Lancelot

…charette, she was rescued by Lancelot (a character whom Chrétien had earlier named as one of Arthur’s knights) from the land of Gorre, to which she had been taken by Meleagant (a version of the story that was incorporated in the 13th-century prose Vulgate cycle). Chrétien presented her as one…

…happy life with her lover; Lancelot, an exaggerated but perhaps parodic treatment of the lover who is servile to the god of love and to his imperious mistress Guinevere, wife of his overlord Arthur; Yvain, a brilliant extravaganza, combining the theme of a widow’s too hasty marriage to her husband’s…

…composition of Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la charrette), a courtly romance whose hero obeys every imperious (and unreasonable) demand of the heroine. Soon afterward the doctrine was “codified” in a three-book treatise by André le Chapelain. In the 13th century a long allegorical poem, the Roman de…

…made him the hero of Lancelot; ou, le chevalier de la charrette, which retold an existing legend about Guinevere’s abduction, making Lancelot her rescuer and lover. It also mentioned Lancelot’s upbringing by a fairy in a lake, a story that received fuller treatment in the German poem Lanzelet. These two…

Lancelot; ou, le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et…