnes Jehan/ sainct denys et Jehan longis, marchands/ Libraires demeurans audict lieu. Et fut/ acheue de Imprimer le premier iour de Se/ptembre. Lan mil cinq cens trente.’ (Here ends the romance and history of the brave and valliant knight, Perceval le Gallois, once knight of the Round Table, who achieved the adventures of the Holy Grail, as well as of several of the warlike deeds of the noble knight Gauvain and other knights of the time of the noble King Arthur. All of this was newly printed in Paris for the worthy individuals, Jean Saint Denis and Jean Longis, merchant booksellers residing there. Printing was completed on the first day of September in the year of 1530) (f. 120r). Details of the privilège afforded to this publishing syndicate, which was granted on 20 March 1529 (new style 1530), are provided on the verso of sig. aa. I, where we learn that exclusivity of printing and sale of this text are granted ‘iusq[ue]s a six ans sur peine de confiscation desdictz liures et damende arbitraire’ (for six years under punishment [for other printers breaching this privilège] of the confiscation of said books and an appropriate fine [amende arbitraire suggests that the amount of this fine would be decided by a judge]).

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Here, the reader is twice instructed – once at the beginning (on the title page) and once at the end of the text – from which shop they might purchase their own copy. This is undoubtedly a commercial move. A hyperbolic tone, in line with that which was outlined as being typical of blurbs at the beginning of this chapter, is also employed, and this is indicated by the frequent use of adjectives such as ‘trespreulx’ (brave), ‘vaillant’ (valiant) and ‘noble’ (noble). Given that the title page acts as the foremost gateway for a new reader into the text,40 this presentation is particularly meaningful in giving an insight into how this publisher wishes to brand the text. Chrétien himself, curiously, has disappeared from view. Instead the publisher here seems to place more commercial value on the names of Perceval, Gauvain and Arthur, as well as on the theme of chivalry through the use of terms such as ‘belliqueulx’ (warlike) and ‘chevallier’ (knight).41

Plate 2: Advertisement included on the title page of the 1530 edition of the Conte du Graal and its Continuations; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74. 40

41

Though it is important to note that in some extant versions of this edition, both the Elucidation and the Bliocadran are also included in the volume within the prelims (that is, prior to the foliated pages, which include the prologue, and which have signatures beginning ‘AA’). Thompson suggests this to mean that this inclusion was ‘an afterthought’, L’Elucidation, p. 13. An example of one such version is Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, RESERVE 4-BL-4249. It is, of course, possible that the publishers did not know that Chrétien was the author – I consider this in more detail in Chapter 3.

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This change of focus is also reflected in a new prologue that is included into the 1530 edition on f. 1r–v, and which rewrites Chrétien’s original significantly. It is worth noting here that such prologues in early printed texts have previously been described as notices that exist precisely to recommend a medieval text to a new audience – Jean Vial calls them, for example, formules publicitaires (publicity formulations).42 The prologue of the 1530 edition is visually offset from the rest of the text by its occupation of a whole folio on its own (even though it does not fill that folio) and by a rubric at the end reading ‘Cy finist le prologue’ (Here ends the prologue). Again, Chrétien’s name is absent from this prologue, just as it was on the title page, and there is a sense of prioritising the Conte’s ‘completer’, Manessier.43 I discuss this at length in Chapter 3, showing how this reveals much about the changing reception of the Grail legend in terms of the importance of authorship. This prologue also reveals, though, a more fixed and particularly persistent focus on the chivalric aspects – specifically the deeds of Arthur’s knights –, which may help us to understand more about the publishers’ perceptions of changing tastes amongst audiences of Grail literature since the time of Chrétien’s original composition. Following a much-reduced section in praise of the work’s patron (by comparison with Chrétien’s original), in which Philip is merely referred to rather more briefly as ‘trehault et magnanime […] fort charitable et connoiteux’ (most worthy and magnanimous […] most charitable and knowledgeable) (f. 1r), we are informed that the count wished to read and hear specifically of ‘les faictz et proesses des preux et hardis cheualiers/ aymant leurs vertus et honorables enseigneme[nt]s’ (the deeds and prowess of the brave and hardy knights, being enamoured by their virtues and honourable education) (f. 1r). In commissioning this tale, Philip particularly sought to ensure remembrance ‘des merueilleuses entreprises et nobles faictz des cheualliers de la table Ronde’ (of the marvellous undertakings and noble deeds of the knights of the Round Table) (f. 1r) and to ‘faire uenir a lumiere la vie et faictz cheualiereux du tres preux, craint et hardi cheuallier Perceval le gallois’ (bring to light the life and deeds of the very brave, feared and bold knight Perceval le Gallois) (f. 1r–v). Of course, these motivations for Philip’s commissioning of the original tale are inventions (or at least additions – we do not know that these were not his reasons, rather Chrétien’s version simply does not say as much). Particularly revealing here is the use (and reuse) of adjectives and terms that refer specifically to knightly

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Jean Vial, ‘Formules publicitaires dans les premiers livres français’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1958), 149–54. This is also the case in the versions of the 1530 edition that include the Elucidation and Bliocadran: for instance, the moment at the end of the Elucidation where MS Mons 331/206 mentions Chrétien is removed, though this is perhaps unsurprising given the highly truncated version of both texts.

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activity.44 The prologue continues to repeat such phraseology, in some cases almost verbatim (perhaps even ad nauseam), making it extremely clear that this publishing syndicate sees their reader as one not only familiar with Grail romance (suggested by the fact that Grail is referred to specifically as the ‘Sainct Graal’), but also one specifically and informedly interested in its chivalric associations.45 Additionally, the emphasis on Manessier’s completion of the text indicates to the reader that the text contained within this edition is indeed, and intentionally so, the complete version. This suggests that early-modern readers may have been somewhat more eager for completion, or satisfaction, than were their medieval counterparts.46 That the reader is at the heart of the 1530 edition’s blurb is made clear in the closing lines, where it is noted that the prosification and modernisation of the language of the text is explicitly ‘pour satisfaire aux desirs, plaisirs et uolontez des Pri[n]ces, seigneurs et aultres suyuans la maternelle langue de France’ (to satisfy the desires, pleasures and wishes of the princes, lords and others speaking the maternal language of France) (f. 1v). Furthermore, the final line of the blurb is aimed directly at the reader, asking of ‘tous auditeurs et lecteurs qui ce traictie liront et orront de ce que ay presumptueusement et tropt audacieuseme[n]t mis’ (all listeners and readers who read and listen to this version [treatment] which is presumptuously and too audaciously constructed) that they ‘retenir et reseruer le grain et mectre au ve[n]t la paille’ (retain and reserve the grain and spread the straw to the wind). In other words, the audience is being pleaded with to focus on the core, the heart, of this edition when judging it. The substance of this core, or at least the core that the publishers wish to foreground, must surely be that which is persistently reiterated: the text’s coverage of chivalric matters. Frappier has additionally argued that this phrase is suggestive of the prosifier hoping that, by adding this caveat, ‘Chrétien ne l’aurait pas désavoué’ (Chrétien would not have rejected it [this version]).47 Maria Colombo Timelli has argued that there is a mix of voices contained in this prologue – Chrétien’s and what she refers to as the ‘translator’s’ (by which

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We know that literary idea(l)s of chivalry and knighthood remained an important and powerful constituent of social identities in both France and England throughout the later medieval and early modern period. Their appeal and influence soon extended beyond the courtly nobility to the inhabitants of thriving urban centres (Paris, London, etc.) and the emerging bourgeoisie. As William Hunt has shown in his assessment of knightly ideals during the English Civil War, ‘[c]hivalric myth, as it was appropriated and transformed by the bourgeois audience, had deeply coloured the self-imagination of the early modern Londoner’; William Hunt, ‘Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War’, in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 204–37 (p. 213). On France, see the recent study by Craig Taylor, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Also cf. Ryan Anders Pederson, ‘Noble Violence and the Survival of Chivalry in France, 1560–1660’ (unpublished dissertation, Binghampton University, 2007). Taylor comes to a similar conclusion in her analysis of the prosified prologue, stating that the prosifier sees ‘Perceval as a model of chivalric behaviour’, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 145. See my The Continuations, Chapter Two, for a lengthy discussion of what might constitute a ‘satisfactory end’ in these texts, as well as more generally. Jean Frappier, Autour du Graal (Paris: Droz, 1977), p. 214.

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she means the prosifier’s).48 Undoubtedly, there are deliberate reflections of Chrétien’s original prologue, for example, in the already quoted closing phrase of reseruer le grain et mectre au vent la paille. This clearly reflects, albeit confusedly, the opening lines of the Conte where Chrétien evokes the parable of the sower.49 There is also some expression of Manessier’s closing colophon to be found in the pointed references to the satisfaction of completeness. I would argue, however, that these very specific choices are indicative of there being one voice that stands out above all others – the publisher’s.50 In light of this, the prologue acts precisely and explicitly as a blurb for this edition, showing the publisher marketing and orienting the text towards what she or he perceives as the contemporary audience’s sense of taste. A woodcut on f. 1r, positioned immediately above the commencement of the prologue (see Plate 3), provides support for this. The woodcut shows a somewhat tired and frustrated-looking individual sitting at his writing desk. The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica website captions this image as depicting ‘l’auteur, Chrétien de Troyes, dans son studiolo de travail’ (the author, Chrétien de Troyes, in his little workshop).51 Given the active reduction of Chrétien’s presence in the 1530 edition (suggested above and discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3), I would argue that this is unlikely. Far more likely is that this is meant to depict a member of the publishing team (probably the prosifier whose voice Colombo Timelli hears in the prologue). He seems to be dressed as a cleric, which could well be accurate, but it seems certain that this woodcut was re-used from another project, and therefore cannot be relied upon as a portrait of a specific individual, rather more as an indicative representation of one.52 Either way, this image serves to support my suggestion that it is the publisher’s work that is being accentuated in this prologue, and this prologue therefore functions very effectively as a blurb. As we saw, the prelims and end-matter only serve to underline this further (on the title page, in the privilège and in the closing passage) in their explicit promotion of the sale of the book, which includes detailed information regarding from where, and from whom, it can be purchased.

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Maria Colombo Timelli, ‘Un recueil arthurien imprimé: La Tresplaisante et récréative hystoire de Perceval le Galloys (1530)’, in Actes du 22e Congrès de la Société Internationale arthurienne, Rennes, 2008, ed. by Denis Hüe, Anne Delamaire and Christine Ferlampin-Acher, available at , pp. 10–11. See Taylor’s discussion of this in her Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 145. In the version including the Elucidation and the Bliocadran, the prologue is headed with a rubric reading ‘Cy commence le Prologue de lacteur’ (Here begins the author’s prologue) (f. 1r), as if to differentiate it from the extra prologues now included. This rubric is also put forward as part of the evidence for Timelli hearing Chrétien’s voice in the 1530 edition’s prelims, ‘Un recueil’, pp. 10–11. Available at . Thompson clearly suspects the same, due to his observation that this in fact depicts ‘a monk in a library’, which does not obviously relate to any of the protagonists of the prologue, L’Elucidation, p. 12. I have undertaken some research into this woodcut and have found very close copies of it in other books, and not only in France, but also in England. Wynkyn de Worde, for example, uses two different versions of the same image (distinguishable only in very minor detail) in his 1518 edition of Joannes Sulpitius’ Stans puer ad mensam and John Stanbridge’s Longe accidence published in c. 1520. There are also many other examples; see Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 267.

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Plate 3: Woodcut accompanying the prologue of the 1530 edition of the Conte du Graal and its Continuations; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 74, f. 1r.

This clear shift in the interests of readers in respect of the Conte and its Continuations, or at least the perception thereof, reveals much about the development of reception of the Grail legend more generally. By 1530, audiences appear to have become more likely to respond to recognisable characters and themes, probably owing partly to the sheer passing of time, but also, and more importantly, to the various Grail texts that had appeared in the interim, texts that had rewritten the essence of Chrétien’s original. Such examples of réécriture, I suggest, popularised thematic- and character-driven aspects of Arthurian literature not only over and above Chrétien’s authorship, but seemingly also over and above his influence. The blurb of the 1530 printed edition makes, for example, explicit mention of the fact that this tale had never before been available in print; this is particularly useful in terms of understanding the early-modern audience’s appetite for the Conte. Other Grail texts such as the Vulgate Cycle and Malory’s Morte had been transferred into print in the late fifteenth century, but the same could not be said for Chrétien’s text. In addition, the 1530 volume did not trigger a trend in printing the tale, even after the six-year embargo enforced by the

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privilège had lapsed;53 the Conte would not be printed again, either in France or elsewhere, until Charles Potvin published his edition in the nineteenth century.54 At this point, therefore, I will turn to the Grail texts composed after Chrétien’s Conte, focusing particularly on the thirteenth-century prose romances. Here, I will attempt to trace the emergence of the apparent shift in taste we witnessed in the Conte’s journey from manuscript to print by exploring the various textual and material manifestations of three texts: the Estoire, the Perlesvaus and the Queste.

From the Spiritual to the Chivalric: The Thirteenth-century Prose Romances We have a reasonable, though not exhaustive, understanding of the relative chronologies of composition of the texts considered in this study, as outlined in the Introduction. What we can say with fair certainty is that all of these texts began to be composed about ten to twenty years after Chrétien wrote the Conte, and then all within a generation of one another – that is between about 1200 and 1230. As a result, these narratives together actually represent a roughly contemporaneous kind of movement in relation to Chrétien’s original, and not just in terms of demonstrating a growing preference for romance composed in prose. It is something of a commonplace to recognise in them a reorientation towards more overtly spiritual matters, in large part thanks to Robert de Boron’s endeavour which provided a model for all that followed.55 In terms of blurbing these texts, Levinovitz’s notion that such material is most likely to be found in prelims and end-matter again finds traction, since it is once more prologues and epilogues/colophons that provide the most fertile ground. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Estoire.

Blurbing the Estoire The Estoire contains a much-studied and lengthy prologue. I discuss the authorship of this prologue in Chapter 3, but here I focus my attention on the Estoire’s opening lines, which read: Chil ki se tient & iuge au plus petit & au plus peceor du monde. Mande salus au commenchement de ceste estoire. A tos cheaus ki lor cuers ont & lor creance en la sainte trinite. (p. 3) (He who regards himself as the most humble and sinful man in the world greets, at the opening of this story, all those who place the hearts and their faith in the Holy Trinity.)

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Taylor concurs that the public was ‘unresponsive’, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 137. Perceval le Gallois ou le Conte du Graal publié d’après les manuscrits originaux, ed. by Charles Potvin, 6 vols (Mons: Desquesne-Masquillier, 1866–71). See, for example, Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 56.

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This immediate evocation of the Trinity, which goes on to be explained in further and considerable detail, blurbs the text very explicitly by intimating to readers that the text they are about to read is imbued with spiritual significance. Given that the Estoire appears to have been based closely on Robert de Boron’s Joseph, this is perhaps unsurprising.56 What is particularly important, though, is the clear call to action where the author specifically invites those who believe in the Trinity to listen and to benefit. This suggests that the author wished to maximize his potential audience; who, after all, did not believe in the Holy Trinity in the twelfth-century Latin West (even if the exact nature of the relationship between the three constituent entities was a matter for theological debate)?57 This blurb’s spiritually oriented exposition of the Estoire is also reflected in its account of the circumstances of the text’s composition, where we learn that Christ himself was the original author, having delivered a book that he had written to a hermit, who then translated it for wider dissemination.58 Whilst the claim of a pre-existing version of the text is, as we have seen, so common as to be rather hackneyed, nominating Christ as the original author is a particularly potent strategy for authenticating a text purporting to be deeply entrenched in spirituality. The success of this tactic has, though, often been debated by scholars: Carol Chase calls the attribution ‘somewhat scandalous’,59 while E. Jane Burns suggests that any authority intended by this ascription is in effect wiped out by the multiplication of other authorities around it.60 In spite of this, many manuscript publishers from across the full extent of the text’s transmission (though particularly those of the thirteenth and fourteen centuries) reflect the blurb’s spiritual scaffold for the text in the associated mise en page. It has often been noted, for example, that the most frequently used subject for illumination at the opening of the Estoire is that of Christ delivering his book to the hermit.61 Some examples include MSS fr. 96, fr. 747, fr. 19162, as well as MSS Rennes 255, Le Mans 354, Add. 10292 and Royal 14 E III (see cover image; also reproduced in Plate 21). Other manuscripts, meanwhile, such as MS fr. 95 (see Plate 4), specifically depict the Trinity, and some manuscripts even combine both sets of imagery, such as MSS fr. 749 and Brussels 9246 (see Plate 5).

56 57 58

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Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 59. See the Filioque debate, which is explained thoroughly in A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: The History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I discuss the multiplication of authorities in this prologue in Chapter 3. Rupert T. Pickens explores the nature of the hermit’s translating ‘the language of heaven’ into ‘human language’ in his ‘Autobiography and History in the Vulgate Estoire and in the Prose Merlin’, in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, ed. by William W. Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 98–116 (pp. 99–103). Carol J. Chase, ‘Christ, the Hermit and the Book: Text and Figuration in the Prologue to the Estoire del Saint Graal’, in ‘De Sens Rassis’: Essays in Honor of Rupert T. Pickens, ed. by Keith Busby, Bernard Guidot and Logan E. Whalen (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 125–48 (p. 127). E. Jane Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press for Miami University, 1985), p. 13. See, for example, Chase, ‘Christ, the Hermit and the Book’, pp. 125–26; Alison Stones, ‘Seeing the Grail: Prolegomena to a Study of Grail Imagery in Arthurian Manuscripts’, in The Grail: A Casebook, pp. 303–66 (pp. 303–06).

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Plate 4: The depiction of the Trinity at the beginning of the Estoire del saint Graal; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 95, f. 1r.

Plate 5: The Trinity depicted in the same scene as the hermit receiving the book at the beginning of the Estoire del saint Graal; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS fr. 9246, f. 2r.

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Consequently, we can see several publishers of the Estoire using visual representations to support the blurb’s exposition of the text as one directly aimed at a spiritually interested audience. MS fr. 113 takes this strategy a step further, by augmenting the opening of the prologue as follows: Cil qui la haltesse et la seigneurie de si haulte histoire comme est celle du graal met en escript par le commandement du grant maistre mande tout premierement salut atous ceulz et atoutes cell qui ont leur creance en la saincte glorieuse trinite… (f. 1r) (He who puts into writing, at the command of the grand master (= Christ), the exaltedness and nobility of such a high history as that of the Graal, greets first and foremost all those men and women who have their faith in the glorious Holy Trinity.)

Taking all of this evidence together, then, there is increasing support of the hypothesis that spirituality did indeed come to be more and more frequently associated with the branding of Grail texts in the aftermath of Chrétien’s Conte, and reflections of this can be seen in the other thirteenth-century prose romances, too. The Perlesvaus, for example, contains a lengthy prologue that certainly appears to set out the stall of the romance as one focussing on spiritual matters.62

Blurbing the Perlesvaus Notwithstanding the proliferation of ‘authorities’ associated with the Perlesvaus’ prologue (as I discuss in Chapter 3), particularly notable is the announcement made in the very first line: ‘Li estoires du saintisme vessel que on apele Graal, o quel li precieus sans au Sauveeur fu receüz au jor qu’il fu crucefiez’ (The story of the holy vessel known as the Grail, in which the precious blood of the Saviour was received on the day when he was crucified) (lines 1–2). The author thus wastes no time in revealing to his audience that there will be no mystery here – the Grail of this story, we are told, is the cup of the Crucifixion. He accordingly sets a very clear backdrop against which he will recount the tale. In MS Brussels 11145, a prefix is even added to this opening line, thus turning it into a call to action: ‘Oiez lestoire…’ (Come hear the story…) (f. 1a). This opening is thus very reminiscent of that which we saw in the Estoire, as I will now explore in greater detail. Just as in the Estoire, this opening gambit is followed by an exposition of how this text came into being and, as with the other Grail texts we have explored, there is the implication of an anterior version that serves as evidence of authenticity. More important for this discussion, though, is the fact that the order for its earthly 62

Ben Ramm refers to it as a ‘quasi-prologue’ apparently owing to its rather narrative or literary tone, which does not explicitly position the actual author as its writer as would ordinarily be expected, rather foregrounding the presumably fictitious narrator, ‘Locating Narrative Authority in Perlesvaus: Le Haut Livre du Graal’, Arthurian Literature, 22 (2005), 1–19 (p. 11).

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mediator, one Josephes, to write this text down was delivered ‘par la mencion de la voiz d’un angle’ (at the behest of an angel) (lines 3–4). The narrator then tells us the name of the story – ‘Li hauz livres du Graal’ (The High Book of the Grail) –, which itself suggests an exalted status for the narrative, and provides yet further echoes of the Estoire’s blurb by invoking the Trinity and by making a direct invitation to all readers to listen and profit: Li hauz livres du Graal conmance o non du Pere et du Fill et du Saint Esperit […] et tuit cil qui l’oent le dovent entendre, e oblier totes les vilenies qu’il ont an leur cuers, car il iert mout porfitables a toz cex qui de cuer l’orront. (lines 8–11) (The High Book of the Grail commences in the name of father, the son and the holy spirit […] and all those that hear it should understand it and forget the sins they have in their hearts. For it will be of profit to those who listen from the heart.)

In a move away from the Estoire’s format of exposition, the prologue then ends with a lengthy genealogical exposition in respect of the lineage of Perlesvaus (lines 12–57), with the author directing his readers, as Kelly insightfully remarks, towards two associated focal points – the Grail family and the Arthurian court.63 Crucially, it transpires that Perlesvaus is descended from Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, two witnesses of the passion. That the Perlesvaus’ author spends such a considerable amount of time on this aspect of hereditary legitimacy suggests that he is prioritising the issue of lignage alongside that of spirituality as being at the heart of his exposition of the text. In appending the lofty name of The High Book of the Grail, he expressly epitomises this sense of moral and pious superiority. There is thus evidence both of branding and of reader enticement in this prologue. As with the Estoire, the narrative, the prologue suggests, will situate the story of the Grail in a deliberately spiritual landscape, and an audience will ultimately benefit, again spiritually, from taking the time to listen. In the manuscripts, this passage is included into all extant witnesses that are not fragmentary at the appropriate moment.64 Further, in all of these cases the prologue is offset by decoration (typically in the form of coloured initials), which – as we saw with the Conte – provides evidence of publishers treating these kinds of opening passages discretely from the rest of the text. This prologue’s robustly ‘proselytising fervor’, to borrow Lori Walters’ terminology,65 could have been alienating for some readers less likely to be stirred by the sermonising tone. In two manuscripts, and possibly in more originally, there is some suggestion that the publishers of Perlesvaus editions also shared this concern. A passage forming part of the Perlesvaus’ epilogue (possibly

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Kelly, Li Haut Livre du Graal, p. 52. Such as MS fr. 1428, which lacks both its opening and closing folia. Lori J. Walters, ‘The King’s Example: Arthur, Gauvain and Lancelot in Rigomer and Chantilly, Musée Condé 472 (anc. 626)’, in ‘De Sens Rassis’, pp. 699–718 (p. 701).

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added later)66 seems to attempt to remedy this: as a possible means of drawing in some more marginal readers, the publishers of MSS Hatton 82 and Brussels 11145 exploit a topical attraction that is hinted at in the main body text.67 The text in question reads: Li latins de cui cist estoires fu treitiez en romanz [fu pris] an l’Isle d’Avalon, en une sainte meson de religion qui siét au chief des Mares Aventurex, la ou li roi Artus et la roïne gisent, par les tesmoinage de preudommes religieus qui la dedenz sont, qui tote l’estoire en ont, vraie des le commancement desqu’en la fin. (lines 10188–92) (The Latin book from which this story is translated into romance is in the Isle of Avalon, in a holy house of religion situated at the head of the adventurous moors where King Arthur and the queen are buried, according to the testimony of the religious and worthy men who are there and who know the entire story, which is true from beginning to end.)

This is, of course, a clear reference to the famed ‘discovery’ of the graves of Arthur and Guinevere by the monks at Glastonbury in 1191. Here, a story that seems to have captured the popular imagination and regenerated interest in the Arthurian legends in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is linked, probably strategically, to the Perlesvaus. Attempts have been made over the years to suggest that the Perlesvaus may have originated from Glastonbury, thus offering a rather more persuasive, and less calculated, reason for Glastonbury’s appearance in the text, but none is so far compelling enough as to assure us of more than an indirect connection.68 As a result, this epilogue has all the appearance of a deliberate marketing ploy, blurbing a text otherwise heavily steeped in spiritual matters, such that it could offer a wider appeal through its association with popular legend. I suggested earlier that the blurb of the 1530 edition of the Conte indicated a prioritisation of Arthurian characters and themes as a method of branding Grail texts in the sixteenth century. Here, I propose, we have evidence that this trend in fact began rather earlier, and enjoyed a gradual rise.

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Nitze argues that this passage is original to the text since it is in strong accord with a parallel in-text episode: ‘On the Chronology of the Grail Romances I: The Date of the Perlesvaus’, Modern Philology, 17 (1919), 151–66 (p. 152). I would suggest that, whilst this is plausible, there is not enough evidence to be absolutely sure, especially since it would be perfectly possible to construct such a passage on the basis of simply having read the main text. Manuscripts such as MS fr. 120 and its twin MS Ars. 3480 deliberately truncate the text and thus deliberately omit this passage (that is presuming it was indeed original), and I will come to these in a moment. It is also possible that others of the fragmentary manuscripts, such as MS fr. 1428, may originally have included this passage, but it is impossible to be certain, so for now my focus has to be on just these two examples. This, the episode where Lancelot visits the tomb of Guinevere in Avalon, is found at line 7569 ff. See Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 132–33 and William A. Nitze, ‘The Glastonbury Passages in the Perlesvaus’, Studies in Philology, 15 (1918), 7–13 (pp. 7–8).

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Blurbing the Queste The Perlesvaus also appears in severely truncated form in the two sister manuscripts of MSS fr. 120 and Ars. 3480, both of which were copied in the fifteenth century.69 Here, an excerpt from the narrative is positioned as a kind of introduction to the Queste, emended textually via the suppression of the details of Perlesvaus’ lineage so as to allow Galaad, the Queste’s hero, rather than Perlesvaus, to go on to achieve the Grail. The Perlesvaus’ placement in this context is rather perplexing since there are considerable difficulties in reconciling these two rather divergent texts (a point which I discuss further in Chapter 4). At least part of the reason for this compilation, I believe, lies precisely in the notion of blurbing that is so central to the analysis of this chapter. The Queste itself launches directly into the action, arriving immediately at the court of Arthur on the eve of the feast of Pentecost without the kind of introductory prologue we have seen elsewhere. It has been suggested that this is because of the text’s strategic design as a ‘chapter’ in a larger cycle, in which the diegetically anterior text(s) arguably provide all the introduction required, and in which prologues at the beginning of each and every text would affect the coherence of the whole.70 This implies that texts typically bound towards the beginning of volumes, of which the Estoire provides a prime example, in effect blurb the later ones. I contend that this provides a possible and plausible explanation for the interpolation of a section of the Perlesvaus into MSS fr. 120 and Ars. 3480. Indeed David F. Hult has suggested that the purpose of this interjection is to provide a ‘prologue’ to the Queste,71 and this excerpt certainly receives the same treatment we have seen of other prologues, whereby it is offset by decoration (illumination and rubrics) from the texts between which it is sandwiched. I would argue additionally, though, that a specific marketing tactic is applied which lends to it the particular quality of a blurb. The heavily spiritual nature of the Perlesvaus reflects some of the tone and content of the Queste, which I discuss below. More importantly, though, the opening of the Perlesvaus, when combined with the immediate entrance into the chivalric world offered at the beginning of the Queste, allows for a more careful balancing of spiritual and chivalric matters. This, in turn, further supports my hypothesis that publishers perceived shifting tastes amongst their audiences towards more chivalric matters at this later stage of transmission. Irène Fabry-Tehranchi argues that this delicate equilibrium is also indicated by the programme of illumination surrounding this moment, where she says ‘[o]n passe d’une perspective religieuse à une perspective chevaleresque’ (we move from a religious perspective to a chivalric one) but that the particular combination is suggestive ‘d’une promotion de la chevalerie de type “célestiel”’ (of a promotion 69

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These manuscripts each belong to multi-volume sets; these are MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80 respectively. The Perlesvaus appears on ff. 520a–522d and ff. 482a–490d respectively. Just Branch I and the opening lines of Branch II are included, and both are in truncated form. See, for example, Alexandre Leupin, Le graal et la littérature: Étude sur la vulgate Arthurienne en prose (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1982), p. 46. David F. Hult, ‘From Perceval to Galahad: A Missing Link?’, in ‘De Sens Rassis’, pp. 265–82 (p. 281).

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of a kind of ‘celestial’ chivalry).72 In effect, then, this excerpt of the Perlesvaus is employed to blurb an edition of the Queste that the publishers wish to position more clearly as satisfying the audience’s cravings for both chivalric and religious content. Even without this interpolation of the Perlesvaus, the Queste is infused with a sense of spirituality through the narrative peppering of Cistercian doctrine.73 Famously, for example, Perceval as Grail knight is replaced by the new and perfect model of Galaad, who is ‘presented as a type of Christ’.74 Unlike the Estoire, though, which covers the story of the Grail prior to its entrance into the world of Arthur, the Queste is actually situated in the Arthurian environment and thus offers an opportunity for popularising its more spiritual content amongst a wider audience. Accordingly, there is emphasis on chivalric characters and themes, which are in effect enhanced, or ‘redeemed’ by the spiritual matters governing their setting.75 In editions of the Queste that do not interpolate an extract from the Perlesvaus, the Queste in effect has no prologue to speak of, and so it is another passage that provides what I contend to be the Queste’s blurb. As we have seen with other texts, sometimes the end of a text offers as much material in this respect as does its beginning, and the Queste provides support for this assertion. Most editions end with a version of the following lines, which state: Et quant bohort ot contees les auentures del [saint] graal teles comme il les auoit veues si furent mises en escrit & gardes en labeie de salesbieres dont maistre gautiers map les traist a faire son liure del saint graal por lamor del roi henri son signor qui fist lestoire translater du latin en franchois.76 Si se taist atant li contes que plus nen dist des auentures del saint graal. (pp. 198–99) (So when Bors told of the adventures of the [holy] grail exactly as he had experienced them, they were written down and kept in the abbey at Salisbury, whence Master Walter Map extracted them in order to make his book of the Holy Grail for love of his lord King Henry, who had the story translated from Latin into French. Here the story ceases to speak of the adventures of the holy grail.)

I speak at some length in Chapter 3 about the positioning of the cleric Walter Map as the Queste’s author (or at least as its translator from Latin to French), and the existing debate as to the truthfulness of this claim. Either way, the clerical status of the individual purported to be responsible for authorship remains

72

73 74 75 76

Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, ‘“Le Livre de messire du Lac”: Présentation matérielle et composition des manuscrits arthuriens de Jacques d’Armagnac (BnF fr. 117–120 et 113–116)’, in 22e Congrès de la Société internationale arthurienne, Rennes 2008, ed. by Denis Hüe, Anne Delamaire and Christine Ferlampin-Acher (2008), pp. 1–38 (p. 26), available at . Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 59. Ibid. This subject is at the core of Pauline Matarasso’s monograph: The Redemption of Chivalry: A Study of the Queste del Saint Graal (Geneva: Droz, 1979). MS Digby 223 states ‘de franch[ois] en latin’ (from French to Latin) (f. 172d), but this is presumably a scribal mistake.

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important. It provides a clear indicator of the framing of this text as one that speaks authoritatively on spiritual matters. This is also underlined by the various other details included. Yet again, for example, we have the claim of an anterior version, one not only in Latin, but also originally written and thereafter kept in an eminent religious institution, Salisbury Abbey. In terms of marketing the text to a reader, this – on the surface – prioritises the spiritual legitimacy of its contents. What creeps into view once again, though, is an even greater sense of the growing interest of audiences in the chivalric motifs of the Arthurian world. For example, the fact that one of the Arthurian characters, Bors, is the apparent source for the original written incarnation of the tale is important in itself, but we also find implicit allusions here to the geography, or the landscape, of the Arthurian world. Much Arthurian romance is, of course, situated in England and Wales, and so the inclusion of Walter Map, an English cleric, alongside the mention of Salisbury and the patronage of King Henry II, is meaningful. By juxtaposing the seriousness afforded by religious connections with hints of chivalric Arthurian surroundings, these references facilitate precisely the promotion de la chevalerie de type ‘célestiel’ proposed by Fabry-Tehranchi (cf. p. 51). Several manuscripts augment this referencing of Arthurian motifs through the addition of copy in the closing lines or rubrication adjoining this moment, both of which serve to foreground particular characters and themes even more overtly. MSS fr. 342 and fr. 12580, by way of two examples, were both composed in the late thirteenth century and both extend the final colophon to remind the reader that when Bors recounts the story to Arthur, he specifically talks of ‘la fin de Galaad et de piercheval’ (the end [deaths] of Galaad and Perceval) (MS fr. 342, f. 149d).77 Meanwhile, the fifteenth-century MS fr. 111 reiterates such motifs from the story at considerable length by providing an extra passage just prior to the end which is introduced by a rubric reading ‘Co[m]ment le roy fist mestre en escript toutes les aua[n]tures de les co[m]paignons’ (How the king had all of the adventures of the companions put into writing) (f. 268a). The extra passage responds precisely to this cue and recapitulates the contents of the story to be written down. It then closes the narrative with a much-shortened version of the standard colophon (though with the mention of Map expunged) and a rubric reading ‘Cy fine la q[ue]ste du sai[n]t greal’ (Here ends the quest of the holy grail) (f. 268b). In another fifteenth-century example, MS fr. 116 opts to add an extended rubric at the end which – as is not unusual – announces the end of the Queste, but which then takes the opportunity – more unusually – to remind us of the details of Galaad’s assumption at Sarras (f. 677d). A last example from the same era (this time on paper) is even more explicit in its prioritisation of chivalric activity: MS Bodmer 105d. This manuscript bookends the text of the Queste with full-page illuminations that are wholly chivalric in outlook: the opening image shows the feast of Pentecost at Arthur’s court (leaf prior to f. 1r), while the closing image (which also serves to open the Mort Artu) depicts a knight on horseback, with sword drawn, in the act of rescuing a maiden from a violent scene (leaf

77

MS fr. 12580 puts it slightly differently and says that Bors tells ‘c[o]ment Galaad et perceual morurent’ (how Galaad and Perceval died) (f. 223b).

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between ff. 82v and 83r). Additionally, the text of the Queste opens with a rubric that is equally preoccupied with such matters: Cy co[m]mence le derrain liure du saint graal qui sapelle la mort du roy artus Et la destrucion de la table ronde. Et commance com[m]e Agravain fist entendant au roy Artus les amours de la royne genevre et de lancelot du lac. (f. 82r) (Here begins the last book of the holy grail, that which is called the Death of King Arthur and the Destruction of the Round Table. It begins where Agravain informs King Arthur of the love between Queen Guinevere and Lancelot du Lac.)

Thus, whilst the two thirteenth-century examples hint comparatively briefly at chivalric motifs, the fifteenth-century ones allow far more space for the exposition of these aspects, again supporting my hypothesis of a gradual shift in taste over the period of transmission towards the chivalric brands of Grail literature.

Multi-functional Publishers and Self-promotion in the Queste Whilst the examples above show evidence of publishers designing their blurbs to make the Queste appeal to a target readership, what is lacking is an overt call to action for the reader to participate, to listen or read further, or to commission or buy. I am not suggesting that this colophon does not constitute promotional copy – clearly it does, and its varying methods of manipulation by publishers support this contention. Rather, I propose, it does not fully exploit the blurb’s potential since it does not employ the explicitly promotional tone, encouraging the audience to engage, that we have seen in other Grail texts such as the Conte, the Estoire and the Perlesvaus. In the absence of such unambiguous promotion, it is possible to witness certain publishers taking the opportunity to advertise their own business across the entire period of transmission. They name themselves and present their wares in additional colophons, rather in the vein of the scribe Guiot in his manuscript of Chrétien’s œuvres and selected romans antiques, MS fr. 794. One example of a publisher keen to put his name to his work in this way comes in the thirteenth-century MS fr. 12581, a collected volume in which the scribe names himself simply as ‘Michael’ at the end of the work of Brunetto Latini: Expletus fuit liber iste dies xix aug[usti] anno d[omi]ni moccolxxxiiiio. Explicit iste liber scriptor sit crimine lib[er]. Uiuat i[n] c[o]elis michael no[m]i[n]e felix. (f. 229d; reproduced in Plate 6) (This book was finished on the 19th day of August in the year of the Lord 1284. Here ends this book, may (its) scribe be free of sin. May he live in the heavens (= may he be remembered) by the blessed name of Michael.)

In a volume characterised by multiple scribes and texts, Michael is one of those responsible for the copying of the Queste. This is confirmed by the replication of the wordplay of the above passage in a colophon written in Michael’s hand

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and closing his work on the last folio of the Queste (the text of which appears diegetically prior to that of Brunetto Latini in the manuscript): Explicit iste liber scriptor sit crimine lib[er]. Qui scripsit ualeat semp[er] et d[omi]no uiuat. Hic liber est scriptur q[ui] sc[ri]psit sit b[e]n[e]dict[us]. Scriptor q[ui] scripsit sine c[ri]mine uiuere possit. (f. 83a) (Here ends this book, may (its) scribe be free of sin. May he who wrote this be always well and live with God. This book is written, he who wrote it be blessed. The scribe who wrote (this) may live forever free of sin.)

By means of this example of his intellectual use and manipulation of language, Michael suggests himself as someone able to do more than just copy text, perhaps trying to intimate to his reader (and perhaps also to potential customers) that he can also operate as a skilled editor and redactor. Michael’s Latin, however, especially in terms of lexical variation and style, is far from perfect, and it is also rather uninventive (seemingly based on proverbs and common phraseology). His attempts to self-promote, therefore, are rather let down by his execution. Regardless of his relative success and skill, however, Michael’s self-presentation suggests that he is (or, at least, considers himself to be) a scribe who has various functions, reminiscent in some respects of Guiot. Michael is, however, less explicit than some in articulating his skills.

Plate 6: The colophon of Michael in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12581, f. 229d.

The fourteenth century, for instance, saw a further multi-tasker lend his name to a Grail manuscript. MS Ars. 5218 presents an example of a publisher who seems to be particularly proud of his unusually extensive contribution to the volume: Chius liures fu parescrips le nuit n[ost]re dame en mi aoust la mil trois cens et li. Si l’escripst pierars dou tielt. Et enlumina et loia. (f. 91c; reproduced in Plate 7) (This writing of this book was completed on the night of Our Lady in the middle of August 1351. Pierars dou Tielt transcribed it. And he illuminated and bound it.)

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This much-studied colophon is indicative of yet another diversely skilled publisher, operating in the style of Guiot, and who is keen to show his wideranging wares to the reader; Walters suggests that he may even have been preparing the book for an abbey library and, in delineating his contributions, he ‘gives testimony to his accomplishment’.78 With Pierart otherwise known only for his work as an illuminator,79 this extraordinary statement certainly appears to serve as a kind of advertisement for the broad variety of work that he was actually able to undertake. Walters even argues that the passage is suggestive of Pierart also acting as the planner of the manuscript, since he is known to have been the head of a workshop.80 Thanks to unusually good documentation of Pierart’s life, we know that he was quite well known and esteemed in Tournai.81 This suggests that he would have been an easily identifiable person to readers (local and perhaps otherwise), and therefore that the mention of his name and skills here could well have led to the potential for additional business, assuming readers liked what they saw.

Plate 7: The colophon of Pierart dou Tielt in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5218, f. 91c.

As a final example of such self-promotion in the fifteenth century, MS fr. 112 includes a closing colophon at the very end of the codex. This reads: ‘Aujourduy iiije Jour de Jullet lan mil ccc[c] soixante dix a este escript ce darnier liure par micheau ga[n]telet prestre demeurant en la ville de tournay’ (Today, the fourth day of July in the year 1470, Micheau Gantelet, priest residing in the town of Tournai, completed the writing of this last book) (f. 233a; reproduced in Plate 8). Micheau Gantelet has been conclusively identified as Micheau Gonnot, one of the scribes known to have worked for the Duke of Nemours, Jacques d’Armanac.82 This colophon, it transpires, is typical of the phraseology used elsewhere by Gonnot to sign off his work, even in spite of the mistakes in both his name and

78

79 80 81 82

Lori J. Walters, ‘Wonders and Illuminations: Pierart dou Tielt and the Queste del Saint Graal’, in Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. by Keith Busby (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 339–72 (p. 62). Ibid., pp. 339–41. Ibid., pp. 339 and 361–62. Ibid., pp. 339–41. Cedric Edward Pickford, L’Évolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du Moyen Âge, d’après le manuscrit 112 du fonds français de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Nizet, 1960), pp. 21–22.

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the town where he resides.83 It is also widely accepted that Gonnot was not only a scribe, but also a compiler of this and other manuscripts;84 Pickford in particular labels him a scribe-remanieur.85 In this, Micheau also finds common ground with Guiot, as well as with both Michael and Pierart: he is a multi-functional book trade professional, who autographs his work so as to leave a reader in no doubt as to, first, who was responsible for it and, second, the extent of his skills. This annonce is surely aimed at encouraging new commissions.86

Plate 8: The colophon of Micheau Gonnot in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 112, f. 233a.

The Queste thus presents a multi-faceted example of blurbing. Throughout its transmission, it is frequently used as a site for self-promotion by the publishers involved in the production of the narrative. More importantly, though, in terms of shifting tastes, the Queste provides evidence in line with that offered by the other Grail texts studied here. Following the prioritisation in Chrétien’s Conte of mysteriousness and suspense, the prose romances increasingly reinterpret these cues in an overtly spiritual manner. Publishers in turn reflect this in their blurbs. As time continues, the blurbs begin to show a sense of yet a further shift in taste, one which attempts to balance the spiritual with the chivalric.

83

84

85

86

The town should actually be Crozant. It has been shown that these mistakes are written over erasures that may have been introduced at a later stage to remove any possible link to the Duke following his rather spectacular fall from grace, ending in his execution. See Bart Besamusca, The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 2. See, for example, Alison Stones, ‘Aspects of Arthur’s Death in Medieval Illumination’, in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. by Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 52–86 (p. 69). Cedric Edward Pickford, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Copyist and his Patron’, in Medieval Miscellany Presented to Eugène Vinaver by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, ed. by Frederick Whitehead, Armel Hugh Diverres and Frank Edmund Sutcliffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), pp. 252–62 (p. 255). From the second half of the thirteenth century onwards, Busby suggests that such scribal signatures were increasingly aimed at the marchands-libraires that I spoke about in Chapter 1, rather than at consumers, since they came to be the middlemen in providing employment for scribes; Codex and Context, I, p. 478. In the case of Michael, this is perfectly possible as he is clearly part of a team of scribes. For Gonnot and Pierart, however, this seems less likely since there is evidence that both were responsible for manuscript planning, possibly themselves taking on the guise of a libraire. Whoever were the targets, though, there is clearly a promotional and commercial aspect to these signatures.

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It was the 1530 printed edition of the Conte, of course, that provided the basis for my original hypothesis of a gradual move towards interest in the chivalric in French Grail romance more generally. I will therefore now conclude this chapter by considering the early printed editions that include the Estoire, the Perlesvaus and the Queste, in order to see whether these can offer further corroboration of this trend.

Chivalry and the Printed Book The 1488 edition of the Vulgate Cycle opens the Queste with a woodcut depicting the feast of Pentecost, the scene which commences the narrative action (see Plate 9). Included into this image are many motifs which make specific hints towards chivalric, rather than spiritual content: there is, for example, a castle, some knights in armour on horseback and servants bringing food to the Round Table. This exposition is also reflected in the firmly secular, and especially courtly, woodcuts chosen – indeed, commissioned, as Taylor has shown87 – to illustrate the other two texts included in this edition, the Lancelot and the Mort Artu.88 Meanwhile, the accompanying table of contents (comprised of tituli which are also included as navigational aids throughout the text) is firmly focused on the activities of the Arthurian knights, rather than notions of spirituality, as are the corresponding tables of contents included for the other texts. The overt positioning of the text as specifically related to pious matters, such as we saw in many manuscripts, is entirely absent in this edition. This is a book clearly preoccupied with Arthurian and knightly matters, and this is confirmed by what I suggest constitutes one part of the book’s blurb – the introductory passage included at the beginning of the volume. This passage emphatically states the book’s purpose. It is: la perpetuation de memoire des vertueux faiz et gestes de plusieurs nobles et excelle[nt]s cheualiers q[ui] fure[n]t au te[m]ps de tresnoble et puissa[n]t roy art[us] co[m]paigno[n]s de la table ro[n]de. (sig. aai) (the perpetuation of the memory of the virtuous and excellent knights who were companions of the Round Table in the time of the very noble and powerful King Arthur.)

87 88

Taylor notes that all woodcuts excepting one were commissioned especially for this edition: Rewriting Arthurian Romance, pp. 65–66. Volume I opens with an image of Arthur and his knights feasting at the Round Table (sig. aa), while the Lancelot’s first book commences with a representation of Lancelot’s birth and the Lady of the Lake (sig. a). Its second book opens with a depiction of a single combat in an arena (sig. ziii), while the third book, which opens Volume II, shows an image of Lancelot fighting a dragon (sig. Ai). Finally the Mort Artu is introduced by Agravain surprising Lancelot and Guinevere (sig. ddii).

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I say ‘one part of the book’s blurb’ since this same focus on the chivalric deeds of Arthur and his knights is also reiterated several times in the other incipits and colophons included throughout the book, as Chase has explored in detail.89

Plate 9: The feast of Pentecost depicted at the opening of the Queste del saint Graal in the 1488 printed edition of the Vulgate Cycle; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 46–47, sig. P.

