The Grail legends have been appropriated by novelists as diverse as Umberto Eco and Dan Brown yet very few have read for themselves the original stories from which they came. All the mystery and drama of the Arthurian world are embodied in the extraordinary tales of Perceval, Gawain, Lancelot and Galahad in pursuit of the Holy Grail. The original romances, full of bewildering contradictions and composed by a number of different writers, dazzle with the sheer wealth of their conflicting imagination. In Nigel Bryant's hands, this enthralling material becomes truly accessible. He has constructed...

Chretien de Troyes' Perceval is the most important single Arthurian romance. It contains the very first mention of the mysterious grail, later to become the Holy Grail and the focal point of the spiritual quest of the knights of Arthur's court. Chretien left the poem unfinished, but the extraordinary and intriguing theme of the Grail was too good to leave, and other poets continued and eventually completed it. This is the only English translation to include selections from the three continuations and from the work of Gerbert de Montreuil, making the romance a coherent whole, and following...

Perceforest is one of the largest and certainly the most extraordinary of the late Arthurian romances. Justly described as -an encyclopaedia of 14th-century chivalry- and -a mine of folkloric motifs-, it is the subject of rapidly increasing attention and research. The author of Perceforest draws on Alexander romances, Roman histories and medieval travel writing (not to mention oral tradition, as he gives, for example, the distinctly racy first written version of the Sleeping Beauty story), to create a remarkable prehistory of King Arthur's Britain. It begins with the arrival in Britain of...

The chronicles of Jean le Bel, written around 1352-61, are one of the most important sources for the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. They were only rediscovered and published at the beginning of the twentieth century, though Froissart begins his much more famous work by acknowledging his great debt to the -true chronicles- which Jean le Bel had written. Many of the great pages of Froissart are actually the work of Jean le Bel, and this is the first translation of his book. It introduces English-speaking readers to a vivid text written by a man who, although a canon of the cathedral at...

The mysterious and haunting Grail makes its first appearance in literature in Chretien de Troyes' Perceval at the end of the twelfth century. But Chretien never finished his poem, leaving an unresolved story and an incomplete picture of the Grail. It was, however, far too attractive an idea to leave. Not only did it inspire quite separate works; his own unfinished poem was continued and finally completed by no fewer than four other writers. The Complete Story of the Grail is the first ever translation of the whole of the rich and compelling body of tales contained in Chretien's poem and its...

The History of William Marshal is the earliest surviving biography of a medieval knight - indeed it is the first biography of a layman in the vernacular in European history. Composed in verse in the 1220s just a few years after his death, it is a major primary source not simply for its subject's life but for the exceptionally stormy period he had had to navigate. It could hardly be other than major, given that its subject was regarded as the greatest knight who ever lived and that he rose in the course of his long life to be a central figure in the reigns of no fewer than four kings: Henry...