Strange Bedfellows: Politics, Miscegenation, and Translatio in Two Lays of Lanval

This article compares Marie de France's 'Lanval' and Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal to explore the relationship between colonialism and translatio, arguing that both authors offer pessimistic readings of the colonial threats relevant to their eras yet counterbalance that threat with an optimistic reading of the possibilities of translatio, not from the classical past but from the literature of languages spoken at the time of writing.