What is nature, what is woman? Jean d'Arras's fourteenth-century amalgam of romance, history, genealogy, crusade epic, and fairytale reminds us that the definition of nature is a work in progress, changing through time, depending as much on culture's framing optics as on the state of scientific knowledge. And woman's inscription into nature, as suggested by Melusine and multiple traditions of Western culture, is decidedly not the same as man's.

Jean's prologue implies two views of nature that will uncomfortably coexist as his romance unfolds. One is attached to Aristotle's notion of finality: in nature, all things tend toward perfection or fail to reach it because of their “vices” (p. 110) – that is, in Aristotelian terms, deficiencies in their seed that produce the likes of monsters and human twins.

Mixed with this Aristotelian perspective is Jean's Christian and biblical concept of nature: God has created wonders that surpass human understanding, invisible things about which only Adam before the Fall had perfect knowledge.

If Lancelot and the grail are names that anyone familiar with Arthurian literature recognizes without hesitation, the same cannot be said for the author who stands behind their invention. Yet asked to identify the most important romancer of the Middle Ages, any connoisseur, medieval or modern, would likely name Chrétien de Troyes, the writer who stepped beyond antique romances to offer models that energized and redirected romance from the twelfth century on, first in verse, later in prose. Through allusions and adaptations, translations, amplifications, parodies, and prosifications, Chrétien’s five romances spawned a huge variety of offspring that span medieval Europe and spin anew in modern forms and media.

What do we know about the author 'Crestïens de Troies', as he identifies himself in his first romance, Erec et Enide (9)? Though historical identification eludes us, a number of possibilites emerge in the romances themselves. Similarities between the coronation scene at the end of Erec and Henry II’s court at Nantes (Christmas 1169), when his son Geoffrey was recognized as the future duke of Brittany, suggest that Chrétien may have been associated with the Anglo-Norman court at that stage of his career. Such a displacement might explain why the romancer adds a place name to his signature in Erec, thereafter simply signing 'Crestïens' in prologue or epilogue. Chrétien names two patrons, Marie de Champagne (wife of Henry the Liberal, count of Champagne) and Philippe d'Alsace, count of Flanders: they place him, c. 1160s-1191, at two important political and cultural centres of northern France, located along significant commercial axes connecting northern and southern Europe, England, and the Continent.

A desire to bring together medieval French literature and performance has twice led me to teach a course focused on the city of Arras through its geography, history, and literary expression. The course's interdisciplinary structure and multiple aims are briefly outlined in the description:

In the course design, performance as a facet of medieval works intersects with performances realized by students, who are invited to encounter these very foreign texts through distinct but complementary approaches, each yielding its own kind of insights and identifications. An intellectual approach “from the outside” situates the medieval texts in their historical and political, social and cultural contexts. A more intuitive approach works “from the inside”: students organized in teams invent ways to present selected scenes, excerpts, or poems, and then perform them for the pleasure of the class, whose collective role as Arrageois audience completes the exchange and launches further analysis and discussion. In this essay in honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, teacher and mentor par excellence, I would like to share my experiment, its promise and problems, and offer colleagues a pedagogical model that capitalizes on the multiple talents of our students, while demonstrating that medieval works can still leap off the page and live in performance.

Since the course was conducted in French and included both undergraduates and graduate students who had no previous experience with medieval literature, I used texts in bilingual editions or found both versions in separate editions to put on reserve or include in a course packet.

Lancelot is a name that still reverberates for the modern public with the intensity discernable in his medieval reception from the moment Chrétien's romance launched him into Arthurian history in the provocative guise of the Knight of the Cart. Efforts to understand what makes him such a compelling figure lead inevitably to the question of desire, Lancelot's for Guenevere, of course, but also our desire for him, the desires of so many inside and outside the romance world, which Chrétien has crystallized around the hero himself. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette, Lancelot generates a magnetic field of erotic potential at once positive and negative, productive and disruptive, as singular and extraordinary as his heart and as paradoxical as the romancer's art. Indeed, story and romance mirror each other in a kind of infinite regress that traps readers in an open-ended quest for meaning, the san that Chrétien claims to receive from his patroness, that we can only seek to uncover in the arrangement of fiction produced by ‘sa painne et s’antancïon’ [his effort and creative intention]. Since Chrétien has crafted a romance as enigmatic as Lancelot's love story, we will have to follow the writer's ploys as much as the hero's exploits. A quick summary will set the stage.