The 1516 and 1523 editions of what is often referred to as the Sainct Greaal (which includes the Estoire, the Perlesvaus and a much-shortened version of the Queste) also reveal that publishers were keen to present these texts as associated with chivalric deeds. For example, both editions receive the heading (or blurb): Lhystoire du sainct greeal Qui est le premier liure de la table ronde lequel traicte de plusieurs matieres recreatiues. Ensemble la queste dudict sainct greaal faicte par Lancelot, Galaad, Boors et Perceval qui est le dernier liure de la table ronde lesq[ue]lz liures ne furent iamais imprimez iusques a present.90

89

90

Carol J. Chase, ‘Les Prologues dans les éditions imprimées du Lancelot du Lac’, in ‘Chançon Legiere a Chanter’: Essays on Old French Literature in Honor of Samuel N. Rosenberg, ed. by Karen Louise Fresco and Wendy Pfeffer (Birmingham: Summa, 2007), pp. 265–84 (pp. 268–70). This appears in the 1516 edition. The 1523 version uses identical phraseology, except for adding the prefix of ‘Cest’ [This is] and the replacement of the last phrase with ‘nouvellement imprime a Paris’ (newly printed in Paris).

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(The history of the Holy Grail, which is the first book of the Round Table, and which treats several entertaining matters, alongside the whole of the quest of the aforementioned Holy Grail undertaken by Lancelot, Galaad, Bors and Perceval and which is the last book of the Round Table. These books have never been printed before now.)

This is the first notice that a reader will see, and it is explicit in evoking the nature of the contents of this book as related to the activities of the knights of the Round Table. Nowhere are spiritual matters mentioned in this initial presentation of this book. Indeed, all but one of the woodcuts included in this edition are firmly grounded in secular, knightly activity. The one exception occurs where the Estoire commences (sig. Ai): it is a representation of the Trinity. Given the Estoire’s opening lines and its lengthy prologue, however, this could barely be avoided unless significant rewriting of this section occurred. As a generic image that could be used in a multitude of publications, it is also possible that this represented an economical choice, since the woodcut may have already been in the workshop and could be used without the need to commission a new piece.91 Elsewhere in the edition, there is even evidence of textual revision seemingly aimed at rebranding the text in a less spiritual way, thus supporting my interpretation of the edition’s blurb. For example, the Queste is shortened to a decidedly meagre length and its associated textual recasting leads Taylor to conclude that the editor had a ‘lack of concern for, even perhaps dislike of, the moral and theological underpinnings of the romance’.92 Taken together, then, the evidence of the blurbs in these printed editions lends support to my hypothesis: literary tastes gradually moved towards an eventual preference for the chivalric content of Grail narratives, and publishers responded methodically in their presentation of the texts in material form. In conclusion, then, these blurbs whether situated in manuscripts or printed books, or as prefaces, epilogues, colophons, or indeed as another kind of paratext, give us access to contemporary perspectives on the texts from the ghosts in the margins – the publishers. Their blurbs suggest important details as to how they perceived the development of their audience’s tastes. Support for our interpretations of these blurbs, as we have seen above, came through other contributions appended by publishers, such as textual augmentation and recasting, as well as rubrication and illustration. From Chrétien’s overt invitation to observe the brilliance of his writing to the early-modern preoccupation with the prioritisation of chivalric material, blurbs in Grail texts developed steadily in terms of content, subtlety and sophistication. Their presentation and placement can vary from text to text (though they often appear in prelims and end-matter), and they sometimes require us to pull together excerpts in order to gain a complete picture. All retain similar underlying characteristics, though, which take us right back to the definition put forward at the outset of this chapter. Blurbs, whether in manuscript or print, represent promotional copy that is directed towards the contemporary tastes of readers, endorsing both the book itself and, often, the 91

92

Taylor suggests that the selection of woodcuts used in the edition were indeed ‘part of du Pré’s stock-in-trade’ since they are also to be found in the publisher’s Conqueste de Grece, which was published in 1527; Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 107. Ibid., p. 114.

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work of the publisher, too. They overtly reference crowd-pleasing aspects in order to entice, and frequently to invite, the target reader to invest time, money or both into experiencing the text within.

3

Disclosing the Author Much scholarship on medieval authorship focuses specifically on textual evidence – that is, what the text itself says about an author. Scribes and planners are thus often neglected as agents of composition and reception, and seen rather as ‘mechanical means’ through which details of authorship are transmitted, to borrow Matthew Fisher’s terminology.1 This chapter therefore attempts a distinctive analysis, one that aims to show that the medieval publishers (including scribes) of French Grail literature adopted strategic and deliberate tactics in the disclosure of authorship in their editions. These strategies, I argue, reveal important developments in the social and cultural positioning of authorship during the period under consideration in this book. My primary concern, therefore, is to understand whether the author gradually gained a consistent position within the manuscript publication of French Grail texts, in effect establishing a standard for the print industry which followed, or whether such trends in fact remained specific to certain texts, workshops and traditions, or even to particular authors themselves. A secondary benefit of viewing the consumers of these texts through the eyes of the publishers who tailor products on their behalf, or even at their behest, is the generation of important insights into medieval audiences’ perceptions of Grail authors, as well as indications of whether knowledge of authorial identity actually mattered to these audiences. Medieval publishers, after all, were literate, and must therefore also be counted among the primary audiences for the texts they published.2 Modern readers, of course, are accustomed to the notion of authors occupying a place of prominence in printed editions of texts, typically being named on the front cover, title page and spine. Medieval texts transmitted in manuscripts, however, do not usually accord the names of authors the same method of presentation. A notable amount of medieval literature is, for example, anonymous.3 And even when authors are named by having been, for instance,

1 2 3

Matthew Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), p. 6. For more on scribes as an audience for medieval literature, see Fisher, Scribal Authorship, p. 6. Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, The Cloud of Unknowing and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight represent some of the most obvious amongst the many examples. On anonymity and the medieval author, see Roger Dragonetti, Le Mirage des sources, l’art du faux dans le roman médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 1987), pp. 9 and 18.

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interwoven into the main body of text,4 name-checked in a scribal preface or colophon, or referred to by a pseudonym,5 they actually often claim to be handing down something from another auctor, rather than creating it themselves. The purpose of this often appears to be to lend to the text, as Marie-Dominique Chenu points out, a notion of greater authority and authenticity.6 This seems to be due to an interpretation of the author’s role that is considerably different from, and decidedly more problematic than, that in use today. As Sylvia Huot points out in her contribution to The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French: [medieval] French literature was heir to previous traditions which it appropriated and adapted. The author was seen less as a creator or innovator than as one capable of making this material accessible to the French public, thereby participating in an unbroken tradition that bridged ancient and medieval cultures.7

In other words, the medieval author, in an age of réécriture,8 was in effect a textual phenomenon. He was a deliberate creation either omitted entirely or carefully woven into a prologue, epilogue or other narrative section so as to affect a text’s fundamental reception.9 Whilst chiefly interested in modern publishing, Genette in his seminal work on paratexts draws out the key differences between authorial disclosure in medieval and modern practices. In print publishing (as opposed to manuscript production), Genette notes that: The paratextual site of the author’s name […] is […] very circumscribed […;] the canonical and official site of the author’s name is in practice limited to the title page and the cover (with possible reminders on the spine). Other than that, the author’s name appears nowhere else...10

Despite his acknowledgment of the evident differences between the techniques of ‘authorial disclosure’ in manuscript and print, Genette nonetheless points towards a common rationale for the practice, in essence one of branding. He suggests that the author’s name is not ‘a straightforward statement of identity

4

5

6 7 8

9

10

As is the case with, for example, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Roman de la Rose and a great variety of other medieval narratives. Typically, this more often occurs in prologues or epilogues, rather than in medias res, as Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner points out in her Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 35. Paien de Maisières, for example, has been argued as representing a playful pseudonym for Chrétien de Troyes; R. C. Johnston and D. D. R. Owen, Two Old French Gauvain Romances: Le Chevalier à l’épée and La Mule sans frein (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972), p. 7. Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘Auctor, Actor, Autor’, Bulletin du Cange, 3 (1927), 81–86. Sylvia Huot, ‘Authorship in the Middle Ages’, in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. by Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 52–53 (p. 53). On authorship and rewriting being embraced as an approach not only to literary studies, but also to historiography, see Lake, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, esp. pp. 96–97. See, amongst many examples, Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. by R. C. Davis and R. Schleifer, 4th edn (New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 364–76 and A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Genette, Paratexts, p. 38.

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[…] it is, instead, the way to put an identity, or rather a “personality” […] at the service of the book’.11 In light of this, Genette outlines three kinds of authorial disclosure: pseudonymity, anonymity and onymity,12 each of which provides a different kind of ‘service’ in terms of positioning a book for the benefit of an audience. Disclosing the author in any of these three ways, he suggests, creates a particular frame for the text through which the reader views and understands it, while the specific method and manner of that authorial disclosure ultimately impacts ‘the credibility of the testimony, or of its transmission’.13 Identifying authorial disclosure in medieval literature is, however, particularly complicated, since it always raises the question as to whom we should define and/ or identify as an author. Bruckner broaches precisely this point and questions whether, due to the nature of the medieval production of texts, we should also count compilers, translators, Continuators, redactors, editors, scribes and illuminators as ‘authors’, even where an author in the traditional sense is already named.14 She suggests that the presence of these multiple ‘authors’ in manuscripts means we should refer to such texts as collective works.15 Paul Zumthor’s persuasive notion of mouvance similarly suggests that we should never lose sight of the dynamic nature, and the importance, of the collective authorship of these various agents in manuscripts.16 Yet further complication arises in relation to the phenomenon of authors being disclosed outside of their narratives in the works of other authors, something not uncommon in medieval literature. For example, Denis Piramus’ designation of Marie de France as ‘Dame Marie’ seems to suggest for her a noble pedigree, even though Piramus appears to propose this as a reason to doubt the veracity of her work.17 Marie’s own moments of authorial disclosure do not reveal any such details of lineage, but Piramus’ epitext nonetheless shapes the way in which we read her work.18 Such complexities of medieval authorship are important to bear in mind, but for the purposes of this chapter, I focus my attention chiefly on the peritextual 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18

Genette, Paratexts, p. 40. Ibid., pp. 39–42; the definitions of these were provided in the Introduction, but by way of a brief reminder: anonymity refers to the practice of not naming an author; pseudonymity involves using a false name for an author; onymity requires the use of the author’s true name. Ibid., p. 41. These agents are sometimes referred to in English manuscript culture by the umbrella term of ‘bokmaker’, in which we might see an echo of this study’s use of the term ‘publisher’. However, to the best of my knowledge, ‘bokmaker’ is not used in relation to agents responsible for marketing and publicity. See examples under entry 3 of ‘māker(e’ in The Middle English Dictionary, available at: . Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, p. 33; see also Lake’s distinction between auctor and compilator, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, p. 96. Daniel Wakelin, meanwhile, tackles the subject of authorship as a result of scribal correction in his Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 277–301. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972). See Denis Piramus, La Vie de seint Edmund le rei, ed. by Hilding Kjellman (Göteborg: Wettergren and Kerbor, 1935), lines 35–42. For more information see, for example, R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 12–13, as well as Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 207.

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presentation of authorship, and then only in the sense of textual creation (as adumbrated by Huot’s definition above), since I am seeking to draw a careful, yet not inflexible, line between authorship and editorial practices. This does not mean that textual addenda by other ‘authors’ (in the sense suggested by Bruckner) are entirely discarded, of course. Attention is also given, for example, to the more substantial contributions of scribes and planners,19 such as calculated rewriting or reorientation for which credit is specifically attributed to a particular individual (named or unnamed). With this in mind and taking each Grail text in turn, my approach involves, first, giving consideration to the significance of textual references to authorship, that is, how the author is or is not disclosed within the accepted narrative of each text. Second, the material responses of publishers to those moments of disclosure are analysed, using Genette’s concepts of anonymity, pseudonymity and onymity to underpin the investigation; these terms provide helpful limitations that assist us in pinpointing the specificities of our material. Answers are sought to the following questions: how is authorial disclosure presented on the manuscript page? Is it demarcated or highlighted through decoration or illumination? Is it ever deliberately excised or moved from its usual position? Is any additional commentary on authorship ever made by publishers in, for example, prefaces or colophons? The resulting data is then correlated to help trace trends in authorial disclosure in the publication of Grail literature from its earliest incarnations in early-thirteenth-century manuscript culture to the print model adopted in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Chrétien’s Conte and its Prequels As explained earlier, the first known Grail text, the Conte du Graal, is also the last known work by Chrétien de Troyes who, as we heard from Gerbert de Montreuil, died before completing the story.20 By the time of the Conte’s composition, Chrétien had become an established writer, such that the mere mention of Chrétien’s name must have provoked a very particular horizon of expectations in the reader or listener, even amongst contemporaries, based on knowledge of him both as a historical person and as the author of previous works. Scholars have argued that the name ‘Chrétien’ is itself a kind of paratextual accessory – less so as a brand, than as a reflection of the Conte’s arguably spiritually oriented subject matter.21 Whilst it is perfectly possible that the name (assuming it is a deliberate pseudonym) is reflective of the ‘author’s’ broader interests – of course, naming

19 20 21

As described in Chapter 1. This was outlined in the Introduction, and the passage in question is also quoted in full later in this chapter. Dragonetti argues that the name is representative of a Christian in pagan Troy (Mirage des sources, pp. 20–22), whilst others suggest it may be more indicative of a Jewish convert, owing to Troy having been a centre for Jewish learning in the twelfth century; see, for example, Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. and Sister M. Amelia Klenke, A New Interpretation of Chrétien’s Conte del Graal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

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in the Conte is a crucial device –,22 it seems somewhat unlikely that this name would have been elected specifically in relation to the Conte itself. After all, this was Chrétien’s final offering in a series of at least five romances; chronology, therefore, renders this impossible. What is perhaps more revealing is the fact that Chrétien names himself not once, but twice within the opening prologue (the blurb) of the romance: Crestïens semme et fait semence D’un romans que il encomence

(lines 7–8)

(Chrétien now sows and lays the seed of a romance that he begins) Crestïens, qui entent et paine Par le comandement le conte A rimoier le meillor conte Qui soit contez a cort roial

(lines 62–65)

(So Chrétien’s toils will not be in vain in striving, by the count’s command, to put into rhyme the finest tale ever told in a royal court)

Bruckner suggests that this duo of self-naming in quick succession in effect ‘form[s] a frame around the praise of his patron’, as was briefly touched upon in Chapter 2. The exalted patron is, as we know, Philip of Flanders, and Bruckner suggests that these references serve to place Chrétien almost on eye level with him – in other words, she sees their names as mutually defining.23 June Hall McCash additionally argues that Chrétien’s emphasis on sowing and reaping around his act of self-naming actually reveals a shift in focus from his previous works, one which suggests a sense of mutuality with his patron – now, he is an ‘essential creator’ and thus due appropriate remuneration for his work.24 Added to this, after naming himself as ‘Crestïens de Troies’ in his first romance, Erec et Enide,25 Chrétien ceased to add the suffix to his name. In his next romance, Cligés, 22

23 24

25

See, for example, Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, ‘Le Jeu des noms de personnes dans le Conte du Graal’, Neophilologus, 85 (2001), 485–99 and Philippe Ménard, ‘La Révélation du nom pour le héros du Conte du Graal’, in Amour et chevalerie dans les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Danielle Quéruel (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), pp. 47–59. Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, pp. 39 and 75. Philip of Flanders in the role of patron is considered in greater detail in Chapter 5. June Hall McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 15–25 (p. 23); see also Rupert T. Pickens’ interpretation of the symbolism implied by sowing and reaping, in which he suggests that the good soil in which Chrétien sows his seeds is ‘the mind, heart and soul of his patron’, Perceval and Gawain in Dark Mirrors: Reflexion and Reflexivity in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte del Graal (Jefferson: MacFarland, 2014), p. 12. This view of an author as less subservient to his patron than we might expect chimes well with recent scholarship in which it is argued that this might also be true more widely than medieval depictions of patronage have led us to believe; see, for example, Deborah McGrady’s ‘Introduction’ to a special edition (entitled ‘Rethinking the Boundaries of Patronage’) of Digital Philology, 2 (2013), 145–54 (pp. 148–50), as well as the other essays contained in the same issue. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. and trans. by Jean-Marie Fritz, in Romans suivis de Chansons, avec, en appendice, Philomena, ed. by Michel Zink (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1994), line 9.

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a reminder of the other texts that Chrétien has authored is also included,26 but in all three subsequent romances ‘Chrétien’ seems to have become authoritative enough in its own right.27 Taken together, these observations suggest that Chrétien’s reputation must have become established rather rapidly; by the time of the Conte’s composition, therefore, Chrétien was surely confident in his position as a master storyteller, and would have understood the power of the brand that his name offered. The act and method of naming the author here, therefore, are just as Genette suggests: they are ‘at the service of the book’.28 Indeed, Virginie Greene astutely observes that Chrétien’s name functions ‘as authors’ names do in our times, that is, as a marketing tool’.29 In this case, this tool serves to lend the text an air of authority, which I contend is reflected by the relatively stable manuscript tradition. As I have argued elsewhere, the vast majority of publishers of Chrétien’s Conte keep the variation of content, episode and text to a minimum, perhaps heeding Chrétien’s warning that: Qui autre fois le conteroit, Anuis et oiseuse seroit, Que nus contes de ce n’amende.

(lines 1381–83)

(If anyone were to tell [this tale] again, it would be annoying and boring. No tale improves on the retelling.)

This passage is actually included as a tool for avoiding the repetition of the circumstances that led to Perceval receiving the armour of the Chevalier Vermeil, but I suggest it serves a dual purpose here in also warning remanieurs against the recasting of Chrétien’s material. This, I contend, is evidenced by the fact that the manuscripts of the Conte are subject to comparatively little variance, which is true not only in relation to the text’s blurb (as we saw in Chapter 2), but also to the romance as a whole.30

26

27

28 29

30

‘Cil qui fist d’Erec de d’Enide,/ Et les Comandemanz Ovide/ Et l’Art d’Amors an romanz mist/ Et le Mors de l’Espaule fist,/ Del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde,/ Et de la Hupe et de l’Aronde/ Et del Rossignol la Muance,/ Un novel conte recomance…’ (He who composed the story of Erec and Enide, and translated the Commandments of Ovid and the Art of Love, and wrote the Bite of the Shoulder, as well as the tale of King Mark and Iseult the Blonde, and that of the Hoopoe and the Swallow, alongside that of the nightingale, begins a new tale here…) (lines 1–8). Whilst no autograph exists, almost all manuscripts agree on this point, which means it is reasonable to assume that Chrétien was responsible for including his own name in this manner. Genette, Paratexts, p. 40. Virginie Greene, ‘What Happened to Medievalists after the Death of the Author?’, in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, ed. by Virginie Greene (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 205–27 (p. 218). Keith Busby concurs and also identifies an almost verbatim repetition of the passage in the thirteenth-century roman d’aventure, Sone de Nansay: ‘The Scandinavian Periphery of Medieval French Romance’, to be published in the Mélanges Gilles Roussineau, ed. by H. Biu, S. Hériché-Pradeau, P. Nobel, G. Veysseyre et al. (Paris: Presses de l’Université ParisSorbonne, forthcoming). With thanks to Keith Busby for letting me see his pre-publication draft.

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Since the blurb is stable, it follows that the references to Chrétien’s authorship (which are contained within the blurb) should be equally consistent: they receive no additional demarcation, except by occasional later hands. There are, however, two notable exceptions. These are MSS fr. 1450 and Mons 331/206, which also came to our attention in Chapter 2. The former, we will remember, was produced in the mid thirteenth century and has been localised to north-eastern France,31 while the latter has been dated to the late thirteenth century with a likely localisation of Tournai, then in France.32 Chapter 2 hinted that both manuscripts have particularly interesting stories to tell in terms of the particular compilations of texts present in each (for more, see Chapter 4); in the current context, however, these stories are also relevant to gleaning an understanding of the methods of authorial disclosure used by the publishers of these two manuscripts. MS fr. 1450 inserts Chrétien’s œuvres complètes into the middle of Wace’s Brut, as well as placing them alongside other ‘historical’ works such as Le roman de Troie and Le roman d’Enéas. This method of presentation plays a key role in the disclosure of authorship of the Conte, since the codex is in effect designed to situate the deeds of Arthur within a historical (or pseudo-historical) context.33 We saw in Chapter 2 that the prologues of both Erec et Enide and the Conte were deliberately removed in an attempt to smooth the otherwise awkward transition between Wace’s brief evocation of Arthur’s adventures and the interpolation of Chrétien’s stories as concrete examples thereof.34 This, I suggested, was due to the fact that their new pseudo-historical context had the effect of rendering them ‘redundant’, to return to Busby’s phraseology.35 A direct and pertinent result of this is that the references to Chrétien’s name in both texts are also removed. Similar omissions of authorial disclosure can also be witnessed elsewhere in MS fr. 1450. The prologue to Cligés on f. 188v, for example, sees a specific removal of the lines that first announce Chrétien’s name.36 Unfortunately, due to the loss of folia at the crucial moment, the examples of authorial disclosure ordinarily expected to appear both at the end of Yvain and at the beginning of the Charrette are lost. However, the final lines of the Charrette (the final text of the Chrétien-sequence in MS fr. 1450) have been removed on f. 225r; these are the lines that contain Godefroi de Leigni’s revelation that it was he who completed Chrétien’s narrative.37 In their place is a transitionary passage, which leads back

31 32 33

34 35 36

37

Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’, p. 31. Ibid., p. 54. Certain parallels might be drawn here with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. Lori J. Walters provides a seminal discussion of this interpolation in her ‘Le rôle du scribe’. Erec et Enide starts on f. 140r, while the Conte immediately follows on f. 184v. Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 409. The lines ‘Don cest romanz fist Crestiiens,/ Li livres est mout anciiens’ (From that material, Chrétien has made this romance. This book is very old) (lines 24–25) are deliberately excised on f. 188v. The missing lines correspond to: ‘Ci faut li romanz an travers./ Godefroiz de Leigni, li clers,/ A parfinee la charrette,/ Mes nus hom blasme ne l’an mete/ Se sor Chrestïen a ovré,/ Car ç’a il fet par le boen gré/ Crestïen qui le comança.’ (The romance ends here unresolved. Godefroi de Leigni, the clerk, has finished the story of the cart, but let no man blame him for having added to Chrétien’s work because it was done with the consent of Chrétien, the one who started it) (lines 7001–07).

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into the second half of the Brut.38 These apparently deliberate and systematic omissions sit curiously, though, alongside the fact that, at the second point in the Cligés prologue where Chrétien is named,39 this line is not only retained, but also highlighted with a two-line, blue majuscule ‘C’. The final line of the same text also retains its usual mention of Chrétien.40 Furthermore, the corpus of Chrétien’s texts as a whole is preceded by transitionary phrase linking the first part of the Brut to the texts, reading: ‘mais ce q[ue] crestiens tesmogne/ Pores ci oir sains alogne’ (but you can hear that which Chrétien testifies here without delay) (f. 139f). Given that all other instances of authorial disclosure are expunged, it seems plausible that the three remaining references to Chrétien in the text of Cligés could simply be scribal oversights. It is difficult to be sure of this, however, thanks to the deliberate announcement of Chrétien’s name at the juncture between the Brut and the opening of his works, which is unique to this manuscript. Even with this discrepancy, it is clear that the publishers of MS fr. 1450 intended a specific agenda for the presentation of Chrétien’s texts in this manuscript, one which effects at least a partial transfer of their authorship to Wace, into whose text the Arthurian tales are interpolated. This might even be referred to more accurately as a reassignment of their authority to a (pseudo-)historical source – Wace, in the first instance, but by extension possibly also Geoffrey of Monmouth, since the Brut is based on his Historia regum Britanniae.41 Overall, this very particular treatment of Chrétien’s onymity gives us an initial indication that authorial disclosure must have carried at least some significance for a medieval audience as, otherwise, all of the references to Chrétien might just as simply have been left in place. A different approach is adopted by MS Mons 331/206 which, we will remember, contains the Conte with all of its Continuations (except that of Gerbert de Montreuil), as well as the Elucidation and the Bliocadran. As we know, these two prequels combine to provide a puzzling biography for Perceval, alongside other background information, though the details frequently contradict Chrétien’s text. The significance of the inclusion of these prequels in MS Mons 331/206, as well as in other manuscripts and the early print edition of 1530, was touched on in Chapter 2 and will be explored further in Chapter 4. For the time being, however, their particular importance lies in their supplanting of Chrétien’s blurb. This is because the Conte’s traditional mention of Chrétien’s authorship is removed by virtue of the excised prologue. Instead, the opening lines of the Elucidation tell us that ‘Maistre Blihis’ (Master Blihis) (f. 1r) is the source for this text. This is a name

38

39 40

41

This reads: ‘Segnor se jo avant disoie/ Ce ne seroit pas bel a dire/ Por ce retour a ma matire’ (Lords, if I told more, it would not be worthwhile telling, which is why I now return to my subject) (f. 225a). ‘Crestiens c[om]m[en]ce son c[on]te…’ (Chrétien commences his tale…) (f. 188v; equivalent to line 45). Typically this reads ‘Ci fenist l’uevre Crestiiens’ (Here ends the work of Chrétien) (line 6784), though in MS fr. 1450 it reads ‘Or c[om]m[en]ce oeure crestien’ (Here begins the work of Chrétien), in effect referring forward to Yvain which commences immediately afterwards, f. 207v. See Françoise H. M. Le Saux, A Companion to Wace (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 89–91.

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that finds echoes, though never exact replication, in the names of other characters in related texts.42 Whether a deliberate connection is intended, though, is unclear since no further explanation of Master Blihis’ person is provided. Following a curious and frequently illogical development of various threads from both the Conte and the Continuations, the closing lines of the Elucidation refer us back to the authority of Chrétien himself (the passage was quoted in full in Chapter 2; see p. 34). The obvious lexical echoes of the Conte’s traditional moment of authorial disclosure in this passage show that the author of the Elucidation, supposedly Master Blihis, had certainly read Chrétien’s text and wished to present Chrétien in similarly laudatory terms. It is curious, then, that it is not the Conte, but the Bliocadran that follows from this point (separated by a historiated initial and a rubric announcing the commencement of ‘li co[n]tes del saint greail’). The Bliocadran, though, claims no particular authority for the content of its text, and the Conte proper (minus its prologue) eventually follows the Bliocadran on f. 15v, offset by a rubric and a historiated initial. These, however, contain no indication of a change of authorship between the Bliocadran and the Conte. As a result, the reference to Chrétien’s authority in the final lines of the Elucidation, coupled with the manner of interpolation of the Bliocadran and the Conte, have the effect of presenting not only the Conte, but also the Bliocadran, as the work of Chrétien. An illusion is therefore created that Chrétien’s authorship extends much further than is actually the case, and this may well be a deliberate move by the publishers of MS Mons 331/206. This observation will be relevant in my discussion of the Continuations – and of the First Continuation in particular – to which I now turn.

Chrétien and the Continuators: Anonymity vs Onymity It is noteworthy that the usual requirement for consistency in copying the Conte does not seem to have filtered through to the four direct respondents who composed the Continuations, even in manuscripts where the texts appear together.43 Indeed, despite writing in the shadow of the well-known storyteller, the Continuations introduce a series of new authors’ names, as well as tangential narratives and a bewildering selection of redactions to the Roman du Graal. At one stage, there existed a relative paucity of research on these texts, but recent years have witnessed a growth of interest through the appearance of several booklength works. As well as my own examination of the mechanics of continuation in the texts and Bruckner’s Chrétien Continued, to both of which reference has already been made, Thomas Hinton has also produced a substantial analysis

42

43

For example, one Blihos Bliheris is mentioned later in the Elucidation (line 162), and there is a Bleheris named in an episode in the Second Continuation, lines 29351–57. For a discussion of this, see Albert Wilder Thompson’s introduction to his edition of the Elucidation, pp. 79–81, in which Thompson argues that the introduction of Blihis as an authority may be an interpolator’s invention, rather than an authentic reference. Actually, most manuscripts contain the Conte alongside one or more of the Continuations; see my The Continuations, pp. 10–11.

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of what he calls the ‘Conte du Graal Cycle’.44 All of these studies lay some considerable emphasis on the effect of Chrétien’s name, and therefore his influence, on the Continuations. Bruckner argues that Chrétien ‘continues to exert authorship throughout the cycle, as Continuators write freely but remain faithful to his tutelage’,45 while Hinton develops the idea further, stating that there is a ‘process of negotiation between fidelity to the narrative past and assertion of independence’.46 Hinton’s thesis is that the naming of authors in the Continuations actually has a retroactive impact on the disclosure of Chrétien’s name, which sees Chrétien’s position as ‘originator partly a creation of the later texts’.47 There is considerable merit in this claim, though the Conte did circulate for some time on its own before Continuations were added at later dates,48 meaning that, at least in some cases, the Continuations could not have had this retroactive effect until later in the tradition. Even then, it is very likely – especially based on the evidence presented above – that Chrétien’s name would have been far more successful in exerting an influence forwards than any of the Continuators’ names would have been in sending one backwards. Such efforts would probably have served simply to underline, rather than establish, Chrétien’s already considerable authority. What, then, is the effect of authorial disclosure in the Continuations, especially given the looming shadow of Chrétien over these texts? In the case of the First Continuation, which was composed around 1200, only a few years after Chrétien ceased to write, we have a case of what at first glance appears to be anonymity. The author of this text is never overtly revealed, and there is rarely any obvious distinction made between the two texts at the point of juncture in the manuscripts.49 MSS Add. 36614 and fr. 12577 make an exception, however, hinting that one ‘Cil del Lodun’ (‘de Loudun’ in MS fr. 12577) is responsible for the narrative,50 while in MSS Add. 36614 and Advocates’ 19.1.5 reference is made at another narrative moment to ‘le Lodonois’.51 There is some debate as to how

44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51

Thomas Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012). Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, p. 2. Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 22. Ibid., p. 25. Three of the early manuscripts, namely MSS Clermont-Ferrand 248, Florence 2943 and Bern 354, provide evidence of this. London, College of Arms, MS Arundel XIV, an Anglo-Norman manuscript from much later in the tradition that was produced in England, also contains the Conte divorced from its Continuations, indicating the possibility that the text circulated for much longer on its own in England than in France. A full inventory of all Chrétien’s manuscripts, including all of those discussed here, is provided by Terry Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’; I also provide an inventory of the Conte du Graal/Continuations manuscripts in relation to the notion of Continuation; see Tether, The Continuations, Chapter One. The exceptions providing overt references are MSS fr. 794, Bern 354, Add. 36614 and fr. 12576. These are demarcated by an explicit, the terminus of the manuscript, a change of hand and a new quire respectively, and all of these manuscripts come from the first half of the tradition. See my The Continuations, Chapter One, for a full consideration of authorial changeovers (both overt and discreet) as attested by the manuscripts; this is further developed as evidence of publishing practices in my ‘Revisiting the Manuscripts’. Equivalent to line 7043 in vol. III.1 (MS Add. 36614) and listed as a variant for line 17118 in vol. II (MS fr. 12577) of Roach’s edition. Equivalent to Roach’s line 5174, vol. III (MS Add. 36614). Reads ‘Loënois’ in MS Advocates’ 19.1.5 (equivalent to Roach’s line 15084, vol. II).

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much these references tell us about the possible author of the First Continuation, other than that he might have come from Loudun – and that is if they are not later additions.52 François Zufferey has gone so far as to argue that this author should be identified with the Norman poet, Roger de Lisieux,53 but this has been persuasively refuted by Massimiliano Gaggero on the basis that Zufferey has to make corrections to passages in the prologue of Sacristine (known to have been written by Roger) in order to make his interpretation work.54 However much or little these notices reveal about the author’s identity, it is perhaps most important to note that, by including them, the publishers of these manuscripts divulge the fact that Chrétien is no longer at work. There are, however, no such references in the vast majority of manuscripts,55 which means that, overall, there is a deceptive sense that Chrétien is also the author of the First Continuation, just as we saw of the Bliocadran in MS Mons 331/206. But perhaps this is the point? Chrétien’s onymous act of self-naming earlier revealed itself to function as a marketing tool. Perhaps, therefore, exercises in branding are equally implied by the decision not to announce a new author for this ‘next section’, such as the omission of references to the Lodonois (if any were included in the original composition), as well as the presentation of the Bliocadran as Chrétien’s work in MS Mons 331/206. Armed with knowledge of the considerable authority of Chrétien – he who condemned all those who dared to tamper with his tale to being ‘boring and annoying’ –, it is possible that the author of the First Continuation and the publishers of MS Mons 331/206 knew better than to present these works as separately authored enterprises, especially considering their deviance from the apparent narrative trajectory.56 As a result, these new authors may be seen virtually to occupy Chrétien’s identity, rather than be completely anonymous. Genette’s rationales for the usage of anonymity range from provoking curiosity in the readership to encouraging success by placing a new work in the context of a previous work by using a formulation like ‘By the author of [insert text title]’, rather than a specified name.57 The particular use of anonymity in the 52

53 54

55

56

57

See Pierre Gallais, L’Imaginaire d’un romancier français de la fin du XIIe siècle: Description raisonée, comparée et commentée de la Continuation-Gauvain, 6 vols (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), II, pp. 723–38. François Zufferey, ‘L’histoire littéraires des prologues de Renart et de Sacristine’, Romania, 107 (2009), 303–27 (pp. 321–27). Massimiliano Gaggero, ‘L’Épée brisée dans le Conte du Graal et ses Continuations’, in Dai pochi ai molti: Studi in onore di Roberto Antonelli, ed. by Paolo Canettieri and Arianna Punzi, 2 vols (Rome: Viella, 2014), I, pp. 855–83. It is unclear whether the other manuscripts deliberately omit references to the Lodonois, or whether these are a later addition to the narrative. The anteriority of MS Add. 36614 (which also contains the Short Redaction of the First Continuation, which is considered to be the earliest version) might suggest the former, but MSS Advocates’ 19.1.5 and fr. 12577 both contain the later Long Redaction. It is, therefore, impossible to know for sure. I consider the mechanics of the narrative shift in the First Continuation in detail in my The Continuations, Chapter Three. Bruckner also notes that the First Continuation ‘carries a sense of starting in close proximity to Chrétien, and then gradually moving away from him spatially and chronologically’, Chrétien Continued, p. 42. Of the Elucidation, Norris J. Lacy says that there are whole passages which ‘defy logic’; ‘The Elucidation: Introduction’, in The Camelot Project, ed. by Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York and Rochester: The Robbins Library, University of Rochester, 2007), available at: . Genette, Paratexts, pp. 42–46.

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First Continuation and MS Mons 331/206’s Bliocadran does not, therefore, correlate comfortably with these motivations. However, Genette classifies a further form of anonymity as serving as ‘a kind of precautionary measure’ to protect the work from unfair critique. This form does not mean, however, that audiences were always completely unaware of the author’s identity, since ‘quite often the public knew the identity of the author by word of mouth’.58 Genette thus suggests that an author might protect himself from scrutiny, or might feel more comfortable, by withholding his name. This resonates well with our texts. Given the proximity of the First Continuation’s composition to the time of Chrétien’s apparent demise, but also the fact that the Conte had clearly circulated independently for at least some time, it is not impossible that this nuanced form of anonymity was imposed for precisely this reason. The audience might have understood that a new (possibly unknown) author was at work, but it would have been a step too far actually to name him when Chrétien’s influence could still be felt so strongly. Certainly, the manuscripts attest that a knowledge of the change of author existed, even at the earliest stages of transmission, but that very overt references to it were made only rarely,59 such as in Guiot’s MS fr. 794, where the line ‘Explycyt Perceval le uiel’ (Here ends the Old Perceval) is included at the moment of transition.60 Since all of the manuscripts were copied after the composition of the Second Continuation, one might wonder whether this awareness was retroactively imposed by the respective revelations of authorship uttered by the later Continuators (which I discuss below). However, since visual markers of authorial transition are present even in manuscripts not containing the later Continuations, there is evidence to suggest that audiences actually did have a sense of authorial transition between the Conte and the First Continuation well before the later Continuators disclosed their roles in continuing the tale. By the time that the Second Continuation was composed another ten or so years later, this apparent sense of Chrétien’s continued presence seems to have diminished, at least to some degree. Commencing immediately from the last line of the First Continuation (again with no overt reference to a new author at the point of changeover61), the narrator of the Second Continuation finally names the author of the text after around 12,000 lines: Gauchiers de Dondain, qui l’estoire Nos a mis avant en memoire, Dit et conte que Perceval…

(lines 21415–17)62

(Wauchier de Denain, who has pursued the story for us, recounts that Perceval…]) 58 59 60 61

62

Ibid., p. 43. See my The Continuations, Chapter One, for detailed evidence in relation to this point. The importance of Guiot’s manuscript is explored in Chapters 2 and 4. I explain the visual markers present in the manuscripts at this moment in The Continuations, Chapter One, and provide further analysis in ‘Revisiting the Manuscripts’, pp. 33–34 – whilst there are quite often decorative details included, suggesting some implicit awareness of a transition, the manuscripts never make explicit reference to a new author being at work at this juncture. The Second Continuation is contained in volume IV of Roach’s edition.

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There has been some discord over the years as to whether this Gauchiers de Dondain was the same author who translated a series of Vies des Pères for Philip of Flanders – a certain Wauchier de Denain. Scholars have convincingly argued that the author is indeed one and the same person.63 If this is to be believed, then the onymous naming of this author might well have been another kind of authenticating measure for the text. If, as it would appear, enough time had elapsed since Chrétien laid down his pen for it now to be acceptable to name a new author, then who better than someone already known to have worked for the same patron as Chrétien himself – not least the same patron who apparently gave the original story to Chrétien in book form?64 Perhaps indeed Wauchier used the very same book (that is, if it was not an invention altogether) as the basis for the next part of the story? This, of course, is pure conjecture, since Wauchier’s moment of self-naming makes no mention of the famous ‘livre’. As Hinton suggests, though, this is ‘the first official challenge to the authorship of Chrétien’,65 so tempering that by means of a recognised connection may well have been aimed at the service of the book. After all, the Second Continuation has often been cited as the Continuation keenest to reconnect with Chrétien’s original owing to its return to Perceval’s adventures following the First Continuation’s lengthy digression into those of Gauvain.66 All of this said, Bruckner has warned against the simple assumption that a medieval audience would have recognised Wauchier’s name, perhaps evidenced to some degree by a considerable number of orthographical variants across the manuscripts.67 He is, for example, named Gauchiers de Dondain in MS Advocates’ 19.1.5 (f. 204c),68 Gauciers de donai[n]g in MS Add. 36614 (f. 261d), Gauchiers de doudains in MS Montpellier H249 (f. 225b), Gauchier de dordan in MS fr. 1453 (f. 211c), Gautiers de Denet in MSS fr. 12576 (f. 148a) and n. a. fr. 6614 (f. 114b), Gautiers de dons in MS Mons 331/206 (f. 363a) and Gauchiers de doulenz in MS fr. 12577 (f. 208c). Meanwhile, MS fr. 1429 (f. 290c) totally misreads (or re-writes) the name to read ‘Chanter dou douz’.69 In other words, no two of the manuscripts (except for MSS fr. 12576 and n. a. fr. 6614, which are known to have been produced by the same workshop) agree on the presentation of the 63

64 65 66

67 68 69

This was originally heavily contested by Ferdinand Lot in his ‘Les auteurs du Conte du Graal’, Romania, 57 (1931), 117–36 (the original identification had been made by M. Wilmotte, Le Poème du Gral et ses auteurs (Paris: Droz, 1930)). Guy Vial has, however, since re-established Wilmotte’s original stance on the subject in his article, ‘L’auteur de la deuxième continuation du Conte du Graal’, Travaux linguistiques et littéraires, 16 (1978), 519–30, which Corin F. V. Corley supports in his ‘Wauchier de Denain et la Deuxième Continuation de Perceval’, Romania, 105 (1984), 351–59. ‘Dont li quens li bailla le livre’ (line 67). Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 22. Annie Combes states ‘Whereas [the First Continuation] distances itself from the Conte as much as possible, [the Second Continuation], on the contrary, seeks convergence with it’: ‘The Continuations of the Conte du Graal’, trans. by Alexia Gino-Saliba, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 191–201 (p. 195). Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, pp. 46–47. Many thanks to Linda Gowans for helping me to check this reference through her contacts at the National Library of Scotland. Corley makes a persuasive attempt at identifying the author as Wauchier de Denain through an analysis of these variants in his The Second Continuation of the Old French Perceval: A Critical and Lexicographical Study (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1987), Chapter 5.

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Second Continuator’s name. Hinton’s astute observation that ‘the authority is not so much that of the individual named as that of the name’s function’ is helpful in disentangling this conundrum.70 Perhaps unconsciously, Hinton here evokes Genette’s notion that, instead of the effect of onymity being ‘entirely limited to cases of previous fame […] [t]he name of a wholly unknown person may indicate various other features of the author’s identity’.71 These observations combine to suggest that, whilst some readers could indeed have made the Flanders connection with the Second Continuator’s name, and that the effect of this is not to be underestimated, there may also be a further kind of authenticating measure implied. That is, the onymical naming of a writer means that he serves in some way more honestly and openly as a kind of ‘guarantor for the truth’.72 Given that, at the moment of the Second Continuation’s composition, it was probably widely known that Chrétien did not finish his tale, the presence of an onymous author willing to testify to the narrative’s subsequent trajectory might have been welcome to audiences excited to know the ‘truth’ of what happened after the end of Chrétien’s enigmatic narrative. In this sense, as Genette suggests, onymous authorship ‘is a choice like any other… [and is] not always an innocent gesture’.73 This notion that presenting an author’s name, whether recognised or not, was significant to the medieval audience, is largely supported by the publication practices associated with this moment in the manuscripts. MSS Advocates’ 19.1.5, Montpellier H249, Add. 36614, Mons 331/206, fr. 1453 and n. a. fr. 6614 (all of which, except MS Add. 36614, are from the mid to later part of the tradition – the mid thirteenth to mid fourteenth centuries) all introduce their version of ‘Gauchiers’ with a decorated majuscule ‘G’, while MS fr. 12576 places the name directly adjacent to a miniature, drawing a reader’s attention to it. Only MSS fr. 1429 and fr. 12577 are undecorated at this moment, and this is probably to be expected of MS fr. 1429 thanks to its apparent misreading of the Second Continuator’s name. A similar argument could also be made for the remaining two Continuations, both of which also feature onymous authorial disclosure. Both texts were composed in around 1225–30, but by far the more widely circulated of the two is the Continuation of Manessier, and this text provides, at last, an ending for the narrative. Gerbert de Montreuil’s concurrently composed Continuation is thought to have also intended an ending for the tale,74 but the two extant manuscripts (produced by a common workshop and partially by a common scribe) bear witness only to a truncated version.75 This version is interpolated in between the Second Continuation and the Manessier Continuation by means of a ‘loop’, as Bruckner terms it,76 effected by the repetition of the final fourteen lines of the Second Continuation at the end of Gerbert’s apparently curtailed text. Manessier’s 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 77. Genette, Paratexts, p. 40. Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 77. Genette, Paratexts, p. 40. Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, p. 190 and Louise D. Stephens, ‘Gerbert and Manessier: The Case for a Connection’, Arthurian Literature, 14 (1996), 53–68 (pp. 66–67). MSS fr. 12576 and n. a. fr. 6614. Busby explains the relationship in ‘The Scribe of MSS T and V of Chrétien’s Perceval and its Continuations’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, I, pp. 49–65. Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, pp. 192–97.

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Continuation thus emanates from precisely the same line of text as presumably originally intended. Like Wauchier, Gerbert names himself in medias res, but rather unlike his predecessor’s sole mention, he does so five times in quick succession: Autre fois l’avés escouté Dedans le conte par avant, Mais tant puis dire, bien m’en vant, Que onques clerc, ne lai, ne moigne, Si con Gerbers le nous tesmoigne En son conte que il en fist, C’onques nus si bele ne vit.

(lines 6354–60)

(Another time earlier in the story you have heard about it but I can say this much – and of this I boast – that no cleric, lay person, or monk ever saw a more beautiful woman, as Gerbert testifies for us in the story he composed.) Ce nous dist Crestiens de Troies Qui de Percheval comencha, Mais la mors qui l’adevancha Ne li laissa pas traire affin[…] Si con la matere descoevre Gerbers, qui a reprise l’oeuvre, Quant chascuns trovere le laisse, Mais or en a faite sa laisse Gerbers, selonc le vraie estoire; Dieus l’en otroit force et victoire De toute vilenie estaindre Et qu’il puist la fin ataindre De Percheval que il emprent, Si con li livres li aprent Ou la meterre en est escripte; Gerbers, qui nous le traite et dite Puis enencha que Perchevaus Qui tant ot paines et travaus La bone espee rasalda Et que du Graal demanda Et de la Lance qui saignoit Demanda que senefioit; Puis enencha le nous retrait Gerbers, qui de son sens estrait La rime que je vois contant;

(lines 6984–7017)77

(Chrétien de Troyes began [the story of] Perceval but death which overtook him didn’t allow him to finish. […] Gerbert, who has resumed the work, reveals the storymatter when every [other] poet abandons it. But now Gerbert has composed his section according to the true story. May God give him strength 77

This passage is found on f. 147b of MS n. a. fr. 6614 and f. 180b–c of MS fr. 12576.

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and victory to eradicate all villainy and reach the end of Perceval’s story which he undertakes to tell according to the book in which the matter is written. Gerbert, who recounts it for us from the moment when Perceval had so much pain and trouble in resoldering the good sword and asked about the Grail and asked what the Lance that bleeds signified; from that moment Gerbert, who from his understanding extracts the rhyme that I am telling, recounts it to us.)

