COURSE SYLLABUS
Songs of Love and Chivalry:
Arthurian Romances of the Middle Ages
This course was developed as a pilot course by Conan Doyle PhD and taught at the Faculty of Humanites, Charles University in spring Semester 2025, for students on the Electronic Culture and Semiotics MA course (YMSMK061PV), the Liberal Arts and Humanities BA course and Erasmus exchange students (YBLO008), and Studium humanitní vzdělanosti (YBEC211). This course arose in part from Doyle’s work on the development of the index translationum database. Since the course is taught concurrently to a mixed cohort of undergraduate and graduate students, assessment methods and class preparation expectations are different based on specific course enrolment.
Course Description
Although Arthur was a legendary Romano-British king or warlord, supposed to have repelled the earliest Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain who was first mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia regum Brittaniae (History of the Kings of Britain), Arthur’s court was the prime locus of literary chivalry not just in medieval English literature, but more generally throughout Western Europe. Arthurian romances exist in French, English, Welsh, German, Icelandic and Czech, among other languages. This course will primarily consider verse romances in Middle English, but with comparative analysis of traditions in other languages with the intention of demonstrating that the so called Matter of Britain, was in fact a common creative property of the entire Latinate Western European region.
The question of the historical ‘identity’ of Arthur is addressed, and promptly dismissed in the opening lecture with reference to Guy Halsall’s monograph Worlds of Arthur. Instead of searching for the historical truth of a literary figure, this course considers how the court of Camelot functioned as a common property of the medieval European imagination, and a story world of chivalric heroism, equally suited to faux historical epic narrative compilations, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, to satirical critiques and pastiches which mock the very narrative conventions they evoke. Individual narratives can also move into and out of the Chivalric locus classicus of Arthur’s world, from the ‘loathly lady’ tales involving Sir Gawain to the treatments of Tristan and Isolde, to the Welsh hero Peredur being recast as Chretien de Troye’s Knight of the Grail, Perceval.
Students will encounter texts in Middle English, but are encouraged to take a comparative approach and consult texts in other languages they have studied, such as Old Norse.
Some of the selected recommended readings represent deliberately chosen antiquated perspectives which will be contrasted to current understandings of medieval literature.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the course students will have:
Course requirements
Students are welcome to audit the course without assessment for credit, and have done so.
To receive credit for the course students are required to:
Participation requires reading a piece of secondary literature in advance each week, as well as the primary source reading, which will be flagged as ‘mandatory’ in the Moodle Digital Learning Environment. Other optional readings will also be provided through Moodle. In the case of exceptionally long texts, suggested line numbers for each week will be provided through Moodle.
Week 1 And did those feet in Ancient Times? History and Mythology
This lecture introduces the problems of medieval historical sources and their relationship with other genres which are primarily considered fictions, such as prose and verse romances, epic poems and even hagiographies. The question of who Arthur really was is considered briefly before being enthusiastically defenestrated. Who Arthur really was is not a question that interests us, rather we question why his court became the subject of such prolific creative endeavours in so many different European languages, after he was mentioned (or perhaps better, invented) by the Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Primary sources: Extracts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Brittaniae, Laȝamon’s Brut and Breta sögur
Recommended reading: Guy Halsall, Worlds of Arthur
Week 2 Creative Anachronism and Cultural Translation: Sir Orfeo
This lecture focuses on a text which is not strictly Arthurian, but rather demonstrates how narratives and characters can migrate between genres. In this case, the legendary Greek poet Orpheus is reimagined as a courtly knight, and the Greek underworld Hades re-cast in terms of a fey or fairy other-world. This seeks to demonstrate an enduring theme of this course, namely anachronism and cultural translation. C. S. Lewis’s seminal essay on courtly love is covered in depth, but not as gospel truth: students are expected to critically engage with it in the context of cultural translation.
Primary sources: Sir Orfeo Comparative source: Ovid, Metamorphoses.
Recommended reading: C. S. Lewis, ‘The Allegory of Love’
Week 3 ‘Male Trouble’ Sir Launfal and medieval masculinities
Thomas Chestre’s Launfal is a middle English verse rendition of Mare de France’s Lanval, both of which are firmly established in the Arthurian milieu, but lie outside of the reported canonical events of Arthur’s court, as later codified. Following from the cultural translation of Hades to a fey otherworld, Launfal takes an elfin or fairy lover, but in many ways inverts the expected tropes of masculinity.
Primary source: Lanval / Launfal
Recommended reading:
Guy Bray, ‘Male Trouble: Sir Launfal and the Trials of Masculinity.’
