#Chrétien de Troyes

[illustratus]

Lancelot crossing the Sword Bridge

Miniature illustration from a four-volume manuscript made for Jacques d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours. Workshop of Évrard d'Espinques. Circa 1475.

[queer-ragnelle]

Do you have a guide/a recommended reading list for getting into Arthurian legends? I’ve been really getting into it in the past few months but I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of the foundations of it. (If you don’t and this is too big of an ask totally feel free to ignore this lol)

hello, anon.

i don't currently although i have plans to add another page to my blog listing medieval texts as well as links to download pdfs of them. i have english translations of texts originating in belarussian, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, latin, middle english, and last but not least, welsh.

in the mean time, i've collected for you some key texts that are readily available to read for free online!

le morte d'arthur by sir thomas malory [part 1] [part 2]

the history of the britons by nennius [here]

the mabinogion translated by lady charlotte guest [here]

four romances by chrétien de troyes [here]

parzival by wolfram von eschenbach [part 1] [part 2]

the wedding of sir gawain and dame ragnelle translated by thomas hahn [here]

sir gawain and the green knight translated by j. r. r. tolkien [here]

better translations/formatting forthcoming! enjoy. :^)

[ghost-bison]

i just had a flashback of 7th grade back when i was so obsessed with teen wolf and we had to write a short story about this book called the knight with the lion by chrétien de troyes, and i said the knight was surrounded by wolves and one of them was called derek. teacher thought it was very funny and gave me an a+ but she never knew i was just deranged. or how i wanted to make a derek hale blanket burrito and make him hot chocolate. so that's that

[gwydpolls]

Lucian's Library 7

Feel free to suggest never written books you wish you could read.

Some items suggested by impatient readers for still living authors.

[laurellerual]

Gawain, Clarissant,  Igraine and Morgause at the château des Merveilles

From Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal, by Chrétien de Troyes

[derangedrhythms]

Love without fear and without dread is fire without flame and without heat; 

Chrétien de Troyes, from ‘Cligès’, tr. L. J. Gardiner

[fallensapphires]

Mythology: Sir Percival

Any wise man fears open spitefulness, whether it be in seriousness or in jest.

[mayapleiades]

The Knight of the Cart Comedic Retelling | 17k | Mature | Complete     

Comedy, Retelling, Comedic Retelling, BAMF Lancelot, badassery and heroism, Adventures, Kidnapping, Swordfighting, Tournaments, A Heap of Modern References, Author Comments, Knights being Dramatic, Queens being Dramatic, Drama, But this stays faithful to the original so you also have, Animal Death, Fake rape, and by that I mean that a lady stages an attempted rape and then calls it off, Suicide Attempt for Dramatic Purposes, Blood, Death

It is Banquet Day in Camelot! Everyone at court is happy and celebrating and eating, and Kay is being very proud, as he is the seneschal of Camelot, and he’s very happy he’s managed to throw a successful party.

Suddenly, the doors open and in steps a Bad Knight.

Bad Knight tells King Arthur, “I have imprisoned thousands of your people into my domains because I Am Evil! I’m just telling you that because you’re a huge loser, and you’re definitely not strong enough to save them. You don’t even have enough resources to do it! Cry, bitch!”

Arthur goes, “Eh, sadness :(( I will cry now.” Weeping sounds ensue.

Bad Knight goes to leave, and then stops at the door. “You know what,” he says, “I’m gonna be generous. Have one knight escort the Queen to the forest. If the knight manages to best me in a duel, you can have your people back. If he can’t, I’m taking him and the Queen!”

Once upon a time, the author tried to write a very short, light, and funny Knight of the Cart summary for her friends who were curious to know what it was all about. 17k later, she realised that while it was quite light and quite funny indeed, she had failed spectacularly in making it an actual summary. So you get a comedic retelling instead.

Read on Ao3

[good--merits-accumulated]

HELLO.

[merrymorningofmay]

"perceval" is like that meme with a mom at a pool and the happy kid she's playing with is carados and the miserable drowning kid is gawain and the long abandoned skeleton at the bottom of the ocean is perceval

[empress-leo]

Yeah Geoffrey, who would ever include something like that?

[queer-ragnelle]

If anything, Arthurian Legend could do with more adultery. When does Enid get to cheat on Geraint?