Of these passages, Bruckner argues that ‘Gerbert serves as a witness; his proper name guarantees with a hyperbole the description found in Chrétien and expects the collusion of the audience (“le nous tesmoigne”)’.78 This suggests precisely, as we saw with Wauchier, that onymity in some way serves as a testimonial for the ‘truth’ of the text. Indeed, Bruckner continues: ‘Gerbert’s name is repeatedly associated with the authority of his text, the truthfulness or authenticity of his version, based on his source.’79 The mise en page of MS fr. 12576 seems to provide support for this, by placing Chrétien and Gerbert’s names almost on eyeline with each other in adjacent columns on either side of a miniature (see Plate 10) – though I acknowledge that this might not be more than coincidence.80

Plate 10: The names of Chrétien (col. 1, line 11) and Gerbert (col. 2, line 1) positioned almost on eyeline with each other; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12576, f. 180r.

78 79 80

Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, p. 63. Ibid., p. 65. This practice of placing authors’ names alongside a miniature, thus drawing attention to them, was foreshadowed by my earlier discussion of MS fr. 12576’s treatment of the Second Continuation’s moment of authorial disclosure. As this is the second instance in the same manuscript, it is not impossible that it could be deliberate.

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In effect, Gerbert’s method of disclosing his identity (and possibly MS fr. 12576’s accompanying presentation) serves to support both the overriding authority of Chrétien and the truth of Gerbert’s appended section. At the same time, though, Gerbert chastises those interim authors who abandoned the poem, and Gerbert is very clear (five times clear, in fact) that this will not be the result of his endeavour. And this is despite the obvious irony that his own ending, if it existed, is now missing. Gerbert’s disclosure of his identity thus appears to be a kind of self-conscious act, as if he is aware of how his authorship risks being perceived by the reader unless he legitimately distinguishes, frames and guarantees his work. The same sense of being ill at ease with the task of continuing an incomplete narrative is, after all, by no means uncommon in medieval literature. For example, Godefroi de Leigni’s insistence on having worked under the instruction of Chrétien in his continuation of the Charrette provides a good case in point (see p. 69), as does the apparent pseudonym adopted by the Continuator of the Prose Tristan. In the case of this latter, the Continuator, apparently anxious as to how his work will be judged against that of the originator Luce del Gat, claims in the epilogue to be Hélie de Boron, the nephew of Robert de Boron. He thus establishes for himself protection from detractors by means of a recognisable literary pedigree, one which is widely held to be invented.81 In Gerbert’s case, the fact that he is the first known person to mention Chrétien’s death makes him also the first person to acknowledge that the unfinishedness of the Conte was not intentional, thus adding further pressure to ensure that his work is not considered as an illegitimate intervention. Hinton suggests, therefore, that Gerbert’s repeated acts of self-naming, when coupled with his informing us of Chrétien’s death, represent: a gesture of faithfulness to the first author. At the same time as claiming literary filiation and hence authority for his Continuation, Gerbert implies that the original author’s death creates the need for a new author to take responsibility (and credit) for the text.82

This ‘need’ is also developed in Manessier’s moment of authorial disclosure, but he adopts a slightly different approach to onymity than does Gerbert. As I have discussed elsewhere, Manessier reveals his name twice in the epilogue, and also refers back to Chrétien, though not by name as Gerbert does, but rather by implicit reference to content and patrons, and through lexical echoes of Chrétien’s prologue:83 81

82 83

Amongst the twenty-three manuscripts of the Prose Tristan, this epilogue appears in twelve of them. In nineteen of them, a prologue attributes the authorship to Luce de Gat, but four manuscripts contain a prologue acknowledging the combined authorship of Luce del Gat and Hélie de Boron – these are all noted in Tristan en prose, ed. by Renée Curtis, 3 vols (vol. I: Munich: Max Hueber; vols II and III: Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1963–85). On this subject, see also Renée Curtis’ two articles: ‘The Problems of the Authorship of the Prose Tristan’, Romania, 79 (1958), 314–28; and ‘Who wrote the Prose Tristan? A new look at an old problem’, Neophilologus, 67 (1983), 35–41, as well as Emmanuèle Baumgartner’s Le ‘Tristan en prose’: Essai d’interprétation d’un roman médiéval (Geneva: Droz, 1975) and ‘Luce del Gat et Hélie de Boron: le chevalier et l’écriture’, Romania, 106 (1985), 326–40. Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 128. Tether, The Continuations, pp. 170–71.

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Si com Manesier le tesmoingne, Qui met a chief ceste besoingne El non Jehanne la contesse, Qu’est de Flandres dame et mestresse, La vaillant dame et la senee Que Damediex a assenee A sens, a valeur, a biauté, A cortoisie, a loiauté, A franchise, a largesce, a pris. […] El non son aiol conmença, Ne puis ne fu des lors en ça Nus hons qui la main i meïst Ne du finner s’antremeïst. Dame, por vos s’en est pené Manessier tant qu’il l’a finé Selonc l’estoire proprement, Qui conmença au soudement De l’espee sanz contredit.

(lines 42644–61, Manessier Continuation)84

(As Manessier testifies, who brought this work to an end in the name of the Countess Jeanne, lady and mistress of Flanders, the worthy and wealthy lady whom God has endowed with such wisdom, valour, goodness, beauty, courtesy, loyalty, nobility, generosity and worth. […] It was begun in the name of her ancestor, but no-one subsequently set his hand to completing it. Lady, it is for you that Manessier has laboured to finish it – and accurately according to the source.)

These intertextual echoes beg the question as to how readily an audience would have recognised them – did they identify the particular phraseology as distinctly ‘Chrétien-inspired’, or were they simply aware of a sense of familiarity? These are questions which have often been raised in relation to other Chrétien epigones that employ similar kinds of borrowings, such as Meraugis de Portlesguez by Raoul de Houdenc, which makes extensive use of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide.85 In the case of Manessier, even if the similarity in phraseology went unnoted, some of the content surely did not. For example, by explicitly referring to a patron who is a direct descendent of Chrétien’s original patron, Manessier presents himself as ‘the Continuator of the original author’s work’.86 This said, Manessier’s relatively unknown name (except perhaps in Flanders),87 rather like those of Wauchier and Gerbert, must have paled into insignificance next to Chrétien’s. This is especially so since Manessier is the only one of the named Continuators for 84 85

86 87

The Manessier Continuation is contained in volume V of Roach’s edition. See, for example, Michelle Szkilnik, ‘Méraugis et la joie de la cité’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 15 (2008), 113–27; Keith Busby, ‘Chrétien de Troyes and Raoul de Houdenc: Romancing the conte’, French Forum, 16 (1991), 133–48; Renate BlomenfeldKosinski, ‘Arthurian Heroes and Convention: Meraugis de Portlesguez and Durmart le Galois’, in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly and Keith Busby, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), II, pp. 79–92. Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle, p. 129. I return to the patronage of this text, and its presentation in the manuscripts, in Chapter 5. Indeed, MS fr. 1429 spells the name ‘Manetiers’, f. 272a.

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whom no evidence exists of his having written other texts. There is, therefore, the suggestion that the combination of the absence of Chrétien’s name and the shifted focus towards the patron in Manessier’s epilogue constitutes a self-conscious act similar to those we have previously seen. Once again, the reader does not need to know Manessier’s actual identity. Rather, it is the mere inclusion of a proper name that is important. In Bruckner’s words, it represents: a way of designating [Manessier’s] continuation as the work of a writer who is not Chrétien de Troyes [but which] has the advantage of placing [Manessier] in Chrétien’s position. […] Manessier thus accumulates guarantors for his ending: witness represented by his proper name.88

It is the implication of this comment – the idea that onymity somehow conveys to the reader a sense of truth and honesty in relation to the text – that really ties all of the named Continuators into Genette’s theory of the concept: ‘the author’s name fulfils a contractual function […] where the credibility of the testimony, or of its transmission, rests largely on the identity of the witness or the person reporting it.’89 One manuscript, however, does not follow the trend of ending on Manessier’s moment of authorial disclosure – MS Mons 331/206. This is the very same manuscript that we witnessed replacing Chrétien’s prologue with the Elucidation and the Bliocadran. The manuscript simply ends with: Si ke crestijens le tesmoigne Ki a cief mist ceste besoigne

(f. 487a)

(As Chrétien testifies, who brought this work to an end.)

Both Manessier’s authorship and Jeanne of Flanders’ patronage of the Continuation are thus totally expunged. Chrétien provides their replacement,90 though Manessier’s phraseology is maintained. Just as we saw a transfer of the Bliocadran’s authorship to Chrétien in this manuscript, therefore, here the publishers take steps once again to give the illusion that all of the manuscript’s contents were authored by Chrétien, even in spite of the interim mentions of Master Blihis and Wauchier de Denain discussed above. This unifying editorial move reveals much about the aims of the publishers of MS Mons 331/206; they clearly felt a pressing need to exploit the anonymity of the Bliocadran and the First Continuation, and to excise the onymity of Manessier, with a view to positioning Chrétien’s name as the key brand for their edition of the text. The practice of disclosing the author across the Continuations and its prequels, both textually and materially, is a very similar exercise in branding to that which we witnessed with the Conte itself. In effect, it imposes the ultimate authority of Chrétien, and therefore also of the tale(s), on the reader, whilst also attempting to persuade an audience that there is a genuine necessity for the introduction of a Continuator to complete or further the narrative. In other words, the fact that 88 89 90

Bruckner, Chrétien Continued, pp. 54–56. Genette, Paratexts, p. 41. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of patronage in this manuscript.

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these texts were designed to emanate from the end of an unfinished original means that their authors must recognise, and act on, the need to anchor themselves to that original. By making careful use of either anonymity or onymity as befits the text in question, each Continuator works hard to build a profile as a ‘guarantor for the truth’ of the narrative trajectory after Chrétien. Accordingly, publishers often reflect this in their material presentation of authorship, editing, excising and highlighting authorial disclosure so as to bring a sense of cohesion to this corpus of texts. Whilst such techniques of authorial disclosure, as we shall see, are also discernible in other Grail texts, the motivations behind these methods do differ from text to text, and the earliest known non-Continuatory response to Chrétien provides a case in point: Robert de Boron’s Joseph (and Merlin).

Robert de Boron: meistres or messires? With only two exceptions, the prose version of Robert’s Grail text, the Joseph, is always found in combination with his Merlin.91 Curiously, despite the later Vulgate Estoire du Saint Graal’s apparent design as a replacement for Robert’s Joseph, three Vulgate Cycle manuscripts place extracts of the Joseph either before or after the Estoire, while six further manuscripts interpolate sections of the Joseph into the Estoire.92 Robert onymously discloses his authorship on two occasions in the closing lines of the Joseph, and the ways in which he names himself have been considered crucial to understanding the composition of his text. In the verse version of the text (extant only in MS fr. 20047), Robert’s name is first noted as ‘Meistres Robers dist de bouron’ (f. 50r; equivalent to line 3155), and then as ‘messires Roberz de beron’ (f. 54v; line 3461). The title of ‘meistres’ versus that of ‘messires’93 has led scholars to argue as to whether Robert was a cleric or a knight and, for our purposes, this is highly significant.94 Of course, there is nothing to say that Robert could not have been both knight and cleric, particularly if he were occupied outside of monastic orders as a secular cleric. Hugh M. Thomas argues, for example, that ‘[c]lerics of elite status sometimes 91 92

93

94

And two of these also contain the Didot-Perceval. Richard O’Gorman identifies these in ‘La tradition manuscrite du Joseph d’Arimathie en prose de Robert de Boron’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 1 (1971), 145–81 (p. 146). Examples of the Joseph placed before or after the Queste are provided by MS Beinecke 227; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. Lat. 1687; Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 951 (the last two are not part of the corpus for this study). Manuscripts which interpolate fragments of the Joseph into the Estoire are MS fr. 770 and MS Le Mans 354; MS St Petersburg Fr.F.v.XV.5; MS fr. 749, MS Chantilly 643 and Geneva-Cologny, Bodmer, MS 147 (the last is not part of this study’s corpus) also provide such examples, but these are not noted by O’Gorman. It may or may not be relevant that the etymology of ‘messire’ suggests that the term is first attested in the writings of none other than Chrétien himself, who in c. 1170 applies it to Gauvain (mes sire Gauvains); see the entry in the Portail Lexical of the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales: . There is at least a small chance, then, that Robert could have adopted this title for himself as a deliberate kind of lip-service to Chrétien, consciously mimicking his predecessor’s phraseology. See, for example, William A. Nitze, ‘Messire Robert de Boron: Enquiry and Summary’, Speculum, 28 (1953), 279–96 and Pierre Gallais, ‘Robert de Boron en Orient’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Jean Frappier (Geneva: Droz, 1970), pp. 315–19. Bogdanow suggests, based on textual content, that he must at least have had a cleric’s education, ‘Robert de Boron’, p. 19, n. 1.

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adopted knighthood to make clear their abandonment of clerical status, but others tried to alternate between the two statuses in the pursuit of their own interests.’95 This sense of pursuing other interests (such as writing literature in the vernacular, perhaps) could be seen as one possible means of explicating the two titles given to Robert in MS fr. 20047, and arguably also in the original version of Robert’s verse composition. This idea is not without complication, though, since the precision of the copyist of MS fr. 20047 has been called into question thanks to various inaccuracies elsewhere, including ‘garbled and corrupt passages’.96 As a result, ‘meistres’ could be nothing more than a scribal slip. Lending support to this is the fact that the prose version (of which several examples were copied prior to MS fr. 20047) never uses ‘meistres’ on either occasion of authorial disclosure (equivalent to line 1640 and line 1802 of the prose redaction). In fact, only one manuscript (MS Tours 951) transmits the first mention at all, and then it is as ‘messires’.97 All others either omit the first mention entirely (such as the fifteenth-century paper copy, MS fr. 1469, f. 29v), or replace the line with ‘Et cil qui fist cest livre dist…’ (And he who wrote this book says…) (line 1640).98 If we were to give the verse version in MS fr. 20047 the benefit of the doubt, then this removal of the first mention in all but one prose manuscript (and even in that one, transmitting it as ‘messires’) could be seen as the result of a later editor clearing up the confusion between Robert’s two conflicting (or complementary, if we follow Thomas’ argument) titles.99 Either way, what is important is that, even if Robert did skirt the line between the two roles, publishers of the text seem to have considered the announcement of Robert’s title as useful in creating a paratextual frame for the narrative. Given the overwhelming preference for ‘messires’ amongst the publishers of this text (and therefore possibly also amongst its audiences), it seems that framing Robert’s Joseph as authored by a chivalric, rather than clerical, individual was deemed an effective method of attracting and 95

96 97

98 99

Hugh M. Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 13. Jean Dunbabin discusses this practice in detail, providing a series of examples. One particularly pertinent example comes in the shape of Philip of Flanders’ youngest brother, Peter, who – as Philip’s only viable heir – eventually had to throw off his habit and be knighted in order to succeed to the county of Flanders; ‘From Clerk to Knight: Changing Orders’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood, II: Papers from the Third Strawberry Hill Conference, ed. by Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), pp. 26–39 (pp. 30–31). Richard O’Gorman, ‘The Prose Version of Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie’, Romance Philology, 23 (1970), 449–61 (p. 450). This manuscript has a Mediterranean influence in its illumination, which seems to be the work of an Italian painter. It is probable that the planning of the manuscript was undertaken by a French collaborator (at St-Jean-d’Acre), but since it has a mixed heritage, it is not included in the corpus of artefacts for this study. See Alison Stones, ‘Manuscript List by Library’, The Lancelot-Graal Project (2009), available at: ; see also Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Manuscript Illumination at St. Jean d’Acre, 1275–1291 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 122–23. See O’Gorman, ‘The Prose Version’, p. 456, for greater detail. Patrick Moran argues for a move towards an Arthurian ‘canon’, which requires just such tactics of reconciliation as time moves on, using the characters of Galaad and Lohot as examples. These tactics, he suggests, oscillate between two poles that he terms la tolérance (tolerance) and l’exclusion (exclusion); Lectures cycliques: Le réseau inter-romanesque dans les cycles du Graal du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2014), pp. 129–63.

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engaging an audience with a text that is actually rather exegetic in nature. MS fr. 748 provides support for this hypothesis. It is one of the earliest surviving witnesses of the Joseph, dating to the second half of the thirteenth century.100 It is also an example of one of the manuscripts that replaces, rather than removes, the disputed line at its first mention with ‘Et ce qui fist cest liure dit que…’ (And he who wrote this book says that…) (f. 16c). This manuscript’s particular significance is in its reiteration of Robert’s title through the addition of further, extratextual notices of his authorship. For example, a colophon mentioning him twice is included (f. 18a–b; a marginal manicle (likely a later reader) points out Robert’s name at its first mention), and the Merlin’s incipit includes his name (f. 18b). At all three moments, the publisher gives Robert’s full name with his title (‘Messires Roberz de borron’). This indicates that, for the publishers of MS fr. 748 at least, Robert’s guise as a knight was considered not merely his accepted profile (as suggested by the manuscript tradition in general), but a brand which could be employed in their edition. Meanwhile, MS n. a. fr. 4166 features a curious excision of Robert as author. It is one of only two manuscripts to preserve the aforementioned Didot-Perceval alongside Robert’s Joseph and Merlin (the other is MS Modena E 39).101 The text of the Didot-Perceval itself is in essence composed of a long Grail quest led by Perceval, followed by a short Mort Artu, the combination of which prefigures the Vulgate Cycle’s Queste–Mort Artu sequence. There is a clear attempt to represent the Joseph, Merlin and Perceval as a closely linked corpus in this manuscript, and this still fuels debates as to whether or not Robert de Boron ever fulfilled his promise to return to the ‘Rich Fisherman’ and, therefore, whether this Percevaltext is a rehandling of his lost poem. Curiously, the expected moments of authorial disclosure are totally removed in the manuscript, as they also are in MS Modena E 39. No mention of authorship is made anywhere in the Perceval, while the closing lines of the Joseph are adapted so as to remove precisely the lines that make reference to Robert’s authorship and the role of his patron. Julien Abed, whilst not referring to the excision of authorial disclosure, convincingly argues that Merlin himself is presented as the auctor in this manuscript. This, he suggests, is exemplified by the manuscript’s treatment of the Merlin (which includes a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini), as well as by the opening rubric on f. 1r reading ‘Ci comence le romanz des prophecies merlin’ (Here begins the romance of the Prophecies of Merlin). In light of these, Abed believes that the text ‘mérite bien le nom de Roman de Propheties de Merlin, tant la diversité des prédictions prononcées par le personnage est significative’ (deserves the name of the Romance of the Prophecies of Merlin, since the diversity of the predictions uttered by the character is significant).102 Perhaps 100 101

102

O’Gorman, ‘La tradition’, pp. 171–72; see also Gowans, ‘What did Robert de Boron actually write?’, p. 17. MS n. a. fr. 4166 was probably copied in Normandy; it is dated 1301 on f. 126c. MS Modena E 39 is dated to 1200–20, and was copied in northern France, possibly in Champagne; see Stones, ‘Manuscript List by Library’. Julien Abed, ‘La traduction française de la Prophetia Merlini dans le Didot-Perceval (Paris, BnF, Nouv. Acq. Fr. 4166)’, in Moult Obscures Paroles: Études sur la prophétie médiévale, ed. by Richard Trachsler, Julien Abed and David Expert (Paris: Presse de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2007), pp. 81–105 (p. 104).

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this shift in emphasis led the publishers of MS n. a. fr. 4166 simply to do away with Robert as author, since his presence could challenge the ‘authority’ of Merlin in their particular edition?103 We might also consider whether there is a further motive for the removal of authorial disclosure related to the fact that Robert probably did not write the Didot-Perceval.104 In order to present these three texts together as a homogeneous narrative, it might well have been in the service of the book to remove onymous authorial disclosure from those texts known to have been written by Robert de Boron, and then replace it with anonymity across all three texts. Such a move might have allowed an audience to suspend disbelief and accept the works as three equally authentic (and equally authoritative) sections of a triptych.105 Whether Robert is firmly proclaimed as a knight or excised completely, therefore, the manuscripts of his work demonstrate that publishers had strategic reasons for the (non-)disclosure of Robert’s name, and that these find commonality in their positioning of the text(s) according to pre-conceived branding agendas. The disclosure of Robert de Boron as an author(ity), however, is not limited to the manuscripts of his Joseph and Merlin; his brand remains important for at least some time in the Vulgate Cycle’s recasting of his material, as we shall now see.

Validating the Estoire: Robert de Boron and Anonymity The Vulgate Cycle’s reworking and expansion of Robert’s material sees new and purposeful motives in terms of authorial disclosure, often in relation to the presentation of Robert himself. This is particularly the case in the Estoire, which is, in essence, a direct (if extensive) rehandling of Robert’s Joseph.106 Much has been made of the curiosities surrounding the narration of the Estoire, since the text makes reference to several authorities. The narrator of the prologue, for example, is a hermit who claims that Christ visited and gave him a small book that he had personally written. This book then disappeared, but the hermit searched for it, found it and copied it. In two later passages, though, we discover that Robert de Boron apparently translated the text from Latin into French: ensi le tesmoigne mesires robers de Borron qui a translate ceste estoire en franchois de latin (Estoire, p. 195) (thus testifies my lord Robert de Boron, who translated this story from Latin into French)

103

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105 106

As well as the parallel removal of authorship notices in MS Modena E 39, the mention of Robert’s authorship is removed from the closing lines of Joseph in MSS Add. 38117 and fr. 423, both of which are manuscripts closely related to MSS n. a. fr. 4166 and Modena E 39, though the Didot-Perceval is, of course, included in neither. There is a sudden cessation of rubrics at the beginning of the Perceval in MS n. a. fr. 4166, which serves as additional evidence that Robert was probably not the author of this Perceval’s narrative. Gowans suggests a similar rationale to mine, that it is ‘an action intended to tidy up the cycle being completed with the Prose Perceval’; ‘What did Robert de Boron actually write?’, pp. 17–18. Not forgetting, of course, that certain publishers also opt to interpolate (sections of) the Joseph into their editions of the Estoire; these are MSS. fr. 749, fr. 770, Beinecke 227 and Le Mans 354.

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Car messires robers de borron qui ceste estoire translata de latin en franchois & la uraie estoire le tesmoigne, car sans faille chis le translata (Estoire, p. 280) (Because my lord Robert de Boron, who translated this story from Latin into French, and the true story, testifies to this, since he is certainly the one who translated it)

What is not clear is whether this means that he translated this particular version of the Estoire or produced a parallel one.107 Whichever way this is interpreted, the Estoire ‘accumulates authorities in baffling succession’.108 Pinpointing with any certainty whom to understand as the author of the Estoire is therefore difficult, and must remain outside of the remit of this book for two key reasons. The first is that the subject has been, and continues to be, debated at length elsewhere.109 The second, and most important, is that I am aiming here to consider publishers’ representations of such aspects, rather than to make concrete identifications based on the text itself. With this in mind, there exists a key passage in the prologue which, when combined with the above two mentions of Robert de Boron’s name, is useful in telling us more about the positioning of authorship within the text. This is especially so since the manuscripts’ material manifestations of this passage reveal interesting responses on the part of the text’s publishers. The passage reads: Li nons de celui qui ceste estoire escrist nest pas noumes ne esclairies el commencement. Mais par les paroles qui chi apres seront dites porres grant aperceuoir del non de celui et le païs ou il fu nes & vne grant partie de son lignage. Mais al commencement ne se veut pas descourir & se i a .iij. raisons por quoi. La premiere si est por ce que se il se noumast & deist que diex eust descouert par lui si haute estoire comme est cele du saint graal qui est la plus haute estoire qui soit. Li felon & li enuieus le torneroient en vielte. Lautre raison si est por ce que tels poroit oir son non qui le connistroit si en priseroit mains lestoire por ce que si poure persone eust mis en escrit ceste estoire. Lautre raison si est por ce que sil eust mis son non en lestoire & on i trouast aucune cose mesauenant ou par visse de maluais escriuain qui apres le translatast dun liure en autre, tous li blasmes en fust sor son non. Car il sont ore en no tans plus de bouches qui mal dient que bien. Et plus est vns homs blasmes dun seul mal quil ne seroit loes de .C. biens. Et por che ne veut il pas que ses nons soit del tot descouers. Car ia soit ce quil sen volsist courir si sera il plus descouers quil ne voldroit. (Estoire, p. 3) (The name of he who wrote down this story is neither named nor explained at the beginning. However, the words which follow will reveal a lot about him, 107

108 109

Carol Chase seems to suggest that Robert translated this version, ‘“Or dist li contes”: Narrative Interventions and the Implied Audience in the Estoire del Saint Graal’, in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, pp. 117–38 (p. 117), while the notion of a parallel version is hinted at by Carolyne Larrington, ‘The Enchantress, the Knight and the Cleric: Authorial Surrogates in Arthurian Romance’, Arthurian Literature, 25 (2008), 43–66 (p. 49) and Rupert T. Pickens, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 104–05. Chase, ‘Or dist li contes’, p. 117. See those cited in n. 107 as well as, for example, Burns, Arthurian Fictions, pp. 35–40 and Miranda Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 95–96.

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the country of his birth and his ancestry. But he wishes not to reveal his name at the outset for three reasons. The first is because, if he said his name and explained that God had through him revealed such a noble story as that of the Holy Grail (the noblest there is), then the treacherous and envious would call it boastful. The second reason is that, if someone who knows him heard his name, they might value the story less, since a very humble person wrote it down. The third reason is that, if he included his name in the story and there were anything inappropriate in it, even if through the inattention of a poor scribe who later transmits it from one book to another, all of the blame would fall upon the author’s name. For, in our times, there are more mouths that would say bad than good, and a man is blamed more for one bad deed than he is praised for one hundred good ones. For these reasons he wishes that his name is not revealed, even though he knows that, despite all attempts to hide it, it will still become more known than he would like.)

I quote at length here since this extract represents a particularly clear pronouncement of the reasons why the author wishes to avoid disclosure of his name. Here is an author who appears to have decided that no reputation is better than a bad one; he thus opts to avoid the repercussions of naming himself to protect, first, his own reputation and, second, that of the text. This second concern is important as it is indicative of an awareness of the need to service the book, which has also been at the root of authorial disclosure in our other texts. This sense of a concern for reputation is far from an unfamiliar trope in medieval literature. Pickens designates this particular example as belonging to the ‘fear-of-detractors topos’,110 but there are also other similar kinds of strategy that are based on classical rhetorical patterns, and which all aim to protect reputation. For example, ab adversariorum involves attacking the work of rivals, while ab nostra uses self-flattery.111 Indeed, Tony Hunt has argued for the use of such devices in Chrétien’s prologues, as well as in Arthurian romance more generally.112 Just as with the familiar ‘pre-existing book’ trope that we saw in the Conte, the inclusion of such a device leads the reader to wonder as to how truthful these claims might be, and whether ‘truth’ actually even matters when the overriding aim is simply to validate the text (successfully or not) by means of a familiar and traditional method. For Chase, for example, the two later mentions of Robert de Boron’s name as the translator of the text represent an ‘attempt to convince a possibly dubious public of the authenticity and veracity of this romance’.113 Pickens, meanwhile, who understands Robert to be the translator of a parallel version (rather than of this version), argues that ‘the Vulgate Estoire does not seek to arrogate or to appropriate to itself the authorial identity of Robert de Boron […] the references constitute a conventional appeal to Robert de Boron’s authority as that of another translator.’ In effect, Pickens argues that this later 110 111 112

113

Pickens, ‘Autobiography’, p. 101. Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Authorising History in the Vernacular Revolution (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), p. 88. See Tony Hunt’s ‘The Rhetorical Background to the Arthurian Prologue: Tradition and the Old French Vernacular Prologues’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 6 (1970), 1–23 and ‘Tradition and Originality in the Prologues of Chrétien de Troyes’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 8 (1972), 320–44. Chase, ‘Or dist li contes’, p. 118.

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‘appeal to Robert de Boron’s authority’ serves to legitimise the Estoire as it is told here by our modest narrator.114 Thus, and as we have seen elsewhere, the veracity of authorial disclosure (as well as of any rationale given for authorial disclosure) is a secondary concern. First and foremost, authorial disclosure – represented initially in the Estoire by anonymity and, later, by implied pseudonymity – is a mechanism for textual authentication that is employed strategically and calculatedly, but not necessarily in any expectation of its being taken as truthful. The fact that such authentication mattered to the audiences of these texts, even where they knew authorial disclosure to be no more than a device, is borne out by the fact that there are a handful of examples of publishers who deliberately manipulate these moments visually for the benefit of their editions. One such example is provided by MS fr. 749, which opens with a three-panel miniature (f. 1r; see Plate 11). Despite the shy narrator’s apparent keenness to remain anonymous, the publishers of this edition depict him not once, but three times on this opening folio. In the three-panel miniature, he is shown twice: in the second panel, we see him reading the book given to him by Christ while, in the third panel, he is shown in the act of receiving the book from Christ (a scene which is also depicted in the opening initial of MS fr. 747, f. 1r; see Plate 12). In the third instance on the opening folio of MS fr. 749, a portrait of the narrator writing the story down is included as part of the opening initial (f. 1a; see Plate 13).115 I am not suggesting, of course, that a medieval audience would have been able to identify the narrator personally from these images per se, rather that, through his visual depiction, certain clues to his persona are revealed to the audience.116 In addition, Elizabeth Sears suggests that: ‘[t]o place an author portrait before a text, in the central Middle Ages, was to declare the authority of that text. The image focused readers’ attention, before reading, on the voice speaking through the transcribed words.’117 I suggest, therefore, that there is a sense of playfulness provided by these examples. On the one hand, they respond perfectly seriously to the desideratum of medieval audiences for textual authority. On the other, the publishers take the opportunity to mock the Estoire author-narrator’s false modesty, mischievously revealing clues to his identity in visual format in spite of the narrator’s clear wish to remain anonymous. At least in some sense, therefore, the narrator’s prophecy that his identity will come to light is fulfilled by the actions of the publishers.

114 115

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Pickens, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 104–05. A similar historiated initial, depicting the author writing, is also present in MS Douce 303 (f. 1r), while MS Rennes 255 has an illumination of the hermit receiving the book from Christ (f. 1r), as do MSS Add. 10292 (f. 1r) and fr. 19162 (f. 1v); MS Royal 14 E III depicts the hermit translating the book from Latin in a miniature (f. 6v). On medieval author portraits and suggestions of identity, see Anton Legner, ‘Illustres manus’, in Ornamenta Ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik: Katalog zur Ausstellung des Schnütgen-Museums in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, ed. by Anton Legner, 3 vols (Cologne: Stadt Köln, 1987), I, pp. 187–262. Elizabeth Sears, ‘Portraits in Counterpoint: Jerome and Jeremiah in an Augsburg Manuscript’, Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Manuscript, ed. by Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 61–74 (p. 61); see also the various case studies in Pen in Hand: Medieval Scribal Portraits, Colophons and Tools, ed. by Michael Gullick (Walkern: Red Gull Press, 2006).

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Plate 11: In panel 2, the narrator of the Estoire reads the book from Christ; in panel 3, the narrator receives the book from Christ: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 749, f. 1r.

Plate 12: Historiated initial depicting the narrator of the Estoire receiving the book from Christ: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 747, f. 1a.

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Plate 13: Historiated initial providing a portrait of the narrator writing down the Estoire: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 749, f. 1a.

The association of the name of Robert de Boron with the Estoire provides a further example of publishers manipulating textual authority. References to Robert are, for the most part, maintained throughout the tradition,118 but a handful of manuscripts from the later part of the tradition (1480 onwards) seem to deprioritise his authority. For example, his name is totally removed from MS fr. 1427 (composed in 1504; it contains only the second half of the story). In MS Brussels 9246, meanwhile, Robert is not removed entirely, rather displaced. This manuscript, copied is 1480, is an intralingual translation of the text from Picardie ‘en françoiz’, the importance of which I discuss in Chapter 5. The translation was undertaken by a scribe named Guillaume de la Pierre, who is also the manuscript’s copyist, on behalf of Jean-Louis de Savoie (1447/48–82), Bishop of Geneva. The translator’s contribution to authorship in this edition is lauded by a special preface written in his own hand, which may once have been illustrated with a half-page illumination (now cut out; f. 1v). This conspicuous presentation of Guillaume as translator gives the impression of prioritising Guillaume’s influence over that of Robert de Boron, who is only mentioned later in the manuscript. Such examples suggest that, at this later stage of transmission, publishers felt a less pressing need to authenticate the text by including or highlighting the mention of a parallel text’s translator. They may even indicate that Robert’s name in particular had become less of an attraction for an audience by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 118

Emmanuèle Baumgartner suggests that Robert’s name becomes ‘emblématique des écrivains du Graal’ (emblematic of the writers of the Grail); ‘Robert de Boron et l’imaginaire du livre du Graal’, in Arturus Rex, vol. II: Acta Conventus Lovaniensis 1987, ed. by Willy van Hoecke, Gilbert Tournoy, Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), pp. 259–68 (p. 268).

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This sense of Robert’s gradual loss of authority is by no means unique within medieval literature. Busby has drawn our attention, for instance, to the fact that ‘signatures’ in epilogues designating Marie de France as the author of her lais gradually seem to disappear from manuscripts, suggesting that ‘the genre became largely divorced from the name of its most celebrated practitioner in less than a century after her death’.119 We might therefore wonder whether a similar phenomenon is happening in relation to Arthurian literature, or whether this loss of authority is something more specific to Robert de Boron. Since other authors’ names within Arthurian literature seem to persist (as we will see), I lean towards the latter. In support of this, I suggest, is Champ fleury, a treatise of the use of the French language by Geoffroy Tory (1480–1533) published in 1529. In this work, Geoffroy advises future grammarians not to forget the examples of best practice set by certain medieval authors. Amongst these, he names Chrétien de Troyes, Raoul de Houdenc and Huon de Méry.120 The fact that Robert de Boron is not named here, in spite of his considerable influence on Arthurian romance, is perhaps revealing in terms of the late-medieval and early-modern perception of his authority.121 The peculiar and confused treatment afforded to Robert’s name in the 1516 and 1523 printed editions of the Vulgate Estoire provides further evidence of the apparent wane of his significance in the later stages of transmission.122 Here, ‘sire robert de berron qui ceste histoire translata de latin en francoys’ (Sir Robert de Berron who translated this story from Latin into French) (f. 84r) becomes ‘messire robert de bosron’ (My lord Robert de Bosron) (f. 109v, incorrectly labelled as ‘cxi’), before metamorphosing entirely into ‘messire pierre de bosro[n] leq[ue]l a translate ceste hystoire de latin en prose fra[n]coyse’ (My lord Pierre de Bosron who translated this story from Latin into French prose) (f. 115r). There is, of course, the slim possibility that Pierre and Robert are intended to be different people – the deliberate mention of Pierre de Bosron translating the text into 119

120

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Busby, Codex and Context, I, pp. 472–73; see also Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz, ‘Medieval French and Italian Literature: Towards a Manuscript History’, in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. by Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 215–42 (p. 221). ‘On porroit aussi user dez oeuvres de Chrestien de Troyes & ce en son Chevalier a l’espee, & en son Perseval qu’il dedia au Conte Philippe de Flandres. On porroit user pareillement de Hugon de Mery en son Tornoy de l’Antechrist. Tout pareillement aussi de Raoul en son Romant des Elles' (We can also use the works of Chrétien de Troyes, particularly his knight of the sword episode and his Perceval which he dedicated to Philip of Flanders. We can equally use Huon de Méry and his Tournament of the Antichrist, as well as Raoul [de Houdenc] and his Romance of the Wings); Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury: Au quel est contenu l’Art & Science de la deue & vraye Proportion des Lettres Attiques, qu’on dit autrement Lettres Antiques, & vulgairement Lettres Romaines proportionnees selon le Corps & Visage humain (Bourges: Geoffroy Tory and Gilles de Gourmant, 1529), f. 3v. I use the digitised copy provided by Les Bibliothèques virtuelles humanistes, available at: . Of course, there is a chance that this is because Robert may have been best known for his prose writing, where Geoffroy’s selected authors are all poets – but since there is conjecture that Robert’s Grail works were originally composed in poetry, it is difficult to be certain in respect of either possibility. By way of a reminder, the 1516 edition was published by the consortium of Galliot du Pré, Jean Petit and Michel Le Noir, while the 1523 version (which is extremely similar) was published by Antoine Cousteau for Philippe Le Noir, son of Michel. I return to the other contents of these volumes below.

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French prose could indicate a distinction between the authors of the verse and prose versions of the Estoire.123 Given the deprioritisation of Robert’s name in the later manuscript tradition, however, I would suggest this is unlikely. It seems more probable that the introduction of the name Pierre is an oversight by the sixteenth-century publishers, perhaps owing to their attaching only minimal significance to Robert’s name. At the earlier stages of transmission, though, the name of Robert de Boron clearly had both endurance and significance. This is most notably the case in the Post-Vulgate Cycle, since its entirety – where possible to reconstruct – appears to have been attributed pseudonymically to Robert (or at least, the text claims that Robert is the source, if not the author).124 This attribution is particularly curious in view of the Post-Vulgate Queste’s closeness to the Vulgate Queste, the latter of which was itself pseudonymically attributed – arguably and also perhaps ironically – to Walter Map.

Walter Map: Pseudonymity and the Queste The narrative of the Queste, as mentioned earlier, was probably composed between 1215 and 1230.125 The epilogue claims that the adventures contained in the story: …si furent mises en escrit & gardes en labeie de salebieres dont maistre gautiers map les traist a faire son liure del saint graal por lamor del roi henri son signor qui fist lestoire translater de latin en franchois. (pp. 198–99) (…were written down and kept in the abbey at Salisbury, whence Master Walter Map extracted them in order to make his book of the Holy Grail for love of his lord King Henry, who had the story translated from Latin into French.)

It has been argued by critics such as Lot, Frappier, Matarasso and Baumgartner, as well as many others, that the attribution of authorship to Gautier (or Walter) Map is a hoax, to the extent that it now represents something of a commonplace.126 Map, a cleric responsible for other works such as his De nugis curialium, died in 1209/10 according to a commemoration at Hereford Cathedral.127 He cannot, therefore, have been responsible for the Queste which most critics believe, owing to the 123 124

125

126

127

One might also wonder whether this is meant to suggest that Pierre is a relation of Robert’s, as we saw was claimed to be the case with Hélie de Boron in the Prose Tristan. As argued by Helen J. Nicholson, Love, War and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Medieval Epic and Romance 1150–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 22. On the Post-Vulgate Cycle, see also Fanni Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail: A Study of the Structure and Genesis of a Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Prose Romance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966). Kathryn Marie Talarico, ‘Romancing the Grail: Fiction and Theology in the Queste del saint graal’, in Arthurian Literature and Christianity: Notes from the Twentieth Century, ed. by Peter Meister (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 29–59. Ferdinand Lot, ‘Sur la date du Lancelot en prose’, Romania, 57 (1931), 137–46; Jean Frappier, Étude sur la Mort le roi Artu: Roman du XIIe siècle (Paris: Droz, 1961), pp. 21–22; Pauline Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry, pp. 205–41; Emmanuèle Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le pain: Essai sur La Queste del Saint Graal (Paris: SEDES, 1981), pp. 42–45. Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 60.

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narrative’s intertextual referencing of texts dated to post-1210, was composed at least fifteen years after his death.128 Whilst Roger Middleton has argued forcefully that this reasoning is not clearly evidenced enough for us to be sure of the work’s date – even within a period of five to ten years –,129 the broader consensus remains that Map could not have been the author. Matarasso argues, for example, that the largely positive slant on Cistercian monasticism prevalent in the Queste could not have come from Map because of the ‘much trumpeted abomination of the Cistercians and all their works’ present in his other writings.130 Richard Kaeuper is similarly unequivocal on the matter: ‘[Map] truly hated the Cistercians’, he says.131 According to Genette’s definition, the particular kind of pseudonymity present in the Queste (and indeed in the Post-Vulgate Cycle) can be argued as constituting the second of seven kinds of pseudonymic practices, that is, where a work is incorrectly (though deliberately) attributed to a known author; Genette calls this apocrypha.132 But why would a fallacious attribution such as this be included? The question has been mused on many times, but it was not until relatively recently that the subject has been more closely investigated. In earlier scholarship, for example, Lot claimed (in two articles in the 1930s) to have quashed once and for all the Map connection to the Queste through his analysis of dating and of intertextual borrowings from Robert de Boron’s Joseph and other texts.133 However, despite an evident keenness to prove the ascription false, Lot, along with Frappier and Pauphilet, never really broached the question as to why Map’s name was chosen.134 In the 1970s, Matarasso argued the point at length, eventually suggesting that whoever made the attribution ‘either knew very little about [Map] or did it tongue in cheek, wishing he might turn in his grave’;135 in other words she understood the attribution to be the result of some kind of roguish protest against Map’s clear distaste for Cistercian monasticism. More recently, though, a less contemptible purpose has been posited as lying at the root of it. Emmanuèle Baumgartner considers that Map’s inclusion is reflective of: the anonymous author’s desire to inscribe the genesis and the trajectory of this disconcerting text in a space-time that goes from the fictional world of Arthur to the Norman kingdom of England at the end of the twelfth century.136 128 129

130 131 132 133 134

135 136

See Lot’s ‘Sur la date’ in particular. With thanks to Roger Middleton for providing a copy of his paper, ‘The Perils of Dating: Map, Cycle and Taxis’, which was delivered at the Conference of the International Arthurian Society British Branch, Durham, September 2009. See also Matarasso’s balanced argument of the matter in The Redemption of Chivalry, pp. 205–41. Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry, p. 236. Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 254, n. 6. Genette, Paratexts, p. 47. Lot, ‘Sur la date’ and ‘Compte-rendu de Jean Frappier: Étude sur la Mort le Roi Artu’, Romania, 64 (1938), 120–22. Frappier, Étude, pp. 21–22 and Albert Pauphilet, Études sur la Queste del saint graal attribuée à Gautier Map (Paris: Champion, 1921), the latter of whom avoids the question altogether other than to make reference in his title to the fact that the work is attributed to, rather than authored by, ‘Gautier Map’. Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry, p. 237. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ‘The Queste del saint graal: from semblance to veraie semblance’, trans. by Carol Dover, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp. 107–14 (p. 107).

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In this respect, Baumgartner is far from alone; Taylor suggests that ‘the readers might [have found] it reassuring to have the corroboration of an authentic, and verifiable, voice from Anglo-Norman England.’137 On this basis, we might even wonder whether at least a small part of the target audience for the narrative could actually have been English nobility, who would, after all, have had excellent French.138 Helen Cooper, too, hints at a similar possibility: had the author […] indeed been Walter Map […] then the Cycle itself would have been English in that broader sense. The lack of distinction between French and Anglo-Norman culture in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is indeed indicated by the fact that Map could so happily have been regarded as its author: there was clearly nothing felt to be implausible about the attribution.139

So whilst the earliest scholarship turned on the simple refuting of Map’s authorship, later conjecture moved towards considering the reasons for introducing the pseudonym. As we have seen, some of the reasons put forward for the use of this pseudonymic device initially included suggestions of ignorance, mischievousness and even malice, but these finally gave way to the more persuasive idea that there existed a desire to anglicise the material in some way, to frame the tale geographically, if not linguistically, within the world occupied by the narrative – possibly even in the knowledge that some of the material’s audience could have been English. Map, after all, appears to have been well placed to form the bridge between French and English narratives since he is known to have visited Troyes at the peak of Chrétien’s fame and to have read French romances, even if we cannot prove that he ever wrote them.140 There is even a suggestion that he may have written a now lost Lancelot-romance, which could be another reason for his connection to the Queste.141 As our other examples have shown, whether or not the real Walter Map was responsible for the Queste, and even where the audience knew such attributions to be untrue, veracity in authorial disclosure seems not to have mattered as much as did the effect of a proper name on the framing of the text.142 In his discussion of pseudonymity, for example, Genette states that ‘[c]ertain formulae, we know, are obligatory. Others – sometimes the same ones – are good for business.’143 In other words, Genette implies that the false attribution of a text to a known 137 138

139 140 141 142

143

Taylor, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Arthur’, p. 60. See, for example, Serge Lusignan, La langue des rois au Moyen Âge: Le français en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), Chapter 4, in which he argues that French was the language of the elite laity from almost immediately after the Norman Conquest. In the late thirteenth century, he contends, French became used for government and law, thus indicating that it held a certain prestige, even if Latin continued to play an important role. Helen Cooper, ‘The Lancelot-Graal Cycle in England: Malory and his Predecessors’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp. 147–62 (p. 147). Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry, p. 234. Ibid., pp. 234–35. Busby’s argument that ‘when medieval audiences or readers listened to or read a work said to be that of Chrétien de Troyes or Robert de Blois, they are unlikely to have indulged in theoretical meditations on whether Chrétien or Robert were historical figures or fictional constructs’ is particularly pertinent in this respect; Codex and Context, I, p. 463. Genette, Paratexts, p. 54.

