These articles are mainly concerned with medieval French literature, particularly those areas in which the honorand of the volume, Rupert T. Pickens, has distinguished himself: Old French Arthurian romance, Marie de France, chanson de geste, later poetry (including Villon), and the Occitan troubadour lyric. Among the contributors are some of the most significant scholars from the U.S.A., Canada, France, Switzerland, and the U.K. working in Old French studies today. The volume will be of interest to specialists in Old French, Occitan, and medieval literature generally. Some of the articles...

The renowned and illustrious tales of King Arthur, his knights and the Round Table pervade all European vernaculars, as well as the Latin tradition. Arthurian narrative material, which had originally been transmitted in oral culture, began to be inscribed regularly in the twelfth century, developing from (pseudo-)historical beginnings in the Latin chronicles of "historians" such as Geoffrey of Monmouth into masterful literary works like the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Evidently a big hit, Arthur found himself being swiftly translated, adapted and integrated into the literary traditions...

These two volumes are about the forty-five surviving manuscripts and fragments that transmit, and sometimes illustrate, the texts of Chrétien de Troyes. Here is presented, for the first time, a photographic corpus of those manuscripts that is as complete as possible and includes all the illustrations of the illustrated manuscripts, organized according to a new interpretation of their chronology and distribution. This visual material is complemented by a catalogue of all the extant manuscripts and their illustrations and by a series of analytical essays on aspects of the codicology,...