Misunderstanding, Misperception and Mistakes: The Logic of the Grail in Old French Arthurian Romance and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal

This article seeks to resituate critical discussions about logic in the Old French Grail romances and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal. Where previous scholarship has emphasised the mystical elements of the Old French Grail narratives to suggest alternate meanings for the Grail itself, this article reads the Grail miracles as structuring devices that reflect classical theories of dialectic and demonstrative argumentation. Through examining one example from Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, the Didot-Perceval, The Vulgate Cycle Queste del Saint Graal, and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal, this article also highlights fundamental similarities between the logical systems underlying each Grail narrative that are not restricted by language or date of composition. Thus, the article depicts Malory not just as consciously drawing upon the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, but also as unconsciously inheriting elements from each of his Old French predecessors.

Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances

The previous chapter showed how the large narrative structures of both the Gospel of Nicodemus and the French grail romances, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Perlesvaus, permeate the poetic diegesis and thought of Piers Plowman, albeit reformulated in Langland’s distinctive terms. This chapter homes in on three particular structures that Langland shares in varying degrees with the grail romances: first, travellers in a landscape, whose discovery of imperfect forms of understanding is imagined as ‘news’ transmitted across the landscape; second, multiple quests, seekers and absent objects of desire—some of them seekers who are sought by other seekers; third, narratives that are predicated on a crucial and usually involuntary mistake, often committed unknowingly by a main protagonist. These intertwined narrative structures focus with a distinctive emotional intensity on instances of inadequacy and loss, all of which contribute to the inculcation of desire—both for the protagonists, and for the reader. The chapter tracks these structures in the later parts of Piers Plowman (B.16–20) and then across the poem as a whole. It also explores possible connections between the protagonists Perlesvaus and Piers Plowman, noting the syllable ‘Per’ shared in their names. The last part of the chapter revisits two passages of Piers Plowman to focus on how romance structure is here both intertwined with, and at odds with, ethical instruction.

The Sad Vices

This chapter and the next propose that analogies can be drawn between Piers Plowman and the French grail texts, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Perlesvaus, though the chivalric materials are also radically transformed in Piers Plowman. The connection is cemented by a further set of connections to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and its narrative of the harrowing of hell and Joseph of Arimathea. In the romances and Piers Plowman a theological version of chivalric aventure foregrounds the mysterious and grace-dependent aspects of the spiritual life; the romances also contain enigmatic figures of seemingly involuntary guilt. However, these emphases stand in marked tension with other aspects of these texts, such as their more clear-cut allegorical glosses and their many practical ethical instructions. This is a tension that is particularly marked in Piers Plowman, where Langland repeatedly insists on the obligation to do penance and actively pursue dowel. The first part of this chapter introduces the Queste del Saint Graal, the Perlesvaus and the Gospel; it also provides evidence that Langland could have known both grail romances. The body of the chapter explores the rich texture of romance and grail romance allusions in the later parts of Piers Plowman (B.16–20), but also comments on the work that a series of grail romance structures do in the poem more generally.

Weaving a Tapestry from Biblical Exegesis to Romance Textuality

This study examines how the particular character of Grail romances follows from the incongruous meeting of courtly and Christian discourses, combined for the first time in LeConte du Graal, Chrétien de Troyes’s last, unfinished romance. The romancer’s unsettling inclusion of religious issues within Arthurian narrative coincides with a new turn toward the Bible’s literal and historical sense observable in both Christian and Jewish biblical exegesis. By investigating features shared by romance and exegesis, we can glimpse how a number of issues involving representation and interpretation disseminate through later Grail stories, as the romancer’s inaugural gestures structure how rewriters negotiate the complexities of their enigmatic model. Divided into three sections, the chapter first treats the littera’s historical aspects and its arrangements (order, sequence, context). The second section examines the shifting relation between literal and allegorical senses, in order to explore the exegetical surprises of Chrétien’s prologue in the third.

Margaret Atwood’s Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Novels with Psychological and Mythic Influences: The Archetypal Analysis of the Novel Surfacing

The paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels from the psychological perspective of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes and from the perspective of Robert Graves’s mythological figures of the triple goddess presented in his work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1997). In this regard, the paper focuses on the mythic and psychological roles embodied and played by Atwood’s victimized female protagonists who actively seek their identity and professional self-realization on their path towards personal evolution in the North American patriarchal society of the twentieth century. Thus, they are no longer passive as female characters of the nineteenth-century colonial novels which are centered on the male hero and his colonial adventures. In her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels, Atwood further introduces elements of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths and revives different literary genres, such as a detective story, a crime and historical novel, a gothic romance, a comedy, science fiction, etc. Moreover, she often abuses the conventions of the existing genre and mixes several genres in the same narrative. For instance, her narrative The Penelopiad (2005) is a genre-hybrid novella in which she parodies the Grecian myth of the adventurer Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope by subverting Homer’s serious epic poem into a witty satire. In addition, the last part of the paper analyzes the author’s cult novel Surfacing (1972 (1984)) according to Joseph Campbell’s and Northrop Frye’s archetypal/myth criticism and it demonstrates that Atwood revises the biblical myth of the hero’s quest and the idealized world of medieval grail romances from the ironic prospective of the twentieth century, as it is typical of postmodernism.

Pan-Brittonic Hagiography and the Arthurian Grail Cycle

St. Joseph of Arimathea, acclaimed by the monastery of Glastonbury as the apostolic evangelist of Britain, gained this accolade through the Arthurian Grail romances, and most particularly, the Estoire del Saint Graal. Heretofore, the majority of those favoring the Christian origin of the Grail legend have plumbed the Bible, the apocrypha, and the Christian exegetical tradition in search of source elements of the Grail's history. Their research has been concentrated on the mystery of the Grail itself, or the pre-Britain adventures of Joseph and his followers. Some others have investigated various aspects of Celtic Christianity, particularly the assimilation of Celtic legends and narrative materials regarding Bran, son of Llŷr, into Christian tradition, as the genesis of Joseph's activities in Britain. This euhemerization of pagan folklore was a natural consequence of the pattern of Christianization established during the apostolic era, which attempted to build the new religion on the foundations of the old, retaining and adapting heathen practices which were consonant with Christianity. A few, notably Roger Loomis, studied the impact of these euhemerized legends on the Grail history, pursuing the mutations of the myths through oral transmission, in accordance with the process outlined by the noted Bollandist, Père Hippolyte Delehaye. Still others correlated the religious elements of the entire Joseph/Grail saga with the history and characteristics of the Celtic Church in Wales, with strong overtones of heterodoxy.

New Light on Oriental Sources for Wolfram's Parzival and Other Grail Romances

Did Wolfram have any other sources beside Chrétien? Opinions are still divided. According to Fourquet, he used only two different Chrétien Mss. Weber assumes three additional sources, one for the “Enfances Perceval,” another for books i and ii, and a third one, which he considered an alchemistic writing, for the Grail. Schneider, summing up the investigations of scholars in his history of MHG literature, holds that Wolfram must have known, beside Chrétien, a Grail story in Oriental setting. My own research has gone in a similar direction and like Schneider, I am indebted to the pioneers in this field, to Veselovskij and Singer, founders of the Ethiopian theory.