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author must be due to a question of business, and of selling the product. By this definition, mocking the named author, as Matarasso suggested was the case with the Queste/Map conundrum, is unlikely to be the point. Rather the purpose is to tap into, and to corner, a market. Modern business terms these may be, but they are nonetheless pertinent. Taylor, Cooper and Baumgartner have, after all, identified the market for us – the ‘British’ market keen to claim Arthurian material as its own. This is reminiscent of one of the central theses of Beate SchmolkeHasselmann’s seminal Der arthurische Versroman von Chrestien bis Froissart, which holds that Arthurian romance was actually English literature written in French.144 By disclosing, even spuriously, the presence of an author more closely connected with English material than with French, the author of the Queste manipulates and exploits, for the benefit of popularising his text, an emerging preference for ‘British’ Arthurian literature which would later see Malory’s Le Morte Darthur force French Arthuriana onto the sidelines. Certain publishers of this text clearly understand the marketing potential of Map’s association with the text, and they make marked use of this in their editions. Amongst these manuscripts, it is possible to discern two distinct approaches to the disclosure of Map’s authorship. The first is to remove Map’s name from the typical point of disclosure in the text’s epilogue, and to announce him instead in a rubric (often closing the entire manuscript). The second depicts Map visually alongside the text. In some cases, some combination of the two can be witnessed. Examples of the first strategy, which in essence serves to imprint Map’s authorship across a wider corpus than just the individual texts with which he is usually associated, can be found in MSS fr. 771 (dated to c. 1240–50) and fr. 12573 (dated to c. 1310). These manuscripts both excise mention of Map at the traditional point, but then include his name in a rubric between the Lancelot and the Queste. In both manuscripts, this reads: ‘Ci fenist ici mestre Gautiers map son liure et commance le graal’ (Here Gautier Map ends his book, and begins [the story of] the grail) (MS fr. 771, f. 143c; MS fr. 12753, f. 182d).145 Importantly, the 1488 printed edition of the Vulgate Cycle enacts a similar strategy. Here, the traditional moment of naming is removed from the Queste’s epilogue (though kept at the beginning of the Mort Artu) and is then replaced with a dividing rubric between the Queste and the Mort Artu. This rubric reads: ‘Cy fine maistre gaultier map son traitee du saint graal/puis apres vouldra traitter de la mort du roys artus’ (Here Gaultier Map ends his treatment [translation] of the holy grail, after which he will treat [translate] the Death of King Arthur) (verso of sig. ccvii). Meanwhile, in a similar vein, and produced at around the same time as the 1488 edition, MSS fr. 111 and fr. 113–16 also remove Map’s name from the epilogue (MS fr. 111 additionally removes it from its typical moment of disclosure at the beginning of the Mort Artu).146 An extended rubric is then 144 145 146

Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arthurische Versroman von Chrestien bis Froissart (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1980), p. 184ff. MS fr. 771 contains Lancelot and the Queste only, while MS fr. 12573 also contains the Mort Artu at the end. MS fr. 111 contains the Lancelot, the Queste and the Mort Artu, while MS fr. 113–16 also includes the Estoire and the Merlin at the beginning (MS fr. 116 is the volume that contains the Queste). MS Royal 19 C XIII similarly removes Map’s name from the colophon on f. 322d, but retains it at the beginning of the Mort Artu on f. 323a.

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included at the end of both manuscripts, and this serves, in both cases, to present not just several of the texts, but in fact the entire enterprise, as Map’s endeavour. This rubric in MS fr. 111 reads: Cy fine li livre de messire lancelot du lac, lequel translata maistre gautier map, ouquel sont contenuz to[us] les faiz et les chevaleries de luy, et de laduenement du saint greal. Et de la queste diceluy, faicte et acheuee par le bon cheualier galaad, parceval le galoys et boort de gaunes. Et avecq[ue]s ce de la mort du roy Artus, en laquelle queste furent plus[ieur]s autres chevaliers. Cest assauoir lancelot du lac, tristan et palamides, compaignons de la table ronde. (f. 299c) (Here ends the book of Sir Lancelot du Lac, which was translated by Master Gautier Map, and in which are contained all of Lancelot’s chivalric acts, as well as the coming of the Holy Grail and its quest, which was undertaken and achieved by the good knight Galaad, and Perceval le Gallois and Bors of Gaunes. Alongside this is the death of King Arthur, in which quest many other knights are implicated, including Lancelot du Lac, Tristan and Palamides, companions of the Round Table.)

By enumerating the contents of the all of the texts in the manuscript at this moment, the publishers of MS fr. 111 in effect imprint Map’s name on all of them as their translator. The publishers of MS fr. 113–16, meanwhile, adopt a similar enumeration strategy, but also go a step further in their version of the closing rubric: Cy fine le liure de messire Lancelot du lac, filz au Roy ban de benoic que on disoit le Roy mort de dueil, translate de latin en romment du liure que maistre gaultier maip lun des quatre hystoiregraphes de Roy artus auoit compose des faitz de Lancelot et de la table Ronde et fut faicte la translacion de ce pre[sen] t liure a la Requeste du Roy henry dengleterre. Et a este diuise le liure en trois parties… (f. 735a) (Here ends the book of Sir Lancelot du Lac, son of King Ban of Benoic, known as king who died of mourning, translated from Latin into French from the book composed by Gaultier Map, one of the four historiographers of King Arthur, about the acts of Lancelot and of the Round Table. And (he) undertook the translation of the present book at the request of King Henry of England. He divided the book into three parts…)

This rubric is then followed by a list of contents, which mirrors – in extended form – that contained in MS fr. 111. By contrast, however, Map is granted the status of more than a mere translator. First and foremost, he is described as having not only translated, but also authored the original Latin text at the behest of King Henry.147 Second, and perhaps even more curiously, he is presented as an official historiographer of Arthur. Historiographers, of course, were usually employed by the person whose history they were writing, and simple chronology tells us that Map could not have been directly employed by Arthur. Since Map 147

This is also noted by Fabry-Tehranchi, ‘Le Livre’, pp. 15–16.

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is employed by Henry II, is there a hint here of Henry claiming descent from Arthur?148 Whatever we choose to take from this allusion, this rubric seems to lean towards framing the texts as history rather than as fictional narratives and, as with MS fr. 111, Map is presented as responsible for the entirety of the contents. This is made even more evident by an illumination included at the opening of the Estoire of MS fr. 113–16 (f. 1r of MS fr. 113), which depicts what appears to be Map presenting his completed book to Henry (Plate 14).149 This, in combination with the closing rubric, has the effect of book-ending the manuscript’s contents with Map’s authorship, despite the fact that certain of the texts contained within, such as the Estoire, retain their traditional in-text claims to authority (ff. 1c and 116d).150

Plate 14: Walter Map presents his book to King Henry at the opening of the Estoire; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 113, f. 1r.

The second of the Queste’s two approaches to authorial disclosure, in which Map is depicted visually, occurs frequently. For example, Map’s new and additional 148 149 150

I return to this in Chapter 5. We might also recall from Chapter 1 that the depiction of this moment can be seen as equating to illustrating the text’s original moment of publication. Moran, in discussing the combination of the names of Robert and Walter within the Vulgate Cycle, makes a very convincing argument that ‘le nom de l’auteur est assez vite devenu un signal métatextuel indiquant un certain type de sujet et de récit’ (the name of the author quickly became a metatextual signal indicating a certain type of subject and narrative). He suggests, in essence, that they have ‘une valeur générique’ (a generic quality), which sees Robert as associated with the origins of the Grail and Arthurian prehistory, while Walter Map is more closely connected with the narrative matter of Lancelot’s adventures within the Arthurian world; Lectures cycliques, pp. 430–39.

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role as the author of the original Latin source text that we saw in MS fr. 116 is also touched upon by MS fr. 342. Composed in 1274 by a female scribe, this manuscript includes a large miniature in between the Queste and the Mort Artu. Placed on f. 150r, directly between the closing reference to Map in the epilogue of the Queste and the first mention of him in the prologue of the Mort Artu, this miniature shows Walter Map, complete with a cleric’s tonsure, writing in Latin at the behest of Henry II (see Plate 15). His text reads: ‘Hic incipit de mortuo Artus regis et sociorum suorum’ (Here begins [the story/matter of] the death of King Arthur and his companions).151 The publishers of MS fr. 342 thus foreground two aspects of Map’s authorship: first, they prioritise his authorship of the original Latin text over his translation into French; second, by depicting him with a tonsure, there is a clear importance given to his status as a cleric.152

Plate 15: Walter Map, with tonsure, writes in Latin at the behest of King Henry; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 342, f. 150r.

An analogous image is found at the opening of the Mort Artu in MS Royal 14 E III (copied c. 1315–25), in which a similarly tonsured Map once again writes under the orders of Henry (f. 140a; Plate 16).153 The writing here, though, is more difficult to make out as being either French or Latin (or even just as nonsense). Curiously, the British Library’s manuscript description (that which accompanies the digital edition of the manuscript) claims that this miniature shows ‘King Arthur dictating to a scribe’.154 Owing to the context of the miniature, as well as its close similarity to the illumination in MS fr. 342 and those in other manuscripts depicting the

151 152

153

154

With thanks to Benjamin Pohl for helping me to decipher the particularly tiny writing. See Robert Mills’ thought-provoking discussion of the symbolism of tonsures, ‘The Signification of the Tonsure’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. by Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 109–26. There is also a hooded, bearded man (possibly a monk) depicted in the opening historiated initial of the Mort Artu (Plate 16) whose identity is difficult to ascertain. Were it not for the presence of the miniature directly above it, it would be arguable that this is Map. The miniature, however, depicts Map as unbearded, and so the figure remains unidentifiable. British Library, ‘Royal MS 14 E III’, available at: .

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same scene,155 I would suggest that this must be an error. The publishers of MSS Royal 14 E III and fr. 342, therefore, both use Map’s authorship to frame the text explicitly and comparably. Similar to the strategic positioning of Robert de Boron as a knight that we understood as imbuing his narrative with chivalric significance, these publishers use Map’s status as a cleric to present the work both as one of authority (originally written in Latin, as is clearly the case in MS fr. 342) and as one with authentic spiritual significance. A further manuscript depicting this same scene is less equivocal in its depiction of Map as a cleric. In MS fr. 122 (copied in 1344), Map sits at his writing desk in the historiated initial used to open the text of the Mort Artu (f. 272b; Plate 17). By contrast, Map has a full head of hair. Whilst we know that the tonsure was considered to be a clear symbol of clerical status, an abundance of hair was actually sometimes linked to male sexual potency.156 It seems somewhat unlikely that this is what is intended here, but what is true is that – as was discussed in relation to Robert de Boron – clerics could also take on more secular duties. In order to undertake such tasks, growing out a tonsure would not have been out of the ordinary.157 The depiction of Map here as untonsured thus seems to suggest a publisher keen to lessen the spiritual overtones associated with Map’s writing, therefore proposing a more secular tone for this edition. This observation supports the hypothesis in Chapter 2 that, by the later stages of transmission (from around the late thirteenth century onwards), publishers sought to exploit the secular over the spiritual in their editions. Map’s authorship is thus a crucial device – it not only allows an edition to be given a particular orientation, but Map’s is a brand deemed sufficiently powerful to warrant its use in association not only with other Vulgate Cycle texts, but also with other Grail texts, as we will now see.

155

156 157

These are MS Rylands 1, f. 212r; MS Brussels 9627–28, f. 69r; MS Beinecke 229, f. 272v; MS Rawl. D.899, f. 206r; MS fr. 339, f. 264r; MS Add. 17443, f. 62r; MS Rawl. Q. B. 6, f. 360r. This last manuscript also shows an unidentified individual in discussion with Henry, while Walter Map is seated in the act of writing. It is also possible that the artist misunderstood the scene from an exemplar, and rather saw it as Bors relating events to Arthur and the court, as in the narrative, and thus added the extra figure without comprehending whom was meant to be shown here. For a comprehensive discussion of these, see Martine Meuwese, ‘Crossing Borders: Text and Image in Arthurian Manuscripts’, Arthurian Literature, 24 (2007), 157–77 (p. 160). On MS Yale 229 in particular, see Ronald E. Pepin, ‘Walter Map and Yale 229’, in Essays on the Lancelot of Yale 229, ed. by Elizabeth M. Willingham (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 15–17. See Mills, ‘The Signification of the Tonsure’, p. 116. When individuals found themselves once again engaged in spiritual duties, they would simply have the tonsure cut back in; see Dunbabin ‘From Clerk to Knight’, pp. 27–28.

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Plate 16: Walter Map, with tonsure, writes at the behest of King Henry, while unidentified monk introduces the Mort Artu; London; British Library, MS Royal 14 E III, f. 140a.

Plate 17: Walter Map at his writing desk with full head of hair; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 122, f. 272b.

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Walter Map, Anonymity and the Perlesvaus Dated to c. 1406, MS fr. 120’s disclosure of authorship seems not unusual within the context of Vulgate Cycle codices: it maintains, for example, all of the usual, expected, moments of disclosure in its respective texts. However, the publishers of this manuscript also attach to the beginning of the Queste a section of the Perlesvaus (ff. 520a–22d). This work is not typically attributed to Map, of course; it is rather considered to be anonymous. Its unusual, often violent, content also makes it an incongruous bedfellow for the texts of the Vulgate Cycle. In MS fr. 120, however, thanks to the maintenance of usual moment of authorial disclosure in the Queste and the Perlesvaus’ undemarcated attachment to the Queste as a prefix or blurb, the publishers pass off the Perlesvaus as being part of the Queste, which makes it look like this section of text is also authored by Map. This presentation is also mirrored precisely, though unsurprisingly, by MS Ars. 3479–80, a twin manuscript produced in the same workshop at around the same time (c. 1406; the Perlesvaus appears on ff. 483a–90d).158 This is reminiscent of that which we saw in relation to the First Continuation and the Bliocadran, in which authorship is implicitly attributed to Chrétien, by virtue of the manner of the texts’ interpolation in the manuscripts, in an apparent act of supercherie (false advertising).

Plate 18: Walter Map presenting his book to King Henry(?); Cest lhystoire du Sainct Greaal (Paris: Antoine Cousteau for Philippe Le Noir, 1523), f. 122v. 158

See Alison Stones, ‘Illustration and the Fortunes of Arthur’, in The Fortunes of King Arthur, ed. by Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 116–65 (p. 122).

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Furthermore, as incongruous as this combination of texts might appear, it is not actually unique to these manuscripts. It is also to be found in the 1516 and 1523 early printed editions of the Estoire. The Estoire takes up the entirety of the first volume, but volume II consists of the Perlesvaus (ff. 123r–211v) and a truncated version of the Queste (ff. 211v–31r). In these editions, the opening of the Perlesvaus is marked by the inclusion of a woodcut (see the version of the 1523 edition in Plate 18; the woodcut used in the 1516 edition is different, but depicts the same scene), which is reminiscent of the opening miniature from MS fr. 113 (see above, Plate 14), a manuscript copied not more than a generation earlier. Despite the fact that the mention of Walter Map is removed from the Queste, this woodcut’s close similarity to the illumination in MS fr. 113 might suggest that this is actually supposed to depict Map presenting his book to King Henry (though Map’s lack of tonsure might again indicate a more secular stance, as in MS fr. 122; see Plate 17). That the figure in the woodcut is Map also seems likely since there are no other corresponding scenes in either the Perlesvaus or the Queste (indeed, the Perlesvaus opens with a book being delivered by an angel, a point to which I shall return shortly).159 We will recall, however, that these 1516 and 1523 editions actually make confused reference to an author within the text of the Estoire. He is named first as Robert de Boron and then as Pierre de Bosron (the latter most likely being a mistake). Owing to these editions’ excision of all other notices of authorial disclosure, one could argue for Robert as being proclaimed the author of the entire ensemble. Perhaps this woodcut, indeed, is actually meant to depict Robert delivering his book to his patron (Gautier de Montbéliard; see Chapter 5)? The kneeling figure’s full head of hair might render this possible, but the woodcut’s similarity to the many other images of Walter Map we have seen means it is difficult to state this with any certainty. I would suggest, therefore, that the 1516 and 1523 editions of the Estoire, Perlesvaus and Queste seem to conflate Robert de Boron’s onymity with the visual depiction of Walter Map. In so doing, they create a veil of pseudonymity which, whether a conscious act of supercherie or not, serves to conceal the complexity typically associated with identifying the author of the Perlesvaus. In modern scholarship, of course, the Perlesvaus is understood to be anonymous. As we saw in Chapter 2, however, there are named, if convoluted, authorities present. For example, the text proclaims in its opening lines that Josephes (a ‘bon clerc’ [a good cleric], e.g. line 56) originally received the story from an angel and then set it down in Latin. The narrator of the text before us is thus merely a translator of that Latin text, the book containing which he found in the Isle of Avalon. As with the many similar references to pre-existing source books that we have seen, it is difficult to take this claim of a Latin source or authority seriously, especially since the testimony of Josephes is often referred to by characters within the text (rather than in the narrator’s own words) as a guarantor for truthfulness. Naturally, if Josephes knew the characters personally, then he himself must have

159

As we saw in Chapter 2, at least a selection of images from this work were reused in Galliot du Pré’s 1527 Conqueste de Grece, so it is not impossible that this image came from another project; cf. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 107.

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witnessed the events. He hardly, therefore, needed to receive the story from an angel in order to write it down in Latin. In addition, and in terms of lending a sense of authority, the choice of Josephes’ name itself appears to be a device. Kelly suggests that, since the Josephes of the text is referred to as an author and priest who lived in the first century AD, he should probably be identified with Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian whose work was particularly popular in the Middle Ages. This is relevant since Glastonbury, as we saw in Chapter 2, is invoked in two manuscripts of the Perlesvaus through a reference to the ‘discovery’ of the graves of Arthur and Guinevere in Avalon,160 and Flavius Josephus was known at Glastonbury via the work of Freculf, Bishop of Lisieux († c. 852–53).161 As a result, the ‘real’ author of this text remains anonymous, hidden behind various layers of auctoritas.

Plate 19: Opening miniature of the Perlesvaus, depicting a scribe writing at the behest of a king(?); Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 11145, f. 1a.

By way of a reminder, the Perlesvaus survives more or less complete in four manuscripts. There are also two fragments, and extracts of the text are found interpolated into at least three other manuscripts, such as we saw in MS fr. 117–20 160 161

‘la o li rois Artus e la roïne gisent’ (there, where King Arthur and the queen lie) (line 10190). Kelly, Perlesvaus, p. 16. See also Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, II, pp. 176–79 and J. Neale Carman, ‘The Relationship of the Perlesvaus and the Queste del Saint Graal’, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, 5 (1936), 1–90 (pp. 16–20).

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and MS Ars. 3479–80, where Walter Map is arguably pseudonymically presented as the author of the Perlesvaus. One manuscript to contain the text in its entirety, MS Brussels 11145, opens with a (rubbed) miniature. This image has traditionally been described as a depiction of Josephes receiving the story from the angel. This would seem, therefore, to be a crucial source for the material presentation of authorship (see Plate 19).162 However, on closer inspection, it appears likely that this supposed visual depiction of authorial disclosure is not quite as it seems. The authority figure looks, for example, less like an angel and more like a king thanks to his crown and throne. Undoubtedly the person seated is writing, but we cannot be sure that this is meant to represent Josephes when the other individual clearly cannot be his source, at least not according to the text’s version of events. In which case, who is depicted here? The answer, I believe, lies in a dedication unique to MS Brussels 11145, and which is included at the end of the text. It reads: Por le seingnor de neele fist li seingnor de ca[m]brein cest liure escrire [q’] onques mes ne fu troitiez que une seule foiz auec cestui en roumenz et cil qui auant cestui fu fez et [sic] si anteus q[u’a] gr[an]t poine an peust lan choissir la lestre et sache bien misires johan de neele que lan doit tenir cest contes cheir ne lan ne doit mie dire a ient malantendable quar bone chosse qui ert espendue outre mauueses gens nest onques en bien recordee par cels. (ff. 111d–12a) (The lord of Cambrein had this book written for the lord of Neele. Only once has it been written in French and that copy is so old that it is with great difficulty that one makes out the letters. And let my good lord Johan de Neele know that this tale is one to cherish; men of ignorance should not be told it, for a good thing spread amongst bad people is never well remembered by them.)

It is this dedication that has formed the basis for much of the conjecture related to dating the Perlesvaus, including Grand’s aforementioned study, since it makes reference to a traceable individual, one Jean de Nesle. This manuscript, however, is dated to the late thirteenth century.163 It therefore cannot be the version of the text copied for Jean de Nesle since he is known to have died in 1239 (the terminus ad quem for the text’s composition).164 Rather, this dedication was probably contained in this copy’s exemplar, and was simply taken over by the scribe. This manuscript is characterised by various inaccuracies (see the confusion over et and est in the dedication, for instance) and, as a result, inattention to a matter such as the inclusion of this dedication seems not unlikely. The scribe could well have considered this passage to be original to the text and simply copied it across, since the wording is vague enough to suggest that the Perlesvaus itself was dedicated to Jean de Nesle. It is thus perfectly plausible that this miniature was also merely copied from the exemplar. If we accept this version of events, then 162

163 164

Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, I, p. 4. Colette Coolput-Storms provides a notice of this manuscript under ‘4.4. Perlesvaus’, in Arturus Rex, 1: Catalogus: Koning Artur en de Nederlanden: La matière de Bretagne dans les anciens Pays-Bas, ed. by Werner Verbeke, Jozef Janssens and Maurits Smeyers (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1987), pp. 210–12. Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, I, p. 4. Grand, ‘A Time of Gifts’, p. 138.

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we might see pictured here not Josephes and the angel, but the Lord of Cambrein commissioning the manuscript from a scribe for Jean de Nesle, rather similar to the images that we saw of Henry II commissioning Walter Map to write the Queste.165 Therefore, in MS Brussels 11145 and contrary to previous scholarship, the author-narrator of the Perlesvaus is not given illustrative treatment; rather, both he and the ‘real’ author maintain their anonymity. Additionally, given that the Perlesvaus is often referred to as a rehandling (a particularly brutal one) of Chrétien’s Conte,166 we might detect once again the sense of anonymity implied by the text as a form of ‘precautionary measure’, to return to Genette’s terminology and my examination of the First Continuation. The use of such anonymity in effect provides a form of protection against any would-be detractors who might prefer to see Chrétien’s literary workmanship remain untouched.

Disclosing Chrétien’s Authorship in the 1530 Printed Edition If Chrétien was a literary force to be reckoned with (and not to be meddled with) in the age of the medieval manuscript, then much would change by the early-modern period. We have already seen several examples of confused or conflated authorial disclosure in printed Grail texts, and the 1530 edition of Chrétien’s Conte, some of its Continuations (all except that by Gerbert) and the Bilocadran and Elucidation prequels presents yet another important scenario in this respect. Unlike many of the other Grail texts we have explored, which were repeatedly copied in the later Middle Ages and then made into printed editions at the earliest stages of the print revolution, Chrétien’s material seems to have experienced a downturn in popularity. The latest extant manuscript is the midfourteenth-century London, College of Arms, MS Arundel XIV, which appears to have been produced in England for an English audience. No lavish manuscript copies similar to those containing the Vulgate Cycle exist for Chrétien’s Grail from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In fact, no manuscript copies from this period exist at all. The 1530 mise en prose could, therefore, have been conceived of as an even riskier endeavour than those printed editions of Grail texts that were in wider and more recent circulation.167 Evidently, Chrétien’s brand had become much less powerful than it once had been, undoubtedly due in part to the mere passing of time, but probably thanks most of all to the proliferation of Arthurian prose romances and, indeed, the appearance of Malory’s Morte in England. This is made plain not only by the specific lack of mention of Chrétien’s name in the preliminary matter (such as in the frontispiece and table of contents, discussed in Chapter 2), but also and more importantly by the way in which his authorship is disclosed in the prologue to the 1530 edition (ff. 1r–v).168 There 165 166 167 168

With thanks to Miha Zor for his assistance in deciphering the probable identities of the individuals depicted in this miniature. See, for example, Norris J. Lacy, ‘Perlesvaus and the Perceval Palimpsest’, in Perceval/Parzival: A Casebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 97–103 (pp. 97–98). See Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 137. As was mentioned in Chapter 2, in those versions of the 1530 edition that also include the Elucidation and Bliocadran, Chrétien’s name is additionally removed from the moment at the end of the Elucidation where he is mentioned in MS Mons 331/206.

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is a chance that the members of the publishing team simply did not know who had authored the text, but their knowledge of other related details seems to suggest that this is unlikely. Philip of Flanders as patron is referred to by name several times, for instance. Chrétien, by contrast, is merely referred to as ‘le Chroniqueur’ (the Chronicler) who died before finishing the story.169 Jeanne of Flanders, we are told, thus had no choice but to hand the job of completing the text to a Continuator, whose name, by contrast, is included: ‘Menessier’ (f. 2v). The prologue then reduces Chrétien’s role even further, and refers to him only tangentially as ‘le p[re]desseur’ (the predecessor) of Manessier (f. 2v). This passage thus makes no mention of Chrétien’s proper name, referring only to his function(s); meanwhile, Wauchier de Denain, author of the Second Continuation, is not mentioned at all. The usual moment of Wauchier’s disclosure in medias res is, however, maintained on f. 177r, highlighted with a foliate upper-case G for ‘Gauchier de Doudain’, thus offering a further variant of his name. Additionally, the final lines of the text remove the lexical echoes of Chrétien’s prologue that we saw included in the manuscripts’ closing lines, instead stating: ‘Menessier qui le liure acheua au no[m] de Jehenne contesse de flandres de laquelle orateur et cronicqueur estoit…’ (Manessier, who brought the book to an end in the name of Jeanne, Countess of Flanders, whose orator and chronicler he was…) (f. 220r). The majority of emphasis in the 1530 edition is therefore placed on Manessier’s achievement in having completed the text; this reveals much about the changing tastes of audiences with respect to the shape of romance, indicating perhaps a growth in the preference for closure.170 By the time of print, therefore, authorial disclosure remains important as a means of marketing a text, but the associated strategies are considerably varied. There is, it seems, no perfect trend in terms of the preference for any particular format of authorial disclosure in Grail texts between 1200 and 1530, but what is clear is that different publishers deliberately and strategically deployed calculated tactics in handling the naming (or not naming) of authors. They based these tactics on what they perceived to be the needs of their market(s). It is, however, possible to discern some patterns in the ways in which those markets developed. For example, the employment of Chrétien’s name as brand, as well as of onymous naming more generally, seems to have been considered more effective in the earlier period of publication (until around the mid to late fourteenth century). By contrast, the method of conflating authorship so as to provide one pseudonymic attribution for a corpus (as in the 1516 and 1523 Estoire– Perlesvaus–Queste editions and in certain Vulgate Cycle anthologies such as MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80) seems to have held a little more sway in the later period (c. 1400 onwards). Similarly, an author’s status, or what might be termed 169

170

This designation of Chrétien as ‘Chronicler’ is, of course, rather reminiscent of Map’s being described as a historiographer in MS fr. 116. Again, we might wonder about what precisely is meant by this, since this would suggest that Chrétien perhaps undertook historiographical projects for his patrons. If we are to take this designation literally, then does this suggest a presentation of Philip as descended from the Grail family? It has often been suggested that earlier medieval audiences might have preferred middles to ends; see, for example, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘Looping the Loop through a Tale of Beginnings, Middles and Ends: From Chrétien to Gerbert in the Perceval Continuations’, Faux Titre, 183 (2000), 33–51 (p. 34).

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his or her ‘profession’, seems to have gained momentum over time as a means by which to frame the text. In the earliest examples, for instance, Chrétien de Troyes is simply depicted as a romancer – details of his social or professional status are absent. However, when Chrétien’s work finally returns to circulation in 1530, we see him deliberately designated as a ‘chronicler’. Similarly, we saw that there exists an insistence on Robert’s status as a knight in many manuscripts, while Walter Map is depicted specifically as a tonsured cleric with increasing frequency until the very latest period of production, when depictions of him start to include a full head of hair, thus deprioritising his spiritual vocation. These examples are, however, not pervasive throughout the entire corpus of manuscripts and printed editions, and they are subject to considerable ebb and flow. Robert de Boron’s name, for example, particularly in later manuscripts (c. 1480 onwards) and early printed editions seems to have held less weight, gradually becoming deprioritised and expunged (or, in the early printed editions of 1516 and 1523, inexplicably changed to Pierre). It is more constructive, I would suggest, to conclude that this survey has shown that publishers were extremely adept at tailoring their products so as to please their given audience, having at their disposal a repertoire of devices from which to choose the most appropriate for their ends. They therefore recognised the importance of the author as brand, and manipulated authorial disclosure so as to exploit it commercially. Considering whether publishers’ tactics were to use onymity, pseudonymity or anonymity has therefore proven a useful method for exploring how different audiences might have responded to Grail texts published in France. What we can now be clear about is that authorship, and its specific material presentation, definitely mattered to medieval and early-modern audiences of the Grail.

4

Re-packaging the Grail In this chapter, I explore the medieval and early-modern compilation of French Grail texts, viewing it as a method of ‘packaging’ and ‘re-packaging’ that is analogous, in respect of its purpose and effect, with the development of a modern publisher’s list or series. Following an initial discussion of this model, I mostly adopt in this chapter a more data-led approach than used in previous chapters, whereby I set out and interrogate two key datasets in respect of the compilation of Grail literature in our previously delineated corpus of artefacts. The first dataset is found in Table 2, which sorts the corpus of artefacts, first, by the particular Grail text(s) contained within and, second, by their known (or assumed) date of copying. The second dataset is contained in Table 3, in which all of the artefacts are listed according to their chronological composition, thereby giving an overview of developments across the entire corpus.1 I take each of these datasets in turn, and underpin my enquiry with several key questions: are Grail texts compiled alongside contents with identifiable generic connections (at least from our modern perspective), for example, (pseudo-)historical, religious, literary, romance, verse or prose texts?2 Can any such generic connections be relied upon to have been recognisable to medieval audiences? What types of agency drive the compilatory context(s) of a given text? Can trends be seen in how Grail texts are interpolated, compiled and bound in volumes as time moves on? What does this suggest about changing perceptions of Grail texts, and the ways in which different medieval audiences might have categorised and contextualised them? I contend that the information contained in these two datasets is strongly indicative of there having existed a growing awareness of a form of ‘generic’ relationship between Grail texts between 1200 and 1530, one which became firmly established, and almost exclusively so, from the late thirteenth century onwards.

Medieval Compilation and Publishers’ Lists: Transcending Genre In the past, it was something of a commonplace to suggest that medieval manuscript compilation was haphazard, often following no particular agenda. So-called ‘miscellanies’ were regularly held up as chief perpetrators thanks to

1 2

Both tables can be found at the end of this chapter. I operate in this chapter under the assumption that – unless there is evidence to suggest otherwise (and I will always acknowledge where this is so) – each manuscript concerned here is a single production. That is, the respective contents of each artefact were compiled together as part of the volume’s original conception.

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their apparent lack of any cohering content or theme.3 Much has been done in recent years, however, to debunk this notion. Busby, for example, expresses his strongly held belief that medieval compilers operated with intentions (as well as that it would be ‘illogical’ to suppose that texts simply end up together via sheer happenstance),4 while Ralph Hanna urges us to accept that modern generic expectations are not helpful when examining medieval collections of texts. These, Hanna argues, give rise to a double act of mediation: ‘in explaining the past to ourselves, we necessarily adopt our own language, which is to say our own estrangement from the objects of our interest.’5 Indeed, the very notion of genre is problematic enough when applied in a modern setting, since to categorise something as belonging to a particular genre is to label it using largely subjective perceptions (or judgment calls). When we then attempt to do the same to the products of medieval textual culture, we ignore the simple fact that we have no concrete way of knowing that there is any correspondence between our modern understanding of generic distinctions and those of medieval audiences.6 Nonetheless, by compiling texts alongside each other in a manuscript or early printed volume, medieval publishers in effect request that the user reads, and attempts to understand, those texts in relation to, and in association with, each other. Busby makes the helpful suggestion that, rather than attempting to apply rigid genre labels to medieval narratives, it is far more instructive to think of compilation tactics as providing a window onto what might have been conceived of as a kind of ‘generic resemblance’ between the many and varied contents of manuscripts.7 That is, the grouping of texts suggests ‘an awareness among compilers […] that texts belonged to types, even if these types are not susceptible of definition in the strictest sense of the word’.8 In short, we need to set aside our modern preconceptions and look for different kinds of interrelationships, ones which transcend (or even defy) the modern notion of genre, between the texts contained in medieval and early-modern books. This is, I suggest, where publishing concepts can help us to think with more lucidity and conceptual guidance about the matter.

3

4 5 6

7

8

For a set of perspectives on the problem of the term miscellany, see the various contributions to The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 367. Ralph Hanna III, ‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England’, in The Whole Book, pp. 37–51 (p. 37). The notion of genre in medieval literature has been explored at some length by scholars. Perhaps the most developed and helpful analysis in respect of medieval French literature is that by Simon Gaunt who, drawing upon genre theorists such as Bakhtin, Zumthor and Jauss, concludes that genres are fluid, relying largely on reader reception in order to be identified in one way or another; Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–10. For more on genre in medieval literature generally, see Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Theorie der Gattungen und Literatur des Mittelalters’, in Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. by Maurice Delbouille, 11 vols (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1972), I, pp. 107–38. Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 465; cf. also Busby’s slight change of terminology to ‘generic similarity’ in his ‘Narrative Genres’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 139–52 (p. 147). Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 465

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For instance, in talking of medieval compilation, Stephen Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel argue: ‘[f]ar from being a transparent or neutral vehicle, the codex can have a typological identity that affects the way we read and understand the texts it presents.’9 This suggests that the particular compilatory make-up of a book, in terms of organisation and choice of contents, infuses the texts contained within it with particular meaning. And, by the same token, those same texts, when compiled elsewhere and alongside other texts, take on alternative meaning(s). Here, we surely cannot fail to see a similarity between medieval compilation and the modern packaging and re-packaging of texts that publishing houses undertake in order to target different markets with the same (or similar) textual product. To illustrate what I mean by this, I take a modern example of ‘medievalinspired’ Arthuriana: John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, published first in the UK by Penguin in 1976.10 Currently, the novel is available on two of Penguin’s imprints: Modern Classics and Penguin Classics. The former imprint publishes books which ‘have caused scandal and political change, inspired great films, and broken down barriers’, while the latter is aimed at providing education (‘the domain of students and academics’) through affordable books of good editorial quality.11 The difference in target market is clearly evident in the stark contrast between the jacket design for each product – the Penguin Classic has a colourful, almost cartoon-like appearance, while the Modern Classic is greyscale and serious. Meanwhile, the two respective blurbs work similarly hard to present the text in two different ways: the Penguin Classic focuses on the well-known characters and narrative elements of the Arthurian legend, while the Modern Classic places the literary prowess of Steinbeck himself at the forefront.12 The relevance of these two distinctive ways of packaging the same text hinges upon how the publisher’s deliberate act of contextualising or categorising a work within a specific list (with a particular remit) instils new meaning in the work, leading to the potential for it to be received differently by readers. In the case of my particular example, by placing Steinbeck’s novel on two distinct imprints, Penguin contextualises the work within two separate anthologies of texts, both of which are made up of texts spanning not one, but rather a range of genres. On Modern Classics, for example, the novel appears alongside controversial, modern works such as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, thus imbuing the work with a sense of edginess and revolution. On Penguin Classics, however, Steinbeck’s text takes its place within a longer and wider history of writing that stretches from the modern day back to antiquity, with works such as Morrissey’s autobiography set alongside Homer’s The Odyssey and even children’s novels, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. 9 10

11 12

Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, ‘Introduction’, in The Whole Book, pp. 1–6 (p. 2). With thanks to Samantha J. Rayner for pointing out this example in a joint paper we delivered at the International Congress of the International Arthurian Society in Bucharest in 2014. ‘About Penguin Classics’, available at: . The Penguin Classics cover and blurb are available at: , while those of the Modern Classics incarnation can be viewed at: .

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These two discrete endeavours to re-package the same text, both of which transcend the matter of genre, create two distinctive frames through which the reader views the text and which, in turn, affects his or her reading of it. This, I suggest, is indicative of how we should perhaps consider medieval and earlymodern compilation. Just because there is not always an obvious thematic or narrative coherence between a given set of texts, this means neither that no similarities exist between them nor that such similarities cannot be brought to light through an external party’s act of compiling them together.13 I am arguing, in other words, that the tactics of medieval (and early-modern) compilation may not be all that dissimilar from those applied to the construction (or, increasingly, curation)14 of modern publishing lists or series, where the aim is rarely to suggest that a text belongs to a given genre. Rather the objective is to intimate that a text will appeal to readers with particular kinds of tastes or interests by deliberately amplifying some form of generic similarity that it shares with the texts alongside which it is to be positioned. Thus, any given text, if shrewdly (re-)packaged (or compiled, in the case of the medieval/early-modern book), can appeal to more than one kind of reader and need not be constrained by the rigid and problematic boundaries of genre. With this in mind, I now turn to the matter of compilation in our corpus of artefacts to see if this concept of packaging and compiling volumes according to generic similarity can help us to unravel some of the trends and tastes associated with the publication of French Grail literature.

Re-packaging the Grail: Text by Text I begin with a brief enumeration of the data contained in Table 2, which sets out the chronology of compilation sorted according to the Grail text(s) contained within the volume. The artefacts containing Chrétien’s Conte and its Continuations demonstrate several key trends. The only volumes that contain the Conte on its own (that is, in what Pohl terms as ‘independents’)15 appear at

13

14

15

Stephen G. Nichols refers to such volumes (that is, those containing diverse writings that, by virtue of their compilation together, take on an overarching meaning which might be religious, philosophical, historical or political) as pandects. The makers of pandects, he says, choose an ordering principle that specifically ‘shows the contents off to aesthetic and moral advantage’, an idea which chimes well with that which I am suggesting here – that compilers are attempting, deliberately, to cultivate a given coherence and thus display texts to a particular, circumscribed advantage: ‘“Art” and “Nature”: Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan Chansonnier N (Morgan 819)’, in The Whole Book, pp. 83–121 (pp. 85 and 119–20). The notion of publishers as curators is one that is now so frequently bandied that it has become a commonplace. In essence, in a world where publication formats extend far beyond the traditional book, publishers now describe their business as one that involves packaging, presenting and archiving content according to market forces; in other words, they curate the content licensed to them as a means of adding value. See Anna Faherty, ‘Editor or Curator’, The Bookseller, 25 January 2016 . Manuscripts containing only a single work; see Benjamin Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (York: York Medieval Press, 2015), p. 51.

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the very earliest stages of transmission – specifically MSS Clermont-Ferrand 248 and Florence 2943 in the early thirteenth century. Additionally, this same earlier part of the tradition sees the Conte placed amongst Chrétien’s œuvres complètes alongside what are otherwise usually designated as (pseudo-)historical texts in two examples.16 These are MSS fr. 794 (which sandwiches Athis et Prophilas, Le roman de Troie and Le roman de Brut in between Chrétien’s works),17 and fr. 1450 (which interpolates Chrétien’s works, except the Charrette, into the middle of Wace’s Brut).18 These examples suggest that there was a fairly early acceptance of Chrétien’s romances as constituting a single body of work, and one that could be picked up and placed wholesale into other contexts.19 Additionally, BL Add. 36614 presents the Conte alongside both of its prequels and the first two Continuations, and suffixes the Grail narratives with a saint’s life: La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne. This manuscript is of particular importance since it shows a very early move towards canonising the Conte alongside its prequels and sequels, and I return to this below. In the mid thirteenth century the Conte is placed into a collected volume in MS Bern 354 (containing a large number of dits and fabliaux, as well as the pseudohistorical Le roman des sept sages de Rome), while the Second Continuation forms part of a collected volume in MS Bern 113 (where it finds itself as the second of fourteen chapters, amongst which there are romances, chansons de geste, fabliaux and chronicles). These are the only two such collected volume manuscripts in the transmission history of the Conte and its Continuations in which a sense of internal coherence is not immediately obvious, and I will return to the contextualisation of these works within such collections in a moment. The subsequent part of the tradition (the mid to late thirteenth centuries onwards), meanwhile, sees the rise of the Conte and its Continuations as starting to form a discrete kind of corpus. Reflecting the slightly earlier model of MS Add. 36614, from the mid thirteenth century onwards the Conte increasingly appears as a ‘cycle’,20 complete with Continuations (as well as with prequels in MS Mons 331/206 and the 1530 edition). In fact, from the late thirteenth century, editions of these texts present the narratives divorced from other contents in almost every case – there are

16

17

18

19 20

Possibly three, if we are to understand the Annonay fragments as having originally formed an œuvres complètes volume; cf. Busby and Kleinhenz, ‘Medieval French and Italian literature’, p. 221. Erec et Enide, the Charrette, Cligés and Yvain open the manuscript, while the Conte plus the First Continuation and a fragment of the Second Continuation close the volume. However, there is evidence to suggest that this manuscript has been reordered at some point in its history thanks to Guiot’s closing colophon (pictured in Plate 1) appearing at the end of Yvain, thus suggesting that this text might have been intended as the book’s final chapter. I set out reasons as to why it might not be as simple as this in my The Continuations, p. 29. Even if the texts were bound differently, the only slightly later (late thirteenth-century) contents list tells us that the current order was in place at a very early moment in the codex’s life. Before the Brut are Le roman de Troie and Le roman d’Enéas, and after it is Le roman de Dolopathos. The First Continuation appears between the Conte and Cligés. Middleton suggests that the Roman de Dolopathos is not obviously connected to the other contents (‘The Manuscripts’, p. 16), but I would suggest that since it is derived from Le roman des sept sages de Rome, a text that is compiled with the Conte elsewhere, it does not seem all that incongruous here. See Busby, ‘The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 64–75 (p. 65). To borrow Hinton’s terminology; The Conte du Graal Cycle, pp. 5–7.

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just two exceptions.21 These are MSS fr. 12576 (which also includes La mort du Conte de Henau, a list of debts, Le roman de Miserere and Le roman de Carité) and Montpellier H249 (which suffixes the texts with the Salut d’Amour). However, the supplementary texts included in both of these volumes are thought to be later additions,22 which suggests their original conception might actually have fitted the proposed pattern. The tradition of the Conte and its Continuations, therefore, indicates two clear shifts: the first charts the compilation of the Conte as a standalone text (or independent) towards its interpolation amongst historical and religious texts; the second gathers momentum in the second half of the tradition (from the late thirteenth century onwards), building on the two early examples of the cyclification adumbrated in MSS Add. 36614 and Advocates’ 19.1.5, whereby the Conte is only ever compiled alongside a selection of its prequels and/or Continuations. These shifts in the tradition of the Conte and its Continuations have, of course, been noted elsewhere by scholars such as Nixon and Middleton.23 However, by considering them alongside those indicated by the other artefacts containing French Grail literature, I believe we can gain a broader and richer understanding of them. I move, therefore, to Robert de Boron’s Joseph, where it seems that whether compiling the verse or prose version, the text is always accompanied by Robert’s Merlin. This indicates that these two texts were probably conceived of, from the beginning, as forming a unit. Two of the manuscripts attach continuations to the end of Merlin – the Suite du Merlin in the case of MS Add. 38117 and the Suite Vulgate in the case of MS Beinecke 227. Meanwhile, the anonymously authored Didot-Perceval appears after Merlin in both MSS Modena E 39 and n. a. fr. 4166. All of these three post-Merlin chapters carry some sense that they are directly linked to the combination of Robert’s Joseph and Merlin, with no overt indication of the involvement of a new or different author. As we learnt in Chapter 3, the Didot-Perceval has even been theorised (although this is now largely discredited) as having been authored by Robert, since it would represent a direct response to several of the narrative promises set out in his Joseph. Thus, there are only two manuscripts that include texts not overtly linked to the Joseph but which, through their treatment of spiritual matters, seem to claim an indirect connection. These are MSS Modena E 39 (which also contains an Old French Lapidaire) and fr. 423 (in which the Joseph is preceded by a series of pious works), both of which are from the early to mid thirteenth century. Since the manuscripts of the Joseph come from across a fairly broad time spectrum, and persistently compile Robert’s works together (only rarely including contents obviously authored by others), they can reasonably be argued as demonstrating a resolute and consistent awareness of Robert’s authorship of this body of work. This additionally supports the idea of authorship as a legitimate brand in medieval publishing, as was explored in Chapter 3. It also chimes well with Busby’s implication (noted in respect 21 22 23

I set aside the various fragments here (Brussels, Brussels BR and MS E122/100/13B), since these particular examples can tell us little about compilation owing to the level of mutilation. For MS fr. 12576, see Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’, pp. 49–50; for MS Montpelier H249, see Walters, ‘The Image of Blanchefleur’, p. 450; I return to these additions later. See Terry Nixon, ‘Romance Collections and the Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, II, pp. 17–25 and Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 16–18.

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of Chrétien, but which I suggest is also applicable elsewhere) that medieval awareness of authorship seems to have been consolidated by the relatively frequent appearance of author collections.24 Thus, authorship might well have constituted a characteristic of one of the text types (or generic resemblances) that medieval compilers could seize upon when compiling a volume. The manuscripts of the Joseph certainly seem to provide an example of this, except, that is, where we find extracts from the Joseph interpolated into the manuscripts of the Vulgate Cycle. The artefacts of the Vulgate Cycle are many and varied in terms of their contents. Importantly, though, the Cycle’s constituent texts rarely appear in manuscripts that contain other, less overtly related texts. Looking again at Table 2, we can note just four examples. These are MSS fr. 12581 (often called a ‘miscellany’, as it includes the Queste as the first item in a long list of varied texts such as chansons and fabliaux); fr. 770 (which includes three more historically oriented texts after the end of the Suite Vulgate: L’Histoire d’Outremer et du roi Saladin, La fille du Comte de Ponthieu and L’Ordre de chevalerie); fr. 95 (which contains the same Vulgate Cycle texts as fr. 770, but these are followed instead by Le roman des sept sages de Rome and La Pénitance Adam); Ars. 5218 (which contains the Queste followed by a set of church annals). Similarly, it is only rarely that Vulgate Cycle texts appear entirely on their own as independents. The most likely text to be found in an independent is the Estoire, with five examples. These are MSS Douce 303, Brussels 9246, fr. 1427, Le Mans 354 and St Petersburg Fr.F.v.XV.5, though in the last two of these, and as alluded to earlier, the narrative also contains interpolations from Robert’s Joseph. We can also see that composite Vulgate Cycle artefacts throughout the tradition most frequently commence with either the Estoire (sixteen cases) or Lancelot (seventeen cases) as the opening chapter. Where it is the Estoire that commences the volume, it is most usually followed by Merlin and the Suite Vulgate (ten cases), while an opening chapter of Lancelot is always followed by the Queste. The Queste, meanwhile, appears in thirty-one of our artefacts, and in twenty-four of these it is followed by the Mort Artu. In only three of the remaining seven artefacts can we be fairly certain that the Mort Artu was never intended for inclusion: MS fr. 12851 (discussed above) and the 1516 and 1523 editions. We must therefore conclude that the Queste and Mort Artu were considered largely inseparable. Just six manuscripts place the Queste and Estoire in the same volume (or set of volumes). The first three of these are MSS Add. 10292–94, Royal 14 E III and Rylands 1 (when taken together with ex-BPH 1 and Douce 215), all three of which appear to have been produced c. 1315–25, and probably by the same production team. The other three are MSS fr. 113–16, fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80. These all come from the fifteenth century and seem, again, to have been produced by a single team. MSS fr. 113–16 and fr. 117–20 were both made for Jacques d’Armanac, Duke of Nemours, while Ars. 3479–80 is a direct copy of fr. 117–20.25 Due to the presence of a single publishing team for each of the groups of three manuscripts, the practice of placing the Estoire into the same volume as the Queste is perhaps even less widespread than the existence of six examples would usually suggest. 24 25

Busby, ‘The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances’, p. 65. I return to these two triptychs of manuscripts in greater detail in Chapter 5.

