N’en sont que trois materes a nul home vivant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Ronme la grant;
Ne de ces trois materes n’i a nule samblant.
Li conte de Bretaigne si sont vain et plaisant,
E cil de Ronme sage et de sens aprendant,
Cil de France sont voir chascun jour aparant. (Saisnes, ed. A.Brasseur, 11. 6–11) masks a
continuity that the romances themselves exploit between the Matter of Rome and that of
Britain: Brutus and the British nation are, in the fiction of the chronicles, both the
descendants of Aeneas and his Trojans and also the ancestors of King Arthur. This
distinction nonetheless takes into account the two principal sources of romance
inspiration in the 12th century and the differences in their expression.
Composed in the continental domains of Eleanor of Aquitaine after 1150, the
Romances of Antiquity (Thèbes, Énéas, Troie, Alexandre, and the Ovidian tales) are on
one level a vulgarization of myths, legends, and historical figures of classical antiquity.
Their didactic intent is evident in the role accorded to descriptions, which offer scientific
knowledge (as in Alexandre de Paris’s third branch of the Roman d’Alexandre) as well as
idealized models of the beautiful (portraits, descriptions of towns, art objects). It is also
seen in extensive discourses on politics and on love, notably in the Roman de Troie.
The Matter of Britain is represented in the 12th century principally by the Arthurian
romances of Chrétien de Troyes and by the verse romances about Tristan and Iseut. The
anonymous Breton lais and those by Marie de France exploit a wide variety of motifs and
legends, in which the Fairy Mistress and the rivalry between the otherworld and this
world play an essential role. Originally transmitted orally, the Matter of Britain was first
written down in French in Wace’s Brut. The account he gave of Arthur’s reign and deeds
provided the setting and time frame for key characters and motifs—Arthur and
Guenevere, Merlin, Gawain, Kay, the Round Table—exploited by Chrétien and his
immediate followers and, in the 13th century, by the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles.
Better than the Matter of Rome, which was seen as more or less historical, the Matter of
Britain was the ideal locus, with its blend of the real and the fantastic, in which to explore
other modes of structuring romance materials (focused on the knight-errant and the quest
for adventure) and to test a complex meditation upon the nature of love and its relation to
bravery. Exemplified in the “Breton romance,” this meditation reached its highest
expression in the Grail.
Introduced by Chrétien de Troyes in the Conte du Graal, where it was attached to the
person of Perceval, the motif of the Grail offered an alternative to the quest for earthly
love. But it quickly became, with the story of Grail origins launched by Robert de Boron
in the verse Roman de l’estoire dou Graal, a myth of origins relating simultaneously to
the central figure of Joseph of Arimathea, the holy vessel, and chivalry itself. The
interrelated stories of the Grail and Arthur’s kingdom became, in the first third of the
13th century, the subject of immense cyclical prose romances: the trilogy of the Pseudo-
Robert de Boron (Jo seph, Merlin, the Didot Perceval), the Perlesvaus, and above all the
Vulgate Cycle, or Lancelot-Grail. Organized around the motif of the Grail quest, these
works function as a summa of the Matter of Britain and as a rewriting of the Arthurian
“pre-text.” They also offer a reflection on “courtly” chivalry and on its relation to royal
authority and its ability to penetrate the sphere of the sacred (Perlesvaus, the Queste del
saint Graal). The choice of prose is explained by the belief in its greater veracity and by
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