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.