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This said, the early printed ‘sister editions’ of 1516 and 1523 also compile the Queste and the Estoire into the same volume. In terms of an overall picture of the sequencing trends associated with Vulgate Cycle texts, what emerges by the end of the tradition (demarcated in our corpus by the production of the 1523 edition) is an increasing preference for the particular combination of Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu, with fourteen examples, which is by far the most frequently witnessed sequence. Finally, it is worth noting that, in the very latest part of the tradition, a short extract of the Perlesvaus also finds itself interpolated into the cycle, being present in four examples, two of which are the 1516 and 1523 printed editions, and the other two are MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80 (the latter being a direct copy of the former, as noted above). Taken together, these observations of the compilation of Vulgate Cycle texts show that Vulgate Grail narratives are subject to several different compilatory trends – the various texts of the Vulgate Cycle (and seldom all at once) are combined in a variety of sequences. What stands out above all else, however, is simply that Vulgate Cycle texts most frequently find themselves bound only in combination with each other. They are rarely to be found as independents, and they are equally rarely to be found in composite volumes that also contain non-Vulgate (and non-Grail) narratives. Finally, I come to the Perlesvaus. Aside from the relatively late Vulgate Cycle artefacts that I have just mentioned as containing an extract of the Perlesvaus, this text follows a slightly more unusual transmission history if we compare its compilation with our other Grail texts. At the earlier stage of transmission (that is, up until the late thirteenth century; there are no fourteenth-century witnesses), and with one exception, the Perlesvaus only ever appears in independents. The manuscripts concerned are MSS Hatton 82, fr. 1428 and Brussels 11145. The exception is the mid-thirteenth-century MS Chantilly 472, in which a fragmentary Perlesvaus is compiled into what appears to be a mostly Arthurian verse anthology, alongside such texts as Fergus, Le bel inconnu and three of Chrétien’s romances (Erec et Enide, Yvain and the Charrette); I return to this compilation below. In a loose sense, then, the transmission tradition of the Perlesvaus to some degree mirrors the path of the Conte du Graal, moving from its compilation in independents through to its interpolation into a Grail cycle that takes up an entire volume in its own right. However, the extract of the Perlesvaus contained within MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80 is so brief as for it to be difficult for a reader (medieval or modern) to distinguish it as separate from the accompanying Vulgate Cycle texts; in short, the evidence for the Perlesvaus’ cyclical compilation in manuscript is rather more implicit than explicit. The text’s more pronounced appearance in the 1516 and 1523 printed editions, however, does suggest more firmly that the Perlesvaus had been absorbed and accepted into the wider corpus of Grail literature by the sixteenth century.26

26

Adolph Benjamin Swanson, speaking of the 1516 and 1523 editions, suggests that the introduction of the Perlesvaus into the Vulgate Cycle represents an attempt to make the Trinity a ‘unifying doctrine’ for the volume. If true, the same might also reasonably be suggested for MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80: A Study of the 1516 and the 1523 Editions of the Perlesvaus (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1934), p. 5.

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These brief initial observations of the compilation of each respective text offer a useful starting point for a more significant discussion, since they provide some broad-spectrum indications of the possible changing perceptions of patrons and publishers as to how our Grail texts should be contextualised and categorised across their medieval and early-modern transmission. Some trends noted here are strongly evidenced, with witnesses provided in considerable numbers, where others are more general and less explicit, typically relying on a smaller corpus of witnesses. Sharper and more meaningful trends emerge, however, when we step back and apply the same methodology to our entire corpus of French Grail literature. I refer now, therefore, to Table 3, which sets out the compilation of all artefacts in our corpus, sorted by their established or presumed chronology of composition. Whilst there are obvious exceptions and overlaps to the suggestions I make here, I nonetheless believe it is possible to discern from this dataset three chronologically governed (or at least chronologically specific) trends in the compilation of medieval French Grail literature. These trends, I contend, suggest that the perceptions of French publishers and patrons as to how Grail texts should be categorised developed in chorus with each other over time, and that the nature of such categorisation metamorphosed concurrently in respect of the entire body of Grail literature, and not just in relation to individual narratives.

The Independent Trend Looking at the manuscripts dating to between c. 1200 and 1310, we see that Grail texts are bound on their own as independents with reasonable frequency, as is the case for the Conte in MSS Clermont-Ferrand 248 and Florence 2943; for the Perlesvaus in MSS Hatton 82, fr. 1428 and Brussels 11145; for the Estoire in MSS Douce 303, Le Mans 354 and St Petersburg Fr.F.v.XV.5 (the last two interpolating extracts from the Joseph). Just one example of an independent comes from a later period, and that is MS Brussels 9246, which contains the unusual fifteenthcentury translation from Picard to ‘modern’ French of the Estoire that was mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3. Independents in vernacular literature, as a general rule, do largely seem to be a product of earlier production processes,27 and their survival seems just as rare amongst French Grail romances as it is more generally. Middleton questions whether this is because the production of independents was rare, or because their preservation was rare. He points out that larger, richer, often more illustrated volumes, simply by virtue of their costs of production, inevitably stood a greater chance of being preserved once read. 28 Since the independents concerned were composed at the cusp of the transition between oral and written culture, there might also be something about their intended use that made books of short length and/or diminutive size (as all of these books are, in relative terms) a preferred format at an earlier point of transmission. One possible, if controversial, option hinges upon whether 27

28

See Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 19–20. In fact, independents seem to be a product of early transmission in the case of other forms of medieval writing too, such as historiography; see Pohl, Dudo of St-Quentin, pp. 54–55. Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 18.

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a book was aimed less at reading (either to oneself or aloud to a group) and more at preparation for performance, or put another way, the learning of lines. Verse romances, after all, were likely to have been performed (even sung) when originally composed, and performers might have needed a script for rehearsal. Whether such items existed or whether jongleurs were even literate, however, are subjects of considerable debate.29 In support of the scenario is the appearance of some of the manuscripts. For example, MSS Clermont-Ferrand 248 and Florence 2943 are described as ‘modest in appearance, and frankly scruffy in the case of the Florence copy, which cannot possibly have been intended for sale’.30 One or both, therefore, might conceivably have been an economical, pocket-sized copy designed merely for the learning of lines.31 In the end it is impossible to know just how common independents were, and it is even more difficult to argue as to the possible uses that might explain such small, economical formats for, whilst none of them is among the most luxuriously adorned or robustly sized, all (perhaps with the exception of MS Hatton 82) are at least slightly more decorative than MSS Clermont-Ferrand 248 and Florence 2943. Whatever the intended use of these independents, there is nonetheless a publication trend to be remarked upon here in which Grail texts are compiled alone only for a limited period. This period is confined to the early period of transmission, dying out almost entirely by 1310. I shall henceforth refer to this movement as the Independent Trend.

The Anthology Trend Overlapping considerably with the Independent Trend is a second movement, which I shall term the Anthology Trend, and which appears to start in the first quarter of the thirteenth century and continues until around 1290. Here, Grail narratives form chapters in volumes containing a series of texts which, to our modern eyes, might have the appearance of incongruity. However, following our earlier reasoning that the compilation of texts together within a manuscript serves as an indication that contents were perceived to be ‘of a kind’, such artefacts may (and usually do) possess some kind of internal coherence. There are a number of manuscripts that fall under this heading, but I start with those that have at times been categorised under the problematic heading of ‘miscellanies’ thanks to the

29 30 31

An overview of the issue is provided by Andrew Taylor, ‘The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript’, Speculum, 66 (1991), 43–73. Busby, ‘The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances’, p. 70. This said, Joseph J. Duggan sets out very specific criteria as to what would count as a ‘manuscrit de jongleur’, if we embrace the idea that such an item existed. Not one artefact from our corpus of Grail manuscripts actually fits these criteria perfectly. MSS ClermontFerrand 248 and Florence 2943 are the closest contenders, but are still just slightly too large at over 200mm in length); see his ‘The Manuscript Corpus of the Medieval Romance Epic’, in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic: Essays in Honour of David J. A. Ross, ed. by Peter Noble, Lucie Polak and Claire Isoz (New York: Kraus, 1982), pp. 29–42.

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seemingly varied nature of their contents: MSS Bern 113, Bern 354 and fr. 12581.32 In all three cases, work has been done to identify the kinds of connections that medieval planners and readers might have made between the various contents of these manuscripts, particularly in respect of the first two, as I outline here. In the case of MS Bern 113,33 a manuscript containing works in verse and prose which span romances, didactic works, historical works and chansons de geste, Busby identifies in all some link (sometimes more implicit than explicit) to the Holy Land, and specifically French relations with it.34 Of MS Bern 354, which contains fabliaux and short stories, the Roman des sept sages de Rome and the Conte,35 Busby notes that there is a slant towards the ‘comic or burlesque’ in a good number of the contents, even in those that are not fabliaux, leading him to conclude that the codex’s primary use is rooted in ‘post-prandial entertainment’.36 The overall composition of MS fr. 12581, which contains a wide selection of contents including chansons, gospels, a treatise on falconry and Brunetto Latini’s Trésor amongst other compositions,37 has received less detailed attention (although various studies do exist concerning its individual contents). However, in a study of another collected manuscript in the Bibliothèque national de France – MS fr. 25545 –, Ariane Bottex-Ferragne argues for a didactic undertone that she sees as reflected in the compilation of several other manuscripts, amongst which she lists MS fr. 12581.38 In other words, she pinpoints a connecting factor between all of the texts that, in essence, has to do with instruction. Such an interpretation is supported by the identification by Claire M. Waters of several of MS fr. 12581’s illuminations as being didactic in character, such as that on f. 408r, which shows a father teaching his son.39 To some degree, one could return to Gaunt’s suggestion that notions of generic likeness are in essence imposed by readers – it is only through their interpretation that such designations are made. Therefore, the connections suggested by modern scholars as cohering the contents of manuscripts such as MSS Bern 113, Bern 354 and fr. 12581 must always be viewed with some caution 32

33

34 35

36 37

38 39

For example, the captions to images of MS Bern 354 in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes describe it as a ‘Verse Miscellany’, pp. 398–99, while Tara Mendola sees MS Bern 113 as amongst a series of ‘miscellanies’ that she studies in ‘Traveling Companions: Narrative Diffusion of Floire et Blancheflor in Medieval Miscellany, 1325–1400’, Narrative Culture, 2 (2015), 227–49. Similarly, Stones refers to MS fr. 12581 as a miscellany in her list of manuscripts on her online The Lancelot-Graal Project. In his edition of Durmart le Galois (one of the contents of MS Bern 113, which is the only extant witness of this text), Joseph Gildea provides a full description and list of contents of the manuscript, Durmart le Galois, roman arthurien du treizième siècle, 2 vols (Villanova: Villanova Press, 1965–66), I, pp. 7–17. Busby, Codex and Context, I, pp. 431–34. A full description is provided by Jean Rychner, ‘Deux copistes au travail: Pour une étude textuelle globale du manuscript 354 de la Bibliothèque de la Bourgeoisie de Bern’, in Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T. B. W. Reid, ed. by Ian Short (London: The AngloNorman Text Society, 1984), pp. 187–218. See also Luciano Rossi, ‘À propos de l’histoire de quelques recueils de fabliaux: 1. Le code de Berne’, Le moyen français, 13 (1983), 58–94. Busby, Codex and Context, I, pp. 444–45 (see also pp. 413–15). Huw Grange provides a full description as part of the University of Kent’s Elucidarium Project, available at . Ariane Bottex-Ferragne, ‘L’Esprit du bourgeois ou l’esprit du bourg: Le siècle dans tous ses états dans le manuscript de Paris, BNF, fr. 25545’, Études françaises, 48 (2012), 127–51 (p. 131). Claire M. Waters, Translating ‘Clergie’: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 20–24.

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as, even if they provide evidence that miscellanies were rarely miscellaneous, we still cannot suppose that the very same connection would have been drawn by medieval readers.40 Nonetheless, what we can observe with some certainty here is that Grail narratives had the capacity to be placed into obviously different compilatory contexts, even if it is sometimes hard for us to define precisely what those contexts were. There are, however, examples of the compilation of Grail literature with otherwise unfamiliar bedfellows where such contexts seem, at least to our modern eyes, more obvious: that is to say where the varying contents appear to be (or at least can more easily be reflected upon as being) linked by a key topic. Textual collections of this ilk might best be referred to as anthologies, hence my naming this second trend the Anthology Trend. The most obvious example is probably MS Chantilly 472, which contains a collection of Arthurian narratives (mostly in verse, with the Perlesvaus as the exception; the only non-Arthurian item is the selection of branches from the Roman de Renart).41 Arthurian matter might seem to be a perfectly logical connecting subject for compilation to a modern audience, but the extant medieval tradition suggests something rather different. MS Chantilly 472 is in fact a relatively rare example of an almost purely Arthurian anthology,42 a situation which is also reflected in the Arthurian manuscript tradition in England.43 The physical structure of MS Chantilly 472 is rather complex, and there are a number of different scribes at work, which has made it difficult to determine for certain whether the manuscript as we have it now is the same as would have originally been conceived.44 Something suggesting it is so is the fact that there is a clearly concerted effort made to gather these texts together by, on the one hand, removing/reducing various prologues and, on the other, including the prologue of the Perlesvaus which, as Walters argues, is important since it lends the text ‘extra authority by appearing to impose its principle of “branch composition” on the entire collection’.45 The comparative rarity of the Arthurian anthology might well suggest that individual Arthurian texts were far more likely to have been understood by medieval audiences as connected with non-Arthurian texts, than with each other.46 Indeed, Busby suggests that the absence of other non-Arthurian contents might indicate that the compiler/planner/patron/publisher of MS Chantilly 472 took a ‘view of Arthurian romance as a popular rather than a learned form’.47 What Busby is referring to here is the fact that it is far more usual to see Grail 40

41

42 43

44 45 46 47

Busby and Kleinhenz also warn against the tendency towards exaggeration, as well as artificiality, in such modern interpretations of compilations in recueils, ‘Medieval French and Italian literature’, pp. 219 and 224. Busby suggests that the manuscript is in fact a ‘Gauvain cycle’ and analyses in a brief but convincing discussion the way in which each of the manuscript’s contents explores ‘the potential and limitations of the figure of Gauvain’, Codex and Context, I, pp. 409–13. That is, where the contents are Arthurian, but not specifically Grail-related. See Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘Keeping Company: Manuscript Contexts for Reading Arthurian Quest Narratives’, in The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur, ed. by Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 109–25 (p. 120). Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 16. Walters, ‘Manuscript Compilations’, p. 473. Eckhardt makes a similar assertion in ‘Keeping Company’, p. 120. Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 409.

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texts (as well as Arthurian texts more generally) compiled in anthologies containing (pseudo-)historically or spiritually oriented texts. Within our corpus of manuscripts, such anthologies are represented by MSS Modena E 39, fr. 770, fr. 794, fr. 1450, fr. 423, Ars. 5218 and the combination of MSS fr. 95 and Beinecke 229, which once formed a unit alongside a now lost third manuscript.48 The reasonably obvious connections between the non-Grail contents of these manuscripts have readily been suggested as frames through which we should understand medieval audiences’ reading(s) of the Grail-related contents of each. For example, MSS fr. 794 and fr. 1450 are very frequently discussed in respect of their compilation of pseudo-historical romans antiques alongside the romances of Chrétien (as detailed above) which, it is suggested, is indicative of a medieval blurring of the line between fact and fiction.49 Richard Trachsler discusses this at some length and suggests that such blurring may be to do with the fact that there is an affinity between romance and chronicle that is rooted in recounting res gestae of the past, as well as that the writers and audiences of both text types were often shared.50 Meanwhile, in the case of MSS Modena E 39 and fr. 423’s respective compilations of Robert’s Joseph and Merlin alongside a lapidary and a series of pious works, it requires little imagination to make the leap to identifying a common connection between the texts that is related to spiritual matters. Something similar can be said for MS fr. 95’s inclusion of Le roman des sept sages de Rome and La Pénitance Adam, so long as we embrace the idea that the Estoire ‘se présente comme un apocryphe du Nouveau Testament, une sorte de continuation des Évangiles’ (is presented as an apocryphal story of the New Testament, a kind of continuation of the Gospels),51 while the inclusion of crusading-related contents in MS fr. 770 has led scholars to suggest a medieval reading of the Estoire that turned on deeds related to overseas wars and pilgrimage.52 Finally, MS Ars. 5218’s compilation of church annals, as well as its programme of illumination, gave Lori Walters grounds to argue that the manuscript’s medieval planner/reader read the Queste

48 49

50 51

52

Alison Stones, ‘The Illustrations of BN, fr. 95 and Yale 229: Prolegomena to a Comparative Analysis’, in Word and Image, pp. 206–63. See, for example, Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 16–17; Nixon, ‘Romance Collections’, p. 17, Walters ‘Le rôle du scribe’; see also Busby’s assertion that this form of compilation places the works of Chrétien ‘in the context of translatio studii et imperii’, ‘The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances’, p. 66. Of course, fact versus fiction in the medieval world is a subject much studied, and so the existence of such mixed anthologies is hardly a surprise; see, for example, Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. Section 3. Richard Trachsler, ‘A Question of Time: Romance and History’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail, pp. 23–32 (pp. 23–25). See Jean-Marie Fritz’s chapter, in which a set of rationales is laid out as to why the compilation of these texts ‘n’est pas aussi incongrue qu’il n’y paraît’ (is not as incongruous as it seems): ‘Mise en scène de la translatio dans les Vies médiévales d’Adam et Ève’, in La transmission des savoirs au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, 1: Du XIIe au XVe siècle, ed. by Pierre Nobel (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2005), pp. 99–118 (p. 110). See, for example, François Berriot, ‘Descriptions manuscrites de Jérusalem (XIIIe siècle)’, in Le mythe de Jérusalem: Du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, ed. by Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1995), pp. 59–78 (pp. 60–61). Cf. Nicholson, Love, War, and the Grail, pp. 178–80, who discusses the argument as to whether Robert’s Estoire was written in the Latin East; arguably, therefore, it could be connected to the non-Grail texts of MS fr. 770 via this link.

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in light of church history.53 As mentioned above, most of this anthologising of Grail material takes place in the thirteenth century and then wanes. MS Ars. 5218 is in fact the only later example and, as an apparent exception owing to its late date of composition, it deserves some consideration. MS Ars. 5218 presents a rather peculiar case, since it is one of the only Grail manuscripts where there is a strong indication that it was copied for an abbey library and possibly even within a monastic setting, specifically the Benedictine monastery of St-Martin de Tournai.54 I discussed the planner of this manuscript, Pierart dou Tielt, in Chapter 3. What is of particular interest here, though, is the question as to whether the church annals are in fact contemporary with the manuscript’s original conception, since that affects the trend to which this manuscript should be assigned. If the annals are original, then the manuscript would fit the Anthology Trend; if they are not, then it would fit the Independent Trend. Either way, the manuscript was composed far later than the majority of the other artefacts belonging to either trend. We could simply put this anteriority down to the probable monastic circumstances surrounding its creation, which mean it might not have been produced according to the same commercial demands, or for the same kind of purpose or audience, as the majority of our other artefacts. This might well help to explain there being a compilatory difference between MS Ars. 5218 and artefacts produced at around the same time. However, upon inspection, it seems to me that there is room to suggest that other contents may have originally been planned for this book, items which might have served to change its trend designation. Walters’ analysis of this manuscript is robust and, working with Middleton, she sets out her view of the manuscript’s compilation. She acknowledges that it remains difficult to be sure as to whether the annals are a later addition. On the one hand, they commence in a new gathering, and three folia in the final quire of the Queste are left blank, so there is clear space between the two works. However, aspects of decoration, ruling and page layout are so closely aligned that the two do seem to have been created around the same time. Thus, she leans towards the idea that the Queste and the annals were composed concurrently, but as separate works (with Pierart perhaps moving back and forth between them), and that they ended up compiled together as an afterthought, rather than as part of the original plan.55 I would echo that this seems to be a likely scenario, having noted additionally that the parchment itself seems to be marginally thinner for the annals than for the Queste, perhaps indicating a different batch (or even supplier). My inspection of the quire structure, however, reveals a little more information, which does not negate, but rather adds to, Walters’ conclusions. The structure of the codex as preserved today is 1–118, 126, 138, 147. The Queste is present in quires 1–12, of which all are regular quaternions, except the twelfth of which is a ternion. Since the final lines of the Queste take up the first three folia of this final quire and the final three folia are blank, I suspect that this quire was originally also a quaternion but that, at some point in its history – probably when rebound –, 53 54 55

Walters, ‘Wonders and Illuminations’, p. 339. Ibid., pp. 339 and 351. Ibid., p. 351; see also Middleton’s notes on the manuscript reproduced in Walters’, p. 369, n. 41.

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the quire’s central bifolium (the only one upon which there would have been no text) was removed. There is a blank bifolium with identical ruling included at the beginning of the manuscript which is used to make up the front paste-down and a flyleaf. This is probably the missing bifolium. The annals then commence at the beginning of quire 13 (another quaternion) and run as far as three and a half folios into quire 14 (which in its current state of preservation is an irregular with seven folia), leaving the equivalent of three and a half folia of blank parchment. Again, I suspect that the final quire was once also a quaternion, but that the final folio was cut out at some point. This is difficult to be sure of thanks to the tightly packed nature of the binding, within which the seventh folio of the quire is used as the end paste-down. It does, however, look as if the first folio of the quire is a single (or half-sheet) due to a slight fold visible in the gutter. The question of the large amount of blank parchment in this manuscript is where I think more can be added to existing scholarship. Middleton has suggested that Pierart simply prepared more parchment than he needed,56 but I think there could be a more practical explanation based on the commonly held understanding that blank folia often indicate an original desire to add more material.57 Evidence for this is actually provided by MS Ars. 5218’s own annals, whereby blank leaves are mostly likely included to allow for the addition of the events of later years, a practice widely seen in other cases involving similar kinds of historical and/or commemorative records, such as mortuary rolls, necrologies and libri vitae. The annals in MS Ars. 5218, after all, end at 1281, and the manuscript was composed in 1351, so there would already have been a further seventy years’ worth of activity to include at the moment when Pierart’s pen came to rest. The blank leaves at the end of the Queste are more perplexing, especially since Pierart includes both his colophon and a clear ‘Explicit’ of the Queste here, as discussed in Chapter 3, which perhaps suggests an intention to end at this moment. However, had Pierart planned to terminate the manuscript with the Queste, which as mentioned above only occupies the first three folia (or six pages) of quire 14, it would actually have sufficed to make this final quire a binion (which is the smallest quire unit to offer the space required, and even then there still would have been one blank folio remaining at the end). There is, I suggest, a chance that he actually planned to start another text at the top of the next blank folio following the Queste, or perhaps even directly after the explicit of the Queste (in the same column). I noted above that the compilation history of our artefacts set out in Table 3 shows that, in nearly every instance, the Queste is followed by the Mort Artu. Is it possible that Pierart might originally have planned to start the Mort Artu at the top of the next folio, or even straight after the Queste’s explicit, but for some reason did not complete the endeavour? The positioning of Pierart’s colophon at the end of the Queste suggests this might not

56 57

Ibid., p. 369, n. 41. Good examples of folia left blank precisely with the intention of adding additional texts and/ or continuations include those discussed by Mary J. O’Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 24 and Jan Broadway, ‘No Historie So Meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 81.

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be the case, though it would not be the only example in our corpus of a scribal colophon appearing in the middle of a manuscript (cf. the discussion of MSS fr. 794 and fr. 12581 in Chapter 3). It is impossible to ascertain whether the Queste in MS Ars. 5218 was originally designed to be accompanied by a copy of the Mort Artu, but the transmission of the Queste elsewhere suggests that it is not outside of the realms of possibility. If that were the case, and we accepted that the annals were indeed some kind of an afterthought (even if a very early one), then MS Ars. 5218’s designation would actually be to a third trend (see below), and this would mean it were no longer an exception to the typical chronology of compilation that is beginning to emerge here. To conclude, up until around 1300, the compilation of Grail literature seems largely to have been driven by an interlacing of the Independent and Anthology Trends. These differing ways of (re-)packaging Grail literature might suggest that publishers of, and audiences for, Grail literature were still developing and negotiating their ideas as to where these texts best fitted – were Grail texts a new and discrete text type that should sit alone, or could a meaningful reading be gleaned by embedding them with other, popular text types of the time? Since both trends have a good number of extant witnesses, we can assume that neither tactic was a one-off experiment, but that there was also no particular sense that the compilation of Grail literature should operate according to a single set of rules. However, the third trend that I am about to describe shows that, following about a century’s worth of varied approaches, there came a fairly swift consolidation of ideas as to how Grail literature should be compiled, and this consolidation actually saw the almost complete suppression of the Independent and Anthology Trends.

The Cycle Trend From the late thirteenth century onwards, there is a clear and distinct movement towards the compilation of what might be termed ‘cyclical’ manuscripts – that is, volumes in which Grail(-related) texts were bound together, completely divorced from other text types. Indeed, if you look at the artefacts from this point in Table 3, the transition is actually visibly marked. Prior to this time, there are just three manuscripts that compile their contents in this cyclical manner: MSS Rennes 255, Advocates’ 19.1.5 and Add. 36614. MS Advocates’ 19.1.5 is dated to the mid thirteenth century, and so could be considered as sitting on the cusp of the period in which this trend, which I will term the Cycle Trend, takes hold; it therefore might legitimately be argued as forming merely an early witness of the same movement. MSS Rennes 255 and Add. 36614, on the other hand, are dated very early in the transmission history – however, they do represent special cases. It is not without controversy, for example, that Alison Stones’ dating of MS Rennes 255 sits as early as it does (c. 1220). Based upon her examination of the style of illumination in the manuscript, Stones sets forth a compelling argument for this early date.58 However, as scholars have noted, embracing this dating 58

Stones, ‘The Earliest Illustrated Prose Lancelot Manuscript’.

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means we have to revise all traditional assumptions as to the chronology of the composition of the Estoire (which is normally supposed to have been inscribed no earlier than 1225), something that scholarship has so far been reluctant to do with any vigour.59 As a result, there remains fair argument that this manuscript might have been composed somewhat later than is suggested by Stones’ dating. MS Add. 36614 is a special case for a different reason. I go into considerably more detail in Chapter 5, but for now it suffices to say that this manuscript contains evidence for its having originally belonged to descendants of Chrétien’s patron, that is to one or more members of the House of Flanders. Since both the Second Continuator and Manessier can claim to have a patron in Jeanne of Flanders (though Manessier’s Continuation is not contained within), then the possible owners of this manuscript clearly would have been amongst the first to have conceived of these texts as being compiled together. Furthermore, there is the addition of a short text at the end of the manuscript, La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, which might mean that we should actually consider MS Add. 36614 as part of the Anthology Trend. Certainly, there is evidence that the inclusion of this female saint’s life was part of the original conception of the manuscript, and that we should read the Grail texts in association with it, since it might serve as a reflection of a female patron (see Chapter 5). However, the early combination of the Conte alongside not only Continuations, but also prequels, leads me to lean more towards the Cycle Trend; it must be emphasised, though, that this is by no means a clear designation. In the later part of the tradition, that is from the late thirteenth century onwards, we find similarly few exceptions to the Cycle Trend; numbering three, these are MSS fr. 12576, Ars. 5218 and Montpelier H249, but in all three cases I demonstrated above that the non-Grail contents contained within are later additions (or at least afterthoughts) and, in the case of MS Ars. 5218, that it might have originally been designed to contain a copy of the Mort Artu. All of this is in no way to suggest, of course, that the importance of such later additions should be minimised, for they offer us insight into how later audiences might have re-contextualised our texts, perhaps using such additions to develop particular themes or topics present in the narratives. For the purposes of this study, however, in which our key focus is on the original publication of the corpus of artefacts, these three apparent exceptions to the Cycle Trend turn out not to be exceptions at all, since their original conception would have seen them presented as Grail-only compilations. In short, from the late thirteenth century onwards and according to our corpus, Grail texts seem only ever to have been bound with other Grail texts (or at least, with texts known to be part of the same compositional movement as Grail texts, as in the case of Lancelot, Merlin and the Mort Artu in the Vulgate Cycle, for example). The distribution of the three trends described above, organised according to the assumed chronology of artefact composition (early thirteenth to early sixteenth century), is presented in Graph 1. Note that I have not included manuscripts that have not been dated to a window of less than one hundred years. Fragmentary manuscripts that cannot be allocated to a trend because of the extent of their mutilation are designated ‘unknown’. 59

Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 8.

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Graph 1: Trend (Independent, Anthology, Cycle).

Possible reasons for Trends: length, form and generic resemblance There may be some perfectly pragmatic reasons for the trends discussed above. For example, in the latter era of Grail literature transmission, the number of available Grail texts becomes so many (such as in the case of the Conte conjoined with all, or some, of its Continuations and/or prequels, and the various combinations of the texts of the Vulgate Cycle) that to include further narratives into a volume would produce an unwieldy object indeed – hence a possible practical catalyst for the Cycle Trend. This said, there generally does seem to have been a greater tolerance of larger volumes in the Middle Ages than today. For instance, some of the compilations currently held in three-volume sets (such as MSS fr. 117–20 and fr. 113–16) were once bound together in one very large volume,60 so it is not inconceivable that length was less of a concern than we might think. Another possibility that I have not as yet touched upon in any detail is how trends in compilation might be influenced less by narrative content and more by narrative form – that is, whether there is any difference in compilation to be discerned dependent on whether the contents are in verse or prose. In Table 3, I have included two columns that, for each artefact, specifically set out the form of the contents (verse, prose or a mixture of the two) and the compilation trend to which it belongs, according to what appears to be the artefact’s original conception (at least as far as it is possible to discern). Scholarly works scrutinising the manuscripts of medieval vernacular literature often tend to treat verse separately from prose. The underlying assumption frequently seems to be that each of these two forms of textual composition and presentation represented a distinct development – a separate response, as it were,

60

Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 45–46.

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to different medieval reading cultures.61 For example, verse is quite regularly presented as a residue from oral culture, whereby stories were recited rather than inscribed (other than in oral memory, that is). Prose, by contrast, is thought of as having become the standard form for written culture within an environment of increasing literacy (especially in the context of Latinity). Furthermore, prose throughout most of the early Middle Ages remained the typically selected form for the writing of history, at least in Latin, whereas verse was more usually associated with various types of literature. To some degree, this meant that the combination of prose and Latin ultimately came to be regarded as a guarantor for the ‘truth’ (or what was perceived as the truth). These paradigms shifted in the course of the central and later Middle Ages, particularly during the twelfth century. In the twelfth century, vernacular writings began to appropriate (and in some cases take over) some of the functions previously reserved exclusively for Latin, including the writing of history. Indeed, several of the writers that Peter Damian-Grint has famously referred to as the ‘new historians’ of the twelfth century wrote their ‘histories’ in the vernacular, and quite often in verse.62 Examples include the works of Wace, but also those of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Geffrei Gaimar.63 The rise of verse, especially in the vernacular, was not without controversy, however. Several historians of the twelfth century who wrote their histories in prose or Latin (or indeed both) looked down upon the works of their poetic colleagues, often dismissively likening the latter’s endeavours to the works of troubadours or jongleurs. During the early thirteenth century, prose can thus be observed as reclaiming its position (which it never really forfeited) as the more popular and enduring form for historical works of length.64 Vernacular literature, despite its proliferation, appears to have followed suit, and this is no less true of the composition of Grail literature. In many ways, therefore, the developments of verse and prose did influence, and in some regards cross-pollinate, one another.

61

62

63

64

For instance, Busby’s Codex and Context and Schmolke-Hasselmann’s The Evolution of Arthurian Romance both focus on works in verse alone, while Middleton’s analysis in ‘The Manuscripts’ splits the corpus into verse and prose manuscripts. Generally speaking, this focus on form rather than content has often been inspired by principal works such as Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987). Damian-Grint, The New Historians. Also cf. Peter Damian-Grint, ‘Estoire as Word and Genre: Meaning and Literary Usage in the Twelfth Century’, Medium Aevum, 66 (1997), 189–206; Ashe, Fiction and History. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, ‘Latin and French as Languages of the Past in Normandy during the Reign of Henry II: Robert of Torigni, Stephen of Rouen and Wace’, Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays, ed. by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006), pp. 53–77. See also Keith Busby, ‘Vernacular Literature and the Writing of History in Medieval Francophonia’, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500, ed. by Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), pp. 27–42; Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Molly M. Lynde-Recchia, Prose, Verse, and Truth Telling in the Thirteenth Century (Lexington: French Forum, 2000). On the relationship between prose and verse, see also principally Joseph C. Harris and Karl Reichl, eds, Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997).

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Whilst it seems to me that making a distinction between the two makes a good deal of sense in many scholarly contexts (if only to limit the corpus to something resembling manageable), by this point it will have become plain that in the present book I have avoided splitting the corpus in such a way, and opted for a more holistic approach. This is quite deliberate for, save in one or two circumstances (which I have acknowledged), it has been my general observation that medieval publishers do not seem – at least for the large part – to have made their decisions about blurbing, authorial disclosure, compilation or patronage based upon whether or not the particular Grail texts they used circulated in verse or prose.65 What started out as a hunch is borne out by the evidence presented in Table 3 in respect of the compilation of Grail texts. To begin with, some general observations can be made, such as that verse compilations of Grail literature stop being produced by 1300 and, as a rule, there are generally fewer extant verse books than prose. These, however, are broadly true in respect of other medieval vernacular literature, too. In specifics, of the seventy-six total artefacts in our corpus, sixteen contain only verse contents, and fifty-five contain only prose contents. There are also five artefacts that contain a mixture of prose and verse contents. These figures are set out according to assumed chronology of composition in Graph 2 (again, manuscripts whose composition has not been dated to a window narrower than one hundred years are left aside here).

Graph 2: Form (Verse, Prose, Mixed).

This weighting towards prose artefacts is not necessarily because fewer verse artefacts existed in the first place, but rather because there seems to have been 65

Of course, it is a different matter if one looks to items such as mise en page in which decisions about columns might well give rise to different models for layout, but this has not been a key focus in this study since it has been examined at length elsewhere; see, for example, the various contributions to Rencontres du vers et de la prose: conscience théorique et mise en page, ed. by Catherine Croizy-Naquet and Michelle Szkilnik (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); see also Massimiliano Gaggero, ‘Verse and Prose in the Continuations of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal’, Arthuriana, 23 (2013), 3–25.

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more reason to preserve books produced at later dates. Later artefacts, for instance, are more frequently richly decorated (there are not really any full programmes of illumination in verse manuscripts until about 1270–80);66 there was also an upward curve in antiquarian book collecting throughout the Middle Ages, references to which become particularly prolific from the fourteenth century onwards.67 As a result, all conclusions have to bear this hazard of transmission in mind and so the percentages below are calculated not as a proportion of the entire corpus, but rather as a proportion of the total artefacts that contain contents composed in the specified form. In respect of the Independent Trend, there are seven prose artefacts and two verse artefacts. Whilst that might seem to indicate a marked difference, when these figures are calculated in relation to the number of artefacts composed in each form, it transpires that there is barely any difference whatsoever in the treatment of verse and prose artefacts belonging to the Independent Trend: 12.5% of all verse artefacts are independents, and 12.7% of all prose artefacts are independents. In terms of the Anthology Trend, we have almost the opposite scenario. The figures themselves suggest little difference (two verse compilations, five mixed-form compilations and five prose compilations), but when considered as proportions according to form type, we find that 12.5% of verse artefacts, 100% of mixed artefacts and 9.2% of prose artefacts conform to the Anthology Trend. It is perhaps unsurprising that mixed compilations are always anthologies, since where cycles do exist, they consist of a series of texts composed in the same form. As a result, to create a Grail cycle in mixed form would involve placing a text like the Conte in the same manuscript as the Estoire, which raises obvious problems in terms of narrative coherence and content. Considering that mixed compilations tend more often to be dominated by verse contents, one could extrapolate that there is a considerable preference for verse in the Anthology Trend, but once again, this may owe more to pragmatics than taste. For instance, where prose texts can be fairly easily added to in the interests of producing continuous prose (such as in a cycle), a verse text is far more likely to preserve its integrity as it is harder to alter (that is, emendments require the editor to write in, and understand, poetic form and metre). By its very nature, therefore, verse lends itself more easily to interpolation into anthologies (e.g. collections of individual texts), while prose works are a good fit for cycles (where texts are more closely interlaced).68 In the case of the Cycle Trend, the numbers of preserved prose books far outweigh those in verse: there are eight verse compilations, which together amount to 50% of all verse compilations, and there are forty-three prose compilations, equating to 78.1% of all prose compilations. In both cases, then, it is a majority of extant manuscripts that conform to the Cycle Trend, with a heavier

66 67

68

Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 20–21. See, for example, the English bishop Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, published in manuscript in 1344 and in print in Cologne in 1473 by an unknown publisher, in which he sets out a defence of book collecting, arguing that the activity is both about learning and about an appreciation of the object. A good Latin–English parallel edition of the Philobiblon is that translated by John B. Inglis and edited by Samuel Hand (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1856). Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 39.

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slant on the side of prose. But, again, considering that both cycles and prose are products of the later transmission history of Grail literature, as well as that later artefacts are generally more likely to be preserved, this extra weight might be explained away to some degree. It is perhaps more remarkable that as many as 50% from a small starting number of artefacts (sixteen) conform to this one trend, and actually several of the verse cycle compilations provide particularly early examples. I suggest, therefore, that there seems to have been little distinction made between prose and verse by medieval publishers and planners when they were compiling Grail literature, especially once we remove from the equation the manuscripts designated ‘unknown’ as they are too fragmentary to be assigned to a trend.69 In order to help illustrate this, I have visualised the distribution of form relative to trend in Graph 3 (this time including all artefacts). Generic resemblances between content seem to have been revealed as the far more crucial factor in deciding which items to compile together.

Graph 3: Form relative to Trend.

Given the almost complete suppression of the Independent and Anthology Trends by the Cycle Trend, I suggest that it is hard to deny that medieval and early-modern audiences and publishers of Grail literature harboured a growing awareness of a particular generic resemblance (and indeed a generic relationship) between different Grail narratives, and that this relationship was stronger than any resemblances that were understood between Grail narratives and other text types. This led publishers and planners increasingly, and eventually exclusively, to sever Grail texts from other forms of narrative. If any further evidence were needed, we might think, for example, about the fact that Chrétien’s Conte actually appears in only two (possibly three) cases amongst his œuvres complètes. All other

69

The homogeneous-looking column for mixed compilations can equally be set aside, since it is inevitable that mixed-form textual selections would lead to a compilation conforming to the Anthology Trend, the reasons for which were explained above.

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manuscripts containing two of more of Chrétien’s works actually omit the Conte.70 Furthermore, manuscripts containing one of more of Chrétien’s works other than the Conte most usually present them as part of an anthology alongside a series of other varied contents (ranging from fabliaux to pseudo-historical works to other romances) from the middle of the thirteenth century to as late as c. 1400.71 It is far more common, during the same period, to see the Conte alongside its Grail-focused Continuations (and prequels), and even before then it is found in independents: in both cases, in other words, it is divorced from other kinds of text. Whilst other forms of romance such as non-Grail Arthurian narratives find their way consistently into anthologies, with this remaining the most popular method of compiling them from the very earliest until the very latest stages of medieval (manuscript) publication,72 Grail literature seems to have been subjected to rather different treatment. I argued at the beginning of this chapter that modern publishers exploit and experiment with generic connections when compiling their lists so as to attract different kinds of audiences to the same texts. I believe we can now also suggest something similar for medieval publishers and patrons in respect of the compilation of Grail literature. Following a period in which Grail narratives were variously re-packaged so as to fit into different kinds of anthologies, typically spanning several text types, in practical terms Grail literature seems to have presented itself as a case apart from the very beginning, quickly becoming conceived of as generically distinctive from other (Arthurian) romance. Eventually, a successful formula for compiling Grail literature was developed but, as we will see in Chapter 5, this was far from spelling the end for the broader development of re-packaging tactics as a means of appealing to changing tastes (and fashions) of audiences. Table 2: Compilation of artefacts text by text. Text(s)

Artefact

Texts within

Date

Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal and its Continuations

MS Clermont-Ferrand 248

CdG

Early 13th C

Annonay fragments MS Add. 36614

Erec+Cligés+Lion+CdG (frags) Early 13th C CdGP+B+CdG+C1+C2+La Vie de Early 13th C Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne CdG Early 13th C

MS Florence 2943 70

71 72

At least in their current state of preservation. See, for example, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MSS fr. 12560, fr. 1420 and fr. 375; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France MS 6138; Princeton, University Library, MS Garrett 125; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 1725. For a listing of the contents of all of the manuscripts to contain Chrétien’s works, see Nixon, ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’. But also other vernacular text types such as fabliaux and chronicles. As Busby and Kleinhenz point out in respect of medieval French manuscripts in the vernacular: ‘Manuscripts that gather together texts of certain genres […] exist, but are relatively rare in comparison with the large number of “recueils”’; ‘Medieval French and Italian literature’, p. 218.

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Text(s)

Artefact

Texts within

Date

MS fr. 794

Erec+Charrette+Cligés+Lion+Athis et Prophilas+Le roman de Troie+Le roman de Brut+Les empereurs de Rome+CdG+C1+C2 (frag.) Le roman de Troie+Le roman d’Enéas+Le roman de Brut (beginning)+Erec+CdG+C1+ Cligés+Lion+Le roman de Brut (end)+Le roman de Dolopathos Selection of 14 romances, chansons de geste, fabliaux and chronicles – C2 is second in contents list CdG+C1+C2+CM Large miscellany containing 75 dits and fabliaux, Les sept sages de Rome and CdG (as the final text) CdG (frag.) C1 (frag.) C1 (frag.) CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM+La mort du Conte de Henau+list of debts+Le roman de Miserere+Le roman de Carité CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM+Salut d’amour

Early 13th C

E+B+CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM E+B+CdG+C1+C2+CM Prose Joseph+MR+DidotPerceval+Old French Lapidaire

Late 13th C Late 13th C Mid 14th C Mid 14th C 1530 c. 1200–20

Prose Joseph+MR Pious works+Prose Joseph+MR Verse Joseph+Verse MR Prose Joseph+MR+Didot-Perceval Prose Joseph+MR+Suite du Merlin Prose Joseph+Estoire+MR+SV Prose Joseph+MR Prose Joseph+MR

c. 1230–50 Mid 13th C Late 13th C 1301 c. 1310

MS fr. 1450

MS Bern 113

MS Advocates’ 19.1.5 MS Bern 354

Brussels fragment Brussels BR fragments MS E122/100/13B MS fr. 12576

MS n. a. fr. 6614 MS Montpellier H249 MS Mons 331/206 MS fr. 1429 MS fr. 1453 MS fr. 12577 1530 edition Robert de Boron’s MS Modena E 39 Joseph MS fr. 748 MS fr. 423 MS fr. 20047 MS n. a. fr. 4166 MS Add. 38117 MS Beinecke 227 MS Ars. 2996 MS fr. 1469 Didot-Perceval

Lancelot-Grail (Vulgate Cycle)

MS Modena E 39 MS n. a. fr. 4166 MS Rennes 255

Early 13th C

Mid 13th C

Mid 13th C Mid 13th C

Mid 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C

Late 13th C Late 13th C

1357 Mid 14th C 15th C (on paper) c. 1200–20

Prose Joseph+MR+DidotPerceval+Old French Lapidaire Prose Joseph+MR+Didot-Perceval 1301 Estoire+M+L c. 1220

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Artefact

Texts within

Date

MS fr. 747 MS fr. 751 MS fr. 771 MS Rawl. D.899 MS Brussels 9627–28 MS fr. 342

Estoire+M+SV L+Queste+MA L+Queste L+Queste+MA Queste+MA L+Queste+MA

c. 1230–50 c. 1230–50 c. 1240–50 c. 1250 c. 1250 1274 (female scribe) c. 1275–85 c. 1280 c. 1280 c. 1280

Estoire+M+SV L+Queste+MA Estoire Estoire with Joseph interpolations MS fr. 12581 Queste is the first item in a miscellany containing Traité de fauconnerie+four Chansons+Li livres dou Tresor (Latini)+Les Quatre Évangiles+Prière de Nostre Dame+La devisions des foires de Champaigne+Chansons françaises+Elucidarium+Uns dialogues entre le Pere et le Fil+Fretellus+La mort Adam+Distiques de Caton+Proiere de Nostre Dame+Des XXIII manière de vilains+Li fabliaus des treces+Livres des moralités+Philippe de Novare+Discipline de Clergie MS fr. 770 Estoire with Joseph interpolations+M+SV+Histoire d’Outremer et du roi Saladin+La fille du Comte de Ponthieu+L’Ordre de chevalerie MS fr. 12580 L+Queste+MA MS fr. 95 Estoire+M+SV+Les sept sages de (companion to MS Beinecke Rome+Pénitance Adam 229) MS Beinecke 229 L+Queste+MA (companion to MS fr. 95) MS Add. 17443 Queste+MA MS Royal 19 C XIII L+Queste+MA MS fr. 749 Estoire+Joseph (interpolated frags)+M+SV MS fr. 12573 L+Queste+MA MS Rawl. Q. b. 6 L+Queste+MA MS St Petersburg Fr.F.v.XV.5 Estoire with Joseph interpolations MS. Add. 10292–94 Estoire+M+SV+L+Queste+MA MS Royal 14 E III Estoire+Queste+MA MS fr. 19162 MS Digby 223 MS Douce 303 MS Le Mans 354

1284

c. 1285

c. 1290 c. 1290

c. 1290 Late 13th C Late 13th C c. 1300 c. 1310 c. 1310 c. 1310 1317 c. 1315–25

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Text(s)

Artefact

Texts within

Date

MS Rylands 1 (if taken as part of the full set with ex-MS BPH 1 and MS Douce 215) MS Douce 199 MS fr. 122 MS Ars. 3482 MS Ars. 5218 MS fr. 768B MS fr. 117–20

Estoire+M+L+Queste+MA

c. 1315–25

L+Queste L+Queste+MA M+SV+L+Queste+MA Queste+Church annals L+Queste (frags) Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA Estoire+M+SV+L Estoire+M+L+Queste+MA L+Queste+MA L+Queste+MA Estoire L+Queste+MA Estoire with Joseph interpolations+M+SV L+Queste+MA

c. 1320–30 1344 c. 1350 1351 14th C c. 1406

MS Ars. 3479-80 MS fr. 96 MS fr. 113-16 MS fr. 112 MS fr. 111 MS Brussels 9246 1488 edition MS Chantilly 643 MS Bodmer 105d MS fr. 1427 1516 edition 1523 edition Post-Vulgate Cycle MS Rawl. D.874 Perlesvaus

MS Hatton 82 MS fr. 1428 MS Chantilly 472

MS Brussels 11145 MS Ars. 3479-80 MS fr. 117-120 1516 edition 1523 edition

Estoire Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste L+Tristan (frag.)+P-V Queste+MA Perlesvaus Perlesvaus Les merveilles de Rigomer+L’atre périlleux+Erec+Fergus+Hunbaut +Le bel inconnu+La vengeance Raguidel+Lion+Charrette+ Perlesvaus (frags) +Le roman de Renart Perlesvaus Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste

c. 1406 c. 1440–55 c. 1470 c. 1470 c. 1480–85 1480 1488 15th C 15th C (on paper) 1504 1516 1523 14th C 13th C Mid 13th C Mid 13th C

Late 13th C (1275) C. 1406 C. 1406 1516 1523

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Table 3: Chronological compilation of all artefacts73. Artefact MS Modena E 39 MS Rennes 255 MS ClermontFerrand 248 Annonay fragments MS Add. 36614

Texts within Prose Joseph+MR+DidotPerceval+Old French Lapidaire Estoire+M+L CdG

Date c. 1200–20

V/P/M* M

Trend** A

c. 1220 Early 13th C

P V

C I

Erec+Cligés+Lion+CdG (frags)

Early 13th C

V

Unknown

Early 13th C

V

C (poss. A?)

