vestment, and, most importantly, mind and mentality
that make her exemplary of perfect womanhood. In the
aristocratic world of medieval romance, where everyone
of worth is “naturally” on a pedestal, Erec and Enide
come together out of admiration and a kind of noble
affi nity. By the identifi cation of the qualities of per-
sons—the invention of those qualities in source material
and their elucidation in romance narrative—Chrétien
brings together the disparate elements of the storytell-
ers’ versions and fi lls out the missing features in his
new romance. The molt bele conjointure depends on the
disparate elements of romance marvels, reveals the ideal
truth perceived in them by 12th-century civilization, and
articulates a new, marvelous narrative. Once the excep-
tional quality of that narrative was recognized—appar-
ently as early as Cligés—a new genre had emerged. The
word roman, which fi rst meant “in the French language,”
came to mean “romance” as a narrative recounting
marvelous adventures that express an aristocratic ethos.
That achievement was Chrétien’s.
Chrétien’s popularity in his own day is attested both
by the unusually large number of surviving manuscripts
of his romances—an average of seven for the fi rst four,
and as many as fi fteen for the Conte du Graal—and
the enduring infl uence he had on the romancers who
succeeded him. While such writers as Jean Renart and
Gautier d’Arras deliberately set out to rival him, others
more wisely welcomed his infl uence in their work. His
most infl uential romances were the two he left unfi n-
ished: the Chevalier de la charrette and the Conte du
Graal. The latter spawned a series of verse continuations
in the early 13th century, while both provided inspiration
for the immensely successful Lancelot-Grail or Vulgate
Cycle of the second quarter of the same century. The
Grail story was also reworked independently by the
anonymous author of the Perlesvaus.
See also Gautier D’Arras; Raoul de Houdenc;
Wace
Further Reading
Chrétien de Troyes. Christian von Troyes, S mtliche Werke, ed.
Wendelin Foerster. 4 vols. Halle: Niemeyer, 1884–99.
——. Œuvres complètes, ed. Daniel Poirion, et al. Paris: Gal-
limard, 1994.
——. Romans, ed. Michel Zink, et al. Paris: Librarie Générale
Française, 1994.
——. Les chansons courtoises de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Marie-
Claire Zai. Bern: Lang & Lang, 1974.
——. Arthurian Romances, trans. D. D. R. Owen. London:
Dent, 1987.
——. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David
Staines. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
——. Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler. Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1991.
Busby, Keith, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, Lori Walters, eds. Les
manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes/The Manuscripts of Chrétien
de Troyes. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.
Kelly, F. Douglas. Chrétien de Troyes: An Analytic Bibliography.
London: Grant and Cutler, 1976.
Reiss, Edmund, Louise Horner Reiss, and Beverly Taylor. Arthu-
rian Legend and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Vol.
1: The Middle Ages, New York, London: Garland, 1984.
Frappier, Jean, Chrétien de Troyes: l’homme et l’œuvre. Paris:
Hatier, 1968 (English trans. by Raymond J. Cormier, Athens:
University of Ohio Press, 1982).
Lacy, Norris J. The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on
Narrative Art. Leiden: Brill, 1980.
Topsfi eld, Leslie T. Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian
Romances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Kelly, Douglas, ed. The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: A
Symposium. Lexington: French Forum, 1985.
Lacy, Norris J., Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, eds. The
Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1987–88.
F. Douglas KellyCHRISTINE DE PIZAN (ca. 1364–ca. 1430)
France’s fi rst woman of letters was in fact born in Italy,
where her father, Tommaso de Pizzano of Bologna,
was employed by the Venetian Republic. Soon after
Christine’s birth, her father was appointed astrologer
and scientifi c adviser to the French king Charles V, so
the family established itself in Paris in the shadow of
the French court. Christine’s early taste for study was
interrupted by marriage at sixteen to Etienne du Castel,
a young notary from Picardy, who was soon given a
promising appointment to the royal chancellery. This
happy marriage was interrupted ten years later by the
husband’s unexpected death, leaving Christine to sup-
port three children and a widowed mother. She found
herself in a world that had little respect for women,
where she was cheated at every turn. She found comfort
in study and in writing poetry to express her grief and
she soon discovered a talent for writing verse in the fi xed
forms popular in her day.
Her writing brought her into contact with the court of
Louis of Orléans, to whom she dedicated several works,
beginning with a narrative poem, the Épistre au Dieu
d’Amour (1399), which makes fun of fashionable young
men who pretend to fi n’amor while reading Ovid and
Jean de Meun. This work was followed by other narra-
tive poems: the Dit de Poissy (1401), Le Débat des deux
amams, Livre des trois jugemens, and Dit de la pastoure
(1403). These eventually led to even more ambitious
allegorical poems, the semiautobiographical Chemin
de long estude (1402–03), which also commented on
society’s current troubles and proposed an international
monarchy, and a lengthy account of the role of Fortune
in universal history, the Mutacion de Fortune (fi nished
at the end of 1403).
It was also to Louis of Orléans that Christine dedi-
cated an equally ambitious work in poetry and prose,
the Épistre Othea (ca. 1400) combining a commentary
on classical mythology with advice to a young knight.CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES