MEMS Graduate Student Talks:
Rachel Walkover: “Chrétien de Troyes Goes to Burgundy: Erec et Enide and Cligès at the Court of Philip the Good”
Friday December 2, 4-5 pm, in Pugh 160.
The relationship between a work of literature and the society for which it was created is undeniable. Slimmed down from a larger MA thesis, this presentation examines this conversation between a work of literature and its audience in two works—Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide and Cligès and the two fifteenth-century Burgundian adaptations of the works, L’Histoire d’Erec and Le Livre de Alixandre empereur de Constantinoble et de Cligés son filz—to explore how works of fictional literature are adapted to and speak to different audiences. After determining the author’s goal for the text, each pair of works were compared in order to uncover the changes that were made to the text by the fifteenth-century prosateur. These changes and the works as a whole were considered with regard to the historical context from regional histories. The romans courtois allow the authors to communicate information about current events and comment on discourse taking place in society at its composition. This information, similar to what might be found in a diary or private letters, is difficult to find in other sources from the Middle Ages and can help to confirm the ‘historical facts’ that other sources mention. Research using this technique can allow modern scholars to explore this less-frequently tapped source of information.