[histoireettralala]

Marie de France

For six years, from March 1181 to May 1187, Marie exercised the comital office as regent for her son Henry (II). She did so vigorously and alone, without restriction by a regency council. In the great hall of her palace in Troyes, which served as the political and administrative center of the county, as well as in her other castle towns, Marie sat with a small council of barons and administrative officers to discharge all the routine business of medieval rulers: receiving petitioners, arbitrating and settling disputes, making benefactions to churches, confirming private transactions, receiving homages, confiscating fiefs and granting new ones. Since her acts continued to be drawn up by the same chancery officials who had served her husband, they remained the same in form and content. With the notable exception of appointing a new marshal, Geoffroy of Villehardouin, in 1185, she made no discernible changes in her husband's officers or policies. Although feudal tenure by women apparently increased precisely during her rule, we cannot say whether she fostered that practice. Her court, however, was perceived as being receptive to women, several of whom sought her confirmations at critical junctures in their lives.

In 1181 Marie found herself widowed with four young children — Henry II was fifteen, Marie seven, Scholastique five or six, and Thibaut III only two. She considered marrying the recently widowed Philip, count of Flanders (1168-91), the son of her husband's old friend and crusade companion count Thierry. Philip and Marie were about the same age and well acquainted: a decade earlier he had sponsored the betrothal of her two oldest children, Henry II and young Marie, to the children of his sister Margaret, countess of Hainaut. Philip went so far as to seek a papal dispensation for his marriage to Marie, since they were indirectly related, but then, for unknown reasons, broke off negotiations. Marie, at thirty-nine, seems not to have sought another marriage. Thereafter she was preoccupied with completing the marriages between her children and the children of Margaret and count Baldwin V, who had renewed, broken, revised, then delayed carrying out the marriage contract between his only son and Marie's daughter. Countess Marie called on her in-laws to force the elusive count to deliver the groom; Gislebert of Mons describes the scene at Sens where the countess, the archbishop of Reims, the counts of Blois and Sancerre, and the duke of Burgundy cornered Baldwin, perhaps threatening him, if he did not follow through with the marriage, which finally did take place (January 1186). Marie then trumped Baldwin at his own game by ignoring the second part of the contract and arranging her own son's marriage to the infant heiress of Namur instead of to Baldwin's daughter.

When Henry II (1187-90) assumed the countship, Marie retired to Meaux, probably with her youngest son Thibaut, then eight. The forty-twoyear-old countess could not have imagined that she would ever rule again. But the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin on October 2, 1187 electrified France, and young Henry II was swept up by the wave of enthusiasm for a new crusade to recover the holy city. In May 1190 the unmarried count departed with a large contingent of barons and knights on the Third Crusade, leaving his mother as regent once again. Marie ruled in his absence (he died overseas in September 1197), then continued to rule until her death in March 1198 at fifty-three. In all, she had ruled the county over fifteen years — in her husband's absence, as guardian for her oldest son and then in his absence, and finally in the last months of her life as guardian for her second son, Thibaut.

Although she was countess of Champagne for over thirty years, half of them as ruler, we know little about Marie's life and personality beyond her official acts. She seems to have been close to her half-brothers Geoffroy Plantagenet, for whom she dedicated an altar in Paris, and Richard the Lionheart, with whom she shared Adam of Perseigne as confessor, as well as with her half-sister Margaret, who spent Christmas 1184 with Marie and queen mother Adèle. Perhaps Marie saw her sister, countess Alix of Blois, and her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, after her parents were divorced in 1152, but there is no firm evidence of any meeting. For her husband Henry she ordered a sumptuous tomb placed in the center of the church of Saint-Etienne of Troyes next to the comital palace, but she herself chose to be buried at Meaux.

Marie's role as literary patron now seems secure. She could read vernacular French and probably Latin as well, given her education at Avenay, and she had a personal library, although its contents are not known. Chrétien de Troyes and Gace Brulé state that they wrote at her request, and she seems also to have patronized Conon de Béthune and Huon d'Oisy. The collegiate chapter of Notre-Dame-du-Val, which Marie founded in Provins with thirty-eight prebends, seems to have supported not only Chrétien but also his continuator Godfrey of Lagny, as well as the earliest known copyist of Chrétien's romances, Guiot of Provins. Perhaps Marie'sinterest in lyric poetry and romances dates from her married years, for the works she is know to have commissioned as a widow in the 1180s are all translations of religious texts: Psalms (Eructavit), Genesis, and possibly a collection of sermons by Bernard of Clairvaux.

Theodore Evergates - Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

[negreabsolut]

El conte del Greal, de Chrétien de Troyes, té elements que en demostren l'antiguitat més enllà del relat medieval que és. És una llegenda molt antiga, de les poquíssimes que ens han arribat d'uns temps realment pretèrits.

[apaladinsventure]

“But just as the rose is more lovely than any other flower when it opens fresh and new, so where liberality appears it surpasses all other virtues and increases five hundred times the qualities it finds in a worthy, upright man.”

Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances

#Art 🎨 by Julek Heller

[lolochaponnay]