This book is a landmark in Arthurian scholarship. Regrettably, it has until now remained largely inaccessible to those without a reading knowledge of German. This has been doubly unfortunate, firstly because of the general importance of Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's ideas for the understanding of the evolution of French Arthurian verse romance, and secondly because one of the book's central theses holds that much of what we have considered to be medieval French literature is in fact English literature in French. Although Anglicists have always been obliged to deal with the continental literature that provides Middle English with much of its foundations, Schmolke-Hasselmann goes a good deal further and plausibly argues that we urgently need to redraw some lines on the literary and linguistic map of Britain and France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To define English and French literature in merely linguistic terms corresponds to modern preconceptions of ethnic and national identity and creates a highly distorted view of the medieval reality. These suggestions have not proved universally palatable, entailing as they do a radical revision of received views. It is in many ways remarkable that such received views have obtained for as long as they have, particularly since there has long been general agreement that the Norman invasion had profound cultural consequences for the British Isles. One of the stumbling blocks has probably been the assumption that texts written in continental French were written on the continent for continental audiences and that only those written in Anglo-Norman circulated in Britain.