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  • The Continuations of Chrétien’s ‘Perceval’: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending by Leah Tether
  • Thomas Hinton
The Continuations of Chrétien’s ‘Perceval’: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending. By Leah Tether. (Arthurian Studies, 79). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. ix + 241 pp.

The Conte du Graal Continuations are beginning to attract the attention that their medieval popularity warrants, and this is the latest study to exploit their potential as an object of research. Starting from the observation that Chrétien de Troyes’s unfinished Conte du Graal (the first known Grail romance) was usually transmitted along with some configuration of its various Continuations and Prologues, Leah Tether’s clearly written study proposes to use this corpus as the basis for working out a formal model for identifying and distinguishing between different types of Continuation. Her ultimate aim is to define the generic parameters of Continuation, considered as an identifiably distinctive kind of writing that generates particular kinds of reaction and expectation in audiences and readers. The book opens with an examination of how each [End Page 242] codex handles the transition from one author’s work to another. Tether contends that certain signs, chiefly large decorated initials, hint subtly at scribal knowledge of the limits of each portion of the corpus, while acknowledging that the overall impression conveyed to the reader is largely one of unity. Her second chapter considers a range of finished, unfinished, and composite medieval texts in order to produce a set of preliminary definitions of what the aims of different Continuations might be. These definitions are then refined over the course of the three remaining chapters, which offer close readings of strategically chosen moments from various texts of the Conte du Graal corpus: the First Continuation (Chapter 3), the Second Continuation (Chapter 4), and the Gerbert and Manessier Continuations (Chapter 5), these last two being considered particularly in light of what might constitute a satisfactory ending. Tether identifies a fundamental distinction between two ‘subgenres’ of Continuation: Extension and Conclusion, the difference resting on how interested a given Continuation is in providing a ‘satisfactory ending’ to the text that it is prolonging. I wonder, however, whether the aim of defining each individual Continuation as belonging to one or the other subgenre may prevent Tether from describing narrative mechanics in their full complexity: contrary impulses are often felt within the same text, which may coexist in tension or even play out in full-scale conflict. What Tether has uncovered, rather, it seems to me, are two narrative dynamics—one that looks towards the end and one that pulls away from that end—that may be weighted in various ways, even within the same text. Notwithstanding this caveat, this is a lively and stimulating book that will be of interest to those studying the workings of medieval (and indeed modern) narratives. Tether speculates that ‘the medieval audience may well have regarded all medieval Grail texts as part of one single, wider, Grail corpus’ (p. 131). We are moving increasingly to a wide and inclusive understanding of the interconnectivity of the whole corpus of Arthurian romance, and the Continuations may have a surprisingly central role to play in this picture. Tether is to be saluted for placing these fascinating texts at the heart of her inquiry into medieval textuality.

Thomas Hinton
Durham University
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