Early 13th C Early 13th C

V V

I A

Early 13th C

V

A

c. 1230–50 c. 1230–50 c. 1230–50 c. 1240–50 c. 1250 c. 1250

P P P P P P

C C C C C C

Mid 13th C

M

A

Mid 13th C

V

C

Mid 13th C

M

A

Mid 13th C Mid 13th C

P M

I A

Mid 13th C Mid 13th C 1274 (female scribe) Late 13th C (1275)

P V P

A Unknown C

P

I

CdGP+B+CdG+C1+C2+La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne MS Florence 2943 CdG MS fr. 794 Erec+Charrette+Cligés+Lion+Athis et Prophilas+Le roman de Troie+Le roman de Brut+Les empereurs de Rome+CdG+C1+C2 (frag.) MS fr. 1450 Le roman de Troie+Le roman d’Enéas+Le roman de Brut (beginning)+Erec+CdG+C1+ Cligés+Lion+Le roman de Brut (end)+Le roman de Dolopathos MS fr. 748 Prose Joseph+MR MS fr. 747 Estoire+M+SV MS fr. 751 L+Queste+MA MS fr. 771 L+Queste MS Rawl. D.899 L+Queste+MA MS Brussels Queste+MA 9627-28 MS Bern 113 Selection of 14 romances, chansons de geste, fabliaux and chronicles – C2 is second in contents list MS Advocates’ CdG+C1+C2+CM 19.1.5 MS Bern 354 Large miscellany containing 75 dits and fabliaux, Les sept sages de Rome and CdG (as the final text) MS fr. 1428 Perlesvaus MS Chantilly 472 Les merveilles de Rigomer+L’atre périlleux+Erec+Fergus+Hunbaut+Le bel inconnu+La vengeance Raguidel+Lion+Charrette+Perlesvaus (frags)+Le roman de Renart MS fr. 423 Pious works+Prose Joseph+MR Brussels fragment CdG (frag.) MS fr. 342 L+Queste+MA MS Brussels 11145 Perlesvaus

*

The column entitled V/P/M designates whether the contents contained within the manuscript are all in verse (V), prose (P) or a mixture of the two (M), according to what we can assume to have been the artefact’s original conception (e.g. if items are known to have been added at a later date, then these items are disregarded in this designation). ** The column entitled ‘Trend’ indicates whether the artefact can be categorised as belonging to the Independent Trend (I), the Anthology Trend (A) or the Cycle Trend (C) according to what seems to have been its original conception (e.g. if there is evidence that an artefact would have originally contained other items, or now contains items that were added later, then this is taken into account in this designation).

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Artefact MS fr. 19162 MS Digby 223 MS Douce 303 MS Le Mans 354 MS fr. 12581

Texts within Estoire+M+SV L+Queste+MA Estoire Estoire with Joseph interpolations Queste is the first item in a miscellany containing Traité de fauconnerie+four Chansons+Li livres dou Tresor (Latini)+Les Quatre Évangiles+Prière de Nostre Dame+La devisions des foires de Champaigne+Chansons françaises+Elucidarium+Uns dialogues entre le Pere et le Fil+Fretellus+La mort Adam+Distiques de Caton+Proiere de Nostre Dame+Des XXIII manière de vilains+Li fabliaus des treces+Livres des moralités+Philippe de Novare+Discipline de Clergie MS fr. 770 Estoire with Joseph interpolations+M+SV+Histoire d’Outremer et du roi Saladin+La fille du Comte de Ponthieu+L’Ordre de chevalerie MS fr. 12580 L+Queste+MA MS fr. 95 Estoire+M+SV+Les Sept Sages de (companion to MS Rome+Pénitance Adam Beinecke 229) MS Beinecke 229 L+Queste+MA (companion to MS fr. 95) MS Hatton 82 Perlesvaus Brussels BR C1 (frag.) fragments MS E122/100/13B C1 MS fr. 12576 CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM+La mort du Conte de Henau+list of debts+Le roman de Miserere+Le roman de Carité MS n. a. fr. 6614 CdG+C1+C2+CG+CM MS Montpellier CdG+C1+C2+CM+Salut d’amour H249 MS Mons 331/206 E+B+CdG+C1+C2+CM MS fr. 1429 CdG+C1+C2+CM MS Add. 17443 Queste+MA MS Royal 19 C XIII L+Queste+MA MS fr. 20047 Verse Joseph+Verse MR MS fr. 749 Estoire+Joseph (interpolated frags)+M+SV MS n. a. fr. 4166 Prose Joseph+MR+Didot-Perceval MS Add. 38117 Prose Joseph+MR+Suite du Merlin MS fr. 12573 L+Queste+MA MS Rawl. Q. b. 6 L+Queste+MA MS St Petersburg Estoire with Joseph interpolations Fr.F.v.XV.5 MS. Add. 10292–94 Estoire+M+L+Queste+MA MS Royal 14 E III Estoire+Queste+MA

Date c. 1275–85 c. 1280 c. 1280 c. 1280 1284

V/P/M* P P P P M

Trend** C C I I A

c. 1285

P

A

c. 1290 c. 1290

P P

C A

c. 1290

P

A

13th C Late 13th C

P V

I Unknown

Late 13th C Late 13th C

V V

Unknown C

Late 13th C Late 13th C

V V

C C

Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C Late 13th C c. 1300 c. 1300

V V P P V P

C C C C C C

1301 c. 1310 c. 1310 c. 1310 c. 1310

P P P P P

C C C C I

1317 c. 1315–25

P P

C C

Re-packaging the Grail Artefact MS Rylands 1 (if taken as part of the full set with ex-MS BPH 1 and MS Douce 215) MS Douce 199 MS fr. 122 MS Ars. 3482 MS Ars. 5218 MS Beinecke 227 MS fr. 1453 MS fr. 12577 MS Ars. 2996 MS fr. 768B MS Rawl. D.874 MS fr. 117–20

Texts within Estoire+M+SV+L+Queste+MA

L+Queste L+Queste+MA M+SV+L+Queste+MA Queste+Church annals Prose Joseph+Estoire+MR+SV CdG+C1+C2+CM CdG+C1+C2+CM Prose Joseph+MR L+Queste (frags) L+Tristan (frag.)+P-V Queste+MA Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA MS Ars. 3479–80 Estoire+M+SV+L+Perlesvaus (frag.)+Queste+MA MS fr. 96 Estoire+M+SV+L MS fr. 113–16 Estoire+M+L+Queste+MA MS fr. 112 L+Queste+MA MS Brussels 9246 Estoire MS fr. 111 L+Queste+MA 1488 edition L+Queste+MA MS Chantilly 643 Estoire with Joseph interpolations+M+SV MS fr. 1469 Prose Joseph+MR MS Bodmer 105d

L+Queste+MA

1516 edition 1523 edition 1530 edition

Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste Estoire+Perlesvaus+Queste E+B+CdG+C1+C2+CM

137

Date c. 1315-25

V/P/M* P

Trend** C

c. 1320–30 1344 c. 1350 1351 1357 Mid 14th C Mid 14th C Mid 14th C 14th C 14th C c. 1406

P P P P P P P P P P P

C C C A (poss. C?) C C C C C C C

c. 1406

P

C

c. 1440–55 c. 1470 c. 1470 1480 c. 1480–85 1488 15th C

P P P P P P P

C C C I C C C

15th C (on paper) 15th C (on paper) 1516 1523 1530

P

C

P

C

P P P

C C C

5

Patronage and Promotion In the chapters of this study so far, the importance of patronage has been underlined several times, and its significance pertains to several functions in terms of a text’s publication. In Chapter 1, for example, we saw patronage play a central role in defining a text’s initial moment of publication, as well as in providing the preliminary permission for the text’s further dissemination – that which Riddy referred to as the ‘authorial mode’ (cf. p. 20). In Chapter 2, we witnessed the frequent presentation of patronage within ‘blurbs’ and, in Chapter 3, we saw patronage often depicted, visually and textually, as playing a key part in validating an author’s authority. Finally, in Chapter 4, we learnt that textual compilation had a given volume’s patron at its heart, being a physical reflection of his or her agenda through the careful and calculated assembly of a book’s contents. Patronage in its various incarnations, therefore, is closely linked to everything from the genesis of texts to their initial publication and marketing, as well as from their reception amongst audiences to their eventual re-packaging, re-publication and re-marketing. It is one of the unifying elements of this study, and it thus presents itself as a germane subject with which to complete this analysis of publication within French Grail texts. Patronage in the Middle Ages and Renaissance seems, at first glance, to be a commonly understood concept: one attracting scholars from across various disciplines, such as book history, bibliography, literary studies, cultural history, social history and more.1 Owing to the subject’s breadth of coverage, patronage in this period is broadly understood to involve the creation of a literary product in order to please a patron, often at his or her behest, and frequently in exchange for something of value, be that financial remuneration, status or influence. But for all the straightforwardness implied by this, it transpires to be difficult to find a scholarly source that states it this plainly. The reason for this, I suggest, is rooted in the existence of a conflation of identities that muddies the waters. There are, I contend, at least two – if not three2 – different kinds of patrons at work in our period of concern. These various patrons conduct discrete relationships in the world of book production, whilst often co-existing at various moments in time. Scholarship so far, however, whilst evidently cognisant of the differences between

1

2

As summarised by Peter J. Lucas’ survey in his ‘The Growth and Development of English Literary Patronage in the Later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, The Library, Sixth Series, 4 (1982), 219–48 (p. 219). The third form of patronage to which I allude here is specifically implicated within print culture, and I shall return to this subject later in this chapter.

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their pursuits, persists in referring to all of them by the same, indiscriminatory term of ‘patron’.3 So who were these ‘patrons’? The brief designation I suggest above for the aims, objectives and reciprocal benefits of patronage actually applies perfectly well to all of them. I propose, however, that it is crucial to distinguish at least between the role of the patron who commissions the initial creation of a text from an author and that of the patron who commissions a later copy of a text from a publisher. Here we see two different forms of relationship, two different sets of interactions and two different final products. Discriminating between the two is thus crucial for our purposes. This is by no means to say that a person cannot fulfil both roles, or that he or she cannot alternate between the two at various points in his or her lifetime. Rather, I am suggesting that the contractual, economic and social implications of these two forms of patronage are distinct and yet equally important in the publication of Grail (and other) literature in our period of consideration. Before commencing my analysis of patronage in Grail literature, it is important to put in place some technical terminology to facilitate reference to these two patrons. Throughout our texts we have seen recurring references to the patrons of new literary creations as requesting that a given narrative should be mise en escri(p)t (put into writing) by the author in question. This notion of escripture (inscription) is explored at length by Peter Damian-Grint as part of his discussion of the terminology that is used in medieval vernacular texts to describe aspects of composition and format. He argues that the term is often used to refer to the first time that a text is inscribed in a tangible, written format.4 This gives us a useful sense of the patronised product as representing a ‘first edition’, and it is therefore helpful in describing this particular patron’s role. I suggest, then, that we refer to the patron responsible for commissioning the first inscription of a text as the escripture-patron. Damian-Grint’s discussion is also useful as a source of terminology that can be used to describe those patrons who commission copies from publishers. In his consideration of the varied ways in which narratives are referred to – such as estoire (history/story) and conte (tale) – Damian-Grint positions the term of livre (book) as set apart. Even though modern usage of the term in English and French can be more abstract (referring often to the content rather than the object), its use in Old French, he argues, is particularly concrete as a determiner of an item taking the physical format of a book.5 We can infer from this, therefore, that when Chrétien says that Count Philip asked him to put into rhyme the best story (conte) ever told in a royal court, dont li quens li bailla le livre 3

4 5

Interestingly, even where scholarly works propose to discuss the boundaries of patronage, the boundaries in question are typically confined to just one of the types of patron that I suggest we need to consider; see, for example, the contributions to McGrady’s special edition of Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2 (2013), which is entitled ‘Rethinking the Boundaries of Patronage’. Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 244–45. Ibid., pp. 234–44; see also the entry in the Portail Lexical of the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales: . Additionally, Wendelin Foerster’s Wörterbuch zu Kristian von Troyes’ Sämtlichen Werken (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966) gives a definition of Buch (als Quelle) (Book (as source)) (p. 152).

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(of which the count gave him the book) (line 67), there is a distinction being made between the narrative’s content and the format in which it is delivered. Given that the patron who commissions a copy of a text from a publisher desires a physical item in the format of a book, I suggest that we call this kind of patron the livre-patron. The analysis that follows is divided into three sections. The first of these considers both the textual and material manifestations of the escripture-patron across our corpus of Grail texts in relation to manuscript culture. The second section does the same for the livre-patron. My line of enquiry in both sections seeks to answer the following questions: in what ways can we deduce the nature of the relationships between our publishers and these two different patrons from the extant artefacts? What does this tell us about medieval audiences’ reception of patronage in relation to Grail texts? Did the roles of these patrons change as publishing moved towards a print model? The third and final section concludes the chapter with a consideration of the development of patronage in our texts following the introduction of print and the resulting rise of a third kind of patron. Here, I explore the shared motivations of all three kinds of patron and how their combined patronage impacted and influenced the publication of Grail literature between 1200 and 1530.

The Role of the Escripture-patron The escripture-patron, as we have seen, is closely related to the initial publication of a text. Without his original commission, the inscription of a medieval narrative would not occur in many cases, since escripture-patronage is often the only means of remuneration for many authors in the Middle Ages.6 Working as an author without patronage could not, on its own, provide a sufficient living. For this reason, many medieval authors were employed – first and foremost – in other roles, as clerics for example.7 Having the support of a patron could make a significant difference: the patronage system in essence ‘allowed literary men to live by the pen’.8 Even where a patron did not provide financial recompense, he or she might at least have provided for an author in his or her household,9 or perhaps offered a position at court.10 Some might even have supplied all three. As we saw in Chapter 1, though, the escripture-patron has a dual significance. He or she not only facilitated the initial inscription of a narrative though his or her support (financial or otherwise) of the author, but he or she was also a catalyst for the narrative’s ‘final and definite publication’.11 That is, we will remember, 6 7

8 9 10 11

Karl Julius Holzknecht, Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 3. See, for example, Bennett, ‘The Production and Dissemination of Manuscripts’, p. 170; Samuel Moore, ‘General Aspects of Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages’, The Library, Third Series, 4 (1913), 369–92 (p. 374) and John Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage in Medieval England, 1350–1550’, Library Review, 58 (2009), 451–60 (p. 452). Marcel Thomas, ‘Manuscripts’ in The Coming of the Book, pp. 15–28 (pp. 24–25). Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 267. Croenen, ‘Patrons, Authors and Workshops’, p. 10. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 162.

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because the moment of a work’s delivery to a patron implies an obligation for the patron to disseminate it further, by showing ‘the author’s work to his friends, who might be interested and […] desire copies’.12 Even outside of these friendship groups, the addition of a respected patron’s name to a text could encourage a wider public to engage with that narrative.13 None of this, however, is to suggest that the benefits of escripture-patronage are entirely non-reciprocal, since there were considered to be return advantages to the patron both within his lifetime and beyond his years. In the case of the latter, an escripture-patron might hope for fame and immortality, which Holzknecht describes as the ‘great cause of patronage’,14 while Lucas points to ‘spiritual preferment’ – or, rewards in the afterlife.15 Of more immediate benefit, in the case of the former, might be ‘flattery, publicity, and the enhancement of his “magnificence”’, or perhaps the ability to control and influence what was written.16 Croenen argues that it is injudicious to suggest that an escripturepatron was in control of all aspects related to what was composed on their behalf,17 and he is, of course, perfectly correct. It is, however, equally important not to underestimate the full scope of an escripture-patron’s influence on the final product. In his study of patronage in the arts across the ages, for instance, Edward Henning usefully outlines three key aspects relating to an escripture-patron’s influence;18 these he calls ‘stipulation’, ‘attraction’ and ‘selection’.19 Stipulation implies that the aspect of (financial) recompense in an author–patron relationship automatically requires an unconditional carrying out of the service.20 Attraction refers to the ways in which a patron might be able to attract an author to his or her own worldview by virtue of the current climate or, more simply, the draw of economic support. Selection suggests that patrons select works that best suit their current ideological or socio-cultural goals. These distinctions are particularly useful for our purposes. To take one example, Chrétien’s well-documented discomfort in his composition of Le Chevalier de la charrette at the behest of Marie de Champagne has often been noted as indicative of his distaste for the adulterous content.21 But, as Marie was his patron and remunerator, he was compelled to undertake the task regardless – this we might see as conforming to Henning’s notion of stipulation. Soon after, Chrétien would meet his new patron, Philip of Flanders, at Troyes thanks to Philip’s (ultimately unfulfilled) intentions to marry Marie. Chrétien’s openly gleeful acceptance of this new patron is suggestive of 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., p. 237; see also Moore, ‘General Aspects’, p. 373 and Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage’, p. 452. Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 272. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 237. Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 262; see also Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage’, p. 453. Ibid. Croenen, ‘Patrons, Authors and Workshops’, p. 10. Though, of course, Henning uses the term ‘patron’ rather than ‘escripture-patron’. Edward B. Henning, ‘Patronage and Style in the Arts: A Suggestion Concerning their Relations’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18 (1960), 464–71 (p. 467). I use the term ‘author’ in order to clearly connect with the argument of this study. Henning, however, is taking a broader approach, and thus uses the more general term of ‘artist’. See, for example, Fanni Bogdanow, ‘The Love Theme in Chrétien de Troyes’ Chevalier de la Charrette’, Modern Language Review, 67 (1972), 50–61 (p. 50).

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Henning’s concept of attraction since Marie’s literary preferences apparently no longer fitted with his own worldview. Philip’s interests in chivalric activity and crusading for relics, by contrast, were perhaps more to Chrétien’s taste.22 Finally, we are told that Philip selected the subject matter for the Conte du Graal, and much work has been done to show how Philip might well have seen aspects of his own life reflected in its content (I return to this below).23 This we might understand as conforming to Henning’s notion of selection. The relationship between an author and an escripture-patron thus presents an exercise in which a careful balance must be struck. An author must, above all, be sensitive to his patron’s wishes as it is from the patron that he receives his living and/or other favours. The escripture-patron’s role in simply allowing an author to be an author means that he or she must be afforded special treatment, first, in his or her opportunity to influence the product and, second, in the way in which that influence is then represented within the narrative. This rather serious task, though, must be carefully balanced with the author’s obligation to his wider reading public, a public that is equally eager to be satisfied, even if that is more by means of entertainment than flattery.24 What the task of writing necessitates, in essence, is deference to both parties. The virtues of escripture-patrons are thus regularly extolled in prologues and epilogues in expectation of what Holzknecht refers to as ‘the largess of the great’.25 This, in other words, presents the patron’s contribution overtly and immediately, thus imprinting the rest of the text with a sense of his or her influence, but without intruding in medias res on the wider public’s enjoyment of the narrative. I now turn to some of these examples of laudation in our corpus, considering both the author’s original relationship with his escripture-patron and the later material presentation of these relationships by manuscript publishers. In Chapter 2, I quoted a passage from the prologue in Chrétien’s Conte in which Chrétien referred to the Conte’s patron, Philip of Flanders (1143–91), as the worthiest man in Christendom (le plus preudome qui soit en l’empire de Rome), greater even than Alexander (qui valt mix ne fist Alixandres). A full sixty lines are devoted to Chrétien’s praise of his patron, and we know that this is not merely to satisfy convention.26 The patronage of Marie de Champagne (1145– 98) of Chrétien’s Charrette, for instance, did not inspire him to write any such unambiguous swathe of exaltation. He is, of course, not unflattering to Marie – we can assume she still paid for his living, after all. But scholars have shown that, whilst Chrétien provides a prologue that appears to say all of the right things,

22 23 24

25 26

Hall McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 24–25. This is echoed by Thomas, who states that ‘the price paid by the author was his obligation not to say anything displeasing to his patron, while at the same time trying to write to please a growing public’, ‘Manuscripts’, p. 25. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 237. Hall McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, p. 24.

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he avoids hyperbole – he pays Marie lip service, but nothing more.27 Perhaps most important in the Charrette’s prologue is Chrétien’s deferral of responsibility for the narrative’s sens et matiere (meaning and matter) to Marie (lines 26–27), which Walters suggests to mean ‘that the patron’s role in the production of literature is potentially more important than that of the poet himself’.28 Evidently uncomfortable with appending his name to this content, Chrétien thus distances himself from it. This stands in stark contrast to his prologue to the Conte, where Chrétien proudly announces his joint enterprise with Philip. Indeed, he uses the very first lines to refer to his personal role as the sower of the romance’s seeds, which, Hall McCash suggests, shows Chrétien as ‘more enthusiastic about his work for Count Philip and expresses greater freedom in bringing something of his own to it’.29 As noted, he then explains that Philip gave him a book containing an anterior version of the narrative which, even if the idea of a physical book is no more than a device, does imply that Philip had some role in suggesting the content, perhaps in order to reflect his own interests in relics, knightly training and lineage.30 Mary Stanger suggests that Philip may even have identified very closely with Perceval’s knightly advisor Gornemant de Goort in this context, and that Philip’s main motives for literary patronage had a great deal to do with his own personal ambitions and vanity.31 The manuscript publishers’ responses to Count Philip’s patronage are mostly understated, if non-existent. Just as we saw with this prologue (or blurb) in Chapter 2, publishers rarely seem to wish to amend Chrétien’s writing substantially, and so the notices of Philip’s patronage are equally untouched.32 It is worth pointing out, however, that MS fr. 794 (Guiot’s manuscript), whilst not highlighting Philip’s patronage in any particular way, does introduce a miniature of Marie de Champagne at the beginning of the Charrette (f. 27b; see Plate 20), the text for which she acted as the escripture-patron. Given that this is the only illumination in the entire manuscript, this might suggest a preference on Guiot’s part for Marie. This can be reasonably explained, though, not so much 27

28 29 30 31 32

Amongst the many discussions of this point, the following are particularly insightful: Tony Hunt, ‘Chrétien’s Prologues Reconsidered’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. by Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 153–68 (esp. pp. 160–62); Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘Le Chevalier de la Charrette: That Obscure Object of Desire, Lancelot’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 137–55 (esp. pp. 139–41); Gerald Seaman, ‘Reassessing Chrétien’s Elusive Vanz’, Arthurian Literature, 20 (2003), 1–30 (esp. pp. 18–19); Michelle Reichert, Between Courtly Literature and Al-Andalus: Matière d’Orient and the Importance of Spain in the Romances of the Twelfth-Century Writer Chrétien de Troyes (New York and Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2006), Chapter 3 (esp. pp. 116–17); Jean Rychner, ‘Le Prologue du Chevalier de la Charrette’, Vox Romanica, 26 (1967), 1–23; Jean Frappier, ‘Le Prologue du Chevalier de la Charrette et son interprétation’, Romania, 93 (1972), 337–77. Lori J. Walters, ‘Jeanne and Marguerite de Flandre as Female Patrons’, Dalhousie French Studies, 28 (1994), 15–27 (p. 17). Hall McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, pp. 23–24. Ibid. Mary D. Stanger, ‘Literary Patronage at the Medieval Court of Flanders’, French Studies, 2 (1957), 214–29 (p. 216). For example, MSS fr. 794, Bern 354, Clermont-Ferrand 248, Florence 2943, Add. 36614, Montpellier H249, fr. 12576 and fr. 12577 all include the usual mention of Philip’s patronage without further embellishment, and we can fairly safely presume the same would have been true of MSS fr. 1429, Advocates’ 19.1.5, fr. 1453 and n. a. fr. 6614, were the relevant folia of these manuscripts not missing.

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by any particular disagreement with Chrétien’s more overt laudation of Philip, but rather by the fact that Guiot’s workshop at Nostre Dame del Val would have operated under Marie’s jurisdiction.33

Plate 20: Guiot’s depiction of Marie de Champagne at the opening of Le Chevalier de la charrette; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794, f. 27r.

Only MSS fr. 1450 and Mons 331/206 remove the mention of Philip’s patronage, and this seems to owe more to the factors associated with their calculated removal of Chrétien’s prologue (as discussed in Chapter 2), in which Philip is mentioned, than it is to do with excising Philip’s involvement specifically. The removal of the prologue in MS fr. 1450, of course, was to do with placing Chrétien’s texts within a pseudo-historical framework. The excision of the prologue in MS Mons 331/206, meanwhile, was to enable the interpolation of the Elucidation and Bliocadran. However, MS Mons 331/206 also in effect reinstates Philip since he is mentioned in the transitionary passage of the Elucidation we encountered in Chapter 2, which we saw was written to echo Chrétien’s own prologue lexically, and to lead directly into the Bliocadran. Here, though, we do not hear Philip’s full name – he is merely referred to as ‘le conte’ (the count) (f. 6b). This suggests one of two things: first, that Philip’s attachment to this story is so well known as not to require his full name (as I showed might be true of Chrétien where the suffix of ‘de Troyes’ is omitted in all but his earliest romance); second, and perhaps more likely, that his name has become inconsequential – his function as an assuredly noble patron is the more important aspect, and the title of ‘le conte’ serves as guarantee enough.

33

Lori J. Walters, ‘Manuscript Compilations of Verse Romances’, in The Arthur of the French, pp. 461–87 (p. 469).

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Several of these manuscripts, of course, also contain Manessier’s Continuation. Manessier’s narrative contains a specific mention of the fact that Countess Jeanne of Flanders (c. 1199–1244),34 a descendant of Philip’s (his great-niece), commissioned Manessier to complete the Grail story: Si com Manesier le tesmoingne, Qui met a chief ceste besoingne El non Jehanne la contesse, Qu’est de Flandres dame et mestresse

(lines 42644–47, Manessier Continuation)

(As Manessier testifies, who brought this work to an end in the name of Countess Jeanne, lady and mistress of Flanders)

I discussed in Chapter 3 the way in which this passage in effect legitimised Manessier as the author of the closing section of the story, since to have as his escripture-patron a direct descendant of Chrétien’s original escripture-patron lends credibility to his endeavour. As well as Jeanne’s legitimisation of Manessier’s task, in commissioning this narrative, Jeanne was likely to have been responding to the well-documented upsurge of interest in the matière de Bretagne in Flanders during her reign.35 Jeanne might also have impressed her own influence on certain aspects of Manessier’s text, a process suggestive of Henning’s concept of selection. For example, both Busby and Walters have suggested that Manessier’s portrayal of Blanchefleur as particularly determined and strong – that is, not the mere ‘lover’ she was in the Conte and the Second Continuation – was at Jeanne’s behest. They argue that this is particularly likely owing to their interpretation of Blanchefleur’s character as showing sympathy for the view of courtly love as an inspiration for knighthood.36 The manuscripts in which the closing folia are not missing37 mostly maintain Manessier’s mention of Jeanne’s escripture-patronage in unchanged form. One manuscript, however, adopts a different approach, and once again this manuscript is MS Mons 331/206. In the same breath as removing the notice of Manessier’s authorship (as was discussed in Chapter 3), MS Mons 331/206 also removes the mention of Jeanne as patron, merely ending the text with: Si c[om]e crestiens le tesmoigne Ki a chief mist ceste besoigne

(f. 487a)

(As Chrétien testifies, who brought this work to an end)

34

35 36

37

There is some uncertainty as to whether Jeanne was born at the end of 1199 or the beginning of 1200; see Theo Luykx, Johanna van Constantinopel: Gravin van Vlaanderen en Henegouwen (Utrecht: De Haan, 1946), p. 50. Stanger, ‘Literary Patronage’, p. 220; Walters, ‘Jeanne and Marguerite’, p. 21. Keith Busby, ‘Text, Miniature, and Rubric in the Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, I, pp. 365–76 (p. 370) and Lori J. Walters, ‘The Image of Blanchefleur in Montpellier, BI, Sect, Méd, H 249’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, I, pp. 437–55. See also Walters, ‘Jeanne and Marguerite’, p. 23. These are MSS Advocates’ 19.1.5, Montpellier H249, fr. 12576 and fr. 12577. Those which lack the relevant folia are MSS fr. 1429, fr. 1453 and n. a. fr. 6614.

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The resulting impression is that, just as Chrétien seems to have been positioned as the author of the entire narrative, Philip now appears to hold the role of escripture-patron for the entire text. This, of course, provides further support for the contention that MS Mons 331/206 is designed to present a comprehensive and consistent account of the Grail narrative: with just one escripture-patron mentioned, a cohesiveness between the individual texts is strongly implied. Like Chrétien, Robert de Boron also has a noble escripture-patron, and he ensures to mention his involvement in the commissioning of the text. Robert’s patron is one Gautier de Montbéliard, the lord of Montfaucon, who is known to have departed in 1202 on the Fourth Crusade and who, in 1212, died whilst still in the Holy Land.38 Of this relationship, in the verse redaction Robert states: A ce tens que je la retreis O mon seigneur Gautier en peis, Qui de Mont Belyal estoit…

(lines 3489–91)

(At the time at which I was relating this story to my lord Gautier, who was then in peacetime and came from Montbéliard…)

The specific notification here that Robert told Gautier this story at a time of peace (peis) has suggested to scholars that Robert wrote this narrative (at least in its first incarnation) prior to Gautier’s departure for his crusade in 1202. The prose redaction, however, takes out this reference. Whether or not enjoying peacetime, though, the presence of a patron known to be heavily involved in crusading seems to evoke, once again, Henning’s concept of selection. The Joseph is, after all, a narrative that is preoccupied with holy relics. The manuscripts’ material presentation of Gautier’s escripture-patronage presents a somewhat more varied picture than that provided by Chrétien’s publishers. From amongst our corpus, MSS fr. 20047 (the sole witness of the verse redaction), Ars. 2996, Beinecke 227 and fr. 748 maintain the mention of Gautier. MS fr. 748 also adds a second note a few lines later, referring to the ‘preu conte de Monbeliart’ (the noble count of Montbéliard) (f. 18a).39 By contrast, MSS fr. 1469, n. a. fr. 4166, Modena E 39, fr. 423 and Add. 38117 omit all allusions to patronage. These five manuscripts have been classified by O’Gorman, the text’s editor, as belonging to the same textual family (that which he calls z).40 O’Gorman suggests a reason for this complete omission in the z family: ‘En faisant disparaître le nom de l’auteur et les circonstances de la composition, le remanieur de z a sans doute voulu publier l’œuvre comme la sienne’41 (In making the name of the author and the circumstances of composition disappear, the compiler of z undoubtedly wished to publish the work as his own). Gowans, however, argues for its having more to do with the later introduction of the Didot-Perceval, since two of the z family’s manuscripts contain the Didot-Perceval, and the family as 38 39 40 41

Nitze, ‘Messire Robert de Boron’, p. 280. Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 951 (not in our corpus due to the location of manufacture) also adds a second note, but not at the same moment. MSS fr. 20047, Ars. 2996, Beinecke 227 and fr. 748 all belong to O’Gorman’s q family; ‘La tradition manuscrite’, p. 164. Ibid., p. 165, n. 2.

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a whole was most likely copied from related exemplars.42 In the absence of any discernible trend developing over time, as well as the wide spread of dates for the manuscripts belonging to the z family, Gowans’ argument seems to be the more persuasive. It is not impossible, of course, that one of the publishers of the z family manuscripts might have had a self-serving motivation for omitting Gautier’s name, but it seems unlikely that all would have. These manuscripts were not all the product of a common workshop after all – thus accidents of transmission seem to offer the more likely scenario. A far more unified approach is adopted by the Estoire and the Perlesvaus. As we have seen, these are both particularly spiritually oriented texts by comparison with the others in our corpus. All of our texts can claim some element of spiritual significance, of course, but spirituality is more purposefully at the heart of these two texts’ exposition. As a result of this, a different form of escripture-patronage comes into play. As Martine Meuwese puts it, ‘[t]he patron of an Arthurian text is not necessarily of this world.’43 Meuwese is referring to the fact that sometimes an escripture-patron is not a historical figure; in the case of these two texts, he is a rather more spiritual being. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Estoire’s prologue tells us that Christ himself wrote the original book, which he then asks (patronises, perhaps) the hermit to copy for a worldly audience. Meanwhile, we will remember that in the Perlesvaus it is in fact an angel who tells the story to Josephes and who bids him to translate it into Latin. As we discovered, however, in neither case do these mentions of an initial escripture-patron relate to patronage of the redaction of the text that is actually before us – rather Christ and the angel are positioned as having patronised anterior versions of the respective texts. Nonetheless, the publishers of the manuscripts (of the Estoire in particular) frequently depict these moments of patronage visually. As I discussed these same illuminations in Chapter 3, though in that case it was in relation to their depiction of the author, I will be brief in summarising here. Manuscripts of the Estoire that illustrate the escripture-patron include MSS fr. 749, fr. 747, fr. 19162, Rennes 255, BR 9246, Add. 10292 and Royal 14 E III (see Plate 21, which is also reproduced in colour as this book’s cover image). With the Perlesvaus, however, this tendency for depicting the escripture-patron is limited to just one instance, that which we saw on f. 1r of MS BR 11145 (see Plate 19). Indeed, in the two manuscripts in which the Perlesvaus is situated in fragmentary form diegetically prior to the Queste (MSS 3479–80 and 117–20; see Chapter 2), the identity of the escripture-patron is, in effect, transferred owing to the seamless cohesion of the two texts. That is to say that, since the escripture-patron of the Queste is King Henry II of England, the manner of the Perlesvaus’ presentation here passes him off as the escripture-patron of the two texts combined.

42 43

Gowans, ‘What did Robert de Boron Really Write?’, p. 17. Meuwese, ‘Crossing Borders’, p. 160.

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Plate 21: Christ (the escripture-patron) delivers the book to the hermit in the Estoire del saint Graal; London, British Library, MS Royal 14 E III, f. 3r.

Henry II, of course, is well known for his role as a literary patron. Charles Homer Haskins’ often-cited article on the subject argues, though, that Henry was less a connoisseur of the arts than he was an inspiration for literary creation as a result of his deeds and actions. His role was not one where he would seek to involve himself actively in the patronage of new and exciting literature; rather he was more of an ‘administrator’, as Haskins puts it, simply providing the practical means by which literature could be produced.44 Despite this, the medieval perception of him as an important and involved literary patron is clear in our corpus of manuscripts. Henry’s significance is repeatedly underlined, for example, by his consistent inclusion at the typical moment of disclosure in the Queste,45 where the text tells us that: 44

45

Charles H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. by A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 71–77. Note, however, that he seems to have been far more involved in the patronage of historiographical texts, such as those by Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure; on this, see Urbanski, Writing History for the King. And frequently also at the opening of the Mort Artu, which typically appears diegetically immediately after the Queste in the manuscripts: ‘Apres che que maistres gautiers map ot traitie des auentures del saint graal asses souffisaument si comme il fu auis al roi henri son signor que ce quil auoit fait ne deuoit pas souffire sil ne racontoit la fin de chaus dont il auoit deuant fait mention comment chil morurent de qui il auoit les proeces en son liure & por ce commencha il cest daaraine partie.’ (Once Master Walter Map had translated as much as he thought sufficient about the adventures of the holy grail, his lord King Henry thought that it would not be satisfactory unless he also told the full story of the lives of those he had mentioned, and the deaths of those whose prowess he had included in his book, and for this reason, he commenced this final part) (Mort Artu, p. 203).

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maistre gautiers map les traist a faire son liure del saint graal por lamor del roi henri son signor qui fist lestoire translater de latin en franchois. (pp. 198–99) (Master Walter Map extracted [the stories] in order to make his book of the Holy Grail for love of his lord King Henry, who had the story translated from Latin into French.)

Of course, this passage was important to us in Chapter 3 for its nomination of Walter Map as the Queste’s author; in the context of this chapter, it serves to tell us that Henry is not only Walter Map’s patron for this text, but he is also the key driver in having this text translated into the vernacular. This image of Henry certainly militates against Haskins’ view of him. We must remember, though, that there are uncertainties surrounding Map’s authorship, which could mean that this declaration of Henry as patron is equally dubious, perhaps constituting a mere device for authentication, rather than an accurate representation. Either way, Henry’s particular presentation in this passage allows him to perform (knowingly, actively or otherwise) a central function in marketing the text. As an English king, for example, Henry II’s value as a brand for this text is in his ability to position the narrative within an authentically ‘British’ context, as we saw in Chapter 2. The passage not only markets the story as one commissioned by a king, but also as one that owes its existence to a patron known in his own right for acts of chivalry within the geographical context of the narrative. The only manuscripts to remove the mention of Henry’s patronage in the Queste altogether are MS fr. 771 (thanks to an abridged colophon, the reason for which is unclear) and MS fr. 12573 (though the usual mention of Henry is maintained at the beginning of the Mort Artu). Since the Mort Artu follows on immediately from the end of the Queste, this latter manuscript might simply indicate that the publisher is using an editorial tactic to avoid the repetition of identical information in quick succession. All other manuscripts retain the reference and many go so far as to depict Henry’s patronage visually in illuminations (see Plates 15 and 16; a further example is provided in Plate 22). This tells us that Henry is of crucial importance to almost all publishers of the Queste, providing a key brand for the text that is not only maintained and rarely edited, but also often highlighted via illumination. Similarly, the manuscripts of the Post-Vulgate Queste also reveal the enduring importance of Henry as escripture-patron by maintaining his name within the narrative.46

46

See MS Rawl. D.874, f. 235d. MS fr. 343 would also presumably have kept this reference owing to its probably having been copied from the same exemplar, but the final folia are missing. On the link between MSS Rawl. D.874 and fr. 343, see Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Another Manuscript of the Post-Vulgate Queste: MS Rawlinson D. 874’, Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, 37 (1985), 292–98.

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Plate 22: King Henry II patronising Walter Map’s work on the Queste del saint Graal; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 229, f. 272v.

All of the escripture-patrons related to Grail literature that we have seen here seem to conform in one way or another to Henning’s three notions of stipulation, attraction and selection. There are, for example, ideas of obligation associated with the author–escripture-patron relationship, as we saw particularly vividly with Chrétien and Marie, but also with Map and Henry, where Map undertook the work ‘por lamor del roi’ (for the love of his lord).47 This serves to remind us of Henning’s concept of stipulation. Under Henning’s attraction, though, there are also clear hints that certain patrons could provide a level of influence, thus attracting others to particular worldviews, such as with Henry and Jeanne of Flanders. This was even more obviously the case with the Estoire and the Perlesvaus’ otherworldly escripture-patrons, whereby we noted that a strong suggestion of spirituality was pushed to the fore by means of the particular presentation of these patrons. Most clearly evidenced, though, must surely be Henning’s concept of selection, since all of our ‘real-world’ patrons – Philip, Gautier, Jeanne and Henry – seem to be implicated in (or, at least, presented as) selecting and influencing content in order to reflect their own interests. If Haskins is correct that Henry was more of an administrator, he might be an exception in terms of direct involvement, but this does not stop the author and the publishers of the Queste, deliberately positioning him as someone who purposefully directed the enterprise. The consistent, and often highlighted, presentation of all of these escripture-patrons by the publishers demonstrates that patronage remained an important act of branding in the marketing and promotion of Grail literature throughout its transmission in manuscript form in France. Serving as an escripture-patron, however, is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. We will remember the earlier discussion of the possibility that an 47

This passage is quoted in full in Chapter 3.

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escripture-patron might equally fulfil the role of livre-patron, and it is to this that I now turn my attention. One way in which the roles of escripture- and livre-patron might become interwoven is alluded to by Busby’s observation that: while the patronage of a work does not relate directly to manuscript production and ownership, it does imply that the patron might eventually be presented with a copy of the work in question.48

This reminds us that escripture-patronage not only facilitates the composition of a narrative; the requirement of that narrative’s inscription additionally gives rise to a physical product: a book. In effect, therefore, all escripture-patrons also fulfil the role of livre-patron. The reverse, however, is not always true. Many individuals, for example, will have patronised the production of a book, but never the composition of a narrative – these individuals can, therefore, only be referred to as livre-patrons. It is worth also noting that escripture-patrons of one text can also serve as livre-patrons of other texts (that is, texts where they were not involved in the original act of literary creation) simply by commissioning copies of them. There is, therefore, some overlap between escripture- and livre-patrons, and this will be important to keep in mind as I turn my attention specifically towards the material representations of the livre-patron in our corpus.

The Role of the Livre-patron Given the absence of first-generation manuscripts or autographs for any of our Grail texts, the role of the livre-patron for Grail literature is of critical importance. Without the livre-patron’s commissions for copies of texts from publishers, it is likely that we would have little or no knowledge of the medieval French Grail tradition. Accidents of transmission, after all, play their part in both depriving us of, and furnishing us with, examples of medieval literature, but there is a crucial numbers game at play as well. If livre-patrons had not commissioned further copies of a given text, then the only remaining witness to that text would probably be its ‘first edition’, that is, the sole copy meant for presentation to the escripture-patron. Any text inscribed in only one manuscript would inevitably have stood a more diminutive chance of survival across the centuries.49 For a considerable length of time, the only people with the resources either to purchase books or commission texts were those from amongst the wealthiest strata of society. There was, it is true, a marked distinction between the ‘considerable sum paid out by a king or prince to an author for a first edition or presentation copy of a recent work, and the much lower price which later copies fetched, even if de luxe.’50 Commissioning copies of texts was still not cheap, however, and it thus remained an activity of the most affluent. In terms of Arthurian romance, for example, we know that King Edward I of England 48 49

50

Busby, Codex and Context, II, p. 639. See Eltjo Buringh’s data-led enquiry into the average loss rates of manuscripts in the medieval period: Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden: Brill, 2011), esp. Chapter 4. Thomas, ‘Manuscripts’, pp. 24–25.

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(r. 1272–1307) and his wife Eleanor owned (and probably had commissioned) a fine French Arthurian volume, as did many of the most important households across Europe.51 But even the wealthiest in society had budgets to consider when commissioning book projects, and livre-patrons could freely opt for different levels of richness of presentation ‘in accord with their taste and purse’.52 For example, the famed Parisian book producers, the Montbastons, are known to have produced at least nineteen copies of the Roman de la rose. All of these seem to have been for wealthy livre-patrons, but each is unique depending on the commission the Montbastons received, particularly in terms of the richness and volume of illumination, the specific nature of which would have significantly influenced the cost of the commission.53 Over time, the basic rule of supply and demand meant that the increasing literacy-fuelled demand for books brought prices down a little – though as Hanno Wijsman points out, in this case it is more demand and supply, since ‘patrons activated production’.54 Books were still expensive, but the relatively lower price gradually led to a wider demographic of livre-patrons.55 Both lay people and the secular clergy began to buy books from at least the thirteenth century onwards,56 and possibly even earlier.57 Carol Meale argues that wealthy individuals from the middle classes (for lack of a better term) and corporate bodies increasingly came to commission copies of texts both in England and in France, though she says that the dominance of the royal court in such proceedings persisted for longer in the latter.58 But it was not just that more people became literate – the purposes for reading and writing also developed. Members of the professional and mercantile classes had previously only used their literacy in order to conduct their businesses; as books became ever more available, however, they increasingly turned their skills towards ‘edifications and entertainment’.59 They also began to understand the power that books offered in terms of education, knowledge accumulation and the validation of points of view.60 There were, therefore, far more livre-patrons than escripture-patrons. Despite this, however, the identification of livre-patrons in manuscripts is notoriously 51

52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60

Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. by Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 99. See also Roger Middleton’s enumeration of noble households in England known to have owned Vulgate Cycle manuscripts: ‘Manuscripts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England and Wales: Some Books and their Owners’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp. 219–35. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, I, pp. 242–43. Ibid. Hanno Wijsman, Luxury Bound: Illustrated Manuscript Production and Noble and Princely Book Ownership in the Burgundian Netherlands (1400–1550) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 559–60 and 565. This, of course, was not true of escripture-patrons, who were still the noblest in society, since the resources required were even greater, and escripture-patronage was as much about influence as it was about finance. Croenen, ‘Patrons, Authors and Workshops’, p. 5; see also Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 54. Thomas argues that the secular clergy may actually even have been livre-patrons as early as the twelfth century, The Secular Clergy, pp. 87–116. Carol M. Meale, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status’, in Book Production and Publishing, pp. 201–38 (p. 202). Ibid., pp. 216–17. Wijsman, Luxury Bound, p. 563.