Week 4 Gawain I: the Knight of the Garter
The magnificent Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deserves more than one single class, given its linguistic complexity and artistic depth. In this first lecture we consider the framing events of the central narrative: the beheading game, and its parallels in Old Irish literature, before moving on to consider that the greater peril to Sir Gawain was not the Green giant’s axe, but the overt sexuality of his hostess placing him in an impossible conundrum: to be polite (but immoral), or impolite (but chaste), according to the rules of an arbitrary game into which he had been manoeuvred.
Primary source: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Comparative source: Fled Bricrend (Bricriu's Feast)
Recommended reading:
Donald R. Howard Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain Author(s): Speculum , Jul., 1964, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 425-433
R. W. Dance, ‚Tor for to Tell: Words Derived from old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight‘
Week 5 Gawain II: Parody and Performativity
The second of two classes on Sir Gawain also considers the later middle English reworking Greene Knight, which is of less obvious aesthetic merit, and may represent a deliberate parody of the former.
Primary source: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Comparative source: Greene Knight
Recommended reading:
C. Dinshaw ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight‘
Ruth Evans and Leslie Johnson, ‘Introduction: The Wife of Bath and “Al hire Sect”: Medieval Feminists?’
Week 6 Gawain III / What Women Want‘: Loathly lady tales
An extremely different Gawain emerges in the ‚Loathly lady‘ motif tales, which were popularly used by authors including Gower and Chaucer. Not all of the texts under consideration specify that the protagonist is Gawain, and in many ways this is a different character to the protagonist of Sir Gawain: more a comic everyman than a chivalric knight.
Students are invited to question whether the „fairy tale ending“ of these tales is better in its inverted form as presented by the film Shrek (2001).
Primary source: ‘The marriage of Gawain and Dame Ragnall’
Comparative sources: Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’
Recommended readings:
Trimnell, Hunter, ‘And should have been otherwyse understood: The disenchanting of Sir Gromer Somer Joure’ Medium Ævum 71. 2 (2002), 294-301
Norris, Ralph, ‘Sir Thomas Malory and “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” Reconsidered’
Edwards, Suzanne, ‘The Rhetoric of Rape and the Politics of Gender in the Wife of Bath's Tale and the 1382 Statute of Rapes’
Week 7 Yvain, the Knight of the Lion and Ywain and Gawain
The narrative poems concerning Ivain (or Ywain, or Iwein) probably warrant a lecture course all to themselves. However, in this text we consider the interplay of an incredibly convoluted plot of marital abandonment and reconciliation with the essentially hagiographic trope of the grateful lion. The symbolic power of the lion is not only martial, but psychological (or perhaps spiritual), as the lion actively intervenes to the protagonist’s suicide in several versions of the narrative. Should we, like C. S. Lewis, reduce the lion to a mere allegory of (divine) love, or rather see in this text, a glimmer of the redemptive possibility of the bond between human and animal?
Primary and comparative sources:
Chrétien, Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (French ca. 1190)
Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain (Middle Welsh)
Hartmann von Aue, Iwein (MH German ca. 1200)
Ívens saga (Icelandic, 14th Century)
Ywain and Gawain (English, 14th Century)
Recommended readings:
Schiff, Randy P. ‘Reterritorialized Ritual: Classist Violence’
Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist. ‘The Grateful Lion.’
Week 8 Malory, and the post-vulgate prose cycle.
Malory’s Le mort d’Arthur, despite its French title, was a fifteenth century English prose attempt to codify the known cycles of Arthurian literature into a coherent narrative... or was it? Such prose cycles had existed before in terms of the French prose vulgate (Lancelot-Grail) cycle, based on numerous continuations to Chretien’s Perceval, and also the post-vulgate cycle which had attempted to re-historicise Arthur, and link him to the Crusades.
Yet the recent discovery of manuscript copies of Malory’s work suggest that much of what we think we know about Le mort d’Arthur has come from the interference of Thomas Caxton, the printer, as editor, and perhaps even ‚butcher‘ of Malory’s collection of prose Arthurian tales, which were perhaps not intended to convey a single coherent narrative after all.
Practical reading seminar on the Death of Arthur episode.
Week 9 Sir Tristrem and the parody of love
Tristan and Islode are the prototypical star crossed lovers of the larger Arthurian milieu. Some texts such as Marie de France’s Chevrefoil (Honeysuckle) recount just a brief encounter between the pair, and the pathos evoked, finding their way into the medieval Icelandic collection known as Strengleikar, specifically Geitarlauf.
Yet by the 14th century, when the verse Sir Tristrem was written (and the Icelandic Tristan), the story seemed to have become so old-fashioned that it could only be retold as parody.
