An essay of literary microhistory: poetic mutations in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart and its links with the French cultures of the 12th century

Abstract

The history of Lancelot and Guinevere’s loves has an indisputable centrality in the romance production of Arthurian material, since, in the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes sealed the fate of the knight in the service of his queen in Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart. In this way, Chrétien invented a legend that quickly came to compete, in analogous terms and from a similar theme, with the popular myth of Tristan and Iseut, which, from the dark places of insular Britain, had conquered the imagination of the medieval men. Based on this assertion, the objective of the article is to review the relationship that the writer establishes between the two couples through the particular analysis of The Knight of the Cart. I will present some hypotheses concerning the type of love that the gentleman feels for his queen, which does not seem to reproduce Tristan’s feelings for Iseut. Finally, I will try to sketch an overview of the position that the text occupies in the whole work of Chrétien de Troyes, speculate on the guidelines that guided its production in general and propose some explanations of how the roman respond to specific intellectual coordinates of his time of writing.