Band 8, Heft 1

On the verso of the last leaf of a twelfth-century manuscript containing the poetry of Hilarius, a student of Abelard, appears a faux charter purporting to have been issued by Arthur, king of the Britons, in the hundredth year of his immortality. In the act, Arthur thanks the descendants of his British subjects for their fidelity and grants them an exclusive franchise to fish in secret rivulets. The privilege contains two prohibitions: one prohibiting Britons from wearing shoes and the other prohibiting them from owning cats. This article provides a diplomatic edition, English translation and analysis of King Arthur’s Charter . It identifies the strange stipulations of the charter as tropes of anti-Breton satire, attested also in the Privilège aux Bretons ( c . 1240), an Old French song that mocks the customs and occupations of impoverished Breton immigrants to thirteenth-century France.

This article explores the devices employed by the medieval Welsh narrator of Owain , or Chwedyl Iarlles y Ffynnawn (‘The Story of the Lady of the Well’), to convey emotions and the mental states of his characters to his audiences. Although he generally remains inaudible, he uses, at some crucial points, words and phrases denoting emotions in a narrow sense, such as love, sadness and shame, in order to direct and steer the audiences’ perception and their understanding of the narrative. A comparison with thematically related texts, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain , and its Old Norse, Old Swedish and Middle English translations, helps to assess the narrative role of literary emotions in the Welsh text.

David Jones’s last important painting, Tristan ac Essylt , shows its central figures surrounded by other people, beset by dangers, and being carried inexorably towards their meeting with King Mark, to all of which they are sublimely unconscious. Jones renders the world in which the lovers are set, and particularly the ships in which they travel, with a mixture of historical authenticity (whose full extent has often eluded commentators) and non-naturalistic freedom that suggest simultaneously a powerful physicality and the possible presence of hidden forces working to other ends.

The perplexing question of the interrelations between hearing and sight looms large in the verse novel of the second half of the twelfth century, a newly promoted genre of literary fiction, no longer sung but written and intended for public reading in small circles, it seems, permanently shaped by the written word, yet brought to life by a fleeting voice. In what is commonly and sometimes abusively referred to as the Arthurian romance in verse of the second half of the twelfth century – the Arthurian part of Wace’s romance of Brut (in fact, a text between the chronicle and the romance in terms of style), the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the romances of Tristan by Thomas and Béroul – the ‘soundtrack’ of the Arthurian literary world is poor: the human voice in particular, the sole focus of my study, is rarely mentioned, while discourse proliferates. For multiple reasons, above all because it is an acoustic phenomenon of physiological origin which is linked to breathing, the voice, as an undeniable vital force, seems to be stifled: this is what will be examined to start with. The paradoxes haunting the voice need to be addressed and assessed. In fact, it is as if vocality gave way to a rustle of words, both those of the characters and those of the narrative instances. A second step of the analysis will therefore consider how orality, patently obvious as it is, tends to mask the vocality of the text to draw attention to itself: if the voice, in its materiality, appears neglected, it is because it is henceforth subsumed under the spoken word. Yet, the voice is most saliently causing distinct stylistic traits or modes of writing which animate the jongleresque performance. The latter is having its heyday, since, at the turn of the thirteenth century, prose and the advent of silent reading would soon bring about a substantial change in the production and reception of fictional literary works: a third and last point will deal with how, until the book is to enjoy the prestige that the voice once possessed, the letter will not be that irreducibly separated from the very voice from which it originates. Far from being independent from each other, voice and letter converge in the same collaboration, that of the reading experience that allows us, to this day, to make these texts our own.

Departing from the observation that the Middle English romance of Sir Perceval of Galles quotes from Genesis at two crucial moments, this study provides a coherent reading of the text, explaining some of its idiosyncrasies and triangulating it with the versions of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. What distinguishes the Middle English version from the continental texts are its purposeful absences, i. e. that which the author chooses to abbreviate or leave out altogether. The result is the story of a prelapsarian creature who stumbles through an Edenic landscape where time and mortality have been suspended and individual culpability does not exist. Sir Perceval’s non-existent biblical knowledge, blocked by his mother and ultimately brought to its end by a literal fall from his horse, leaves him invincible, ungendered and immortal. It also serves to explain his unapologetic violence as well as his complete lack of sexual desire. This bold experiment cannot last – Sir Perceval does eventually discover knighthood, masculinity and mortality. Unfortunately, these three are inseparably linked: being a knight, being a man and being dead are one and the same thing in Sir Perceval’s universe.

This article examines Nynive, the second Lady of the Lake, in Malory’s Morte Darthur . It reads her in a hybrid context, arguing that her hybridity allows her to occupy a unique position within the Morte . This position goes beyond her roles in the Vulgate and situates her as a defender of Arthur’s court and a dispenser of justice within it. In turn, understanding Nynive’s hybridity allows us to understand how she finds and claims power in the Morte through assisting the court, upholding it from a positionality that is unique to her.