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difficult, particularly at the earlier stages of production in our corpus.61 Scribal colophons occasionally reveal the name of the livre-patron,62 but these are comparatively rare. Kate Harris even suggests that it is sometimes easier to identify first ownership in early printed books than it is to detect the livre-patron in manuscripts.63 It is only really as we move towards the later parts of our period of consideration (c. 1400 onwards) that more visual demarcation of ownership begins to be regularly appended to manuscripts. This is typically in the form of ‘coats of arms, badges, mottoes, signatures, and portrait representations [which] serve to denote membership and rank within a family and society’.64 Booton argues that the increasing prominence of such ownership marks might have offered a method of denoting authority or privilege, both in societal and sacred contexts.65 An interesting development in this respect is that, as book buying increased and standardisation of layout was introduced to keep up with demand, it is often possible to see where otherwise-completed books have blanks left in their decoration. These blanks allowed owners to introduce their own marks of ownership if they so wished. Harris therefore argues that, even before print, ‘the patron was abdicating his role in “the sociology of the text”, losing his direct influence on the form in which a text is mediated to the reader’.66 In terms of French Arthurian manuscripts, Middleton’s impressive study reveals that little is known about the livre-patronage of both verse and prose manuscripts from the thirteenth century. It is only by the fourteenth century that we begin to see extensive and overt markers of livre-patronage, such as coats of arms and ex libris, adorning ornate and rich manuscripts, and even then these are by no means pervasive. For example, Middleton identifies that, amongst the manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, only three have anything known about their ownership prior to 1400, and only nine prior to 1500.67 What the small increase tells us, though, is that Arthurian books grew in importance in social contexts. And even if we cannot make firm identifications of many original livre-patrons, other aspects of the manuscripts’ composition can tell us much about the types of livre-patron who commissioned copies of Grail literature. The compilation of texts, as discussed in the previous chapter, is one such example. We have also seen that illumination is crucial, together with evidence of rewriting and reorientation towards particular topics. I will therefore consider a combination of these aspects, alongside more concrete markers of livre-patronage, in relation to our corpus. I have already noted that manuscripts of Chrétien’s Conte very rarely evince any details of ownership, and this is even truer if we are looking for evidence of their original livre-patrons. I have explored the potential interests of the commissioners of manuscripts such as MSS fr. 794 and fr. 1450 in some 61 62 63

64 65 66 67

Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 20. Booton, Manuscripts, Market, p. 205. Kate Harris, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners: The Evidence for Ownership, and the Rôle of Book Owners in Book Production and the Book Trade’, in Book Production and Publishing, pp. 163–99 (p. 167). Booton, Manuscripts, Market, p. 135 (see also p. 193). Ibid., p. 135. Harris, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners’, p. 183. Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 31.

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detail in Chapter 4, arguing that, thanks to the particular compilation of texts contained within, these two manuscripts show signs of a livre-patron interested in the historical contexts of Chrétien’s works,68 while in Chapter 2 I noted that the inclusion of the prequels in Mons 331/206 might be seen as suggestive of a livre-patron with a preference for learning about the lineage of the Grail family. These kinds of interests certainly support Stones’ suggestion that those who commissioned copies of Chrétien’s works from publishers included the aristocratic laity, as well as probably the regular and secular clergy.69 Two other manuscripts also reinforce this argument by offering more tangible evidence for their earliest ownership. The first of these is MS fr. 12576, the only manuscript to contain the Conte and all of the Continuations in complete form. There is, unfortunately, no specific note of ownership, but what does appear on f. 262r is a late-thirteenth-century note de redevances (list of debts) that is close to contemporary with the manuscript’s composition.70 Owing to the names and status of those listed as ‘in debt’ in respect of property in Amiens, as well as the evidently small-scale commercial operation implied, this list tells us that the manuscript was probably created in Amiens (or at least for someone in Amiens). It also suggests that a very early owner of the manuscript, possibly even the manuscript’s commissioner, might actually have been of a slightly lower social status than one might think.71 Middleton reckons it could have been a ‘prosperous burgher of similar social standing to the former mayors of Amiens named in the note’.72 Stones takes this note, alongside what she calls the ‘sometimes relatively inferior artistic level of Chrétien illuminations’ in general, as evidence that major livre-patrons were quite often members of the bourgeoisie, even if it is only MS fr. 12576 that provides solid proof.73 MS fr. 12576 therefore offers evidence that the livre-patrons of Grail texts actually came from a fairly wide demographic range. Just how wide this demographic might have been is suggested by the second of the two manuscripts: MS Add. 36614. In our discussion of escripture-patrons, I noted that Manessier’s Continuation shows signs of having been composed for a woman because of the narrative presentation of Blanchefleur as particularly strong and determined. We, of course, know this to be true since Jeanne of Flanders is clearly named as the text’s escripture-patron. I additionally noted Busby’s and Walters’ argument that, due to 68 69 70

71 72 73

As does London, College of Arms, MS Arundel XIV, the Anglo-Norman copy of the Conte (not included in the corpus for study due to the probable location of manufacture). Alison Stones, ‘The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts and their Artistic Context’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, I, pp. 227–322 (p. 268). Busby suggests this is in fact a mark of secondary ownership, Codex and Context, I, p. 56, while Roger Middleton leaves the matter a little more open since he argues that the nonGrail texts interpolated (including the list of debts) are indeed slightly later additions, but not so significantly as to exclude the possibility that the manuscript’s livre-patron was the same as the person responsible for the list. It is Middleton who suggests, on this basis, that we might be looking at a lower-status individual than would ordinarily be expected: ‘Additional Notes on the History of Selected Manuscripts’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, II, pp. 177–243 (pp. 216–31). Ibid., p. 220. Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 31. Stones cites further evidence that members of the bourgeoisie, particularly in Tournai, were known to have owned vernacular manuscripts, ‘The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts’, p. 268.

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its preference for illuminating episodes involving Blanchefleur, MS Montpellier H249 might have had a female livre-patron.74 In the case of MS Add. 36614, it is possible that, once again, a female livre-patron is behind this manuscript’s publication. What makes MS Add. 36614 particularly interesting, however, is that the suspicions regarding livre-patronage are not focused on it having been commissioned by just any woman, but by one woman in particular – Jeanne of Flanders herself. Amongst the evidence for this is the particular combination of texts in MS Add. 36614, as Arthurian texts in the vernacular would have represented good choices for a female patron in Jeanne’s position. Hall McCash has convincingly shown, for example, that women could read better in the vernacular than in Latin, and thus female patrons found vernacular literature useful not only as a means of asserting political agendas, but also of fulfilling their obligations to provide courtly entertainment and diversion.75 Even more pertinently, the presence in the manuscript of La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, a female saint’s life, is revealing. Lori Walters, for instance, argues: MS 36614, representing a single production, brings together Jeanne’s interest in the Grail legend and her more pious preoccupations. It is easy to imagine that Jeanne would have commanded the production of this manuscript that was closely bound up with her family’s history in the Crusades. The life of a Sainte Marie appearing in the collection with Chretien’s Conte du Graal and its Continuations would have had a sure appeal for a woman who belonged to a family that claimed several illustrious women named Marie in its number, including the Marie de Champagne who had prompted the writing of another of Chretien’s romances.76

Patricia Stirnemann, meanwhile, concurs that the inclusion of the Sainte Marie text in conjunction with the Grail stories is suggestive that Jeanne could have been the intended reader of this volume. Stirnemann contends, however, that it was more likely commissioned for (rather than by) Jeanne as a gift from her aunt Blanche, Countess of Champagne, as ‘a reminder of her uncle’s role in arranging the marriage of her parents and of his patronage of Chrétien’.77 There is also further evidence of Jeanne’s attachment to the manuscript provided by paratexts added at later dates, suggesting a possible connection to the House of Flanders. Doodles from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the arms of Flanders on ff. 8r, 110r and 271r, for example, might suggest some kind of link.78 Middleton points out, however, that the generic nature of the doodle on f. 271r, which appears to be from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (and of which the doodle on f. 8r seems to be a poorly executed copy), could have been drawn by anyone who simply wished to illustrate the original connection 74 75

76 77 78

Busby, ‘Text, Miniature, and Rubric’, p. 370 and Walters, ‘The Image of Blanchefleur’. June Hall McCash, ‘The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women: An Overview’, in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. by June Hall McCash (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 1–49 (p. 25). Walters, ‘Jeanne and Marguerite’, p. 21. Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Some Champenois Vernacular Manuscripts’, p. 212; see also Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, p. 40. Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Women and Books in France: 1170–1220’, in Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages, ed. by Bonnie Wheeler (Dallas: Academia, 1993), pp. 247–52 (p. 250); see also Busby, Perceval, pp. xix–xx.

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of Flanders to the manuscript.79 By contrast, the shield drawn on f. 110r, which is accompanied by inscriptions that date it palaeographically as earlier than the other doodles (probably early fourteenth century), seems to be a more authentic mark of ownership. This, Middleton argues, is thanks to the engrailed bordure, which suggests that the artist understood the significance of the particular presentation of arms.80 Middleton thus identifies ‘a younger son of Flanders’, and specifically Robert of Cassel (1275–1331), as the probable owner of this manuscript in the early fourteenth century, since these are a credible representation of his arms in particular.81 That the manuscript might have been passed down to him within the family is plausible; Jeanne therefore could have been the original owner.82 The argument for Jeanne as livre-patron finds further support in Stirnemann’s observation in that, whilst the Manerius style of decoration used for section of the manuscript containing the Conte suggests it was completed in the Champagne region, the later sections containing the two Continuations and the Sainte Marie show signs of having been copied in a more northern setting, due to traces of the Picard dialect. If true, this means that the preparation of the manuscript might have been started in Champagne, before it was then taken north and completed there, possibly even in Flanders.83 Busby, however, suggests that the palaeographic styles of the six copyists are so close that their training might have been dispensed in a common workshop, though he does not rule out that this workshop could itself have been located in Flanders.84 Indeed, Busby even argues elsewhere that the specific make-up of the manuscript – that is, in its inclusion of the Conte with two Continuations, which leaves the narrative without a conclusion, might actually have provided the impetus for Jeanne to commission Manessier’s concluding section.85 Obviously, I am far from the first to suggest that Jeanne might have been the original owner of MS Add. 36614, but so far all of the various pieces of evidence have not been brought together in one place. By having done so here, I believe I have constructed a robust case for Jeanne’s serving as the livre-patron for MS Add. 36614, at the same time as revealing Jeanne to be a particularly fine example of an individual who served in the roles of both escripture- and livre-patron for different texts. Jeanne’s connection to MS Add. 36614 additionally offers further evidence that the livre-patrons for the Conte and its Continuations, from the bourgeois owner of MS fr. 12576 to the countess responsible for MS Add. 36614, came from a relatively broad social spectrum. We can therefore infer that Chrétien’s work had a wide appeal throughout its manuscript transmission.

79 80 81 82

83 84 85

Roger Middleton, ‘Index of Former Owners’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, II, pp. 87–176 (pp. 127–28); see also Middleton, ‘Additional Notes’, pp. 232–36. Middleton, ‘Additional Notes’, p. 234. Middleton, ‘Index of Former Owners’, p. 128 and Middleton, ‘Additional Notes’, p. 235. Another fifteenth-century mark of ownership, in the shape of the name ‘Tassin de Caumainil’, which is written three times into the bottom margin on f. 123v, unfortunately cannot be identified with any known individual; Middleton, ‘Additional Notes’, p. 235. Stirnemann, ‘Some Champenois Vernacular Manuscripts’, p. 212. Busby, Perceval, pp. xix–xx. Busby, Codex and Context, II, p. 713.

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From amongst our corpus of non-Chrétien manuscripts, there are equally few opportunities for concretely identifying original livre-patrons, particularly at the earlier stages of transmission. Nonetheless, a handful of manuscripts provides precious testimony as to the kinds of clients for whom publishers of Grail literature worked. For example, in MS Brussels 11145’s redaction of the Perlesvaus, we will of course remember the dedication, encountered in Chapter 3, that reads: ‘Por le seingnor de neele fist li seingnor de ca[m]brein cest liure escrire’ (The Lord of Cambrein had this book written for the Lord of Neele) (f. 111d). Whilst seemingly identifying the intended recipient of the manuscript as Jean de Nesle and its livre-patron as the Lord of Cambrein, we discovered that this dedication is actually a red herring. The manuscript was copied in the late thirteenth century, and Jean de Nesle is known to have died in 1239. So this manuscript cannot have been intended for him. This means that the dedication was probably copied from an exemplar and the Lord of Cambrein (who remains impossible to identify with any historical figure) probably served as the livre-patron for that (or an anterior) exemplar.86 The dedication’s wording, however, does leave open the possibility that the Lord of Cambrein actually served as the original escripture-patron of the Perlesvaus itself, but this seems unlikely for two reasons. First, the dedication only appears in this one manuscript, which would suggest that it belongs to one copy of the text rather than to the original composition, as otherwise we might expect to find further witnesses to it. Second, the dedication states of the narrative that ‘[q’]onques mes ne fu troitiez que une seule foiz auec cestui en roumenz’ (only once has it been written in French). Of course, we have seen many claims of anterior versions within our corpus, but these usually all refer to versions in Latin as a means of underlining the authority of the narrative. These claims, we have seen, are rarely based in fact. In this case, however, the dedication suggests that a French version already exists; it is possible, therefore, that this is a more authentic assertion. This said, the author of the dedication is still careful to temper his statement by appending at least some notion of ‘ancient authority’: ‘cil qui auant cestui fu fez et [sic] si anteus q[u’a] gr[an]t poine an peust lan choissir la lestre’ (the anterior copy is so old that it is with great difficulty that one makes out the letters) (ff. 111d–12a). This claim is more dubious: for the letters to be hard to make out due to age, the exemplar would surely have needed to be much older than is possible. The narrative, after all, cannot have been written more than a generation prior to Jean de Nesle’s copy, in which the dedication was originally inscribed.87 Regardless of the veracity of this particular claim, it seems that Jean de Nesle did at some point receive a gift from a colleague in the shape of a manuscript of the Perlesvaus, and this manuscript was probably very similar in terms of its presentation to MS Brussels 11145 for the reasons discussed in Chapter 3. We can be assured, therefore, that the Perlesvaus had the nobility amongst its livre-patrons.

86 87

Grand, ‘A Time of Gifts’, p. 138. Grand provides a terminus post quem of 1200 in ‘A Time of Gifts’, p. 154.

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This is also confirmed by MS Hatton 82, a rather grubby and undecorative manuscript of the Perlesvaus from the thirteenth century, which seems to have circulated in England (though it remains uncertain as to whether it was originally produced in England or France). A more or less contemporary, though probably slightly later,88 hand writes at the top of the opening folio: ‘Le seint Graal: le liuer sire Brian fiz Alayn’ (The holy Grail: the book of Lord Brian Fitzalan) (f. 1r). Middleton has identified Brian Fitzalan as the Lord of Bedale in Yorkshire who died in 1306, and he thus designates this statement as an ex libris.89 There are, therefore, noble individuals on both sides of the Channel, at least in the century following its original publication, who acted as livre-patrons for the Perlesvaus. In both cases, though, the manuscripts are hardly sumptuous. Thanks to its single illumination and slightly clearer hand, MS Brussels 11145 has the look of a slightly richer artefact. As we saw earlier, though, its redaction is marred by the frequent copying errors of a less than meticulous scribe. So even though livre-patrons for the Perlesvaus seem to come from amongst the nobility, these were not individuals who lavished money on commissioning their copies, whether through financial hardship or personal preference.90 This suggestion is, though, based only on the relatively small corpus of extant manuscripts in which the text survives complete (as opposed to where a fragment is interpolated into the Vulgate Cycle). Most of these manuscripts come from the thirteenth century, where we might expect to see less extensive illumination in any case, but other factors such as poor quality parchment, errors in copying and diminutive format also combine to offer a broader impression of an economy of production. We cannot and should not, however, completely discard the possibility that more lavish examples of the Perlesvaus might once have existed, but not survived. In respect of the Vulgate Cycle, by comparison, we have considerable evidence that this cycle of texts attracted some of the wealthiest livre-patrons in society, particularly in the later period of transmission (from the late fourteenth century onwards). Since manuscripts of the Vulgate Cycle are so often richly illuminated, frequently incorporating both implicit and explicit reference to patronage, a great deal of scholarship on the subject already exists. For example, Elspeth Kennedy compares the illuminations of three fourteenth-century Vulgate Cycle manuscripts known to have been produced by the same publisher: MSS Add. 10292–94, Royal 14 E III and another manuscript known as the ‘Rochefoucauld Grail’ thanks to its possibly having been made for Guy VII, Baron de la Rochefoucauld (†1356). This last manuscript is now split into three parts: one is MS Douce 215, one is MS Rylands 1 and the other was previously MS BPH 1, but has since been sold into

88

89 90

The same hand writes initials into the gaps left for them in the main body text on f. 1, indicating its probable proximity to the manuscript’s original publication. William A. Nitze, The Old French Grail Romance Perlesvaus: A Study of its Principal Sources (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1902), p. 5. Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, pp. 43–44. Further evidence for this suggestion is provided by MS fr. 1428, which is also from the thirteenth century and undecorated. Indeed, the only manuscripts of the Perlesvaus to be particularly rich in decoration are those where a fragment of the text is interpolated as an introduction to the Queste, namely MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80.

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private hands.91 Kennedy’s analysis shows that the programmes of illumination in each of these manuscripts reveal details about the respective livre-patrons’ personal interests, even if they do not concretely identify the people involved. For example, to the livre-patron of MS Royal 14 E III Kennedy attributes an interest in spiritual and theological matters; for MS Add. 10292–94, she suggests someone focused on legal and feudal concerns; the Rochefoucauld Grail, by contrast, is argued as demonstrating disparate approaches for the various branches, and Kennedy believes this to show ‘no clear evidence of central planning for a particular patron’.92 In support of Booton’s earlier assertion, manuscripts from our corpus dating from the late fourteenth century onwards show these visual suggestions of the interests of livre-patrons being increasingly supplemented by more concrete depictions of ownership within their decoration. The following presents a selection of these. MS Ars. 5218’s edition of the Queste, we will remember from Chapter 2, was published by Pierart dou Tielt, who looked after all aspects of the book’s production. In Chapter 4, Pierart’s inclusion of a set of church annals into the manuscript was discussed. The combination of these annals’ inclusion, their pro-French stance and the opposition between ‘spiritual and profane chivalry’ in the manuscript’s programme of illumination led Walters to suggest that the manuscript was made at the behest of Gilles le Muisit, Abbot of St-Martin. This is because Gilles had a personal interest in Charles d’Anjou thanks to family involvement in one of Charles’ campaigns.93 Here, therefore, we have evidence of a livre-patron who appears to commission a copy of a Grail text so as to contextualise it within the settings of ecclesiastical debate and church history. This presents a rather different scenario from that with which we have become familiar. Now we discover that the Grail’s audience extended out from the aristocracy and nobility; it also found readers within the Church. And this Grail manuscript is one of only two known to have been commissioned by a religious livre-patron. The publisher of the other such manuscript, the unique MS Brussels 9246, one Guillaume de la Pierre, is particularly clear in his prologue about the identity of the manuscript’s livre-patron – he is Jean-Louie de Savoie, then Bishop of Geneva. In Chapter 3, we learnt that this manuscript is a special, linguistically modified version of the Estoire, one which ‘metre en françois’ (puts into French) (f. 1v) the text at the specific request of the bishop. This statement is, however, unusual. Similar to the author of the Perlesvaus’ dedication in MS Brussels 11145, Guillaume is not saying that he is translating from Latin, rather that he is modernising the French language used in the narrative. The reason for Jean-Louie de Savoie acting as livre-patron for this manuscript is, however, rather unclear; he does 91

92

93

See Sotheby’s online catalogue, which documents the sale in 2010 and provides a full manuscript description: . Stones’ The Lancelot-Graal Project also compares the illuminations of these manuscripts digitally at . Elspeth Kennedy, ‘The Relationship between Text and Image in Three Manuscripts of the Estoire del Saint Graal (Lancelot–Grail Cycle)’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, pp. 93–100 (p. 94). Ibid., pp. 339–40, 351–58 and 361–63.

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not otherwise seem to have been especially active as a patron for the arts, and so his reason for commissioning such an unusual project – and a sumptuously decorated one at that – is far from obvious.94 A far more typical example of livre-patronage from amongst our corpus is the lavishly illuminated MS fr. 111 from c. 1480–85, which contains the Lancelot, the Queste and the Mort Artu. Owing to the inclusion of arms in the manuscript’s decoration (particularly at the opening of both the Lancelot and the Queste (ff. 1r and 236r)), we know this manuscript to have been produced for Yvon le Fou (†1488), Seneschal of Poitiers and Grand Huntsman of France. He was a known book collector, who is documented as having owned and commissioned various volumes. Most of these are identifiable thanks to similar depictions of his arms within the decoration.95 Decorating manuscripts with arms in this way, as Booton suggested, evidently became something of a commonplace for noble livrepatrons, and perhaps amongst the most well known to have done so is Jacques d’Armanac, Duke of Nemours. Jacques owned not one, but three copies of the Vulgate Cycle, and these are extant in MSS 112, 113–16 and 117–20 (Ars. 3479–80 is a direct copy of this latter). As a result, he has been the subject of much scholarship. The same publishers produced all of these manuscripts in the fifteenth century, and the enterprise was most likely led by Micheau Gonnot, whom we encountered in Chapter 2 as one of Jacques’ best-known manuscript planners/ scribes.96 One of the particular curiosities about this trio of manuscripts is not so much that Jacques owned three copies of the same text, since bibliophiles were often keen to acquire duplicate copies of a text on the second-hand market, but that he actually commissioned the production of all three.97 Middleton suggests that this is indicative of a change in emphasis for livre-patronage, ‘where the making of a particular book [became] more important than the copying of a particular text’.98 What Middleton is referring to is the fact that the text itself seems to have been a secondary concern. Of primary importance, by contrast, was the production of the material artefact. In this respect, considerable enquiry has been undertaken in relation to these manuscripts’ respective cycles of illumination which seem, quite deliberately, to show very little duplication of content, thus suggesting that each manuscript served a discrete purpose for Jacques.99 FabryTehranchi, in particular, has argued that the illuminations in MS fr. 113–16 show a preference for depicting chivalric content.100 Despite his avid bibliophilia,

94

95 96 97 98 99

100

Aurélie Delamarre, ‘Copier au XVe siècle du français déjà ancien: L’exemple de l’Estoire del saint Graal: Commentaire linguistique et édition partielle du ms. b.r. brux. 9246’ (unpublished dissertation, École des Chartes, 2003) – summary available at . See Max Prinet, ‘Manuscripts de la librairie d’Yvon du Fou, grand veneur de France’, Bibliographie moderne, 5–6 (1912–13), 313–19. Susan A. Blackman, ‘A Pictorial Synopsis of Arthurian Episodes for Jacques d’Armanac, Duke of Nemours’, in Word and Image, pp. 3–57 (p. 5). Ibid., p. 3. Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 48. See Blackman’s study of the pictorial cycles in the three manuscripts, ‘A Pictorial Synopsis’. A longer version of Blackman’s study is available in her ‘The Manuscripts and Patronage of Jacques d’Armagnac, Duke of Nemours (1433–1477)’, 2 vols (unpublished dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1993). Fabry-Tehranchi, ‘Le Livre’, p. 11.

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however, Jacques’ later execution for treason meant that his ex libris was actually removed from many of his books in deliberate acts of damnatio memoriae so as to enable their re-sale; the influence of his livre-patronage was therefore directly affected by changes to his standing in society.101 Across the manuscript transmission of our corpus of Grail texts, we have seen that the respective roles of the escripture-patron and the livre-patron are quite distinct in terms of the associated activities and relationships, as well as in the ways in which they are presented in manuscript editions. The escripture-patron, on the one hand, appears to retain a level of importance such that publishers rarely excise references to his or her influence – he or she remains a key brand for the narrative, a guarantor of quality. In the case of livre-patrons, however, it is only much later in the tradition that clear signs of ownership start to be included into the volumes, perhaps suggesting the growing importance of books as status objects and aspirational items amongst ever-wider demographics.102 Certainly, the evidence suggests that Grail literature attracted a wide range of livre-patrons, from the bourgeois to members of the Church to the nobility and aristocracy, giving us a strong indication of just how adaptable manuscript publishers had to be in conducting client relationships. Despite these clear differences, however, escripture- and livre-patrons also share certain motivations.

Shared Motivations Commercial endeavour has, of course, been at the core of this entire study, and this is no less the case with respect to patronage; Holzknecht, for instance, makes the point that more obvious depictions of patronage see a marked rise during the ‘economic phase of the literary profession.’103 Indeed, commercial profit is attached to patronage in more than one way, since escripture-patrons not only fund writers, but also act as a brand for the text’s quality, thus encouraging would-be livre-patrons to commission further copies from publishers. It would, however, be remiss to suggest that economics are the only driver behind the literary commissioning process, and this is true of both escripture- or livre-patronage. Jesse Hurlbut, for example, states: ‘the exchange of wealth for the services of an artist or craftsperson necessarily implies that those services accomplish some valuable

101

102

103

Middleton, ‘The Manuscripts’, p. 66. Jeanette Patterson, in her study of patronage in the Bible historiale, makes the pertinent argument that, through such acts, there is a usurping of power of the earlier patron by later owners, ‘Stolen Scriptures: The Bible historiale and the Hundred Years War’, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2 (2013), 155–80. Meale provides an insightful discussion into the power of book ownerships in her ‘The Politics of Book Ownership: The Hopton Family and Bodleian Library, Digby MS 185’, in Prestige, Authority, and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. by Felicity Riddy (York: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 82–103; for a discussion of the printed book as a commodity, see also Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 109–27. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 3.

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function for the patron.’104 In essence, this connotes that there is some kind of additional benefit to the patron that is perhaps intellectual, social or political. Both escripture- and livre-patrons stood to gain non-financially from being named in, or associated with, books. By acting as either escripture- or livre-patron, for example, these individuals became attached to literary endeavour, with both their name and their services to the arts being immortalised in written form.105 There was, in other words, a benefit to an individual’s social status, because the mere fact of possessing a book said much about the owner, even if he or she never read it.106 There is, in fact, considerable debate as to the actual levels of literacy enjoyed by certain patrons, particularly in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when it is by no means clear that reading books was always a patron’s intention (or indeed ability). If he or she consumed books at all, it might be that he or she listened to them in a group setting, rather than read them alone.107 Furthermore, there is good evidence to suggest that rich, but only semi-literate patrons sometimes commissioned texts and books precisely to demonstrate to others that they were more learned, more well-read and had better taste than was in fact the case.108 I take issue, therefore, with Lucas’ reductive observation that ‘[l]iterary patronage has its roots in literacy, because only the literate patronize literature’,109 since reading books was evidently not the only way to benefit from them. This said, as the spread of literacy increased from the mid thirteenth century, there developed a gradual rise towards what Kate Harris refers to as ‘an increased “bookishness”’.110 That is, there came to be a closer level of interest and engagement between the livre-patron and his purchased text than had previously been the case. Betsy Price refers to this process as the ‘intellectualization of medieval endeavors’,111 by which she means that, as they became more knowledgeable and articulate, livre-patrons would require manuscripts to reflect more closely their personal interests. This is, of course, precisely the kind of tailoring that we have witnessed as increasing within our corpus as time moves on: the later manuscripts not only show ownership marks in increasing abundance, but they also often contain programmes of illumination and textual compilation that reflect a patron’s social and political agenda, even if that is merely to conform to fashion (as suggested by the Cycle Trend of compilation). This is pertinent since it shows the livre-patron becoming increasingly aware of the potential social benefits not only of owning books, but also of reframing literary content within 104

105 106 107 108

109 110 111

Jesse D. Hurlbut, ‘Patron as Pupil: On Becoming the Duke of Burgundy’, in The Search for a Patron in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by David G. Wilkins and Rebecca line Wilkins (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996), pp. 45–53 (p. 49). Ibid. See Meale, ‘The Politics of Book Ownership’. See, for example, Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 109–10. See, for example, Benjamin Pohl’s discussion of the literacy levels and book commissioning activities of the dukes of Normandy in the chapter entitled ‘Patronage and Literacy’ in his Dudo of Saint-Quentin, pp. 156–65. Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 250. Harris, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners’, p. 178. B. B. Price, ‘The Effect of Patronage on the Intellectualization of Medieval Endeavors’, in The Search for a Patron, pp. 5–18.

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manuscripts for their personal benefit. This serves, once again, as an example of a shared motivation of the livre-patron with the escripture-patron who, the author will often tell us (truthfully or otherwise), has influenced the original act of literary creation in such a way as to align the work’s content with certain political or personal goals for similar ends. I do not wish to suggest that patrons were the only beneficiaries of patronage. Indeed, I have discussed many of the advantages to the person(s) being patronised in some detail, and we even saw authors such as Chrétien expressing his personal joy at the mutuality that he sees as governing his author–patron relationship with Philip of Flanders.112 This is in line with Helen Swift’s view of patronage as a dynamic exchange that is manipulated by both sides in order to promote creativity.113 It is, therefore, quite true that both parties brought with them important advantages that could be pivotal to the success of the book.114 However, even in the happiest of circumstances, the reality is that neither escripture- nor livre-patronage was composed of a marriage between equals. Lucas astutely observes that: while the moneyed gentleman was reliant on the person with a book for what was more or less a luxury item, the man with the book was to a greater or lesser extent reliant on the moneyed person, or ‘patron’ for necessities.115

In other words, despite my earlier plea that we should not see economics as the sole driver for patronage (and this remains true), it is nonetheless money that ends up weighting the benefits of patronage more firmly in favour of the patron.116 Thomas links the origins of this imbalance to the escripture-patron’s role in defining the moment of publication, since any financial interest for the author ends after the first edition is delivered to that patron. Thereafter, the author has no rights in his work, and no royalties will come from copies commissioned by book patrons; he has only the meagre hope that he will be asked to compose again by the same, or another, rich escripture-patron.117 Similarly, in relation to livrepatronage, the manuscript publisher can only function in the situation where there is a rich livre-patron willing to hand over money for a product. After all, the manuscript trade did not usually experiment with speculative publishing, rather it relied on commissions. Without a livre-patron, the publisher’s business will fail; if the publisher’s business fails, however, then the livre-patron will survive (and will probably find another publisher). Wace hints at the pivotal role of money in governing the balance of patronage relations in his Roman de Rou, where he claims to direct his work deliberately at:

112 113

114

115 116 117

See Hall McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, p. 15. Helen Swift, ‘Circuits of Power: A Model for Rereading Poet-Patron Relations in LateMedieval Defences of Women’, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2 (2013), 222–42. Sylvie G. Davidson interprets these advantages rather as imperatives to a book’s success, than as additional benefits. She thus refers to them as ‘reciprocal obligations’; ‘Patronage in Paris in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Nicolas Houel’, in The Search for a Patron, pp. 138–44 (p. 144). Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 254. See Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage’, p. 452. Thomas, ‘Manuscripts’, p. 25.

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la riche gent, ki unt les rentes e le argent kar pur eus sunt le liure fait e bon dit fait e bien retrait.118 (the rich people, who have the incomes and the money, because for them books are made and good works are composed and well produced.)

The patron, therefore, is the core focus of all publication in manuscript form, but in order to survive publishers had to learn how to balance putting customers first with managing their expectations, exploiting their purse and attracting their return custom. Whilst terms like ‘customer’ or ‘client’ might seem to be more appropriate for the non-bespoke trade that arose with the printed book,119 I would argue that they serve as valid descriptors of patrons owing to the explicitly commercial environment in which Grail literature was produced. Even in spite of the mutual social benefits afforded by patronage discussed earlier, in the end profit and commercial enterprise appear to dominate patronage relationships. For example, at the height of the French manuscript trade’s commercial operation in the fourteenth century, in order to keep up with the demand, manuscripts were sometimes produced according to standardised templates (such as MSS fr. 117–20 and Ars. 3479–80). We also saw that blank patches were often incorporated into these templates, showing that publishers recognised and responded to the increasing desire of livre-patrons to imprint their identities onto the fabric of the book. This tactic had the additional benefit, though, of creating an extra paid-for service in customisation. Seeing the patron increasingly as a kind of customer or client, therefore, one who is to be both respected and managed, seems a fitting reflection of the development of the patron’s role during the move towards print.

Patronage and Print Culture Escripture-patronage experienced some change as the publishing trade moved towards print, since the need for a patron to help disseminate a text was greatly diminished; the ability to produce many copies at once meant that accessing a reading public was much easier.120 The role of the livre-patron, meanwhile, was affected even more severely. Whilst bespoke books were still produced, print enabled publishers to begin – cautiously – to publish speculatively, taking punts as to what might satisfy a reading public’s desires enough to sell more than just a handful of copies.121 This meant that the livre-patron was on a path towards redundancy from the late fifteenth century onwards, as copies of texts were usually only commissioned where a particularly deluxe item was required, in which case a manuscript (or a printed version made to look like a manuscript with hand-drawn decoration and an appropriate layout) would have been the

118 119 120 121

Wace, Le Roman de Rou, ed. by A. J. Holden, 3 vols (Paris: Picard, 1970–73), I, p. 167. Harris, ‘Patrons, Buyers and Owners’, p. 178. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 59. Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage’, p. 453.

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preferred format.122 As a result, literary patronage took on a rather different form. The escripture-patron retained his place as the original sponsor of a literary work, but lost his function as the primary conduit for distribution, while the livre-patron experienced a gradual demise in the face of new technology. Print would thus see the development of a new kind of patron. The patrons mentioned in printed texts were often not involved with a text’s publication at all. Occasionally they might have provided some capital towards production costs such as typesetting,123 but far more frequently books came to be dedicated to a patron without their having provided any input whatsoever – and often this happened even without their knowledge. This is because the nature of the printed book trade, in its mass-market orientation, meant that the most useful aspect of patronage was its function in endorsing a text. In other words, it was best used as a piece of sales promotion or marketing strategy.124 I shall therefore refer to these printed book patrons as promotion-patrons. As with the escripture-patrons of manuscripts, the inclusion of references to promotionpatrons offered a method for reaching a wider public. Their status, typically as prominent citizens,125 not only provided encouragement for wider reading and sales, but also sometimes served as a method for protecting books from detractors.126 Taylor describes the practice as: constructing an ideal readership […] cultivating the impression that this great romance is designed for a royal court, the traditional centre for literary authority. […] To name the king as patron was to borrow prestige and imply that the volume corresponded to royal taste, and was therefore to advertise the book itself.127

Additionally, the unauthorised loan of a promotion-patron’s name suggests that publishers expected little in return from the patron him- or herself; rather the return they hoped for was a subsequent generation of sales.128 This is not to say, however, that promotion-patrons never responded to these dedications; authors often arranged for a rich copy, perhaps on vellum, to be printed for initial presentation, and the dedicatee might then send the author an expensive gift or similar in return.129 This was, however, far from being the key driver in promotion-patronage: its chief raison d’être was as ‘a potent marketing tool’ for the text.130 Even where a promotion-patron was closely involved in a text’s production in printed form, he or she would also have been aware of the wider social context in which book production now operated. The trade was not only 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130

Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book, p. 65. Lucas, From Author to Audience, p. 273. Walsh, ‘Literary Patronage’, pp. 455–57. Kathleen line Scott, The Caxton Master and his Patrons (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1976), p. 1. Lucas, From Author to Audience, pp. 272–73. Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 47. Ibid., p. 49; see also Holzknecht, Literary Patronage, p. 155. See, for example, Benjamin Pohl and Leah Tether, ‘Books Fit for a King: Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi (British Library, MS Royal 8 B VII and Pembroke College, Cambridge, MS 217) and Johannes Sturm’s De Periodis (Trinity College Library, Cambridge, II. 12.21 and British Library, C.24.e.5.)’, The Electronic British Library Journal (2015), art. 7, 1–35 (pp. 7–9 and p. 15, n. 75), available at . Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 48.

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commercial, but increasingly corporate; a patron’s personal desires could only be accommodated to a certain degree because the needs of a far-wider readership had to be addressed.131 In this sense, the promotion-patron’s influence is very different from that of the escripture-patron. For example, the promotion-patron does not exercise the same level of control as the escripture-patron in terms of Henning’s notions of stipulation and selection, that is, he does not influence content choices and production decisions to the same extent. In terms of Henning’s concept of attraction, however, the promotion-patron might be seen to be more influential than his predecessor, as his brand on the text will be seen by a far-wider readership and thus has the potential to draw a larger audience to his worldview, as adumbrated by the outlook of the publication. Amongst our corpus of printed Grail texts, publishers offer many and varied responses to both escripture- and promotion-patrons. In the case of the 1488 edition of the Vulgate Cycle, for instance, no patron of any kind is referred to – not even Henry II as the original escripture-patron. Considering the expense and risk of this publishing project – it was the first French Grail text to be printed –, this is perhaps curious. Why would the publisher not have sought support for the enterprise – or perhaps they did, and could not find anyone? As we know, it actually took the efforts of a syndicate of two (possibly three) publishers to bring this book to press, indicating that external support for the project was not entirely forthcoming. Taylor analyses the work’s prologue and describes the impression of the work it creates as ‘apologetic, anxious’.132 This interpretation might suggest that the publishers of the work were aware that they were working in a still unknown marketplace, and were unsure of how to produce this book to its best advantage. Support for this contention is provided by the layout: the two-column format as well as the broader design are clearly intended to mimic a manuscript. Additionally, the publishers make provision for future owners to customise the book, using similar methods to those that we saw in manuscripts. For example, they use guide letters to indicate where decorative initials could be painted in, and they leave spaces in woodcuts for the later addition of names and painted coats of arms (see Plate 23, in which names have been inserted into spaces in banners, and where an ex libris has been stamped in the space for arms). The publishers thus seem intent on operating within existing textual frames in order to maintain the familiarity of print at the same time as embracing the economy of print, perhaps indeed to avoid discouraging customers with more traditional tastes. The idea that the publishers’ evident anxiety in producing the 1488 edition lies at the root of their choice not to include a patron finds support in a later edition of the same book. Having achieved at least some modicum of success with the editio princeps, Vérard (the probable underwriter of the 1488 edition) produced a further and apparently more confident edition of the same texts in 1494. By this point, the role of the promotion-patron, it seems, had become far better understood, since a patron is now introduced. Vérard dedicates this edition to Charles VIII, though it 131

132

Werner line Gundersheimer, ‘Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach’, in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. by Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 3–23 (pp. 18–19). Taylor, Rewriting Arthurian Romance, p. 89.

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seems unlikely Charles had much, if anything, to do with the book’s production. Nonetheless, special vellum copies of it were made for presentation to him.133

Plate 23: Woodcut with spaces for names and arms; Lancelot du Lac: Livre fait des fais et gestes […] du tres vaillant chevallier, Lancelot, du Lac, 2 vols (Rouen: Jean Le Bourgeois; Paris: Jean du Pré, 1488); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Y2 46–47, I, sig. aa.

By the time of the publication of the 1516 edition of the Sainct Greaal (containing a sequence of Estoire–Perlesvaus–Queste), there appears to have been even more marked growth in terms of confidence in the use of patronage for marketing texts. The title page (sig. ai), for example, carries details of the three-year privilège granted to the edition’s publishers by the king (who would have been Francis I). Francis is thus positioned clearly and immediately as the promotion-patron. Additionally, both the 1516 and 1523 editions carry (different, but similar) woodcuts that seem to show the moment of the text’s presentation to an escripturepatron (f. 122v in both editions; see Plate 18 for the 1523 edition’s woodcut). As explained in Chapter 3, however, the identity of the patron in the woodcut is unclear. Given the compilation of texts contained within, it could be Robert de Boron’s patron, Gautier de Montbéliard, or Walter Map’s patron, Henry II. The image is, however, rather generic and, as we know, woodcuts were frequently reused from other projects. It is not impossible, therefore, that this could actually 133

Ibid., p. 81; see also Winn, Anthoine Vérard, pp. 303–05.

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be intended as an illustration of the promotion-patron, Francis I, receiving his presentation copy. The 1530 edition of the Conte and its Continuations is perhaps the most deliberate in its presentation of patronage, as well as the most aware of the discrete advantages offered to the volume by each of its various patrons. Once again, the title page makes reference to the granting of a privilège, and the details of this are then explained in full on the reverse of the leaf (sig. ai). Not only is the king named as would be expected (once again, he is Francis I), but also all of the other prominent (and titled) individuals involved in the administration of granting the privilège are noted here. These are Jehan de la Barre (who, we are told, also carries the titles of Count of Étampes, Viscount of Bridiers, Baron of Vérets and the lord of various territories) and Bailly of Paris, the first gentleman of the King’s Chamber and the conservator of the royal privilèges of the University of Paris. As a means of marketing the text, this is particularly effective as it positions the volume as one supported by not just one, but by several important promotion-patrons. We saw in Chapter 3 that the publishers of the 1530 edition seem to know little of Chrétien as author, making no mention of his name in the prologue. However, his escripture-patron, Philip of Flanders, is mentioned five times. We also discovered, both here and in the closing lines, that the publishers make as much of Jeanne of Flanders’ input in having Manessier complete the tale, as they do of Philip’s provision of the original creative impulse. Walters suggests that the extra weight added here to Jeanne’s contribution is due to Jeanne’s having inspired a concluding Continuation that is ‘made up of elements drawn from both romance and hagiography’.134 There may be some truth in this, but I would suggest that having Philip and Jeanne’s contributions extolled side-by-side in the prologue is even simpler to explain. These are, after all, both noble escripture-patrons who each had an important part to play in having the original narrative inscribed, and this inscription took place more than three hundred years prior to this volume’s production. There is, therefore, an anterior version of the text, and the publishers manipulate the texts’ dual escripture-patronage as a marketing strategy; specifically, the presence of these patrons – patrons who are related – gives a sense that the text has been handed down, and that it is therefore authoritative. The publishers, however, do not leave the matter here. In addition to addressing the escripture-patrons and several promotion-patrons, they also turn their attention to other key individuals. For example, the prologue states that it was ‘pri[n]ces seigneurs et aultres’ (princes, lords and others) (f. 1v) who suggested the printing of this text.135 Here, therefore, the publishers introduce even more promotionpatrons for the text than were enumerated in the privilège. There is also an explicit acknowledgement of the other patrons of the narrative – the publishers’ potential 134 135

Walters, ‘Jeanne and Marguerite’, p. 22. This actually echoes a tactic of William Caxton in the prologue to his edition of Le Morte Darthur in which he says that ‘Many noble and dyuers gentylmen’ had requested that he make a history of Arthur: William Caxton, ‘Prologue to Le Morte Darthur’, in The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. by W. J. B. Crotch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 92–95 (p. 92). There is a sense that these descriptions of an elevated buying public might have been designed to appeal to the social aspirations of potential buyers. If they wished to emulate these princes, nobles and lords, and share in their social prestige, then they should buy this book.

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customers: ‘tous auditeurs et lecteurs qui ce traictie liront et orrant’ (all of the listeners and readers who read and listen to this translation) (f. 1v). This is an important development since it is the first evidence from our printed corpus of publishers making a direct appeal to the mass market that has been opened up to them in the wake of the introduction of print. Since escripture-patrons are no longer responsible for the text’s wider distribution and promotion (most would be long-since dead, after all), the publishers must take on this task themselves. Thus, the 1530 edition presents a remarkable accumulation of patrons. Every possible means of presenting patronage is exploited in the exposition of this text. This shows that the publishers of this, the last French Grail text to be rendered into print for a further three hundred years, recognised patronage precisely as the ‘potent marketing tool’ that Taylor describes. Unfortunately, the lack of a later edition of the Conte and its Continuations suggests that these tactics did not, ultimately, have the desired effect. This chapter has investigated how patronage developed in the publication of Grail literature from manuscript to print. Across both manuscript and print formats, all forms of patronage found common ground as a tool that could be used for commercial benefit, as well as for reaping other social or political rewards. The nature of, and the need for, patronage changed in other ways, though. While the escripture-patron remained a key brand across the full publication history of Grail literature between 1200 and 1530, he or she saw his or her importance as the primary distributor of literature disappear in the age of print. We also saw that print brings about the gradual demise of the livre-patron in favour of the promotion-patron. Owning books remained meaningful for an individual’s social standing, of course, but books were less rarely tailored from the outset for individuals, rather just customised after the event as an optional extra. Speculative publishing in the age of print thus spelled the end for most livre-patrons, but that did not mean that patronage as a whole disappeared; rather it was remodelled. Indeed, our printed Grail editions show publishers actually affording increasing prominence to marketing strategies that foreground patronage. These strategies, of course, see the introduction of the all-new promotion-patron, but perhaps their most significant development is in the publishers’ gradual recognition of the importance of the mass-market patron – the book buyers and consumers upon whom the publishing trade would henceforth rely.