Commanded by the Countess of Champagne, Chrétien has undertaken to write a romance entitled the Knight of the Cart. It begins on Ascension Day as an unknown knight erupts into court and challenges Arthur to send the Queen into the forest with a champion who will fight, double or nothing, for the release of the King's subjects held captive in the stranger's land. By the manipulations of a Rash Boon, Keu claims the role of defender and leads off the Queen. Gauvain and others belatedly follow: Keu's riderless horse reveals the unfortunate results. Gauvain next encounters a hard-riding knight who pursues the Queen with even greater haste. Catching up a second time, Gauvain sees the knight step, after a moment's hesitation, into a cart driven by a dwarf, who promises information on the Queen's whereabouts. The narrator explains the shame associated with carts, used in those days for felons and murderers. Gauvain follows them to a castle, where they spend the night. Although his hostess scorns him, the Knight of the Cart insists on sleeping in the Perilous Bed and survives the adventure of the flaming lance.

Aknight paradoxically associated with a shameful cart rescues the Queen, liberates the captives, and becomes Guinevere's lover. In its barest outline, that is the plot of Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la Charrete, the romance that catapulted Lancelot into fame and forever changed the course of Arthurian history. What existed before Chrétien remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that his version became the starting point for all subsequent tales of Lancelot as the knight whose extraordinary prowess is inextricably linked to his love for Arthur's Queen. Identity and love, the two great themes of the Charrete, set the agenda for the prose Lancelot, where they were amplified, redeployed, and ultimately redefined. Across the large canvas of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Cart episode remains at the center of Lancelot's story, even as it marks an important shift in Lancelot as hero, still the best of Arthurian chivalry but not ‘the good knight’ who will achieve the Grail.

The manner in which the prose author exploits Chrétien's model is as idiosyncratic as Lancelot himself for subsequent romance tradition. In Myrrha Lot-Borodine's words, the prose Lancelot literally incorporates Le Chevalier de la Charrete. Fully digested, Chrétien's text reappears as ‘li contes de la Charete.’ The reference is a tribute to the fame of Chrétien's romance, but the loss of authorial connection corroborates the extent to which the episode has lost its separate boundaries within the interlaced space of the prose narrative. How does the prose romancer both recapitulate and transform Chrétien's romance? Comparison of their opening passages will give a detailed sense of what the global change in context entails on the levels of style and narrative shape. That analysis will lead in turn to a better understanding of the thematic consequences observable with particular clarity in two sets of episodes, the eponymous cart and the marvelous tomb adventures.

Chrétien's romance opens with a prologue, which places author, story, and public in a triangular dialogue:

The shape of romance in medieval France compels, even as it escapes, our urge to define it. This fundamental dichotomy contributes in no small measure to the vitality and appeal of medieval romance from its start in the mid-twelfth century, when French verse romances introduce a new literary type and set up models that will be vigorously imitated and reinvented by romancers for centuries thereafter. To follow this development, we need to analyze closely not only specific shapes but the art of shaping that gives romance its characteristic traits. The self-reflexivity of romance form calls our attention to the way stories are put together in writing by authors who enjoin the reader to admire the work’s shape, its conjointure, as a source of pleasure, but no less as a source of meaning.

If shape is paramount in defining romance, it is in part because romance is the shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres, a protean form that refuses to settle into neat boundaries prescribed by modern critics. If we line up a spectrum of medieval literary types, we can distinguish romance from saints’ lives, epic, lyric, short tales, all contemporary competitors for audience attention. But we also have to account for the way romance interacts with and even co-opts these other forms and materials. Romances may end after 3000 verses like Floire et Blancheflor or stretch to 30,000 like the Roman de Troie – with a variety of intermediate sizes in between. Eight-syllable rhyming couplets dominate the linear narrative of romance, but occasionally give way to ten- or twelve-syllable lines and epic or lyric stanzas. From the thirteenth century on, verse competes with prose, as the pattern of change itself remains the major constant of the romance genre.