A Literary Seminar at The Cornwall Library

Stories of Arthur’s round table arose at a time of great change across France and England: as Celtic myths become the gold standard of storytelling, as the landscape was increasingly war-torn, as the crowns of England and France battled for supremacy, as Eleanor of Aquitaine brokered her infamous dowery, and as the Middle Ages gave way to the modern world. We’ll look at four of the earliest Arthurian legends: two tales written by a French court poet who single-handedly invented the stories as we now know them and two tales found as solitary manuscripts in estate collections long after their composition. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the other knights show us distinct fractures in personal expression and political power as the medieval became the modern, rifts that still trip us today.

 Reading: Chrétien de Troyes, CLIGÈS (c. 1176 CE), first half

Text: Ruth Harwood Cline (translator), CLIGÈS (University of Georgia Press, 2000), ISBN-13: 978-0820321424 (preferred); or Burton Raffel (translator), CLIGÈS (Yale University Press, 1997) ISBN: 978-0820312132

Format: Mostly lecture with some discussion