This is perhaps best understood in the line in the English ‚Sir Tristrem‘ And Hodain dede also. What are we to understand from this but the dog, having accidentally ingesting some of the same love potion as the doomed lovers, humping at the edge of the bed (or worse) while Sir Tristrem makes love to the bride he is sworn to bring home to his uncle Marc of Cornwall. In a similar way, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar the serious Old Norwegian treatment attributed to ‘Brother Robert’ seems subjected to parody in the later Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd.
Malory, bizarrely, gives us a happy ending for his Tristan, who is coopted into the Grail quest after resolving all of the internecine strife of his tale off the page, as it were.
The recent monographical study by Thomas H. Crofts (2025) provides a useful summary of scholarship and analysis of the Middle English poem.
Week 10 Sir Perceval and Peredur
Agreeing wholeheartedly with the title of Natlia Petrovskaia’s 2023 monograph This is Not a Grail Romance, I wish to expand this idea beyond the Welsh Peredur and to Perceval more broadly. After Chretien de Troye’s untimely death, leaving his magnum opus Perceval unfinished, a great many continuations were written, both in the manuscripts of Chretien, and as completely separate creative undertakings. In several of the later versions, Peredur/Perceval’s naivete makes him wholly unsuited to the task, leading to the invention of new, crusading Knights, like Galahad.
This essay also considers the changing representation of the grail quest from an allegorical spiritual journey, to a journey of colonial violence associated with the Crusading states, and the unsettling consequences of this for contemporary reception and medievalisms.
Recommended reading:
N. I. Petrovskaia, This is Not a Grail Romance (selected chapters)
Essential Online Resources
The following open access digital resources contain excellent open source edited texts and lexical resources, alongside commentaries and introductions:
https://metseditions.org/ (The Middle English Texts Series)
https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/ (Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/ (The Middle English Compendium website containing a digital corpus, a dictionary and a bibliography)
Primary Source editions and Translations
‘Fled Bricrend: the feast of Bricriu’ ed. and trans. George Henderson, (Irish Text Society 1899) < https://archive.org/details/fledbricrendfeas02henduoft/page/n5/mode/2up>
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, trans. J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien, Harper Collins (2021) ISBN: 9780008433932
Sir Tristrem: Study, Text, Translation Ed. and trans. Thomas H. Crofts, Translatio 2, (Durham University Press 2025)
Strengleikar. An Old Norse translation of twenty-one Old French lais. ed. & trans. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane, Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift-Institutt, Norrøne tekster 3. (Grieg, 1979) ISBN 82-7061-273-1.
Secondary Literature
Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist. “The Grateful Lion.” PMLA 39 (3) (1924), 485–524, DOI: 10.2307/457117.
Bray, Guy, ‘Male Trouble: Sir Launfal and the Trials of Masculinity’, ESC: English Studies in Canada, 34, 2-3, (2008), 31–48. DOI: 10.1353/esc.0.0139.
Dance, Richard, ‘”Tor for to Telle”: Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520) ed. by. Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter (Brepols, 2012), pp. 41–58 DOI: 10.1484/M.TCNE-EB.1.100792
Dinshaw, Carolyn, ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (2) (1994), 205–26. DOI 10.2307/465173
Edwards, Suzanne, ‘The Rhetoric of Rape and the Politics of Gender in the Wife of Bath's Tale and the 1382 Statute of Rapes’, Exemplaria 23 (2011), 1–26.
DOI: 10.1179/104125711X12864610741666
Evans, Ruth and Leslie Johnson, Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, (Routledge, 1994) ISBN 9780415058193
Halsall, Guy, Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages, (OUP, 2013) ISBN: 9780198700845
Howard, Donald R, ‘Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain’, Speculum 39 (3) (1964) 425–33, DOI: 10.2307/2852497
Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (OUP, 1958) ISBN: 9780192812209
Norris, Ralph, ‘Sir Thomas Malory and “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” Reconsidered’, Arthuriana, 19 (2) (2009), 82–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27870964
Petrovskaia, Natalia I., This is Not a Grail Romance: Understanding Historia Peredur Vab Efrawc, (University of Wales Press, 2023) ISBN: 9781837720361
Schiff, Randy P. ‘Reterritorialized Ritual: Classist Violence in “Yvain” and “Ywain and Gawain”’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 56 (3) (2014), 227–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43280224
Trimnell, Hunter K., ‘And should have been otherwyse understood: The disenchanting of Sir Gromer Somer Joure’ Medium Ævum 71. 2 (2002), 294-301 DOI: 10.2307/43630438
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