This 1998 study serves as a contribution to both reception history, examining the medieval response to Chretien's poetry, and genre history, suveying the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in French. It describes the evolutionary changes taking place between Chretien's Eric et Enide and Froissart's Meliador, the first and last examples of the genre, and is unique in placing Chretien's work, not as the unequalled masterpieces of the whole of Arthurian literature, but as the starting point for the history of the genre, which can subsequently be traced over a period of two centuries in the French-speaking world. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is only now being made available in English.

A 1985 study of the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in a 1998 English translation.
Reviews
"In English the book reads with remarkable freshness. Scholarship on the verse romances has continued in recent years, but has concentrated on the production of (very welcome) new editions and articles on fashionable aspects of individual texts; Schmolke-Hasselmann's breadth of approach remains unparalleled. Like all the best criticism, Schmolke-Hasselmann's book raises as many stimulating questions as it answers." Rosemary Morris, Albion



Book Information
ISBN 9780521025652
Author Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 153mm * 23mm