Conclusion

The professionals of the book trade manipulated the response of medieval listeners and readers just as modern editors are capable of manipulating ours by the presentation of texts in a particular way.1

My aim in this book has been to use publishing concepts as a lens through which to enhance and enrich our understanding of pre-print and early print production of French Grail literature, and my study has achieved the objectives set out in the Introduction. Whilst it cannot by its nature be completely exhaustive, and of course there remain further avenues to be explored I hope that I have offered new and useful insights into the developing tastes of the audiences for Grail literature in medieval and Renaissance France, and have identified and analysed some of the most impactful tactics that medieval and early-modern publishers in France used to target and, in a sense, manipulate these audiences. Chapter 1 synthesised and evaluated existing scholarship on the issue of publication in Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It offered a clearer definition of what it meant, practically and logistically, to ‘publish’ a text prior to the advent of print. Throughout this chapter, I argued for a more nuanced understanding of the transition between manuscript and print as more fluidly linked practices and purposes, suggesting that print standardised, rather than revolutionised, many book production processes – a large number of which were already in place in some form or another. I also set out the rationale for understanding the book trade that produced Grail literature in France as firmly rooted in commercial strategy by discussing how the dynamic and collaborative ways in which book production professionals worked together for financial gain could be seen as an early form of the modern publishing house. Additionally Chapter 1 concretised the notion of the pre-print moment of publication by showing it as being defined by the first instance of a product’s authorised distribution amongst a reading (or listening) public. Through demonstrating the interconnected and interdependent relationships between pre-print and print production, these discussions legitimised the application of publishing terminology not only to our corpus of Grail literature, but also to medieval vernacular literature more generally, as a means of drawing out a greater understanding of both publishers and audiences in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Chapter 2 focused on the modern device through which literature is typically accessed for the first time: blurbs. By identifying the key characteristics of modern blurbs, this chapter sought examples of promotional copy in Grail literature artefacts that performed similar functions. Prefaces, epilogues and colophons 1

Busby, Codex and Context, I, p. 58.

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presented themselves as typical sites (or lieux) for such copy, and these suggested important details as to how medieval and early-modern publishers attempted to frame Grail narratives so as to appeal to their target audience’s tastes, as well as revealing how such tastes developed from text to text and, even more importantly, over time. A general, if not unwavering, trend was identified in which blurbs in Grail literature focused initially on the mysteriousness of the subject matter, before starting to reinterpret such mystery in a more spiritual sense. A further shift was then seen in how blurbs became increasingly preoccupied with chivalric matters, a trend that was shown to reach a peak in the early printed editions of our texts. Medieval and early-modern publishers, we therefore learnt, deliberately manipulated blurbs to emphasise particular textual details according to the perceived interests of audiences in very similar ways as do their modern counterparts. Chapter 2 thus established these snippets of copy as particularly important indicators of the prevailing fashions and tastes that developed in respect of Grail literature, and probably also with regard to vernacular literature more generally. The analysis of authorial disclosure in Chapter 3 evinced that different publishers employed strategic tactics in handling the naming of authors in French Grail texts. As a general rule, onymous naming seems to have been thought of as more effective in the earlier period of publication (that is, the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries), whereas the scheme of pseudonymic naming, as well as the clear delineation of an author’s ‘profession’, were shown to have been strategies more frequently turned to in the later period (from the mid fourteenth century onwards). As in my other chapters, these shifts were not witnessed by every single artefact, but rather revealed themselves as generally applicable to broad periods in the transmission history. More importantly, though, through its identification of the use of deliberate tactics in respect of the manipulation of authorship, Chapter 3 revealed a clear perception amongst medieval publishers, and, by extension, their prospective audiences, that authorship, whether onymous, anonymous or pseudonymous, mattered as a crucial method of branding and marketing the text in question. This finding, whilst directly applicable to Grail literature, undoubtedly has a broader importance in respect of other medieval vernacular literature. Chapter 4 identified three chronologically demarcated trends in the compilation (or re-packaging) of French Grail literature in France: the Independent, Anthology and Cycle Trends. These clearly distinguishable trends, amongst which the most notable was the marked shift in the late thirteenth century towards cyclical compilation, provided evidence that medieval and earlymodern audiences were increasingly aware of a generic resemblance between Grail texts. A statistical analysis of the ways in which verse and prose forms of Grail literature were compiled additionally suggested that little distinction was generally made between them when deciding whether to compile Grail texts into anthologies or cycles, which called into question the tendency of modern scholarship to separate these two forms, at least in respect of Grail literature. These findings together suggested that publishers and audiences treated Grail literature considerably differently from other contemporary forms of vernacular

conclusion

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literature, examples of which are more typically found compiled in anthologystyle volumes throughout their transmission histories in the medieval and earlymodern periods. Chapter 5’s analysis of patronage and depictions of patronage in our corpus of Grail literature established key distinctions between types of patronage, offering new technical terminology to help distinguish between the role of the patron who commissions an original work (the escripture-patron), that of the patron who commissions a copy of a work (the livre-patron) and that of the patron whose name is used without his or her input (or sometimes even knowledge) to promote a book (the promotion-patron). These patrons were traced across our entire corpus, and all found common ground in their function as a tool that could be used for commercial benefit, as well as for reaping other social or political rewards. Crucially, though, Grail literature witnessed a development in the nature of, and the need for, patronage. The escripture-patron’s role was consistent as a key brand across the full publication history of Grail literature, but the age of print brought about an inevitable decline in his importance as the primary distributor of literature. Print (as well as the associated rise of speculative publishing) also contributed to the demise of the livre-patron in favour of the promotion-patron, since books were far less regularly tailored from the outset for individuals in an age of print runs. Patronage, in other words, was continuously remodelled and renegotiated, and publishers of Grail literature in France responded to these fluctuations by either amplifying or diminishing declarations of patronage according to prevailing trends in terms of which patron held the most weight as a brand. Perhaps most important of all, though, was the publishers’ acknowledgement of yet another patron who came to the fore in the early days of print: the mass-market customer who would frequent bookshops and bookstalls and buy the books on offer. In this we witnessed another clear piece of evidence for the idea that print publication developed directly from the processes associated with manuscript publication. By closing this book with a study of medieval and early-modern publishers’ relationships with patrons as demonstrated by their depiction and demarcation in the artefacts of Grail literature, I hope to have shown that, in the end, it is always (and perhaps inevitably) the customer who is at the heart of any commercial enterprise. The chapters of this study have ultimately argued in favour of this observation: manuscript publishers were just as likely as were their print counterparts to (re-)orient texts through the manipulation of key components such as authorship, blurbs, compilation and patronage towards the tastes and interests of audience(s) at whom their respective volumes were aimed. And this was just as true whether that audience consisted of an individual commissioning a single manuscript in the scriptorium or of a more diverse group of people for whom a printed edition had been speculatively designed. It is this shared commercial focus, this commonality in prioritising the consumer, that together allow us, legitimately, to draw upon similarities between the activities of medieval and early-modern publishers and their modern counterparts, and to use them to help enrich our understanding of some of their motivations. By extension, we are therefore in a position to reason in a more informed manner

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about the various ways in which audiences might have interpreted medieval and early-modern literature. As I moved through the various subjects for analysis, I was struck by the frequency with which potential side routes and tangents presented themselves, and I hope that such avenues will be taken up by other scholars. I have said repeatedly that my findings and methods here could be usefully employed in studies of other vernacular literature, but especially interesting would be a similar enquiry that looked at French Grail literature produced outside of France (for example, in England, Germany or the Low Countries). In a similar vein, a study of Grail literature produced in other languages would make for a fascinating comparison; Middle English, Middle High German and Middle Dutch are perhaps the most obvious in offering particularly promising corpora of texts and artefacts. There are, of course, other aspects of the publishing process that could be considered, too, such as the mise en page (column layout, hands, rubrication), and even rewriting as a form of editorial. I also focused the majority of my analysis on the original conditions surrounding publication; there is much more that could be said about the second-hand book trade, later ownership and how paratexts added at later dates, such as marginalia, contents lists and ownership marks, provide useful trade-related markers that say something about the changing reception of medieval Grail (and other vernacular) literature. Finally, I felt I often dealt with artefacts summarily, necessarily so, but nonetheless, there is surely no doubt that individual items could be the subject of closer scrutiny by applying a similar method to that used here. Grail literature has proven itself an extraordinarily rich test bed for a publishing-led approach to artefacts containing medieval literature and, as well as providing sets of evidence and findings that have relevance for studies of other contemporary vernacular narratives, it has also shown itself to have been regarded both with distinction and as distinctive, particularly in respect of its compilation history. Indeed, we witnessed trends develop in French Grail literature that in some cases ran counter to accepted scholarly conjecture, such as the lack of distinction between verse and prose in the compilation of Grail literature into anthologies and cycles, as well as the swift and sudden rise of the Grail cycle from the late thirteenth century onwards. These idiosyncrasies in the treatment of Grail literature are perhaps evidence that medieval and earlymodern audiences responded in similar ways to the same quality, that which still eschews definition, that sets Grail literature apart to modern audiences as unusually irresistible and enduring. Publishing the Grail in medieval and Renaissance France, therefore, was a meticulous enterprise that strategically tailored and marketed the product towards intended (or imagined) audiences, whilst at the same time it recognised and foregrounded the ways in which Grail literature was unique and generically distinctive. These are practices that evidence just how much the operations and motivations of medieval publishers have in common with those of their modern counterparts.

Appendix: Timelines of Composition and Production

Timeline 1: Approximate dates of composition.

Timeline 2: Approximate timespans of publication (according to extant artefacts).

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Index ab adversariorum 87 ab nostra 87 Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, The see under Steinbeck, John Africa see under Barbato di Solmona Agravain 54, 58 Alexander the Great 30, 143 Amiens 155 Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, MS 1, ex- xvi, 115, 133, 136, 159 Annonay fragments xiv, 113, 131, 135 anonymity 65, 66, 73, 82, 101–105, 107, 172 Anselm of Canterbury, St 18 anthologies 118–124, 129, 131, 172–173 apocrypha see under pseudonymity Are You a Bromide? see under Burgess, Gelett Arthur, legendary British king 1, 6, 37, 39, 40, 41, 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 169 Arthurian romance 1–7, 53, 91, 116, 120, 152 as subject for publication 1–3 popularity of 1–2 Athis et Prophilas 113, 132 Augustus, Emperor of Rome 18 authorial disclosure 10, 63–107 passim, 172 as authentication 75–77, 87–88, 90 placement of 63–64 service of the book 65, 68 authorship 11, 32–33, 63–107 passim, 115, 172 as guarantor for truth 76, 78–79, 81, 82 occupation of author 82–85, 98–99, 107, 172 Avalon, Isle of 50, 102, 103 Bailly of Paris 169 Barbato di Solmona 19 Africa 19 bele conjointure 37 Bel inconnu, Le 116, 134, 135 Benoît de Sainte-Maure 127

Beowulf 63 Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 354 xiv, 33, 72, 85, 113, 119, 132, 135, 144 MS 113 xiv, 5, 48, 113, 119, 132, 135 Bliocadran xiv–xv, 5, 7, 10, 33, 34–35, 36, 40, 70, 71, 73–74, 81, 101, 105, 106, 113, 114, 126, 131–132, 135–137, 145 binders see bookbinders Blanche, Countess of Champagne 156 Blanchefleur 146, 155–156 Bleheris 71 Blihis, Master 34, 70, 71, 81 Blihos Bleheris 71 Blurb, Miss Belinda 27 blurbs 10, 28–61 passim, 139, 171–172 definition of 10, 27–29, 60–61, 171 placement of 10, 27, 28, 29, 171–172 Boccaccio, Giovanni 19 bookbinders 9, 23 book production see publishing book selling see under publishing under book trade book trade see under publishing Bordeaux 15 Bors 52, 53, 59, 60, 96, 99 branding 32–33, 48, 49, 50, 64, 73, 106, 107, 114, 150, 172, 173 Brunetto Latini 54, 55, 119, 133, 136 Trésor 119, 133, 136 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale IV 852 nos. 10–11 xiv, 114, 132, 136 MS 9246 xvii, 46, 47, 90, 115, 117, 134, 137, 148, 160–161 MS 9627–28 xvi, 99, 133, 135 MS 11145 xvii, 48, 50, 103–105, 116, 117, 134, 135, 148, 158, 159, 160 Brussels fragments (formerly de Lannoy)  xiv, 114, 132, 135 Brut see under Wace Burgess, Gelett 27 Are You a Bromide?  27

196

Index

Cambrein, Lord of 104–105, 158 Canterbury 18 Capgrave, John 23 Caxton, William 169 Champ fleury see under Tory, Geoffroy Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château (Musée Condé) MS 472 xvii, 116, 120, 134, 135 MS 643 xvii, 82, 134, 137 Charles VIII, King of France 168 Charles d’Anjou 160 Chaucer, Geoffrey 19 Chaucers Words unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn 19 Chaucers Words unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn see under Chaucer Chevalier au lion, Le see Yvain under Chrétien de Troyes Chevalier de la charrette, Le  see under Chrétien de Troyes Chevalier Vermeil, Le 68 chivalry 41, 42, 51, 53, 58–60, 172 interest in 41, 42, 51, 53, 60, 143, 172 Chrétien de Troyes 1, 4, 30–34, 35–39, 40–43, 44, 45, 48, 60, 64, 66–71, 72–82 passim, 85, 91, 101, 105–107, 112–114 passim, 115, 121, 125, 130–131, 140, 142, 143–144, 146–147, 151, 154, 156–157, 164, 169 as chronicler 106, 107 authorship 32–33, 44, 66–71, 72–82 passim, 101, 169 Chevalier de la charrette, Le 32, 69–70, 79, 113, 116, 132, 134, 142, 143–144, 145 Cligés 32, 36, 67–68, 69, 70, 113, 131–132, 135 Conte du Graal, Le xiv–xv, 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 30–34, 35–45 passim, 48, 49, 54, 57, 58, 66–71, 87, 91, 105–107, 112–114 passim, 116, 117, 119, 125, 126, 129, 130–132, 135–137, 143, 144, 146, 154–155, 156–157, 169–170 compilation of 33–34, 112–114, 125, 130–131 prologue of 30–39, 41, 79–80, 87, 106, 131–132, 135144, 145 Erec et Enide 36, 67, 68, 69, 80, 113, 116, 131–132, 134, 135 Yvain 69, 70, 113, 116, 131–132, 134, 135 Christ 5, 46, 48, 85, 88, 89, 148, 149 Christine de Pizan 13, 23

church annals 115, 121, 122–124, 134, 136, 160 Cicero 17 Cil de Loudun see Lodonois, Le Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque municipale et interuniversitaire, MS 248 xiv, 33, 72, 113, 117, 118, 131, 135, 144 Cligés see under Chrétien de Troyes Cloud of Unknowing, The 63 colophons 20, 29, 54–59, 60, 64, 123–124, 154, 171 commercialism 21–26, 162, 165, 170, 171, 173 compilation 11, 109–137 passim, 139, 163, 172–173 chronology of 109, 112–117, 118–137 medieval 11, 112 post-medieval 11, 112 trends of see Trends of compilation verse vs. prose 109, 126–127, 128, 129, 130–131, 135–137, 172 Conte du Graal, Le see under Chrétien de Troyes Continuations of Perceval xiv–xv, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 30, 39–45, 70, 71–82, 105–107, 112–114 passim, 125, 126, 131–132, 156–157, 169–170 compilation of 112–114 passim, 125 Continuation of Gerbert de Montreuil xiv–xv, 4, 5, 76, 105 Continuation of Manessier xiv–xv, 4, 5, 12, 35–36, 76, 79–82, 135–137, 146, 155–156, 169 First Continuation xiv–xv, 4, 71–74, 81, 101, 105, 113, 131–132, 135–137 Second Continuation xiv–xv, 4, 5, 71, 74, 78, 106, 113, 131–132, 146, 135–137 Cousteau, Antoine 91 Crozant 57 Crucifixion 5 Cultural Materialism 8 customers 15, 21, 165, 170, 173 customisation see under patronage damnatio memoriae 162 dedications 104–105, 166 Denis Piramus 65 De nugis curialium see under Map, Walter Didot-Perceval xv, 5, 11, 82, 84, 85, 114, 132, 135–136

Index

Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19. 1. 5 xiv, 33, 72, 73, 75, 76, 114, 124, 132, 135, 144, 146 editors 14, 24, 38–39, 55, 65, 129, 171 Edward I, King of England 152 Eleanor of Aquitaine 153 Elucidation xiv–xv, 5, 7, 10, 34–36, 40, 70, 71, 73, 105, 106, 113, 114, 126, 132, 136–137, 145 epilogues 29, 60, 64, 171 Erec et Enide see under Chrétien de Troyes escripture-patron see under patronage Estoire del saint Graal, L’ (Post-Vulgate) 7 Estoire del saint Graal, L’ (Vulgate) xv– xvii, 6, 7, 10, 11, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 54, 58, 59, 60, 70, 85–92, 95, 97, 102, 115–116, 117, 121, 125, 129, 132–134, 135–137, 148, 149, 151, 160–161, 168–169 narrator of 85–88, 89, 90, 97 Estoire dou Graal, L’ see Joseph d’Arimathie under Robert de Boron explicits 10, 54, 55, 72, 123 fear-of-detractors topos 87 Fergus 116, 134, 135 Filioque debate 46 Fille du Comte de Ponthieu, La 115, 133, 136 Firmin-Didot, Ambroise 5 First Continuator 72–74 Fitzalan, Lord Brian of Bedale 159 Flanders 76, 80, 145, 157 doodles of arms 156–157 House of  125, 156–157 Flavius Josephus 103 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 2943 xiv, 33, 72, 113, 117, 118, 131, 135, 144 France, boundaries of 8 Francis I, King of France 168–169 Freculf, Bishop of Lisieux 103 French, use in England 72, 94–95, 105 Gaillard Le Bourgeois 7 Galaad 51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 83, 96 Galliot du Pré 39, 60, 102 Gantelet, Micheau see Gonnot, Micheau Geffrei Gaimar 127 Gauchier de Dondain see Wauchier de Denain Gautier de Coinci 19 Miracles de Notre Dame, Les 19

197

Gautier de Montbéliard, Lord of Montfaucon 102, 147–148 151, 168 Gauvain 39, 40, 75, 82, 120 Geneva-Cologny, Fondation Bodmer MS 105a–d xvii, 53, 134, 137 MS 147 82 generic similarity/resemblance 110–111, 119, 130–131, 172 Genette, Gérard 9, 11, 64–65, 66, 73–74, 76 modes of authorship 11, 65, 66, 73–74, 76 paratexts 9, 10, 30, 60 genre 109–112 Geoffrey of Monmouth 1, 69, 70, 84 Historia regum Britanniae 1, 69, 70 Prophetiae Merlini 84 Gerbert de Montreuil 4, 66, 76, 80 self-naming 77–79 Continuation of see under Continuations of Perceval Gilles le Muisit, Abbot of St-Martin 160 Glastonbury 6, 50, 103 Godefroi de Leigni 69, 79 Gonnot, Micheau 56, 57, 161 Gornemant de Goort 144 graal see Grail Grail 1, 5, 32, 33, 35, 36, 42, 48, 49, 52, 59, 78, 85, 92 95, 96, 97, 131, 150 definition of 5, 32, 48 Grail Castle 6 Grail Quest 84 Guillaume de la Pierre 90, 160 Guillaume de Machaut 23 Guinevere 6, 50, 54, 58, 103 Guiot 37, 38, 39, 54, 55, 56, 74, 113, 144, 145 Gutenberg, Johann 17 Guy VII, Baron de la Rochefoucauld 159 Haut livres du Graal, Li 49 Hélie de Boron 79, 92 Henry II, King of England 6, 53, 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 148, 149–151, 167, 168 as patron 53, 96, 97, 98, 100, 148, 149–151, 167, 168 illustrations of 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 150–151 Hereford Cathedral 92 High Book of the Grail, The see Haut livres du Graal, Li Histoire d’Outremer et du roi Saladin, L’ 115, 133, 136

198

Index

Historia regum Britanniae see under Geoffrey of Monmouth Holy Grail see Grail Holy Land 119, 147 Holy Trinity 45–46, 47, 49, 60, 116 Horace 1, 17, 18 recitationes 1, 18 House of Flanders see under Flanders Huon de Méry 91 Tournoy de l’Antichrist 91 Huth manuscript see London, British Library, MS Additional 38117 Hystoire du Sainct Greaal (1516)  xvii, xviii, 7, 59, 91, 102, 106–107, 115, 116, 134, 137, 168–169 Hystoire du Sainct Greaal (1523)  xvii, xviii, 7, 59, 91, 101, 102, 106–107, 115, 116, 134, 137, 168–169 illuminators 56, 65 incipits 10, 59, 84, 98 independents 112–113, 115, 116, 117–118 Jacques d’Armanac, Duke of Nemours 56, 57, 115, 161–162 Jean de Nesle 104–105, 158 Jean du Pré 7 Jean-Louis de Savoie, Bishop of Geneva 90, 160 Jeanne de Montbaston 153 Jeanne, Countess of Flanders 36, 80–81, 106, 125, 146–147, 151, 155–157, 169 as escripture-patron 146–147, 151, 155–157, 169 as livre-patron 155–157 Jehan de la Barre, Count of Étampes 169 Joseph of Arimathea 5, 49 Joseph d’Arimathie see under Robert de Boron Josephes 49, 102, 103, 104–105, 148 Julian of Norwich 20 Lady of the Lake 58 Lancelot 50, 54, 58, 59, 60, 96 Lancelot (Chrétien)  see Chevalier de la charrette, Le under Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot en prose (Post-Vulgate)  7 Lancelot en prose (Vulgate)  6, 7, 58, 95, 96, 115, 116, 125, 132–134, 135–137, 161 Lancelot-Grail Cycle, The see Vulgate Cycle, The

Lancelot du Lac (1488)  xvii, 7, 58–59, 95, 134, 137, 167–168 Lapidaire 114, 121, 132, 135 Last Supper 5 Le Bec, Abbey of 18 Le Bourgeois, Jean  7 Le Mans, Médiathèque Louis Aragon, MS 354 xvi, 46, 82, 115, 117, 133, 136 limners 23 list of debts see note de redevances literacy 118, 127, 153, 163 rise of 153, 163 livre-patron see under patronage Lodonois, Le 72–73 Lohot 83 London 23 London, British Library MS Additional 10292–94 xvi, 46, 88, 115, 133, 136, 148, 159–160 MS Additional 17443 xvi, 99, 133, 136 MS Additional 36614 xiv, 33–34, 72–73, 75, 76, 113, 114, 124, 126, 131, 135, 144, 155–157 MS Additional 38117 xv, 85, 114, 132, 136, 147 MS Harley 4431 23 MS Royal 14 E III xvi, 46, 88, 98, 99, 100, 115, 133, 136, 148, 149, 159–160 MS Royal 19 C XIII xvi, 95, 133, 136 London, College of Arms, MS Arundel XIV 72, 105, 155 London, The National Archives, E122/100/13B xv, 114, 132, 136 Longis, Jean  39 Luce del Gat 79 Prose Tristan 79, 92, 134 Malory, Sir Thomas 7, 44, 95, 105 Morte Darthur, Le 7, 44, 95, 105, 169 Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS French 1 xvi, 99, 115, 133, 136, 159 Manessier 4, 35–36, 41, 42, 43, 79–81, 106, 125, 146, 169 colophon 36, 43, 79–81, 146 Continuation of see under Continuations of Perceval self-naming 79–81, 146 Map, Walter 6, 52, 53, 91–96, 97, 98–99, 100, 101–105, 106, 107, 149–151, 168 as author of Queste 6, 52, 53, 91–105, 149–150

Index

as historiographer 96–97, 106 authorship 6, 52, 91–105, 150 De nugis curialium 92 illustrations of 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 150–151 marchand-libraire 24–25, 26, 57 Marie de Champagne 142, 143–144, 145, 151, 156 Marie de France 65, 91 Martial 29 proto-blurbs 29 mass market, rise of 23–24, 166 Meraugis de Portlesguez see under Raoul de Houdenc Merlin 84–85 Merlin (Robert de Boron) see under Robert de Boron Merlin (Vulgate)  6, 95, 114, 115, 125, 132–133, 135–137 Michael (scribe)  54, 55, 57 Michel Le Noir 91 Miracles de Notre Dame, Les see under Gautier de Coinci miscellanies 109–112, 118–120 mise en page 12, 27, 46, 78, 128, 174 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS E 39 xiv, xv, 5, 85, 114, 121, 132, 135, 147 Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, MS H 249 xv, 33, 75, 76, 114, 125, 132, 136, 144, 146, 156 Mons, Bibliothèque de l’Université de Mons-Hainaut, MS 331/206 (4568)  xv, 33, 34–36, 69–71, 73–74, 75, 76, 81, 113, 132, 136, 145, 146–147, 155 Mort Artu (Post-Vulgate)  134 Mort Artu (Vulgate) see under Mort le roi Artu, La Mort du Comte de Henau, La 114, 132, 136 Mort le roi Artu, La  6, 53, 58, 84, 95, 98, 99, 100, 115, 116, 123–124, 125, 132–134, 135–137, 149, 150 Morte Darthur, Le see under Malory, Sir Thomas mouvance 65 New Haven, Yale University Library MS Beinecke 227 xv, 82, 85, 114, 132, 137, 147

199

MS Beinecke 229 xvi, 99, 121, 133, 136, 151 New History 8 Nicodemus 49 Nibelungenlied 63 Normandy 18, 84 Nostre Dame del Val 37, 145 note de redevances 132, 136, 155 onymity 65, 66, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 102, 106–107, 172 Ordre de Chevalerie, L’ 115, 133, 136 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 223 xvi, 52, 133, 136 MS Douce 199 xvii, 133, 137 MS Douce 215 xvi, 115, 133, 136, 159 MS Douce 303 xvi, 88, 115, 117, 133, 136 MS Hatton 82 xvii, 50, 116, 117, 118, 134, 136, 159 MS Rawlinson D.874 xvii, 150, 134, 137 MS Rawlinson D.899 xvi, 99, 133, 135 MS Rawlinson Q. b. 6.  xvi, 99, 133, 136 ownership of books 153–162, 170, 174 markers of 154, 159–162, 165–170, 174 in manuscripts 154, 159–162, 170 in printed books 165–170 Paien de Maisières 64 pandects 112 paratexts see under Genette, Gérard parchmeners 23 Paris 23, 24, 39 University of 169 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 2996 xv, 132, 137, 147 MS 3482 xvii, 134, 137 MS 3479–80 xvii, 50, 51, 101, 104, 107, 115, 116, 134, 137, 148, 165 MS 5218 xvii, 55, 56, 115, 121, 122–124, 125, 134, 137, 160 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS 6138 131 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 95 xvi, 46, 47, 115, 121, 133, 136 MS fr. 96 xvii, 46, 134, 137 MS fr. 111 xvii, 53, 95, 96, 97, 134, 137, 161 MS fr. 112 xvii, 56, 57, 134, 137 MS fr. 113–16 xvii, 53, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102, 106, 115, 126, 134, 137, 161 MS fr. 117–20 xvii, xviii, 50, 51, 101, 104, 107, 115, 116, 126, 134, 137, 148, 175

200

Index

MS fr. 122 xvii, 99, 100, 102, 134, 137 MS fr. 339 99 MS fr. 342 xvi, 53, 98, 99, 133, 135 MS fr. 343 150 MS fr. 375 131 MS fr. 423 xv, 85, 114, 121, 132, 135, 147 MS fr. 747 xv, 5, 46, 88, 89, 132, 135, 148 MS fr. 748 xv, 84, 132, 135, 147 MS fr. 749 xvi, 46, 82, 85, 88, 89, 90, 133, 136, 148 MS fr. 751 xv, 132, 135 MS fr. 768B xvii, 134, 137 MS fr. 770 xvi, 82, 85, 115, 121, 133, 136 MS fr. 771 xv, 95, 133, 135, 150 MS fr. 794 xiv, 33, 37, 38, 39, 54, 72, 74, 113, 121, 124, 132, 135, 144, 145, 154–155 MS fr. 1420 131 MS fr. 1427 90, 115, 134 MS fr. 1428 xvii, 50, 116, 117, 134, 135, 159 MS fr. 1429 xv, 33, 75, 80, 132, 136, 144, 146 MS fr. 1450 xiv, 33, 34, 36–37, 69–70, 120, 132, 135, 145, 154 MS fr. 1453 xv, 33, 75, 76, 113, 132, 137, 144, 146 MS fr. 1469 xv, 83, 132, 137, 147 MS fr. 12560 131 MS fr. 12573 xvi, 95, 133, 136, 150 MS fr. 12576 xv, 33, 72, 75, 78–79, 114, 125, 132, 136, 144, 146, 155, 157 MS fr. 12577 xv, 33, 72, 73, 75, 132, 137, 144, 146 MS fr. 12580 xvi, 53, 133, 136 MS fr. 12581 xvi, 54, 55, 115, 119, 124, 133, 136 MS fr. 19162 xvi, 46, 88, 133, 136, 148 MS fr. 20047 xv, 5, 82–83, 132, 136, 147 MS fr. 25545 119 MS n. a. fr. 4166 xv, 5, 84–85, 114, 132, 136, 147 MS n. a. fr. 6614 xv, 33, 75, 76, 132, 136, 144, 146 patron see patronage patronage 10, 11, 117, 139–170, 173 beneficiaries of 162–165 benefits of 139, 142, 143, 162–165, 170, 173 customisation 154, 163–164, 165, 167–168, 170 distribution see under publication escripture-patron 140, 141–148, 149, 150–152, 153, 162–165, 166, 167–170, 173

female 146, 155–157 livre-patron 141, 152–161, 162–165, 166, 170, 173 in print 165–170 markers of 162 mass-market patron 22, 42, 170, 173 moment of publication see under publication modes of 142 attraction 142, 143, 151, 167 selection 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 167 stipulation 142, 151, 167 promotion-patron 166, 170, 173 publication see role of patron under publication role of patron 19, 20, 84, 139, 141–152 Penguin Books 111 Modern Classics 111 Penguin Classics 111 Pénitence Adam, La 115, 121, 133, 136 Pentecost 51, 53, 58, 59 Perceval 5, 6, 39, 40, 41, 52, 53, 59, 60, 70, 75, 77, 84, 96 genealogy of 70 Perceval see Conte du Graal under Chrétien de Troyes Perceval li Gallois (1530)  xv, 7, 30, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 58, 70, 105–107, 113, 132, 137, 169–170 performance manuscripts 118 Perlesvaus 49, 51 genealogy of 49, 51 Perlesvaus xiv, xvii–xviii, 6, 7, 10, 12, 48–50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 59, 101–102, 103–105, 116, 117, 120, 134, 135–137, 148, 151, 158–159, 160, 168–169 colophon/dedication 104–105, 158 compilation of 51, 52, 101, 116, 117, 120 Peter of Flanders 83 Petit, Jean  91 Petrarch 19 Philip of Flanders, Count 30, 31, 36, 41, 67, 75, 83, 91, 106, 140–141, 142–143, 144, 145, 146–147, 151, 156, 164, 169 as patron 30–31, 41, 67, 75, 80, 106, 140–141, 142–143, 144, 145, 146–147, 151, 156, 164, 169 Philippe Le Noir 91 Philobiblon see under Richard de Bury Pierart del Tielt 55, 56, 57, 122–124, 160

Index

Pierre de Bosron 91–92, 102, 107 see also Robert de Boron Pinkhurst, Adam 19 Poitiers 15 Post-Vulgate Cycle xiv, xvii, 6, 7, 92, 93, 134 prefaces 20, 29, 60, 64, 171 pre-existing book topos 32, 46, 53, 87, 102 Princeton, University Library, MS Garrett 125 131 printers 9, 21, 24–25, 39 printing  as ‘culmination’ 16, 25, 171 mimicry of manuscripts 15, 167 rise of 2, 15, 16, 25, 39, 170, 171 success of 25, 44–45 privilèges 20, 39, 43, 44–45, 168–169 professionalism 1, 2, 4, 20, 21–23, 36, 38, 57, 107, 171 prologues 29, 51, 64, 86–88, 143–144 promotion-patron see under patronage Prophetiae Merlini see under Geoffrey of Monmouth Prose Tristan see under Luce del Gat Provins 38 pseudonymity 65, 66, 92–100, 104, 106–107, 172 apocrypha 93–95 publication 13–26 passim copyright 164 definition of 2, 17, 25–26 distribution 17, 26, 171 modes of 20 authorial 20, 139 commercial 20 official 20 moment of 12, 16–20, 26, 97, 141–142, 164, 171 public dissemination 12, 17, 26, 142, 171 role of patron 19, 20, 26, 164 publisher  as reader 63 as curator 112 collaboration 22–25, 26 definition of 2, 26 role of 9 publishers’ lists 109–112, 131 publishing  book production 22–26, 27, 166–167, 171–174 book trade 15, 16, 21, 22, 25, 141–170, 171–174

201

book selling 24, 141–170, 173 second-hand 24, 129, 161, 173, 174 manuscript vs. print 9, 13–16, 25–26, 64, 173 print 13, 20 64, 165–170, 171–174 pre-print 19, 25–26, 64, 141–165, 171–174 Queste del saint Graal, La (PostVulgate) xvii, 7, 92, 134, 136, 150 Queste del saint Graal, La (Vulgate) xv– xvii, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 51–58, 59, 60, 82, 84, 92–105, 115–116, 121, 122–124, 132–134, 135–137, 148, 149–151, 159, 160, 161, 168–169 compilation of 82, 115–116, 121, 122–124, 148, 159 Raoul de Houdenc 80, 91 Meraugis de Portlesguez 80 Romant des Elles 91 recitationes see under Horace recueils see anthologies réécriture see rewriting Rennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 255 xiv, xv, 6, 46, 88, 124, 132, 135, 148 reading 118, 127, 153, 156 alone 118 aloud 118 for education 119, 153 for entertainment 118, 153, 156 for work 153 in groups 118, 156 re-packaging 109–137 passim, 139, 172–173 rewriting 44, 64 Richard de Bury 129 Philobibilon 129 Richard de Montbaston 153 Rich Fisherman 84 Robert de Boron xv, 5, 6, 11, 45, 46, 79, 82–92 passim, 93, 97, 99, 102, 107, 114, 132 authorship 82–92 passim, 102, 107, 114, 147–148, 168 Joseph d’Arimathie xv, 5, 6, 11, 12, 46, 82–85, 93, 114–115, 117, 121, 132, 135–137, 147 interpolation into Estoire xvi, xvii, 82, 85, 115, 117, 132, 133, 136 Merlin xv, 5, 6, 82, 84–85, 114, 117, 132, 135–137 meistres vs. messires 82–85, 99, 107 Robert de Dive 19 Robert of Cassel 157

202

Index

Rochefoucauld Grail 159, 160 Roger de Lisieux 73 Sacristine 73 Roman de Brut, Le see Brut under Wace Roman de Carité, Le 114, 132, 136 Roman de Dolopathos, Le 113, 132, 135 Roman d’Enéas, Le 69, 132 Roman de la rose, Le 64, 153 Roman de Miserere, Le 114, 132, 136 Roman de Renart, Le 120, 134, 135 Roman de Rou, Le see under Wace Roman de Troie, Le 69, 113, 132, 135 Roman des Elles, Le see under Raoul de Houdenc Roman des sept sages de Rome, Le 113, 115, 119, 121, 132, 133, 135, 136 Round Table 39, 41, 58, 59, 60, 96 rubricators 9, 15 Sacristine see under Roger de Lisieux Saint Denis, Jean  39 Salisbury Abbey 52, 53, 92 Salut d’Amour 114, 132, 136 Sarras 53 scribes 14, 23, 38, 63, 65, 66, 103, 104–105 as editors 14, 174 multi-functional 38–39, 54 scriptoria (monastic)  22 scriptoria (professional) 23–24 Second Continuator see Wauchier de Denain Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 63 Sone de Nansay 68 Stanbridge, John 43 Longe accidence 43 Steinbeck, John 111 Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, The 111 St-Jean-d’Acre 83 St-Martin de Tournai 21, 122 St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Fr.F.v.XV.5 xvi, 82, 115, 117, 133, 136 Suite du Merlin (Huth)  6, 114, 115, 132, 136 Suite Vulgate du Merlin 6, 114, 115, 132, 133, 135–137 Sulpitius, Joannes 43 Stans puer ad mensam 43 supercherie 101, 102

taqrîẓ 29 Tassin de Caumainil 157 tonsures 98, 99, 100, 102, 107 Tory, Geoffroy 91 Champ fleury 91 Tournai 56, 69, 155 Tournoy de l’Antichrist see under Huon de Méry Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 951 82, 83, 147 Trends of compilation 117–131, 135–137, 172 Anthology Trend 118–124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 135–137, 172 Cycle Trend 124–126, 129–131, 130, 135–137, 163, 172 Independent Trend 117–118, 121, 126, 129, 130, 135–137, 172 Trésor see under Brunetto Latini Trinity, Holy see Holy Trinity Troy 66 Troyes 94, 142 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Reg. Lat. 1687 82 Reg. Lat. 1725 131 Vérard, Antoine 7, 167–168 Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, La 113, 125, 131, 135, 156, 157 Vie des Pères see under Wauchier de Denain Vulgate Cycle, The xiv, xv–xvii, 6, 7, 8, 44, 58–59, 84, 94, 97, 99, 101, 105, 115–116, 125, 126, 159–162, 167–168 Wace 36–37, 69, 70, 127, 164 Brut 36–37, 69–70, 113, 132, 135 Roman de Rou, Le  164–165 Wauchier de Denain 74–77, 80, 81, 106, 125 self-naming 74-76 Vie des Pères 75 Wynkyn de Worde 43 Yvain see under Chrétien de Troyes Yvon le Fou, Senechal of Poitiers 161

ARTHURIAN STUDIES

I ASPECTS OF MALORY, edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer II THE ALLITERATIVE MORTE ARTHURE: A Reassessment of the Poem, edited by Karl Heinz Göller



III THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, I: Author Listing, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last



IV THE CHARACTER OF KING ARTHUR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE, Rosemary Morris



V PERCEVAL: The Story of the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Nigel Bryant



VI THE ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, II: Subject Index, edited by C. E. Pickford and R. W. Last VII THE LEGEND OF ARTHUR IN THE MIDDLE AGES, edited by P. B. Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford and E. K. C. Varty VIII THE ROMANCE OF YDER, edited and translated by Alison Adams IX THE RETURN OF KING ARTHUR, Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer X ARTHUR’S KINGDOM OF ADVENTURE: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur, Muriel Whitaker XI KNIGHTHOOD IN THE MORTE DARTHUR, Beverly Kennedy XII LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome I, edited by Renée L. Curtis



XIII LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome II, edited by Renée L. Curtis



XIV LE ROMAN DE TRISTAN EN PROSE, tome III, edited by Renée L. Curtis







XV LOVE’S MASKS: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems, Merritt R. Blakeslee XVI THE CHANGING FACE OF ARTHURIAN ROMANCE: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in memory of Cedric E. Pickford, edited by Alison Adams, Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern and Kenneth Varty XVII REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS IN THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES AND LYRIC POETRY OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE: Essays presented to Kenneth Varty on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, edited by Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy XVIII CEI AND THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND, Linda Gowans XIX LAƷAMON’S BRUT: The Poem and its Sources, Françoise H. M. Le Saux XX READING THE MORTE DARTHUR, Terence McCarthy, reprinted as AN INTRODUCTION TO MALORY XXI CAMELOT REGAINED: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849, Roger Simpson XXII THE LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR IN ART, Muriel Whitaker



XXIII GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG AND THE MEDIEVAL TRISTAN LEGEND: Papers from an Anglo-North American symposium, edited with an introduction by Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey



XXIV ARTHURIAN POETS: CHARLES WILLIAMS, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds



XXV AN INDEX OF THEMES AND MOTIFS IN TWELFTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARTHURIAN POETRY, E. H. Ruck XXVI CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES AND THE GERMAN MIDDLE AGES: Papers from an international symposium, edited with an introduction by Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey

XXVII SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: Sources and Analogues, compiled by Elisabeth Brewer XXVIII CLIGÉS by Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell

XXIX THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR THOMAS MALORY, P. J. C. Field



XXX T. H. WHITE’S THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, Elisabeth Brewer



XXXI ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, III: 1978–1992, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Caroline Palmer

XXXII ARTHURIAN POETS: JOHN MASEFIELD, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds XXXIII THE TEXT AND TRADITION OF LAƷAMON’S BRUT, edited by Françoise Le Saux XXXIV CHIVALRY IN TWELFTH-CENTURY GERMANY: The Works of Hartmann von Aue, W. H. Jackson XXXV THE TWO VERSIONS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR: Multiple Negation and the Editing of the Text, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade XXXVI RECONSTRUCTING CAMELOT: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition, Michael Glencross XXXVII A COMPANION TO MALORY, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards XXXVIII A COMPANION TO THE GAWAIN-POET, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson XXXIX MALORY’S BOOK OF ARMS: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur, Andrew Lynch

XL MALORY: TEXTS AND SOURCES, P. J. C. Field



XLI KING ARTHUR IN AMERICA, Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack



XLII THE SOCIAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS OF MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, edited by D. Thomas Hanks Jr



XLIII THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Elizabeth Edwards



XLIV GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND THE ARTHURIAN TRADITION, edited by James P. Carley



XLV THE KNIGHT WITHOUT THE SWORD: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry, Hyonjin Kim



XLVI ULRICH VON ZATZIKHOVEN’S LANZELET: Narrative Style and Entertainment, Nicola McLelland XLVII THE MALORY DEBATE: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick and Michael N. Salda

XLVIII MERLIN AND THE GRAIL: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian romances attributed to Robert de Boron, translated by Nigel Bryant



XLIX ARTHURIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY IV: 1993–1998, Author Listing and Subject Index, compiled by Elaine Barber L DIU CRÔNE AND THE MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN CYCLE, Neil Thomas LII KING ARTHUR IN MUSIC, edited by Richard Barber



LIII THE BOOK OF LANCELOT: The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles, Bart Besamusca



LIV A COMPANION TO THE LANCELOT-GRAIL CYCLE, edited by Carol Dover



LV THE GENTRY CONTEXT FOR MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Raluca L. Radulescu LVI PARZIVAL: With Titurel and the Love Lyrics, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, translated by Cyril Edwards LVII ARTHURIAN STUDIES IN HONOUR OF P. J. C. FIELD, edited by Bonnie Wheeler LVIII THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL, translated by Nigel Bryant LIX THE GRAIL LEGEND IN MODERN LITERATURE, John B. Marino LX RE-VIEWING LE MORTE DARTHUR: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, edited by K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu LXI THE SCOTS AND MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN LEGEND, edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan LXII WIRNT VON GRAVENBERG’S WIGALOIS: Intertextuality and Interpretation, Neil Thomas



LXIII A COMPANION TO CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, edited by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert



LXIV THE FORTUNES OF KING ARTHUR, edited by Norris J. Lacy



LXV A HISTORY OF ARTHURIAN SCHOLARSHIP, edited by Norris J. Lacy LXVI MALORY’S CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England, Thomas H. Crofts

LXVII MARRIAGE, ADULTERY AND INHERITANCE IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Karen Cherewatuk LXVIII EDWARD III’S ROUND TABLE AT WINDSOR: The House of the Round Table and the Windsor Festival of 1344, Julian Munby, Richard Barber and Richard Brown



LXIX GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH: THE HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN: An edition and translation of the De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], edited by Michael D. Reeve, translated by Neil Wright LXX RADIO CAMELOT: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922–2005, Roger Simpson



LXXI MALORY’S LIBRARY: The Sources of the Morte Darthur, Ralph Norris



LXXII THE GRAIL, THE QUEST, AND THE WORLD OF ARTHUR, edited by Norris J. Lacy

LXXIII ILLUSTRATING CAMELOT, Barbara Tepa Lupack with Alan Lupack LXXIV THE ARTHURIAN WAY OF DEATH: The English Tradition, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and K. S. Whetter

LXXV VISION AND GENDER IN MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR, Molly Martin LXXVI THE INTERLACE STRUCTURE OF THE THIRD PART OF THE PROSE LANCELOT, Frank Brandsma LXXVII PERCEFOREST: The Prehistory of King Arthur’s Britain, translated by Nigel Bryant LXXVIII CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES IN PROSE: The Burgundian Erec and Cligés, translated by Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol J. Chase LXXIX THE CONTINUATIONS OF CHRÉTIEN’S PERCEVAL: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending, Leah Tether

LXXX SIR THOMAS MALORY: Le Morte Darthur, edited by P. J. C. Field

LXXXI MALORY AND HIS EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARIES: Adapting Late Medieval Arthurian Romance Collections, Miriam Edlich-Muth LXXXII THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE GRAIL: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and its continuations, translated by Nigel Bryant LXXXIII EMOTIONS IN MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN LITERATURE: Body, Mind, Voice, edited by Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders LXXXIV THE MANUSCRIPT AND MEANING OF MALORY'S MORTE DARTHUR: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialisation, K. S. Whetter

The Grail is one of the most enduring literary motifs in publishing history. In spite of an ever-changing world, the reading public has maintained a fascination for this enigmatic object, as well as for the various adventures and characters associated with it. But the nature and reception of the Grail have not remained static. Thanks to the fact that the first known author of a Grail story, Chrétien de Troyes, died c.1180-90 before completing his tale and revealing the meaning of the Grail, authors and publishers across history have reimagined, reinterpreted and re-packaged Grail literature so as to appeal to the developing tastes and interests of their target audiences. This book analyses the developing publication practices associated with French Grail literature in medieval and Renaissance France. Arguing for preprint book production as constituting an early incarnation of a publishing trade, it discusses such matters as the disclosure of authorship and patronage, and the writing and formatting of blurbs, as well as tactics of compilation as production techniques that bear evidence of common commercial motivations between pre- and post-print publication. The distinctive investigation of manuscript and early-print evidence brings medieval and early-modern publishers and their concepts of both product and market into focus.

Cover image: Christ (the escripture-patron) delivers the book to the hermit in the Estoire del saint Graal; London, British Library, MS Royal E 14 III, f. 3r. From the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts); licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

Leah Tether

Leah Tether is Reader in Medieval Literature and Digital Cultures, and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. She is the author of The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending (D.S. Brewer, 2012).

Publishing the Grail

Series editor: Norris J. Lacy

in Medieval and Renaissance France

Arthurian Studies

Publishing the Grail

in Medieval and Renaissance France Leah Tether