The Historia Meriadoci is at first glance a work quite different from the De Ortu. Like the De Ortu, it focuses on a knightly protagonist, rather than on Arthur, but its abundance of folklore and romance motifs and its quick succession of adventures evoke the atmosphere of a typical roman d'aventure in a way that the previous text did not. The central concern for signs and their interpretation around which the whole of the De Ortu pivots is absent, and yet there is much in this work to confirm the impression that the author of both texts is vitally interested in the process of the creation of literary meaning. Occasional moments of burlesque or parody in the De Ortu become a central principle in the Historia Meriadoci, and the abundance of romance markers in the text encourages one to see the genre itself as the focus of interest here. Once again, the issue is how we are to interpret the signs we are given, but here the signs are the conventional ones of a literary genre which is thus subverted. A genre can be understood as a contract between author and audience, creating what Jauss has called a “horizon of expectations”; the author's subversion of the terms of the contract becomes another means by which to highlight the fragility of all such significative and hermeneutic systems.