Introduction

As Douglas Kelly and a good many others have noted, and as any reader of Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés will easily perceive, this is Chrétien’s most rhetorical romance.¹ That alone should make it extraordinarily interesting for medievalists, but if it fascinates them, they too often appear to keep that fascination out of the pages of journals. Quantitative measures are of limited but not entirely negligible value here: judging by the Arthurian bibliographies for a recent twenty-year period (1978–98), Cligés has been a major—though not necessarily the sole—subject of 162 publications: about eight per year over those two decades. Yet the same bibliographies offer the following numbers for Chrétien’s other Arthurian romances: 233 (Lancelot), 256 (Erec), 358 (Yvain), and 361 (Perceval).²

Not only is Cligés the subject of a smaller volume of scholarship—especially, it appears, in anglophone countries—but it is doubtless the least taught of Chrétien’s romances. If a course on Arthurian romance or legend can include only a couple of Chrétien’s narratives, they would likely be Lancelot and Perceval. Those are indisputably the two most influential of his works. The former introduces Lancelot and his adulterous love for Guenevere, illustrating what we still—alas?—call ‘courtly love.’ The second presents that enigmatic object, initially identified simply as ‘un graal,’ that has given us some transcendent literary and musical creations, as well as a good deal of recent literary, cinematic, and other mischief. Were I to teach two of Chrétien’s romances to students who did not already have a passing knowledge of his works, it would be difficult not to select these two. Alternatively, though, one might wish to teach Yvain, especially in an undergraduate course, because it is easily the most ‘accessible’ of the five texts, especially for an uninitiated audience. It is furthermore possible that Erec et Enide could find its way into a course, though that often occurs in tandem with Yvain, to illustrate the opposing faces of the same thematic coin.

And where does that leave Cligés? Often the answer is: out. Some reasons for its having been given short shrift are surely apparent. Not only is this the least Arthurian of the five romances, dividing its time and location between the Greco-Roman world and Arthur’s realm (and between two generations), but its densely rhetorical texture requires that the reader who wishes to understand and appreciate it bring to the task a solid knowledge of medieval rhetoric and also a fair measure of patience. Without that knowledge and patience, we are likely to find the monologues (interior and other) more than a little tedious.³ If we take the time to read the romance with care and thought, however, we may find it every bit as fascinating and at least as original as anything else from the quill of Chrétien de Troyes.

In any event, Cligés scholarship and pedagogy have not caught up, at least in volume, with the other four Arthurian romances. I dare to hope that this issue of Arthuriana will help to bring more readers back to an engrossing and remarkable romance. Not only are the five essays the work of eminent and innovative scholars, but they illustrate, insofar as possible with a small selection of articles, the richness of Cligés and the range of issues it raises.

In the first article, Peggy McCracken studies the themes of love and war in the first half of the romance, demonstrating the extent to which those themes are interdependent, each of them articulated, as she says, through the other. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in ‘Of Cligés and Cannibalism,’ argues that Chrétien, without including literal instances of cannibalism in the romance, uses it as a trope (drawn from Philomena) to illustrate the ironic interplay of literal and figurative language. In the third article, Douglas Kelly studies the topic of honor, including the ways it may be evaluated and the way it may be received by the work’s audience.

Sharon Kinoshita’s article studies the medieval Mediterranean context...